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"Pushed" by Jennifer Block

Nonfiction, horribly depressing. I read this over Christmas, actually. My dad had asked for it, I think because the author went to BU (though not at the same time as him). It's about why so many US women have bad birthing experiences (C-sections and inductions, etc). It seemed extremely one-sided, and the doctors and OB/GYNs came off pretty badly. And as usual, the drug companies didn't come off that well, either. I would have found the argument more convincing if every mention of the doctors doing all this inducing and C-sectioning hadn't been so snide.

The book made me think, though. For example, one time I was sitting around chatting with a couple of female coworkers, and I said I had been induced, and one of the others said "oh, we were all induced". Interesting. Why? And that in Canada, not the US, where the book is about.

I have a short story in my head about this, actually. Maybe when I'm done the draft of what I'm working on now (when I'm done the next draft in the Saturday Night Rewrites project) I'll whip something up.

Speaking of Saturday Night Rewrites, after falling off the wagon for two weeks (one because I had to go out of town to a wedding that took up the whole weekend, the other because I'm lazy), this weekend I managed to not only get through the paper draft, but pick up one of the 2-hour blocks I lost in the previous weekends. Now I just have to finish doing all the changes I marked. This seems like a "the sooner the better" task, so I don't forget where I was going with it all.

I'm thinking now is the time I should give more characters their forever names, so I can copy edit them better. I've moved tons of sections around, but I don't think I'm done with that yet. I've also found some places where I could have written more.

The thing I'm currently editing, which I refer to as "Toothbrush", is one of the few things I first-drafted on the computer. Next thing I edit I think should be something I wrote in long-hand. I want to see if there's as much "missing" content and the like when I've done it the other way. It's very tempting for me, when I'm writing on the computer, to not start at the beginning and progress in a linear fashion, but to write the start and the end and then fill in the middle. I feel like there's a lot of content missing in that middle now.

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