Jakers!

This morning, a pig yelled at me. Ever since, I've been writing like a madwoman. The pig was Piggley-Wink, the star of "Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley-Wink," a PBS kids' show about a bunch of computer-animated farm animals from the 1950s with Irish accents. (Yes, there's really a show like that.) Anyway, in today's episode, Piggley-Wink had to write a story for school, but he wanted to play instead. You can see where this is going... He learns that if you want to excel at writing, you have to work at it.

At the end, to counteract the obvious subtlety of the moral, the narrator (a grown-up Piggley-Wink, who, we learn, is a children's book author) looked straight at me and said, "If you have a talent, you need to work hard to make it into something." Shamed by the truth of his porcine wisdom, I jumped out of bed and began typing. I've done 10 pages so far, and I can't stop until I've earned that pig's respect!

So as an addendum to my previous post about Raisinets, here is the second secret to writing a novel: every once in a while, get a pig to yell at you.

Thank you, Piggley-Wink.