The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage Page B

book. I don't know what it's like to have a book already written that you can't find a publisher for, and I assume it's hell. But having a deal and no book has to be at least as hellish. The sun comes up, you think about your approaching deadline. You stare at the computer, which stares right back at you. “Why are you surfing porn sites?” your boyfriend says every time he walks into your office. “Don't you have a book to write?” Every time you leave the house a friend asks, “How's the book coming?” Every time the phone rings, it's your mother. “I'm not pressuring you,” she says when she calls to pressure you. “I just wanted to know if the book will be out by Christmas so I can give it to people as a gift.” Having a deal but no book maybe isn't the deepest pit in writing hell, but it's close, and anyway hell isn't a contest. In hell everyone suffers.
    If being asked by your lover, friends, and family how the book is coming is hell, getting calls from your agent, editor, and publisher asking for the manuscript is dirty rotten stinking can't-sleep-at-night hell. Having a book deal and not a clue as to what you want to write a book about is like standing in front of an open trench. There are Nazis standing behind you— No, that's alittle extreme. Let's just say there are very insistent people with German accents standing behind you. If you don't fill that trench with words, hundreds of thousands of them, then one of those insistent people with German accents (your agent, your editor, your mother, your boyfriend) is going to march up behind you and put a bullet in the back of your head, filling the empty trench with your dead body.
    With the deadline trench yawning before me, I asked myself what kind of book the world needed from a gay man right now. I'm not a complete idiot—I did get a book deal, after all—and I had some ideas. But I had wasted so much time surfing porn sites that other gay men with book deals and better work habits were coming out with books I might have written if I could have pulled myself away from bigcocks.com. The “Gay men should stop having sex” book came out, followed by the “Gay men should move to the suburbs” book, followed by the “Gay man giving sex tips to straight women” book, and then the “Gay men should get married” book. Anyway, by the time I was ready to write, the books I might have written were all on remainder tables at Barnes & Noble. Except one. Some gay men were writing books saying gay men should get married and have kids, but none had actually done it themselves—had the kid and written about it. So, I sat down and started writing the “Gay man actually having kids” book.
    There was this book deal, and there was this squandered advance, and there was an approaching deadline. And I really did want kids, and I had almost made kids with lesbians before the book deal, and then the boyfriend started talking about adoption, and, well, why not kill two birds with one stone? Adopt a kid, and write the book about adopting the kid. That way, I wouldn't have to pay back the advance and I would get to write off every expense associated with the kid forever.
    So while the adoption would have happened without the book deal, and the book deal happened without the adoption, I can't say that the book deadline didn't move the adoption deadline up just a tad.
    So, that's why kids. And besides, I'm allergic to dogs.

Put This Book Down

    T hat last chapter wasn't very pleasant to write, so I can't imagine-it was very pleasant to read. When you write about kids, convention dictates that you go all mushy and magical: miracleof-birth, new-life-created-out-of-love, proof-of-God's-existence, blah blah blah. But there are always practical considerations, and as people get better about planning their pregnancies, more people, gay and straight, are applying a kind of Wall Street Journal hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis to timing when they have kids.
    But let me emphasize