Can I send my kids to hang out with yours, HJ and lizmonster? My youngest isn't potty trained yet, but she's really cute. And bionic.
Send them on over, you guys. We've got a nice wooded yard, a swing set, and three iPads in the house.
And my husband makes fresh bread, and cake.
Right now, I'm annoyed with a friend of mine on Facebook. She's one of the "I've always wanted to write a book" crowd. I read a short story she wrote once - a tad rough, but rather nice; she's not without talent.
But she is one of those "I can't write a whole book because I'm too much of a perfectionist" people. I told her that's what I'd found useful about NaNoWriMo - that going through that exercise had broken me of the habit of needing it to be Perfect[tm] coming off the pen.
At which she doubles down on the perfectionist thing: Can't you just write 50,000 words of nonsense for NaNo? Isn't that the opposite of writing? And on and on again, about how she's just too much of a perfectionist to DO that to herself. Like her Art is somehow better than my Art because she keeps it in her head, where it has no flaws.
I am not without sympathy. For years, decades - most of my life - I wrote for no one but myself. But it wasn't the perfectionist meme that stopped me from writing a novel; for me, it was lack of making the time to actually
do it. That's part of what NaNo did for me; it got me into a habit. Just like writing software (my day job), when I did it every day it got easier. It never comes out perfect (just like software
), but I have a much better idea now of what I can and can't pull off, how long things take me, what my limits are, etc.
Feh. She's like this about a lot of things: if she can't be the best, she's going to take her marbles and go home. On the other hand...she's at least 15 years older than I am. Part of me wants to say to her "Fine, but how much more time do you think you're going to get to do this?" Heck, I'm 48 and I feel like I'm running out of time. None of us knows, do we? What's the point of putting something off if you really want to do it?
In other words, Annoying Perfectionist Lady: Maybe you do have the perfect novel in you. Maybe what you write will be unimaginably superior to anything I could possibly come up with. But until you write it...stop telling me how much better than me you are.
(Wow. That was a rant!
)
