Realistic Expectations
2006-11-10, 15:37

Another Friday comes, and so my slow but steady descent into living from weekend to weekend continues. Damn my family for making me want to spend time with them, preferring their company to that of my esteemed coworkers! How dare they! Seriously, I practically race home sometimes.

Time has also shown me that it's clear now that I will not, in fact, be making the NaNoWriMo deadline of 50,000 words by November 30th. And I'm okay with that. I never really expected to make it, to be honest, and not because I was expecting to fail; I was just being realistic about my writing skill. Meticulous Virgo that I am, cranking out words for the sake of getting them down, while I understand fully the benefit of doing so, is just not how I roll. When I was in high school and had an essay assignment, I would always crank them out non-stop, fully formed and without draft and mainly without revision. I guess I'm a get-it-right-the-first-time-even-if-it-takes-literally-forever kind of person, so therefore I lack the intrinsic skill to spit out half a novel's worth of writing in just a month. It's a talent I would need to learn.

Not to say that I plan on giving up on the project; I do like the premise, though it's obvious that it's going to take more research than Google can spit out at a whim. It's mainly those very Google whims that got this idea rolling, really. Idle points between work events lead to ideas, I suppose. But as usual, my aspirations are larger than my brain's capacity to handle them, and, while I have a lot of interest in continuing the story, I won't beat myself up over the pace. I often consider the idea of a writing collaborator, because I work better when I can bounce ideas off of someone else and improve/build on someone else's good ones. I have serious doubts as to whether I could find someone who's just starting out and could possibly tolerate my oft-aimless quirks. Perhaps one day the fates will decide to send someone my way; until then I'll just have to be content with the slow plod that gets easily stuck at the smallest of bumps.

I suddenly find myself worrying that my wife will read this and say, "What, I'm not good enough for you? I couldn't possibly qualify as a collaborator?" This would be followed by a rapid series of blows to the head. And to answer the question borne of my oversensitivity to others' feelings, I would never have thought you'd be interested in writing sci fi, let alone writing anything but the off journal entry in general; I would never deny your ability to put words together in some entertaining fashion. And really, don't you put up with me enough already without having to deal with me as a writing partner to boot (with emphasis on 'boot')?

-- End Transmission --