Weight of the Endeavor
I've posted a couple bits of my incomplete draft for The Juggler so far, and I think I'm probably about 1/2 way through. I'm wondering if that's what I should be doing. The story's not finished, not edited, and I don't quite know how it's going to end yet. But, I feel like I need to instantiate this stuff somewhere earlier than later, in order to help it drag me through to finishing it.
Of course, I haven't actually told anyone about this slush pile yet, so it's not as if I expect anyone but an accidental visitor. I am tempted to toss a link to someone soon to get some premature opinions on what I've written. Not sure if that's a mistake or not.
Basically, my problem is that I keep putting my writing on pedestals. Not in that I think I'm the best ever, just that Writing is a Great Pursuit for Me. I've been doing it for a long time, with varying degrees of success, and I consider it something I Want to Do. Other things that I've Wanted to Do include: Finding a girl exactly like my wife and marrying her (check), writing a book and getting it published (check, check), moving to California to be a Computer Scientist (check). Pretty big things, and there are more, but I've not done too shabby at accomplishing them so far.
Problem is, all this puts a great pressure on me when I face a blank page and feel the Weight of the Endeavor.
Realistically, I know that I haven't written fiction in awhile. So, despite my having perhaps some passable or even good skill at writing in general, 90% of what I'm going to write story-wise will be crap. It'll need reworking and editing and feedback from readers. And though in one cranial lobe I recognize that, the perfectionist side expects me to spin gold immediately.
The thing is, though I think that I can turn crap into gold eventually, it'll take metric fucktons of crap produced repeatedly over a long period of time. And more importantly, although that one cranial lobe considers that Every Story Idea is Precious, the other lobe can admit that even many of my ideas are crap. And, at this stage at least, I'll probably butcher even the ideas that are good.
Hmm. That all sounds horribly depressing, doesn't it? Why bother? Well, mostly, because this is something I've always wanted to do and something I figure I can be half-way decent at with some work.
And, then, there's this skein. Why's it here? Well, mostly, so I can subject some other poor saps to my metric fucktons of crap and get their feedback eventually. Hopefully it entertains, at some point. I'd also like to get beat down a bit early and often so as not to get too precious with this stuff. I suspect I'll have a tendency to do so, thanks to all my pedestal building and Capitalized Phrases of Importance.