Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

A thought I share with Fury

Kevin Fox said at fury.com:

“I’m afraid of success. As long as I’m not giving my 100%, then I can’t fail inside, because I could attribute the failure to my not giving my all. But, if I do give my all, and it turns out to not be enough, then it’s not that I failed, but that I’m incapable of success.

I like creating things, and often feel a sense of loss, of time wasted, when I do things that don’t have permenent, tangible end products.”

I am fairly certain that I’ve made both of these statements, almost word for word, within the last couple of weeks, or had them made to me, about me. These are things that I have been trying to adress and reconcile within myself for quite some time, and I am having varying levels of success. Like writing a novel, finally. I’ve been putting that off for fear of failure for a long time. Now the only way I could fail would be to quit; I’m not trying to write the great American novel, I’m trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

I haven’t been painting enough lately. I think that if I get far enough ahead on my novel this weekend, I’ll take an afternoon or two next week to paint. It’ll be a nice diversion.

Did I have a point here? Probably not. I was just reading Kevin’s site and it resonated with me, and I thought I’d share. Then the babbling began. Have a nice day!

Procrastination power

I won’t tell you I didn’t see this one coming. I know how I work.

So, you wouldn’t believe how much I’ve got done since I was supposed to start writing a book less than 24 hours ago. I managed to go to bed earlier than usual last night. I was asleep before I was allowed to start working on the novel at all. I woke up early enough this morning to eat breakfast, make lunch, and get to work on time without going crazy fast. At work today, I found a small bug in the way I wrote the code that sorts entries; a little difference between how Moveable Type puts out date/time info, and how PHP expects to read it. I then spent a large chunk of my between calls time modifying nearly one hundred different files in the backend of the website fixing the problem. I didn’t even have the chance to get started on Cryptonomicon.

Then when I came home, I lounged about for an hour watching Ground Force and Changing Rooms on the BBC. I followed that by mowing the front side yard and the back yard. Here’s an interesting aside: Angela and I were discussing the matter (She was kind enough to assist me by raking the clipping in the front and some of what was in the back. She did break a rake handle somehow though,) and she wondered aloud what it was about the yard that made it take so long to mow it. She wanted to know how long it would take, and expected an answer in a number of days. I asked her why she asked, and she responded sincerely that “it always takes me so long to mow the yard.” I informed her that I had mowed the yard a total of zero times since she moved in. I suppose that that really is a long time to mow the lawn. She’s been here since … November, I think. So, I guess it took me … six months to mow the lawn. It was suprizingly easy to mow, considering.

Then I watched Enterprise and Drew Carey and made dinner (Beef and bean burritos) and now I’m in here checking my email and posting on my website, and if you asked for a wordcount on my novel, it would still be zero. Luckily for all parties involved, I did come up with a genuinely good idea for a novel, and with any luck will be able to get it out of my head and onto paper for everyone to read. Or no one to read. Depends on how it all comes out, I guess.

So now I’m trying to decide whether to go watch Ed and Felicity (Hooray, they’re turning back time and she isn’t going to end up with Ben! Noel was always the right choice!) or to clean off the table, break out a manual typewriter and get knock some pages out. I know what YOU think I should do. You don’t REALLY watch TV yourself. Your answer is biased.