Neurotically yours

Someday I'm going to be a big, famous, published author, and my agent is going to yell at me for never updating my blog. It's not my fault... really... I'm just not a blogger at heart, I guess. Now, microblogging, yes: I will blog me some microblogs. Facebook, always, of course, and more recently Twitter for all things writing-related. For big blog posts, though, either I take so long to finish them that they're no longer relevant when I'm done, or they veer too far into personal territory and I leave them unfinished and unpublished.

I love you guys. (Not least because right now "you guys" consist mostly of my dear friends, my mom, and my sister.) But I don't think I'll ever be the kind of person to put a lot of in-depth personal baggage into a blog post. Even admitting that I have in-depth personal baggage is getting a bit too personal for me. I do like books, though, and occasionally I'll do a short book review on Goodreads. Should I cross-post those here? Would that help?

I am working on a short story right now that's making me twitchy with excitement. I've come to the (much-belated) realization, lately, that editing is the primary part of an author's job. Producing words is good, but (for me) easy: I can hammer out a thousand words in about ten minutes if I desperately need to. Reworking them into something I can stand behind, though... that takes a LOT of time and attention. "Under Glass" I finished pretty quickly, but mostly because I dedicated the better part of two days to writing and rewriting it. From rough draft to the form I posted here took... let me see... oh, really? Just six days? It seems like it was longer than that. The story I'm working on now, though (it's tentatively called "The Fairy's Kiss") has been in the works pretty much straight-on since October 5, and it's still not done. It's not the length, either: currently it measures just over 3,000 words. It's just... I want it to be perfect.

And I guess every writer wants their work to be perfect. And I guess every parent wants their child to be perfect. (I have committed to using "their" as a gender-neutral singular possessive pronoun, y'all-- just as I have committed to the Oxford comma. I AM AN AMERICAN REBEL.) And sometimes, as I'm working on this story and I rearrange something and it just clicks into place, I think that it might closely approach the vision I had of it in my head.

And sometimes I look at it and think it's crap.

I think this is just the artistic life in general, after all. I'm sure actors and painters and composers have the same neuroses. I know singers do. And maybe it's a part of human nature, to simultaneously be proud of and disgusted by what is, in essence, a representative of YOU.

Or maybe it's just me.

But I am really excited for this story to be done, and I am really hoping that it lives up to my dreams of what it could be.

So I guess I got some goopy personal baggage in here after all. I hope you guys are proud of me!

XOXO, and happy Thanksgiving--

Kate