Day 85: the continuing struggle for personal autonomy

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Several  weeks ago I wrote getting a portable word processor so I could write down story ideas wherever I found just like everyone else who can use a pencil and a napkin. Just as I feared it has been put off for months and I have been recently told that I will not be able to get it before the first of next month even though I am supposed to be able to dictate how my inheritance is spent. People have paid lip service to the fact that they wish me to be a reasonably autonomous adult, able to make my own decisions, have a steady income which is not state provided, pay my own bills, move out of my parents house etc. but when it comes to letting me take the baby steps to those goals it seems to be harder than pulling teeth for all the roadblocks put in my way by seemingly well-meaning family members. Insert silent scream here.

Day 79: “you are held back by the perfection which you are not yet able to achieve.”

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I found that quote in someone’s comment on a Freshly Pressed blog this morning. I believe he said that his first journalism teacher told him that. The thing that struck me is how true this thing is, especially in the context of writing. I am a perfectionist and it is both a blessing and a curse. Despite much poking and prodding from outside forces to finish a draft of my manuscript I refuse to put sentences which are noted to be awkward and badly formed into it just for the sake of a word count. This is not to say I haven’t written any sentences which are awkward or poorly constructed, I write a lot of those but I only see them as lacking something on the second read through, if I had known the sentence was going to sound that awkward I would have rewritten it in my head before committing it to the word processor screen. Some of my family find my writing style infuriating, I get the impression that they wish that I would hurry up and finish the manuscript so that it could be set off to a publisher to critique. The problem is that even if I finished the manuscript tomorrow I would still not feel that it was ready for someone working at a publishing company to see. I am aware that most published writers have had their fair share of rejection slips, I will not be any different. This does not mean I am willing to send out a piece of work which I’m not really happy with, if I’m not happy with it a publisher is even less likely to be happy with it as it stands. Who knows? If I’m really lucky perhaps my ponderous method will make the difference between getting 50 rejections before I get one yes.

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Day 54: I am a mobile writer, or soon will be

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Soon I will no longer have to be tethered to my desk top in order to write. While I DO have a standard laptop thanks to very kind computer rebuilding friend of mine…it Still does not have a word processing program because I can’t get on the internet to download Open Office due to the fact that it is not wi-fi enabled yet because nobody has bought or installed the hardware yet.  Besides I care too much about that laptop to risk dropping it, which I am prone to do. So I went looking for the device I used in high school, called an AlphaSmart.   It’s made of plastic, has no moving parts that can break if dropped and runs off AA batteries which are easily gotten at Walmart. It will take a few weeks but it’s coming.I will save my annoyance about the apparent inability  to get a wi-fi card for a later post perhaps.