Frame me, and hang me on a wall
Jul. 25th, 2005 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI've actually finished both chapter 9 of Measure of a Man, and part 7 of Ciudad de Estrellas. I should feel accomplished, but instead I mostly want to cry. Because finishing is sort of like just starting to peel the corner of the Band-Aid off; it's the rewriting and editing to death that are the painful yanky ow parts and I have a lot of that ahead of me. Because? Both of them suck monumentally. It's just... harder than I thought. I really am not the same person I was when I began these, I don't even feel like I know that person anymore, and so the trajectory of both stories feels... unfathomable.
A while ago, after I'd posted a new chapter of Measure, I got this letter from someone who'd been enjoying the story but who thought that chapter stank and made no bones about telling me (not really constructive criticism, which might have been useful, but that it was different and bad and that basically I'd let him/her down). I can only think that after all these months of no updates, and this weak-ass shit thing I have on my computer now, boy is he/she going to be disappointed again! Because even I know that this is of the suckage. It's almost paralyzing, knowing yourself that you are doing unsatisfactory work before you even start. I wonder why they don't have "I suck" as a mood. Maybe I need an I Suck icon. ;-)
But, back to work. Though all this suckage gives me a chance to use my new Al icon. I think his question from the first ep of second season Deadwood may be the greatest existential question of all time.
A while ago, after I'd posted a new chapter of Measure, I got this letter from someone who'd been enjoying the story but who thought that chapter stank and made no bones about telling me (not really constructive criticism, which might have been useful, but that it was different and bad and that basically I'd let him/her down). I can only think that after all these months of no updates, and this weak-ass shit thing I have on my computer now, boy is he/she going to be disappointed again! Because even I know that this is of the suckage. It's almost paralyzing, knowing yourself that you are doing unsatisfactory work before you even start. I wonder why they don't have "I suck" as a mood. Maybe I need an I Suck icon. ;-)
But, back to work. Though all this suckage gives me a chance to use my new Al icon. I think his question from the first ep of second season Deadwood may be the greatest existential question of all time.
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Date: 2005-07-26 02:48 am (UTC)It's absolutely paralyzing. If you let it be. I personally let it paralyze me more than I like to admit. But I also firmly believe that 95% of all writers live at "I suck." (The other 5% are unreasonably cocky and we hates them. Heh.) I really admire the fact that you're not letting that feeling, or that one reader, stop you from writing. That you're at almost paralyzing, not actually paralyzed, because sometimes I don't quite get past it, and I know there are a LOT of us who get bogged down in it besides just me.
P.S. You don't suck. I know these things. I'm very smart. :)
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Date: 2005-07-26 06:34 pm (UTC)I think you're right -- I was just telling someone who's new to writing that pretty much all of us think we suck all the time, and usually it's the ones who don't think they suck that you have to watch out for. There was that study that found most people who were confident in their superiority had no idea they were in fact incompetent, and the people who were competent and talented always rated themselves as incompetent and untalented...