Blog Entry: Unqualified Goodness
Entry posted on May 2, 2010, 9.43 pm
Categories:
Chocolate, Kat Book 3, Listening, Quotes, Revising, Writing
I really love this blog entry by the very awesome Karen Healey, where she orders women to stop qualifying their achievements and start taking pride in them. (And I'd personally extend that order to the men I know, as well.)
In that spirit, I am not going to focus on the fact that I started my Kat3 rewrite one day late. I am going to focus on the fact that today, despite feeling absolutely terrified, I took out the first draft and began to read, aided by three perfect pieces of encouragement and motivation:
1. This quote, which I came across on the internet yesterday, stared at in shock (because it felt SO relevant to my blocked state), and ended up saving onto my computer to keep open on my screen as often as possible over the next month:
"May I have the courage today to live the life that I would love, to postpone my dream no longer, but do at last what I came here for and waste my heart on fear no more." --John O'Donohue
2. This song, Jem's "It's Amazing", which is directly relevant to anyone trying to get up the nerve to do what they have to do to make their dreams come true:
(It's the kind of soft pop that I don't normally like, but the lyrics more than make up for it, for me.)
3. A vegan chocolate hazelnut brownie...because not everything that's good for me is healthy. ;)
I read through the first third of the novel, not stopping to make any large changes yet, but making notes where I felt things didn't work, so that I can come back to them later with a sense of how the book works as a whole.
The best part? I realized tonight that, without ever consciously thinking about it, my whole attitude had shifted since that moment when I forced myself, with so much difficulty, to start reading. This morning, when I thought about the book, I felt terrified: OMG, how will I fix the problems in the first draft?
This evening, as I settled MrD down to sleep, I spent the time thinking about the problems in the first draft - not fearing them, but thinking them through, puzzling at possible solutions with the same feeling I have when I'm working on a kakuro puzzle: calm curiosity and absorbing interest.
It's a really good shift.
What do you guys use to motivate yourself to do the things you're scared of doing? And: how has your weekend been?