How It Was Made
Luckily this isn't sausage, though life may be more distressing in the end.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
How It Was Made
I have struggled for months on this book. The content has tough portions to tackle but that was the easy part. The difficulty, as I can see now looking back, was in piecing it together and filling in the cracks.
As this was written I would jump from one topic to another, assuming clumping them into similar groups, sections, chapters and classifications would suffice. Then, as I assumed it was time to wrap up the writing and send it in to be read, judged, edited, etc I found I couldn’t do it.
Something was missing. I didn’t like it. I didn’t even want to read it. In fact, I found it near impossible to go through and read it, even to proofread prior to submission.
I struggled with myself and my confidence. I swore there was something wrong with me. Something inside that didn’t want me to succeed or was too afraid to fail.
But that doesn’t make sense. I fail all the time. I just get back up because I don’t have a choice. If I stay down, will my children learn that’s okay? Yes, that’s exactly what they would learn. So fear of failure is familiar to me but in the same way a lazy weekend in the summer or fall as a child is still familiar to me. I can see pictures and drift back to the familiarity of those lazy days, but I don’t experience them much anymore.
Suffice it to say I am a professional at failing. So, hopefully in terms of this book, that means I’ll fail at failing and it’ll be successful.
So fear and character flaws didn’t end up being the problem. I was distracted and I knew there was much missing with the book. I was close to submitting it half-complete. It only consisted of a bunching of individual thoughts with nothing but section headers to tie them together.
That’s not a book, that’s a magazine.
Perhaps a newspaper without the odd paging of articles.
It is my hope that now there is some flow and some reason behind the structural rhyme that was its foundation. This has been a joy, a pain, a blessing and a terror to write. When I was writing it was peace and it was wonder. When I wasn’t writing it was crippling anxiety and depression.
That is something I’ll be working on, maybe even as you read through this book. What was the pressure for? What good did it do? Perhaps a massive amount of good, perhaps no good at all. Either way, it worked out in the end.
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