10: Negotiating Expectations
10/07/2011
Five hours of writing on The Song of Alodia tonight. I only got 3 ¼ pages out of it though. Got Tapu into The Field of the Fallen. He’s about to find Damu. Want to catch that when I’m fresh. I’m getting there, slowly but surely. So far this story of Tapu is 34 pages long, but I’ve got 75 annotations along with it. Will be over 100 by the time I’m done. But that’s only part of the reason this is taking so long to write – juggling the material from my notes I want to squeeze in.
Really, it’s the phrasing that takes so long. The diction and syntax. I’m too anal and too much the perfectionist. I’m not sure how to stop it. I tell myself I’m just going to race through it then clean up the pros on the rewrite, but I can never stick to that. I can never just write it like I am right now in this journal, or like my personal correspondence. If I could write that fast, all four books would be done by now.
Present-Day Reflection
6/4/2026
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Fifteen years later and I’m still living with the mismatch between my expectations and reality. I thought I’d have typed The Song of Alodia so I could upload it to this website over the last couple days, but I never even touched it. I got drawn into getting The Yara prelude posted to my home page as a free writing sample, then the rest of that day getting my newsletter linked at the bottom of The Yara page. Creating an account and formatting the automation for my email campaign with free chapters from Wings of Providence kept me up until midnight.
It took a while because I had no idea what I was doing. Two months ago I’d never even been on personal website, let alone known how to design and build one with blogs and newsletters.
Then yesterday, I had errands to run in the real world – always on foot with no car in the city. I was out getting kitty litter when I got stuck for a while browsing Twice Sold Books up on Capitol Hill, just up the street from the pet store. When I finally got home and back to work, I ended up working on getting content for my Batu Companion uploaded until 11PM.
Both mornings were spent fixing issues with this Author’s Journal section of my website, as well as posting my latest entries. Like this one.
The main difference between now and fifteen years ago is that I’m more comfortable with not meeting my expectations. These days I tend to view them more as options than must-dos. So long as I get good work done and closer to my goals, I’m happy.
