Thursday, August 25, 2005

Can't...take...the...pressure...

We writers are hardest on ourselves. It's a proven fact that no editor, agent, critique partner, husband, wife, lover, mother or father can be any harder on us than we are.
This has become the most apparent to me over the last couple of days. I'm in a race against the clock...at least, the clock in my head that is. I begin my student teaching/classes next week with a couple of days of meetings and a couple of days of room organization and lesson planning with my cooperating teacher. Before this happens, I want to finish the chapter I'm currently working on, plus one more. This will put me in the position where I will only have 8 chapters to write before the end of the year. You did read that correctly, somewhere in between school, work and teaching (and hopefully going out with friends at least once or twice) I plan to write 2 chapters a month over the next four months.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this could qualify me for an insanity plea.
And I'm not the only one who does this. I have a friend on painkillers who's bummed because it means she won't make her page goals. Another friend is bummed because she's barely looked at her book since her baby was born four months ago.
Why do we do this to ourselves? It's not like there is an editor with a guillotine standing over us waiting for us to miss our page goal. Nope. No guillotine in sight. And all around me is encouragement. The Goalkeepers, Ms. K, family...all I get from them is "Great Job!" (and the occasionally where are my pages? from Ms. K, but she's pushy). Their encouragement is what keeps those angry dragons of self-doubt away.

In the meantime though, I have pages to produce...so to borrow a phrase, "Talk amongst yourselves."

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