Plan/Counter Plan
December 4, 1998
5:16 a.m.
Sarah McLachlan on the CD again   Think you're so smart? Take the 5 Minute IQ Test Obviously, that plan I developed a month or so ago has been shredded. By now I was supposed to be through with four short stories and beginning work on the sequel to Glamour of the God-Touched. But for various reasons that hasn't happened. Life, it seems, does not hold itself accountable for individual goals, and now it's time to go back and rework my plan. I do a lot of planning at work, too. And I tend to be a little more detailed in my planning than others. Sometimes folks get a shade sarcastic with me when I plan things to infinite detail, then things go wrong and I have to do it again. They seem to think that I wasted my time in generating the first plan. I disagree, of course. I never expect things to go directly according to plan. Yeah, in this specific case, I'm way off target, and I would like that to be different. But I know things will change even when I'm layign down the first pass at any plan. And when I look back on the past couple weeks, I see I underestimated some things I knew were in my way, and I ran into a couple things that kinda fell out of the blue. No big deal, you know. Having a fairly detailed plan helps me emotionally come to grips with these changes, though. Seeing my stories laid out in my plan, each step assigned a deadline, lets me see the work before me, and when I need to move things around it lets me play priority games. Is beginning the novel more important than finishing the short stories? Do I value two short stories over the other two? Maybe I do them first, and then the novel. Regardless of how I answer, I find comfort in the process and in having the result in front of me. It makes me feel serious about my goals. It gives me direction toward what I want out of life--and by laying it out, I am reminded that there is a way to get where I want to go. So tomorrow I'll go back to my calendar and I'll look at the invisible pile of stories waiting to be written, and I'll plan them out. Invention cannot be planned, they say. Maybe they're right. But it can, I think, be anticipated.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"If you don't set goals you can't regret not making them." Yogi Berra |
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