Making it Right
July 2, 2001
7:29 a.m.
I'm very proud of myself today. I worked on the manuscript diligently this weekend. I probably could have come here today and reported that I was maybe three hundred or so pages into it, and heading toward the home stretch. I could have. It would have been very easy, and in some ways it was tempting. Working "In the open" like this is dangerous that way. I sometimes feel like I have to show a certain progress here, you know? And that builds pressure unto itself. No surprise there, of course. This pressure to produce was, after all, the original reason I started this journal. It's just that, like everything else, helpful things in excess are harmful in the end. in the case of this book, thought, the truth of the matter was that the work I had done between pages 120 and 180 was not so good. It was flabby. It was poorly organized. It didn't get the job done. I so wanted to just wave my magic wand over it and pretend that it was finished, though. I so wanted to ignore those little whisperings that said I wasn't done. But in the end I didn't let myself do that. Instead, I went back over those words. I pulled out a new sheet of paper and I wrote down what happened in bullet points, and I re-arranged, and I mished and I mashed, and I rewrote. By the end of the weekend I was nearing 200 pages, not 300 like I so wanted to report. But those 200 pages are what I wanted to say. And so I'm really proud of myself today.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"The satisfaction of actually finishing that album is still something that I'm very grateful for." - Emmylou Harris - On working on "The Ballad of Sally Rose" |
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