News

The last blog about what I have been reading went up without being spell checked. That’s always a bad thing, but when the writer is dyslexic, as I am, it’s worse. As several of you pointed out the misspellings, the mistakes, I thought, “Crap!” But the very complaints let me know that you all understood exactly what books I was talking about, and the fact that I had misspelled my own state incorrectly seemed to amuse more of you than it upset. I was glad for that. Jon said he could go in and fix it, and I started to have him rush to do it, then I thought, no.

The blog on reading with all it’s mistakes makes a very important point. Perfection isn’t the goal. The goal is to get your information, your stories, told as clearly and interestingly as possible. Everyone understood what I’d meant to say. The information was successful passed from me to you. It was entertaining, perhaps not entirely in the way I had intended, but you all enjoyed it, or enjoyed complaining about it, either way, fun was had by all. I will endeavor to spell check from now on for the blog, but I hope this oversight on my part will finally make the point that I’ve been making to would-be writers for years. If you wait for perfection you will never finish that article, that story, that book. You will polish, and rewrite, and there will always be something that isn’t perfect. There will always be some tweak you can make. The point is not to be perfect. The point is to finish and try to publish. Let the editor worry about polishing it more. She will certainly send it back to you if she thinks it needs work, but by the time she does that she will have bought it, and you will know that you will be published. If the book was still sitting in your computer being made “perfect” that wouldn’t be happening.

When I only had a couple of stories published, I had a saying on the wall in my office. It was a piece of paper that I’d written in big letters. It read, “Perfection is an unattainable goal.” I purposefully spelled “perfection” wrong. Yes, knowing it was spelled badly bugged me every time I looked at it, but that one imperfection made it’s point to me, and my very perfectionist brain. I wasn’t trying for perfection. I was trying to succeed.