Perfectly Imperfect

I’ve a confession.

I’m not perfect.

Whew, glad that’s out of the way. Why am I talking about not being perfect? Because, once upon a time – a very long, long, long, long, lo…you get the point – I thought I had to do it all right the first time. This didn’t just pertain to my writing either, this was everything in my life. I scolded myself for answering questions wrong in school. So much so that I stopped participating in class all together just for fear of saying something wrong. Needless to say, my grades suffered all through high school and I graduated only by the skin of my teeth. In my writing, I chastised myself if it wasn’t perfect the first time, tossing things casually to the side that, at one time, may have held some potential. Writing wise, I even walked away from it for the longest time because I got that frustrated with myself.

To be honest, to this day with my writing, it’s rare that anything is ever to my satisfaction. I didn’t get over it, I learned how to be okay with it. It causes me to make pass after pass after pass through my WiP’s, but that’s not such a bad thing when you look at the bigger picture. Each time I make a pass, the story gets better, the characters richer and more dimensional. Okay, I HOPE that’s what happens because I learn something about my writing each time I do that. I just have to know when enough’s enough and step away from it.

I still have a long way to go and I’ll probably never learn everything there is about writing, but that’s okay too because I don’t want to know it all. I like learning and growing from experiences, from seeing what to do and what not to do. Everyone goes through that and that is something that took me a very long time to learn and accept. It’s made me a better person and a better writer, bringing me to a place where I found enough courage to even be able to think about sending that I had hacked out to a publisher, let alone publishers.

So, I’m perfectly fine with being perfectly imperfect.

Just a couple of notes: Don’t forget to stop back by here on Monday, 10/12, for my first foray into Excerpt Monday.

Also, should I be able to find some time for it in the next few weeks to take a scrub through things, I’ll be posting some free reads up on my Free page. Just a few shorts that don’t really fit anywhere to speak of and are too short to really even be called shorts in the first place. *g*