**Author looks at the date of the last blog post, winces, looks again.**
Nearly four months since my last update.
OUCH.
I won't apologize this time. I've previously documented the combination of factors that leads to this kind of massive gap. There is another contributing issue, however, which I have not discussed. Ironically, it is precisely what I had intended to make this post about when I jotted down the notes for it way back in July.
"Ambition and Perfection and Depression and Inspiration"
Hello, my name is Aethelfled, and I am a perfectionist.
I have difficulty writing anything, even something just meant for myself, that I am not completely happy with. I rehearse phrases in my head to make sure they sound clever before I speak them aloud or put them to paper. In school, I took pride in the fact that my "rough drafts" were polished enough to pass as final papers.
The problem is, that kind of perfection is fleeting. It relies heavily on inspiration, which is just the luck of having the right kind of thought at the right kind of time. It requires spending hours on just a handful of ideas, because the sentence that you used at the end of paragraph three works much better at the beginning of paragraph five, but now there's no clear flow through paragraph four. Cut that one into pieces and wedge a key phrase into paragraph five and another into three, and take that last sentence and make it the beginning of a new paragraph you will now insert between two and three, because you just thought of a clever metaphor that the rearranged blocks of text now seem to be explaining.
Even worse, perfection of any kind takes work, and lots of it. And the longer the piece you want to write, the more ambitious the topic you want to tackle, the harder it is to make it perfect. Especially when you keep smothering your inspiration with the demand that that it be perfect in the very first draft, interrupting your ideas to improve their polish.
Depression makes anything that feels remotely like work much, much harder, so when I demand perfection of myself, I actually hamstring my ability to produce the kind of writing that I want to create.
And I am ambitious. I look at the works of Neil Gaiman and I weep, not only in reaction to the beauty of his words, but with admiration and envy. I yearn to create works that move and inspire people the way his move and inspire me. I want to write novels, and television shows, and movies, and comic books, and short stories, and everything else under the sun. I want to create works that catch the attention of Neil Gaiman and Tamora Pierce and Diana Gabaldon and all the other authors I admire and whose creations I enjoy.
Days like today, I believe that those ambitions are within my grasp, if I'm willing to buckle down and work for them. But, today is a green day. I know that tomorrow may be yellow, or orange, like yesterday was. And one thing is crystal clear.
I will never fulfill my Ambition while I cling to Perfection.
