I love starting projects.
I get all excited planning the project, it’s a chance to buy new office supplies, I have big dreams for how I want it to turn out and every time about ¾ of the way through….pffft.
Pffft is the sound of my enthusiasm running out.
Currently, in my house I have all of the following:
– one sock knit, one sock just started
– the yarn and pattern to make a sweater
– my office closet half cleaned out
– the start of a presentation I’m doing in the fall
– a pile of paperwork on my desk to be sorted
– a stack of cooking magazines where I fully plan to tear just the good recipes out
– a spreadsheet program to organize and track my business receipts plus a shoebox of receipts.
– a list of planned updates for my website
There is something about a new project. It hasn’t become work yet. There is still a real chance that I might not screw it up. This happens when I write too. I become rabidly excited about a new book project. I love the research. I love finding just the right opening sentence. Then a few hundred pages in, it suddenly occurs to me as if a bolt from the blue, “hey this sucks.” Depression follows (full on wallow and dramatic sighs optional)
As a dear friend once told me “writing is not like being licked by kittens.” It is hard work. What typically separates the published from the unpublished is the willingness to see the project through. Even on the days when you want to cash it in. Even on the days you are sure it is the worst thing ever written. Even on the days when you are sure you don’t even know how to finish it.
For now- I’m going to get back to the sock. What is one project you’ve left undone?
I was going to volunteer to knit that other sock for you! Seems like a much better use of my time than actually finishing book #2, which would be the project I’ve left undone (motto: it’s not done until it’s done) …
On the household front, I’d have to say I am long overdue in sorting through my kids’ clothes and pulling out the stuff that doesn’t fit them anymore. It needs to be done, but just seems easier to leave it all hanging there for now, even if it means my husband accidentally tries to squeeze my 18 month old son into a newborn t-shirt …
Uh, I would have to say those photo album/scrapbooks that would detail the fabulous childhood my children had . . . children who are now both away at college (one can even belly up to the bar and legally order a drink). Ditto those baby books gathering dust in the closet.
Sewing…I wanted to learn to sew this year. In January I bought all the stuff (I have a sewing machine I inherited)…patterns, fabric, a cutting board, you name it, I’ve got it. I have one t-shirt cut out…that’s it…
Richard Bach once said something along the lines of: A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t give up.
Great thoughts. It’s true about seeing it through. It’s tough, but we are more than dreamers, right?
I came up with a partial list of things that I have left undone but I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it.
In line with the theme, it’s making my daughter see the errors of her liberal ways and becoming the conservative I tried to raise. And I bet that after all my complaints about her liberalism, the sock was my Christmas gift.
LOL Oh, Eileen, Your Very Proud Father has some unfinished business himself — that of changing your liberal(?) ways!
put it this way–I’ve always worried that if I suddenly keeled over, my husband would have to trek to Front Royal Virginia to the big flea market where he could attempt to unload my vast supply of UFOs (quilts, embroidery, needlepoint, dolls, doll clothes, you name it). I know he would be grumbling to the high heavens about the many things I never finished over the years…
The good thing is I’ve stuck in there with the important things–kids, pets, etc. he he he