One day in Film Directing class, Dr. Stenholm was lecturing as usual when she began, “If something is worth doing…”

With a mental eyeroll and a nod, I finished it in my head: “…it’s worth doing right.”

She surprised me. She finished, “…it’s worth doing badly.”

Huh? That got my attention, and I listened more intently as she explained that many times would-be filmmakers (and other artists) are so focused on being able to do something perfectly that they never do anything. All energy and attention is fixed on learning everything that can be known about a subject, so the actual production never takes place.

Unfortunately, that’s one of my major problems. Those who know me well can attest to my perfectionistic tendencies; some have teasingly called me OCD. I’ve tried to fight that by jumping into things a bit too fast now and then, but since I came back to Huntsville, I’ve been stalled.

Mom recently gave me a printout of an article from MSN titled How to Get the Life You Want, which has a lot of good advice and sparked that memory of Dr. Stenholm’s lecture. Combined with the reaction I got to my poetry, I think it would probably be a good idea to post some of my fiction snippets - the ones that aren’t finished and aren’t going anywhere. To that end, I pulled out the three ring binder I use to keep my writing together, read through most of the pieces I’d been considering for this, and winced.

I’m not sure I have the guts to post them. With my poetry, I kept out all the ones that really made me wince and only posted the ones that weren’t too bad. I found it a little strange that the ones I thought were better works got no comment and the ones I felt were weaker got faves and comments. I’m not sure whether my threshold is higher for fiction, or if it’s just that there’s so much more of it than the poetry. I write poetry when my emotions are too strong to handle; I have fiction running in the back of my head almost constantly.

Anyway, I’m trying to work up the nerve to beat some of the orphans into minimally acceptable shape and slap them up on dA for all the world to see (though hopefully not mock…too badly). Sigh.