Here I am, back again with my periodic proof of continued existence. I did some more outlining, just some generic birds-eye-view scene building really, but it’s progress.

I have a problem, or maybe a quirk, where whenever I spend too much time editing any given photograph I dislike it more and more. It’s like the character creation sliders at the start of Skyrim, where the more time I spend on a photo the less patience I have to continue working on it and the less joy I derive from the finished piece.

I get the same thing with writing.

This can be a blessing sometimes. It means I don’t often get bogged down in trying to perfect a sentence or a paragraph or a scene. But it also means that I struggle with polish, with taking my prose beyond functional and mundane and making it sing.

I wrote a trunk novel a couple years back, and though it had larger issues than the prose itself, when I edited it I basically just ran through the thing and moved some punctuation around and fixed spelling errors. I sent it out to some agents and got exactly the reaction it warranted, which is to say none, with the exception of a couple form rejections.

I don’t know that I’ve got any real point here, except that maybe it’s a good thing to know your weaknesses so you can attack them. Developing a sense of your own ability is tough, and I’ve known folks who’ve over and under estimated their writing. Developing that sense and the perseverance to deal with what you determine from it are probably the keys to learning any skill.

So, fellow nerds, stick with it. Here’s a photo I took the other day down at the lake in Tempe.