"The hard is what makes it great."

My babe's out of town this week, and it's hotter than the 9th circle of hell, so I spent tonight eating popsicles every colour of the rainbow and watching A League of Their Own. (I remember watching it as a girl and being in awe of how beautiful Madonna was.)

Anyway, this has also been a week full of revising, which, for me, means the volumes gets turned up on those bitchy inner voices that love to chime in when you haven't asked them a goddamn thing, you're just sitting at your desk, being a good little writer and they just have to diarrhea all over everything.

There's a scene in A League of Their Own, and I sat up as soon as it started. Tom Hanks is the coach and he's trying to convince his MVP (Geena Davis) not to quit the team. She says, "It just got too hard." His response:

It's supposed to be hard.
If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it.
The hard is what makes it great.

Thank you, Tom Hanks. You're a gentleman, and a scholar.

 

This story's got a finger up my nostril and is leading me around

I recently pulled a story out of hibernation (AKA: a folder on my desktop called 'Don't'). I had forced it into a slumber because, like a bad relationship at the very end, everything the story did annoyed the absolute stuffing out of me. (If my relationship with this story had an anthem, it'd be this.) It was crawling around under my skin like some alien insect on The X-Files. I let it go on for far too long, even though I knew better. Even though the healthy part of me was saying, "Drawer this hoser!"

The good news is that when I pulled it out all these months later, I didn't totally hate it. In fact, it started speaking to me, telling me what it needed, and even what it was concerned with trying to say. And me, being the good little minion that I am, got back to work.

Yadda yadda yadda, the story is at it again. Every time I think it's done, it goes and becomes something else. I sent it out to a Dear Writer Friend, whose advice was: "Depopulate!" They used the word 'disoriented'. 

But they also said they like it. A lot. Which gives me those tingles on the top of my head. 

So I'm back to work, where the story's got a finger up my nostril and is leading me around. Even though it's not my favourite thing I've ever written, when it finally settles down, sending it out into the world will actually feel like my biggest achievement yet.