Hey, new and exciting failure options! This year I have absolutely no chance of getting it done, because I'm going to be traveling three out of the four available weeks. So I should try it! No pressure, right? And who knows, maybe I'll get a ton of writing done sitting at my convention booth.

That's how I feel: I'm almost certain to fail, so: no pressure! Also, it's impossible to write anything good that fast, so: I can suck!

Except I can't convince myself that it's okay to (a) fail, (b) suck, and (c) do both at the same time.

Perfectionism is the reason I don't write, and the reason I should do NaNoWriMo, and the reason I probably won't.

I suck.

Perfectionism is the reason I don't write, and the reason I should do NaNoWriMo, and the reason I probably won't.

Seventeen worlds of this.

Ha. I am not a perfectionist. I have bins and bins full of notebooks with really genuinely lousy writing in them. I enjoy it, though.

So two authors were visiting my school this week: Justine Larbalestier and her husband Scott Westerfeld. They turned out to be amazingly funny and snarky, and after hanging out with them today at lunch, we discovered a mutual passion...for Buffy, of course. Justine in particular has written several essays about the show.

In any case, the reason I'm posting this here is that I talked up Allyson's book, and Justine is really interested in reading it when it comes out. So yay! Free publicity if they like it, Allyson...which of course they will.

Also, Scott's Midnighters series is evidently an homage to Buffy. Tres cool.

That was holy shit very nice of you!

I told Justine about the one you recorded at ND's last year (and you are going to send that to TAL soon, right? 'Cuz I want to hear it again), and she got all excited. Apparently she's been involved in fandom since the early 90's and did her doctoral dissertation on the Futurians.

Allyson, Deb asked me to tell you that, if she gets a chance, she's gonna "pimp your book" to somebody she knows at her signing thing tonight.

ooooh. This is all so exciting! I got the second half of my advance, today, which means my book is officially accepted, and also that I really have to get kicking on these edits.

Money for writing! Yay, Allyson!

This is about a different sort of writing, but I think it still applies here. I received today my mother-in-law's lifetime collection of genealogy research and books. She's in a nursing home and not expected to come out of it. I am officially the family genealogist. Now I need to go through it all and pull it into shape--at the same time pulling my own genealogy together as well as finishing the fun stories. As well as having a life--sometime.

Along with her research, though, are lots of other books and mementos. Lots of family pictures, most of which with no identifiers. And now I'm wrestling with archivist's guilt. I can't keep it all. I'm going to contact my sister-in-law to see if she wants any of the pictures--I think one big batch is from when her daughter was born--but there are still huge amounts. I asked Hubby, and he said, "If there are no dates or names and there isn't anyone to ID them, then they're just anonymouse people, aren't they." He's right, of course.

But now we get into my personal twitches. Mom kept this stuff for a reason, they had meaning to her. I hate being in the position of passing judgement on whether these things are worth keeping, it feels like passing judgement on the validity of her feelings. I'm not good at accepting the transience of things and the memories they invoke. I read too much history to blithely say, "This picture will never mean anything to anyone, let's pitch it." I know the odds of anyone getting information from unlabeled pictures is miniscule, but it feels like I'm erasing people from the great record if I judge their images to be not worth keeping.

I may just have to bite the bullet, say a prayer over them, and just let them go. And label all my own pictures before I get too old to do it myself and someone looks them over and goes, "Get rid of it."