But my point was that I learned to doubt my natural...anything pretty fast.

Yep. Time to take it back, bebe.

Do you get the sense of uh-oh when you assemble ingredients from what you've got in the fridge, put them together, and try to make dinner?

Yep

Do you feel the frantic need to look for other peoples' existing embroidery patterns, every time you get the idea for a picture you want to create with silk thread?

Yep. I'd never attempt to embroider a picture just from an image in my head.

If you had three piano lessons as a kid, and suddenly hear a melody in your head that you can't identify, do you feel the need to read a bunch of books about piano before you flop down on a bench in the music store at the mall, and pick it out on the keyboard, humming as you do so?

I've had oodles of piano lessons, but the idea of picking out a coherent melody on the keyboard just from what I hear in my head is alien to me.

Oddly, writing is the only thing where I will just leap off the creative cliff and see what happens. I'm very analytical with other processes. Some of it is not wanting to waste resources on potentially unusable results (dinner or embroidery), some is a dread of being seen as less than competent at something. Competence is insanely important to me, I've learned. Not so much at the risk-taking. The potential gain is not seen as worth the potential loss, and, yes, I know that isn't the healthiest outlook.

Yep, I'm the person hanging back at home, muttering dire predictions, while Deb is out on the frontier, pushing the boundaries of the known world. But I'm cute.

You are cute. So are we all. Deb is published.

Deb is my Bolander.She listens to my pissing and moaning and threatens to gut me when I get too dramatic. She gives good advice, too. But the metaphor finally breaks down because she is better looking and so not likely to get forced out to get b. org a younger demographic.How many quarters are we up to, internet spouse?

Competence is insanely important to me, I've learned.

I rather like competence myself, but I'm scratching my head in bemusement, even while it's nodding up and down. Very dizzy-making sensation.

The three "yes" answers are making me scratch my head because, well, another language, damn it, and one I don't speak. I'm trying to envision the size of my ulcers if I threw that much consideration into stuff I love doing - that's why I chose cooking and music, which I can still do, and embroidery, which I can't anymore - and truth to tell, I think the ulcers would be bigger than my duodenum. Considering the cost of the ulcer and blood pressure meds, in comparison to the cost of a potentially botched dinner or a few skeins of silk embroidery yarn? I'll take the risk, every time.

But that's bogus, me using that reasoning, because truth is, I don't apply reason to it, ever. If I burn dinner or it tastes like feet sauteed in ass (which I've been known to do, on both counts), I'll make another dinner and eat that. If the tarot card of the Hermit I put on a chamois guitar strap for Jimmy Page in 1977, all hand done to scale in tiny coloured beads with no pattern or template but the card itself on the table next to me, had turned out lopsided or totally crappy, I'd have sworn in highly spiced and probably Elizabethan terms for a few minutes, and bought more beads and tried again, or tried something else.

This is not not not not not a judgment, in any shape or form. It's a statement of incomprehension, or maybe a sort of mildly apologetic explanation of why I blink when people stockpile the writing books and worry about it: literally, my mantra is, what's the big deal? What have I got to lose?

But hell, I'm a freak. Not like we didn't know that.

But the metaphor finally breaks down because she is better looking and so not likely to get forced out to get b. org a younger demographic.How many quarters are we up to, internet spouse?

Yo, rookie! GET OFF MY LAWN!

(puts false teeth back in place and shakes cane at erika)

I think, Deb, if we ever spent time together in the meat world we would quickly drive each other mad. I suspect we're the same tarot card, just one of us the reverse aspect of the other.

Heh. You may well be right. I find I do tend to be the sideways Janus-face of a lot of peoples' perspectives in this life.

In other news, I love my editor. I love love love her. She turns 86 years momentarily, I sent her ginger cake (which I know she adores) and didn't hear a peep. Since she comes from a generation that prizes good manners highly, I was worried sick. So I pinged her, asking if she got cake, and mentioning the good Publishers Weekly review.

I got this in my email:

I came in to the office after having been working from home for over a week and found the ginger cake. And now can't wait to get home and eat it. Do you think I am sharing it here with my colleagues? Think again.

That's a lovely review, and they found someone who knows an excellent book when he/she sees it!

Love my editor, I do.

Connie, are you enjoying FFoSM at all? Hopefully you are, since it was meant as a cheer-you-up prezzie.

At odd moments I think, "Hmm, they're in that pub discussing financial matters, it wouldn't hurt if I just picked it up and--stop it! Must work!"

Then I come here and waste time.

edit: ie, yes, I'm quite enjoying it.

Oh, good! It's doing its job. Always a good thing.

(oh, and psssst, interesting scary things start happening right after the pub and the money....)