So today has not been great.

Today was the day I was going to dedicate my whole afternoon to getting my text story into the proper format, which happens to be an Excel spreadsheet.

Once I looked at the sample spreadsheet the company provided,. I got what the deal with the format was. It’s dead simple, two colums, one for who is speaking and one for what they are saying. Anyone could figure that out in two seconds.

But why a spreadsheet and not just a text file? My guess is that an app has a way easier time reading and interpeting a spreadsheet than a text document.

So that was my Saturday Afternoon Challenge. Making the spreadsheet was no big deal. I have LibreOffice, it does various Excel formats. I learned spreadsheets when I was in high school.

I find them quite beautiful,. to be honest. The ability to so swiftly and easily set up dynamic mathematical relationships between values rocks my freaking world.

For us system times, it’s practically porn.

So there I was plugging away at the thing when I suddenly realized three horrible things at the same time :

1. It was not nearly long enough. It was supposed to be at least 100 lines and it was 52. There goes my concision again. I have to learn to be more prolix.
2. My future at this gig was riding on this
3. It sucked.

It’s really not very good. It starts off very strong but then it veers off into stupidity fairly quickly and I just plain hate the ending.

For quick reference, we are talking about the story I wrote in this blog entry. 

And right at this moment, I haaaaaate it.

But that’s how the artistic process goes. You make it the first time, you love it, then you hate it, then you fix it, lather rinse repeat as many times as it takes, and if you are lucky, you emerge at the end with something you can stand.

Or so I am told. I am still Mister One Draft Only over here. But I feel like I am getting ready to finally evolve into being a real writer who is capable of working on something for a much longer time any day now.

Or so I hope.

For the moment, it’s still write, release, and forget. I am lucky that I have enough talent that I can get away with that kind of thing. My writing hums with life and is alternately hilarious, heartbreaking, or just plain dark.

It’s a mood thing.

I suppose my whole life has been like that, in a way. I have been coasting on raw talent and intelligence since the first day of grade 1. My life has been split between the things I do easily that others can’t do at all and the things others do easily that I can’t do at all.

Call me “differently abled”.

Or a hothouse flower. That certainly fits. In the right environment, I could bloom like crazy and light up the whole greenhouse with my dazzling display of color and form.

But those conditions are so rare as to be currently unknown to science and wisdom, and as to how to get there, well, that’s…. complicated.

What I really need is to be transplanted someplace where I can thrive by the Great Green Gardener in the Sky.

Full of country goodness and green peaness.

All I can do on my own is very slowly creepy in the direction of the sun. I have no idea when I will actually get there, but the light gets brighter as I go and that is good enough for me for now.

I am not, of course, surprised that my re-entry to the world of working has been quite rough so far.

That’s to be expected. I am not used to the world and I have always had a little more optimism than forethought so I am not surprised that I am stumbling out of the gate.

But soon I will hit my stride and then, zoom!

And I mean, worst case scenario, I lose the gigs I have now. That would suck, but there is plenty of more work out there.

I mean, look at all I got with a little less than a week of trying!

And I think that the people I have been writing for will be impressed with my talent enough to be willing to work with me to get the rest of the equation up to par.

I definitely have a talent for writing good stuff. But I need help turning my rich ore into gold bricks. I need someone else being in the equation giving me feedback.

Preferably someone harsh but fair. Like my fave professor, Aaronovsky, fromk VFS. He was the only one who cared enough to be tough with us and say “Not good enough! Do it again! ” till we got it right.

To say that stood out like a rose in a bed of daisies in the don’t give a shit, do whatever is easiest for YOU atmosphere of the VFS writing department would be the understatement of the year, three years running.

As patient readers know, I have had remarkably little challenge in my life. School was always super easy and all that. So when someone gives me the feedback I need and want so bad, I don’t care if it comes via the tip of their boot.

In fact, to be honest, I would prefer that to having it come in the form of vague, hazy statements made by people who are too afraid of hurting my feelings (or of me, for that matter) to push back at all and so, to me, it’s like they are barely there.

It’s hard to convey the deep frustration of being a naturally combative person in a world where nobody is willing to spar with you.

I need opposition! Pushback! Friction! Or any other thing that would make the world feel more real to me.

I am tired of living in this crazy hazy world of dreams.

I want to wake up and get to work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.