Practice

Something else Dalton and I had/have/had/have (I rewrote it four times) in common - we never practiced at anything. For both of us, we were either good at it the first time, or it wasn't worth doing. Frankly, this is a particularly dreadful character trait. Arrogant. Lazy. Undisciplined. It wasn't very kind to our clarity of purpose either. Only very rarely would either of us acknowledge a desire to attempt something that we might fail in. Instead, what we did, the jobs we held, the projects we undertook, the interests we pursued were dictated by aptitude rather than longing.

I am going to give practicing a try.

I am going to write.

Uugh. There is such potential failure in that statement. Actually, I'm not even sure what failure would look like, but since I also can't define what success would look like, the whole enchilada is a risky proposition.

I just know that I want to do it.

I resigned from my position at the church and as of October 27, I am officially unemployed. Instead of writing, I have spent the past month buoying the stock value of The Container Store, filing my 2005 (hey, it was a rough year) taxes, discovering that Dalton actually managed to teach me a thing or two about cooking in the last decade, and planning how my schedule would look once I finally got around to doing what I quit to do in the first place. There are a lot of lists. Not so many manuscripts.

But my month is up, and it's time to learn the art of practice.

My aim is to write something every day. Actually, I want to write two things everyday - something for this blog and something for the book. Some days they will be one in the same, call it a 2-for-1.

And for now, no questions about the structure of content of the book, please. That's what the practice is for.