And I figure if I continue to refridgerate after opening, I've got about a week to finish the story before it goes bad and I can't stand to look at it anymore. I start believing the inner critic who says I should move on to something else. Sure, if I finish I can probably come back to the story and revise it with fresh, new eyes. But if I don't finish the first draft and I leave it to do something else, I know I'll never finish it. Every time I clean out the fridge I find old abandoned stories with which I planned on doing great things. They're rotten now. And I know I'll never make anything of them. I should throw them out. Make room for more food. But who has time to clean fridge when there's so much writing to do?

I'll tell you now you're going to get sick of this comparison before I do.

And it's not just the inner critic giving me grief. Tomatoes are in season right now. New ideas pop into my head while I'm working my current story and when I have to choose between those fresh ideas and the slowly-getting-bad open jar of text on the computer in front of me, it's easy to think, "This is going nowhere. If I work on this new project, this new meal, I'll be able to reset the clock. I'll have the momentum to see it to completion because, instead of only having a few days left to finish this current story (which is already starting to smell), I can have seven brand new days to work on it. And surely I can finish it in seven days!" That I'm not able to finish my current story in seven days seems inconsequential.

Then there's submission. It takes discipline to be willing to subject my work to the horrors of the rejection slip. It means some editor chewed it up, spat it out, and said "I'm not serving this ungodly dish in my restaurant!" And the inner critic is already telling me that it's not worth my time and money to prepare and mail it in the first place.

So the best thing to do is to finish writing, print it out, and mail it immediately, right? Before I have a chance to second guess myself? Tempting, yes. But that doesn't make for a great submission. I now need discipline to wait. To put it in the freezer, for at least a day or two. Even the best pasta can seem less exciting when it's all I've been eating night after night. I eventually return to it (which isn't always easy; reheating usually means doing more dishes) and begin revising.

The discipline I need at this stage is to do what needs to be done. To cut large blocks of text that I loved writing during the first draft. It's like finding freezer burn on my favorite part of the dish. I could still serve it, yeah, but it's only going to decrease the overall quality of the work. If only I'd wrapped it better before I stuck it in the freezer in the first place, but there's nothing I can do about that now.

Eventually, if I'm disciplined enough, it's time to send it off. To serve that pasta I've kept frozen and serve it to its target market, which can be especially difficult if I have doubts in my mind as to the overall quality. In spite of volatility involved in the revision process, the story's actually pretty safe in the freezer. I like knowing I've got a pound of penne (yeah, I wish my freezer was that big) ready to be reheated should the right occasion come up. Like a great new anthology market or something. But the longer I leave it end there, the more likely it is that I'll never get to appreciate it.

There's also the discipline of starting new projects, when it seems easier to rest on the laurels of what I've just accomplished. Even moreso after I've just sold a work. And the discipline of resending projects when they're rejected, when it's so easy to believe that the editor couldn't possibly wrong (or that if it's wrong for his or her publications, it must be wrong for all publications).

I guess the lesson to be taken from this is that success in this business requires a lot of discipline in a lot of disciplines. And failure to practice even one of them can be the foul-smelling ingredient that kills an otherwise great bowl of pasta. Oh, and you can never have too much garlic.

Filed under Journal, Prose and Poetry

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