I had a nice moment yesterday as I was leaving work. I got into the elevator with my coworkers, one of whom I work with daily and the other two that I don't so much. I happened to have a giant tube of paper sticking out of my backpack--I bought this iridescent sparkly paper to use in making resin jewelry, which L was teaching to me last night-- and after I explained what I was doing with that, the regular coworker was all, "She has so much energy, I don't know how she does it." And I was all, "I guess it's because I'm single and I don't have to take care of anybody." They all agreed with me on that one.

After getting out of the elevator, another one of the coworkers walked out in my direction and she was all, "I think it's great to not have kids, I prefer my fur kids, but if you ever get married, marry someone without children." I was all, "I take it your husband has kids?" and she was all, yes, two. One of them is fine, but the other one is a 40-year-old slacker scrub who refuses to work and "I don't want to have to be the one who supports him." I hear that, I said.

So yeah, I should really remember these sorts of things when I am inevitably comparing myself to other people, which is what my shrink was telling me earlier in the day. That being single is freaking awesome when I can do whatever the hell I feel like doing every single night, instead of having to slog home, make dinner for a family of four, put out the husband's medication, completely and utterly manage my children's lives until bedtime, and then fall asleep in front of the TV. Cheers to THAT, y'all. Because really, I would suck at it.

In other not-exactly-news-for-today, I was reading Jenny Crusie on writing Sharknado and other crazy shit. Now I didn't have access to cable, didn't watch Sharknado, and I am very eh on the idea of watching it anyway. But I did like her post on it, and here's why:

"Never ever start thinking about the objections to your story before you�ve written your story. Never ever second guess an idea that makes you breathe faster, that makes a million story moments race through your head, that makes you think, �It would be so much fun to write this story, I want to write this story.� If a Sharknado appears in your frontal lobe, you must write Sharknado. Ignore the naysayers, the literary snobs, the nitpickers, and go for it. I wish I�d thought of Sharknado. No kidding, no snark, I wish I could think of something as brilliantly over the top as Sharknado because once you start with sharks in a tornado, there really is no place you cannot go. You are freed from logic, from science, from technology, from rationality."

I think she has a good point. I pretty much do this a lot in reality--i.e. the first thing I look for is the problems, and/or whether or not they are something I can handle doing. For example, when looking at job listings, the first thing I do is scroll down to the requirements and see what inevitably rules me out of this job--usually because they want someone who can handle finances/was trained on such-and-such financial system, and I neither want to do anything financial for a job (hells no, I don't even want to answer money questions at my current job), nor have I been allowed access to such. I frequently am derailed by stuff like, "I can't drive and there's no public transport there," and "I can drive, but I have no access to a car right now," though obviously those ones have been ruled out and now have been replaced by "I don't wanna drive out there and rent the Zipcar for $66 bucks to have the car sit there for hours while I attend that." Sometimes they're good reasons and sometimes they're rather stupid, I admit it. But the first thing I go to is the ultimate practical, and that's ruling shit out before I waste time on trying to make something doomed work.

I posted something along these lines farther down the page, and Jenny said that the cool thing about fiction is that you can reverse-engineer it later. Alas, my brain doesn't really work that way--my occasional attempts at "one, two, skip a few, profit"-type stuff never exactly "filed in the blanks" or retconned later on. I pretty much have to go step by step from A to Z (plotter, not pantser). One year for NaNoWriMo I decided to write the end first, then start at the beginning and keep writing until I hit word count. It was...incredibly difficult to write out of order, and kind of sucked, and re-joining didn't work that well....I don't think that's for me, much as I may admire some other people's ways of doing it. And of course, that doesn't fly in real life.

I wish I could just do that "take a leap"-type stuff instead of having to ground it in reality...but then again, if it's not grounded in reality, it doesn't get done, with me.

Maybe this sort of thinking just doesn't work outside of fiction writing?

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