In Which I Admit a Personality Flaw and Shout With Capital Letters

I am a Perfectionist.
If something isn't going according to my self imposed definition of perfect I give up.
I find this personality trait to be odd because I KNOW Im not perfect, I fall over myself constantly, am impatient, have a tendency towards laziness, I procrastinate, sometimes I yell, returning phone calls is something that I rarely do, when I write thank you cards I forget to mail them, my attention span can be that of a cat's during conversations, and I can be horribly critical.
(that all makes me sound like such a lovable person-doesn't it?)

This blog post isn't supposed to be about all my flaws, just perfectionism, but I typed them all out because for some reason it felt like the right thing to do.

  I am currently working on a novel (which I do not like to admit because it is putting me out there as someone writing a novel and then people will ask me about it- which is scary because it means I am making a sort of commitment to this project. And while I have been married for 15 years commitment manages to scare the hell out of me.)
As I am writing I am critiquing what I am writing, and while this time I do like the characters enough to not kill them off by deleting all of my progress- I am not entirely happy with my writing because it isn't up to my RIDICULOUSLY IMPOSSIBLE criteria.
SO, I came up with some guidelines for myself.
1) The writing can suck, in fact it is ok if it does suck. That is what editing is for.
2) There will be no quitting until there are a minimum of 60,000 words- because I have never made it that far and I need to show myself that I can make it that far, and that  the world won't end if my story sucks.
3) The end result may be the sort of book I like to make fun of...and that is OK, because I wrote a book and that is all that matters right now- subsequent books can become better because there will have been more practice.

The odd thing is, I can take the critique of other people- it is my own self dialogue of critique that kills me before I leave the starting gate.
Now that I am nakedly exposed and uncomfortable with that, I will end this posting. ;-)