Leave it Alone Already!

     You can't see me, I can't see me either actually, I'm typing this with my eyes closed because they needed a good rest after what I've put them through today. You know by now, if you read my blog, that I often can be found literally minding my own business, but not today; today I was tending to my business! I am tweaking, correcting, and otherwise changing the manuscript for my book "Jude's Almost Daily Blog - Vol. 1".  I have been making corrections and manipulating punctuation and grammar for the better part of two days. Today was a nightmare! After going over the damn thing at least three times since it was given back to me last week, just before the weekend, I have made change after change both in the blogs I am including and in the ones I included to begin with - - LEAVE IT ALONE ALREADY! I'm serious, I'm like a dog with a bone, I just can't stop gnawing on every sentence of every page.  STOP!

    The thing is, I know there will still be mistakes, issues, problems, errors, and flub-ups. No writing is perfect unless you pay for it to be perfect and then, even then, it's not always perfect, but it's probably closer than what I'm going to get for my hard work. I'm having this internal fight inside of me as to whether I should be more professorish or humanish; do I write like I speak, or do I write correctly, and make sure all of the semicolons are in their proper places? It's a back and forth struggle because some of the blogs are more intimately written than others; I don't want to come off as being too strict with myself when I am really just chewing the cud with my readers. I need to put the keyboard down. I need to stop mothering it and just give it the wings I intended to give it; let it fly, and see what happens. I can say all day long that I will do exactly that, but then here I am; not doing that. I'm even correcting myself now so as to not have to go back over this blog in the future when or if I include it in my 2nd book, which will come out in about six more months. (Did you see what I did there? I first wrote out 6 more months, then I went back and thought I shouldn't do that because the rule is that if you say a number under ten you have to spell it out; so I did.) God, I am such a dork! 

    You're going to read my book and look for the mistakes now. I know you are, and that's OK. I need that. I need people to write me and point out every last tiny minute detail of every single error so I can both learn from it, and laugh because I'm not the only one looking at it. If I paid this much attention to my housecleaning I would be under heavy sedation for OCD; can a person have writer's OCD? Is that a thing? I don't even know. I do know that I can't stop going over the blogs one by one and making changes. Most of them resemble the ones I wrote and that are on this website, but some of them have been changed to the point that I really should have just written a new blog and called it done. I've taken to writing little disclaimers that say something like, "Hey, if you see a change in one of my book blogs and you think I'm lying because I changed something, please don't make it a point to tell me, I do actually have a license to write creatively, and I use it from time to time. Thank you." 

What's not cool is that I am harder on myself than I am on my students. I would not allow some of the mistakes I have made to be turned into me without grading down on them; mistakes like misuse of the semicolon of instance. I will, however, with students, allow for run-on sentences when I feel that they don't really know how or when to splice them. I will allow overt descriptions of things because I absolutely love good adjective use. I think adjectives should be giant, big, fat, lovely, and useful. I really do, I'm not just saying that. I'm harder on myself because I am not grading myself, I'm trying to be good enough not to be worried about being graded, but we all know that's an impossibility for anyone. We are all, no matter what, graded by someone, every time we do anything. It's just life, I guess. The trick is not to let it bother us and if it does bother us, not to let it show. Damn the torpedoes woman, and just write! There are times that I literally write something for no other reason than to piss someone off. I can't say I haven't done that a few too many times - - it's passive, I know, but it's better than writing a novel for the sole purpose of murdering them in my mind and applying my plot to paper! (At least when I do that I don't actually commit a crime...just remedy injustice in my brain.) Then I post it.

OK, I'm almost over it. I've about talked myself into just writing and letting it be what it is, I can do this. I can do this as soon as I go over it once more to be sure I don't have anything misspelled or ... damn.