inches offered, miles taken

In the event that you thought you were the only person in the world incapable of learning from experience, I am here to prove you wrong. And when I say I "always" do these things, I'm barely exaggerating at all.

I always do this:

It's written in past tense. It works in past tense. Yet, I'm bedeviled by an overwhelming urge to convert it to present tense. To get rid of the itch, I spend too much time tweaking tense, all the while feeling more and more convinced that I'm doing the absolutely genius thing, internal accolades buzzing through my head like flower-drunk bees, but when I print it out to read (which is a necessity of my own final editing), I realize that this tense switch has been a miserable folly and that I will have to change everything back to the way it was in the first place. In spite of this acute and crushing realization, the digital version of the story will remain diabolically reasonable in its wrongness, and it will require constant comparison between versions to keep me convinced that the paper doesn't lie.

I always do this, too:

I write a story for a challenge. It's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with it, and maybe it's even the rightest thing I could have written for the situation, but then I realize that what I wanted to write - no, NEEDED to write - was a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORY. So I do that. Write a different story. What the hell. I'm only days past deadline, after all. And I can predict, based on much past experience, that when I can finally bring myself to read the original, hateful story months from now, I will have absolutely no idea what I thought was wrong with it.

Just thought I'd share. Now I've got to run and fix some tenses.

inches offered, miles taken

In the event that you thought you were the only person in the world incapable of learning from experience, I am here to prove you wrong. And when I say I "always" do these things, I'm barely exaggerating at all.

I always do this:

It's written in past tense. It works in past tense. Yet, I'm bedeviled by an overwhelming urge to convert it to present tense. To get rid of the itch, I spend too much time tweaking tense, all the while feeling more and more convinced that I'm doing the absolutely genius thing, internal accolades buzzing through my head like flower-drunk bees, but when I print it out to read (which is a necessity of my own final editing), I realize that this tense switch has been a miserable folly and that I will have to change everything back to the way it was in the first place. In spite of this acute and crushing realization, the digital version of the story will remain diabolically reasonable in its wrongness, and it will require constant comparison between versions to keep me convinced that the paper doesn't lie.

I always do this, too:

I write a story for a challenge. It's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with it, and maybe it's even the rightest thing I could have written for the situation, but then I realize that what I wanted to write - no, NEEDED to write - was a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORY. So I do that. Write a different story. What the hell. I'm only days past deadline, after all. And I can predict, based on much past experience, that when I can finally bring myself to read the original, hateful story months from now, I will have absolutely no idea what I thought was wrong with it.

Just thought I'd share. Now I've got to run and fix some tenses.