The "good enough" post.

Bear with me -- this will be a writing post eventually.

It has been years since I did any embroidery. I used to do it quite a lot, but let's face it, a lot of the designs of yesteryear were pretty bland: flowers, vines, more flowers and more vines. One can only embroider so many dresser scarves and pillowcases before one needs to move on.

Well, gods all bless the Millennials, because they are making crafting edgy. Even embroidery.

I stumbled on a bunch of embroidery kits in a shop in Old Town Alexandria a few weeks ago and was charmed by these new designs -- so much so that I picked one up. The kit is by cozyblue and the design I bought is the Lunar Blossom. Here's what you get in the kit: preprinted cloth, floss, a hoop, a needle, and a photo of the finished item with directions on the back.

I'll be honest -- I picked this kit partly for the moon phases and partly because of all that running stitch. I knew it would work up fast. And yet it's been sitting on the coffee table for the past several weeks, while I've been beating myself up over the knitting and writing I was supposed to be doing.

Now here it is, a three-day weekend, and the highs are supposed to be in the 90s, which is way too hot for knitting. I figured I could get the embroidery project done this weekend and I could say I'd actually accomplished something. So I started working on it yesterday.

Have I mentioned that it's been a while since I did any embroidery? Like decades? I tell you what -- my eyesight was a lot better when I was in my twenties. I finally broke down today and got out my needle threader, so it wouldn't take me five minutes to re-thread the needle every time I pulled the floss out accidentally. (Of course I do that. So do you -- don't lie.)

The directions say you can do any stitch you want, but if you want to do what the designer did, to use running stitch for the petals, backstitch for outlining the moons, and padded satin stitch for filling in the moons. Well, the running stitch went fine. I got three stitches into outlining the moons and realized I was doing split stitch instead of backstitch. But it looked okay and she said I could do whatever I wanted, so I kept going.

Padded satin stitch, though. Regular old satin stitch I was familiar with, but padded? So I asked Mama Google and she gave me some sources. Basically, before you do your satin stitch, you outline the section and then fill it in with whatever stitch moves you; most folks seem to prefer straight stitches, but I also saw some do chain stitch. One woman cut a piece of felt to fit and stitched it in place for the padding. Then once you've done your padding, you do your satin stitch perpendicular to the direction of your infill stitches. 

I watched one video where the woman doing it had a very soothing voice -- kind of like Bob Ross but for embroidery. She recommended using one strand of floss for the satin stitches. Her reasoning was that a single strand would produce a more uniform appearance, as multiple strands would twist and not lay flat as nicely. So I tried it her way. It took forever. I did the next moom with three strands, which was a lot faster, plus I liked that it was more poufy. Also, I'm not doing museum-quality work here. Have I mentioned that it's been decades since I've done any embroidery at all?

Here's what I mean. On the bottom is the lovely, uniform single-strand satin stitch; in the middle is the poufy three-strand satin stitch, and at the top is the padding.

Note that the padding isn't even. It doesn't matter whether it's even -- no one's going to see it. You might (if you're picky) notice that my satin stitched sections aren't perfectly perfect, either. Now, I could go back and pull all of that out and re-do it until it's perfect. I'd use a lot of floss and waste a lot of time. And who's going to notice?

A lot of writers agonize over their work. They re-work paragraphs and sentences until they're perfect. They spend a lot of time doing that. Some writers work so hard on the details that they never actually finish anything.

Listen: At some point, you've got to let it go. 

Over the years, I've learned a few phrases for just this situation:

• You've probably heard this one: "Close enough for government work." 
• I learned this one from a former co-worker: "Ain't making a watch." 
• And here's one I heard fairly recently: "If a man riding by on a horse can't tell the difference, it's good enough."

Perfect is good -- but it's also a trap. It's okay to settle for good enough. 

I'll probably go back and re-do that single-strand moon with three strands, though. Just so it'll match.

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These moments of imperfect blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Resolutions? Feh.

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Happy New Year!

If you're like many people, you've already broken whatever resolutions you made before the clock ticked over on New Year's Eve. Other than the set of writerly resolutions I wrote for Indies Unlimited last week (and let's not talk about where I am with the tooth brushing...), I didn't bother making any this year.

But folks on Facebook are always happy to share suggestions they've found elsewhere. Earlier this week, one of my buddies shared this list of 15 suggestions for 2015 from Elite Daily. Neither one of us is in Elite Daily's target GenY demographic, so maybe I shouldn't be nitpicking their suggestions. But I'm going to anyway.

These are the items I have issues with:

• Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Ahem. Some people in this world aren't simply whiners; they really have had a tougher go of it than others. Not everybody has the sort of life they can change just by changing their attitude. And while we all admire the people who smile through their hard luck and exhibit grit and pluck and all those other great pioneer qualities, I'm pretty sure even those folks throw pity parties for themselves every now and then. Don't be a bore, sure. But if you're feeling down, don't make it worse by being hard on yourself.
• Stop thinking money creates value. I think this one is phrased badly. What they're trying to say is, "Don't make decisions based on the cash value of the outcome." In general, I'm on board with this, but only to a point. I've had one of those careers everybody wants (broadcast news), and I've also had a completely prosaic one (my current day job). The prosaic job pays a lot better than the flashy career ever did. So yes, follow your heart -- but if you're going broke, you might want to reassess.
• Stop saying "yes" all the time. Another one I'm only partially on board with. I agree that "no" is a complete sentence, and that too many of us think we owe people a reason for not doing the things they're trying to guilt us into doing. It took me decades to learn that giving reasons for your "no" just gives sales people and guilt-mongers more material to work with; they figure if they can answer your objections, they can talk you around to "yes." But the flip side is that you can get into the habit of saying "no" too often, too. In other words, you can yoke yourself to duty so tightly that you reject any opportunities for having fun. It's okay to play sometimes.

On the other hand, I can totally get behind these:

• Stop comparing yourself to others. This one is spot on; comparing yourself to the Joneses is one of the fastest routes to misery and disappointment I can think of. I've occasionally seen this question tossed around: "Which author do you aspire to write like?" And my answer is always the same: Me. I want to write like me. Certainly, there are writers I admire because they do stuff I can't do. But they have their technique and their voice, and I have mine. I don't want to write like anybody else. If I try to emulate someone else, I will always fall short. That's a setup for feeling like a failure. And that's no way to live.
• Stop worrying about what others think of you. You can't control their thoughts. And anyway, they're probably not thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are. (Especially if they're men.)
• Stop thinking you have to get it right on the first try. This speaks to perfectionism, which is another quick route to misery and disappointment. Look, nobody's perfect. For certain, nobody's perfect on the first go-round. That's especially true of indie publishing. One of my perennial to-do list items is to go back to the first few paperbacks I published and reformat them. The margins in SwanSong are way too wide, and I didn't figure out how to format headers to look like trad books until Annealed. I'll get to it one of these days. In the meantime, they'll just be gloriously imperfect.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go brush my teeth.

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These moments of resolute blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Close enough for a man on a horse.

I seem to collect phrases that cover the sentiment, "It's not perfect, but it will do."  Back in my first radio job, I worked with a guy who would say, "Close enough for government work."  (Of course, repeating that made me zero points with friends who got jobs with the federal government after college.)  The same guy would also sometimes say, "Ain't makin' a watch."  Often he'd say them both, one after another, like this:

"Close enough for government work! Ain't makin' a watch!"

Yesterday, I learned a new handy phrase for something that's less than perfect, but acceptable.  At a gathering of a group of crafters (some quilters, some knitters, some doing other handiwork), one woman said she'd once had an instructor who said of her student work, "A man riding by on a horse couldn't tell the difference."

All these phrases are ways to banish perfectionism.  Of course, we should always strive to do our best work, to catch our mistakes and fix them, and so on.  Nobody wants to be labeled sloppy.  But we're all human, and sometimes we mess up.  And sometimes when we try to fix something, the fix is worse than the original mistake.

That's where I found myself this week with the sweater I've been telling you about.  I thought I had a handle on knitting the nice, wide cable that goes up one side of the front of the sweater.  (You can see a picture of what it's supposed to look like on my post from two weeks ago.) So I tried to work on it while watching a movie.  Sooprise, sooprise, sooprise -- I made a mistake, and I didn't notice it 'til six rows later.  Because the mistake was on the front, I felt compelled to go back and fix it. Let me tell you, ripping a cable back six rows, and then trying to figure out where you are on the chart, is no fun at all.  I managed to fix the first mistake, but my fix made something else look funny, and....  I'm sure you can see where this is going.  After spending several hours over the course of two days on the same six rows of 28 stitches, I finally gave up -- but not until after it occurred to me that I could embroider some chain stitches over the tiny part that still doesn't look right and...all together now...a man riding by on a horse wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Will it be perfect?  Nope.  Will the garment still be wearable?  Totally.  Will anybody be able to tell the difference?  Probably not even if I tell them.  And it's entirely possible that even I won't be able to tell.

The point is that I could have spent another couple of hours making myself crazy, trying to get the cable absolutely perfect.  That's the trap of perfectionism -- not just in knitting or sewing, but in writing, too.  How much time should you spend on a first draft?  How much time on a rewrite?  Should you torture yourself with making sure that each sentence you write absolutely drips priceless pearls of prose before you move on to the next one?  Will you ever be completely satisfied?

Last night, I began the second editing pass on Gravid.  When I do a read-through, I pay particular attention to any phrases that jar my internal ear, and any word whose meaning doesn't quite convey what I'm trying to say.  Sometimes I move phrases around.  Occasionally I move sentences, or paragraphs, or even blocks of text, and then I have to write connections in order to graft them into their new places and bridge the holes they left behind.  Sometimes I move the attribution from one end of the sentence to the other, or embed it in the middle of the quote, or take it out of the middle and put it at the beginning or the end.

But to be honest, many sentences I don't fuss with at all.  And sometimes after I've fiddled with a particular word or sentence for a while, I decide it was okay to start with.  Not perfect, maybe, but still readable.  A man on a horse wouldn't know the difference.

Somebody told me today that she had decided she would never write the Great American Novel, so she moved on to other things.  Usually, I applaud any effort toward self-knowledge, which is a fine and necessary thing. But the phrase "the Great American Novel" struck me, and started me thinking on this business of perfectionism.

When it comes to writing, is the Great American Novel the only worthwhile goal?  If your first draft is a mess, riddled with plot holes and clunky phrases, are you a failure as a writer?  Is perfect the only thing worth striving for?  Is that what you think, Bunky?

Well, I don't think so.  In fact, I reject that sort of thinking wholesale.  The only thing any of us can do is to tell our own stories in our own ways.  Writing is a craft, to a large degree.  Plot holes can be fixed; so can clunky phrasing.  You may have to write several books before you've got one that's ready for prime time, but that's part of learning the craft.  And even then, it doesn't have to be the most perfect book ever written.  If a man riding by on a horse can't tell the difference, it's close enough for government work.  Ain't making a watch!

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I had a terrific time Friday night with Coral Russell and Kriss Morton on their Blog Talk Radio show.  Both of them -- and author/blogger Leanne Herrera, too -- had such nice things to say about my work that it's a wonder I could get my head through the doorway afterward.  Thanks, ladies!  (If you missed the show, I've put a link to the left, as well as on the Radio Appearances tab.)

The Orangeberry Big Bang blog tour for Tapped is underway!  Check the Tour Dates tab for this week's stops.  And have a great week, everyone.

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This moment of imperfect blogginess is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.