As I near The End, it becomes so.
Teenage dinosaur gang dies trapped in mudflat.
It’s pure avoidance behavior. I know that. There’s that within me, as there is within all of us, that wants very badly for me not to succeed. There’s also that within me that shies away from the load of responsibility which will land abruptly on my shoulders when I write those two words at the end of my rough draft of The Dinosaur Lords. (Which just a few minutes ago passed the 900-page, 250,000 word mark.)
No more convenient excuses. Time to act.
So, yeah. Scary.
Yesterday, when he had me over to his house to devour one of the three-dozen ham, egg, bean, and chile burritos he’d made for his work-lunches, Joe suggested I just relax and let it happen, rather than try to force it. “In a very real sense,” he said, “it’s already done.”
Indeed. Joe’s the wisest man I know. Or know of.
A few years back I learned I could most readily complete daunting tasks if I remembered a quote from L. Neil Smith’s first novel, The Probability Broach
That’s been of enormous help to me. Years ago when I was assembling my first “Frankenbox” PC, I found myself sitting on the living room rug halfway done and surrounded by components and sheets of instructions that seemed to bear no discernible relationship to one another. And suddenly those words came to me. I took a deep breath, and realized that at some point in the future, the job was done and the computer worked fine. In time/space, it was an accomplished fact. I just had to persevere until I got there.
And so fortified I did.
Like all the many, many other useful and powerful tools I’ve assembled over my life, I don’t always remember to use that one. When I do it serves me very well.
So I guess I should let it do so now, huh?
(Side note: the above image and links, concerning a newly-announced dinosaur discovery, I threw in to honor the book’s subject matter. Don’t forget to run your mouse over the pic for a special message!)
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“Sinornithomimus (“Chinese bird mimic”)”
Yeah, figured that out at the top of the article (though I was trying to avoid translating “-mimus” as the obvious “mimic”).
Figuring out what dinosaur names mean is more fun than figuring out what German weapon names mean (nebelwerfer, fallschirmjäger gewehr, for example. Panzerschreck is another fun… name. I imagine the weapon itself might not have been so much fun – depending heavily on which end of it one finds oneself).
- M. \”/
Especially since I read German better than Latin.
The Panzerschreck (Armor Terror) was the precursor to the bazooka, as the Panzerfaust (Armor Fist) was to the RPG. It becomes a little less impressive when you discover that Heuschreck (Hay Terror) means grasshopper. Grasshopper.
Odd (or maybe it’s not…) how many contemporary weapons are the more-or-less direct descendants of weapons developed by the Germans during WWII. The Sturmgewehr 44 is another one that lives on today through its many “children.”
“It becomes a little less impressive when you discover that Heuschreck (Hay Terror) means grasshopper. ”
Not necessarily – especially if your ass is grass.
- M. \”0
True.
And good point.