Thursday, April 9, 2009

A Piddler's Plea


I'm a piddler. I dabble in all sorts of time-wasting endeavors. I spend a great deal of time at my day job on the phone and on hold. So I do what anyone would do when that happens: I doodle.

On occasion I'll get a doodle that I like, scan it and email to the house where I can tinker with it on my PC. As you can see, the notebook lines still run through my old man there.

But it gets me thinking about myself. I don't recall ever finishing much of anything. For a guy who spent his entire youth (or at least from 3rd grade through my Junior year of high school) convinced that he was going to become an artist, I never finished much of anything.

When thinking further about it, I was the same way as a musician too. I don't think I ever wrote an entire song. I would come up with a melody or riff then quit and move on to something else. It was like I would get bored with something before I could finish it.

Well, you know who else couldn't seem to get anything done? Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo was a notorious non-finisher too, hell, it took him 15 years to get around to finishing the Mona Lisa. He was too busy inventing helicopters and steam punk robots to waste his time on some stupid portrait. So history does have at least one example of a slacker who didn't like finishing things... and I think he still did okay for himself.

So I won't give up hope, I've got plenty of time to be a published novelist. I have a few (3 to be exact) nearly complete novels lying around that are all in various stages of editing/rewriting. The very thing that has plagued me my entire life continues to do so now in my writing. Nearly done and then I'm off to work on something else.

Oh well, if Leonardo can successfully muddle his way past his waning attention span, I'm sure I can too.

3 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

You're very talented, and I'm sure you'll finish quite a few successful projects.

Rusty Carl said...

I appreciate the kind words Angus, I'll be sure to keep my fingers crossed.