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April 07, 2005
Deadline addict
What have I been doing this past week?! Well, I’ll tell you. The Admiral (he of the Lough Gill extravaganza) and myself have had a notion bouncing around for the past year now: samizdat.ie (I didn’t pick the name! I didn’t!). It’s a new magazine/workshop. It’s mostly the Admiral’s baby, but it’s been fun helping out.
As that page says, the first meeting is tonight. I’m quite nervous about it. More than I thought I would be, in fact. I was quite heavily involved in very similar stuff at college, thought there the focus was on the weekly meetings, and the annual magazine we put out with the best stuff was almost a way to justify the pittance we were given by the college to pay for tea and biscuits.
I was quite regularly asked to submit bits and pieces of writing at college, and I’d be happy to oblige. Looking back, a part of me thinks What was I doing? What about quality control? How much shite am I willing to pump out?! And maybe I did submit a lot of stuff before it was technically finished. But those ideas and inspirations, while precious, shouldn’t be an end in themselves. I just wasn’t good enough to do them justice, and knowing this was paralysing: I could never capture the perfect expression for them.
Which is why I was so lucky to be made meet a deadline so often. Being made to write the ideas out frees you of paralysis, even if the expression is poor. Ideas generate ideas; you’ll never run out of them. Being forced to move on forces you past ideas, makes you practice writing, and makes you improve.
And that’s why I’m doing the whole thing all over again. Being made do it is apparently what I need, since doing it for the love of it isn’t enough. I hate letting my friends down.
I wonder if the Admiral knows this? And is using it for his own nefarious ends?
I hope so. Friends, eh?
PS: I wrote this for tonight.
Posted by Oliver at April 7, 2005 12:25 PM
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