The Biggest Toad

At a party at my friend Patricia's one afternoon, I heard her friend Carolyn mention eating the biggest toad. She is a marvelous and creative chef and I became a little concerned about the tasty dishes of unknown substances I had been inhaling. I thought surely she wasn't talking about serving toad as I eyed the things on my plate? Nothing on there jumped out at me as amphibious (haha jumped bad pun). I sidled over in her direction cuz any scientist worth her weight likes to know stuff.

Her explanation gave me relief and I was able to shovel the rest of the delicacies without thought of gastric retribution. It turns out eating the biggest toad is more a philosophy than a recipe. She explained it like this - When faced with a multitude of tasks to do, always choose to do the most repugnant one first - that is to eat the biggest toad. Generally the rest are easily accomplished once that one is done. That made sense to me.

I have never been an actual list maker. Something about that looooong list of things seems insurmountable and I just shut down in the face of it. Course that doesn't prevent me making the list in my head. But that list is less bothersome than seeing everything that needs done put down in writing (words are THAT powerful to me). The year has been winding to a close and I have been trying to keep my head straight in the cold dark of winter and that means allowing it to create a few short head lists including one of things I did not want to carry into 2010.

The biggest toad on that list was a book that I have been working on for my friend Toby since April 2008. Originally he wanted it done by October of that year. And as a naive first time author of that kind of work, I said I could do that. In retrospect, perhaps I might have met that deadline if I worked on it full time (hard to do when one HAS a full time job, takes classes and has a life already) or if there had been a lot of dynamic conversation between us that kept the project fresh for me (I did ask for that, but it did not happen). I managed a rough draft to him in late October. Not too bad by my way of thinking. Rumors of non-payment. Edits took a long time to come back. Re-writes took almost a year because it just never made my priority list top 5. Clearly the energy for this project had fizzled on both sides and any work on it became a heinous labor. How painful for a scribbler to hate the idea of words!

So a couple weeks ago the book made my head list for things to leave behind in 2009. I would not enter another year with this project unfinished. That gave me 2 weeks to push thru to the final edits. Large chunks were still missing. The info I needed to write these not quite what I needed. I forced myself to write the last bits, invent what I needed, complete footnotes and Appendices etc. DONE with not a day to spare.

This project was challenging beyond what I had imagined, but I learned so much. How to carve out more time for writing. How to be disciplined about it and procrastinate less. How to still my own writer's voice and write from someone else's - which is quite psychotic feeling and I hated every BLASTED MINUTE OF IT. How to be patient when the words are stuck. How to work with someone whose way of doing things is my polar opposite - my kryptonite if you will. How to release the anger when it came and focus my energy on completing what I needed to.

The biggest toad is eaten. The book is done. The thing that helped me get there was understanding that I didn't do this for Toby. I didn't do it to get paid (I still intend for that to happen, but have no expectation that it will). I did it for me. It isn't my best work - not even close - but there are bits of it that to me are good writing. If we had approached it a little less frenetically perhaps it all might have been good writing. I did it because in the end it is still a book with my name on it as author. That's a good thing. It's not like the bar has been set really high either. I'm quite sure any book that is the next one will be better. It will be all mine. It will have no agenda that I have to espouse that I am not quite sure that I believe in. It will come as it comes. It will be great.