Left Right Up Down

One of my favorite places to visit is Indexed, a blog by Jessica Hagy, where she explores relationships between sometimes-disparate things. She uses axes, lines, curves, and sometimes Venn diagrams. I love it.

I thought of her this morning, when I was looking at the various short stories I'm (again) trying to collect. They vary along a continuum from "raw" to "stick a fork in it; it's done."

They also vary along a continuum ranging from "I'm excited by it" to "I'm sick to death of it," another continuum from "examined" to "unexamined," another from "hardly any time" to "relatively, a lot of time," and yet another from "only tweaked" to "revised extensively," by which I mean "every freaking word has been second-guessed."

I hope that the "stick a fork in it" end goes up at the same time that "examined," "revised extensively," and "relatively, a lot of time" also go up. That is, I hope I'm not investing a lot of time and getting them farther from done.

At least I know I can say that the "excited/sick to death" line is a curve -- over time, as the story takes its final shape, I do eventually find excitement in the story again.

Meanwhile, I'll try assigning each story to a point along the "raw/fork" line, to see what my priorities need to be. Fun!