Big hulking thing...

It's taken me a long time to learn how to accomplish a big, hulking thing. Had to do it on the fly, and for that I thank my years at Texas Instruments, a company that specialized in the monster project. I also owe it to my years as a ghost writer and the sparkly wisdom that spilled over me from that "Just Do It" Nike campaign. I'll refrain from mumbling a heart-warming list of lessons learned, except to say that the most important one I got was Just do the fucker, okay? Start keyboarding page one, and keep going until dawn or death, whichever comes first. Eat crap and don't wash your hair. Write it clear through, no rewriting, no matter how dopey it seems at the time. If you stop to jigger with a word, fiddle tinily with a sentence, you might as well hang it up. You're going to spend the rest of the night arranging doilies on the Titanic.

I've had a lot of help in doing gigantic things, mostly from completely unreasonable people, who looked at me with the untroubled gaze of the sociopath, and told me I'd do the impossible or...there was no or. Had a boss who only assigned the unfeasible to everyone, not just me. I can't count the number of times I stayed up all night working, trying to convert some fantasy of his into...whatever...my hands clammy and heart pounding because the guy just scared the living hell out of me. But he broke my natural drift into sloth.

Now I've got another biggie, staring down at me like a mastodon. It's a book, actually two of them, that I've worked at in a piecemeal fashion, hammering away when I had the time. But I've got too much done to go on that way. Now I've got to make sense of it, put it together. Just to see if I can.