Letting Go

I first started drafting this post way back in November 2006:

There’s a point in every writer’s career where they have to let go of their baby.

I got no further than that. I think my now is not the best time to think aloud alarm went off, and it collected virtual dust on the hard-drive.

Not that long ago, the insufferably unstoppable Amit (previously referred to as Mr T but I’ve since regained my manners) asked me to have a look over the locked cut of Five. That DVD sat on my desk. Then it went onto a shelf. Then back onto my desk.

Every day for a month I saw that disc and thought, I must watch that. I must.

But I couldn’t.

Of course, I did watch it. I made some notes and fired off an email that included:

you may have surmised from the extreme delay […] some reluctance on my part to sit down and watch it. i plead guilty. i can intellectualise that the transfer from paper to screen involves a loss of ownership and is How It Is. but the actual experience was quite a lot harder that i expected. but i’m okay now. (i think putting the dvd in the player, handcuffing myself to the couch and tossing the key across the room helped. it was… cathartic.) (having to wait several hours for someone to come home to release me wasn’t so cathartic but that’s the price of personal development.)

of course, if you thought the delay was because i [am a] lazy slackarse, then forget the previous paragraph.