Adolf Hohneck, After Gustav Friedrich Schlick:
"My Peace of Mind is gone" [Faust] (1834)

"I could found The Truly Terrible Publishing Company to distribute my mediocre works out into an already grossly over- stuffed marketplace featuring ever fewer interested consumers." from my Success Series, TheGames, 12/26/2022

Sitting down to finally read through that freshly compiled manuscript proves impossible. Its author feels guilty instead. He senses he might be better off if he just skips reading through the result. He expects not to like what he's created as if the mere act of reading it could only disclose a previously undetected fatal error. If he was to be honest with himself, he could only reject the work and relegate it to history's ashcan, humiliated. So instead, he dances around the job, grateful he doesn't have a printer powerful enough to render its three hundred-plus pages to paper. He distracts himself, busying his attention elsewhere, hiding out. He cannot find an appropriate mind with which to engage in this work. He consequently feels justified in just shirking this necessary next step.

Perhaps he could just move to assembling the next series in line and become, rather than published, more accomplished at assembling, a necessary skill in the vast Publishing world. He could distract himself from this onerous obligation through preoccupation, accidentally on purpose finding himself just altogether too busy to engage in that dreaded reading. He eventually sits down and starts, ridden with misgivings and reasonably confident he'll fail. He begins slowly, moving his lips as he reads, perhaps to erode his progress. He crawls through those first thirty pages. He's surprised. His internal critic's bored. His inner author's intrigued. He fears that he might be in grave danger of satisfying himself. He settles into this chore before finding it's hardly work. After a little relatively minor MindSetting, he finds he hasn't created a catastrophe. He'll have to see how the rest of the reading goes, but so far. … So far.

The catastrophizing may be a necessary piece. I can imagine that I might seem more courageous or even more curious, but I tend to expect the worst instead. This routine sets me up for success, for I only rarely manage to talk myself out of such necessary work. Certainly, I scare myself, but never seemingly enough to completely dissuade me from eventually starting and discovering for myself. Maybe I anticipate the worse to set myself up to inevitably find better since worst-case scenarios seem much more easily imagined than found. The real world tends to deliver more moderate experiences with little potential to utterly disrupt or disappoint. The worst more often underwhelms than overwhelms its protagonist. The worst seems better suited to imaginations and others rather than to personal experience.

I read like a dog settling into his spot. I circumnavigate the space before finally settling to rest. I might be MindSetting while circling and catastrophizing, engaging in more ritual than any more serious business. I genflect by expecting failure, even when and perhaps even especially when I might know that I am more likely poised to experience success. It might be that I find success more troubling than even imagining catastrophe seems, that a dream come true might prove most unsettling since it couldn't help but contradict my most heartfelt expectations for myself. I doubt that I'll ever learn different. I expect to need to remember that I need some terribly deliberate MindSetting before attempting to review my finished product. It seems I can only hide out for so long, and I always give in before it gets too late to recover. I expect my worse but rarely ever manage to satisfy those expectations, thank heavens.
©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Publishing, #PureSchmaltz