42. Pressing the wrong button

Finding fun in failure, and writing my way out of being lost.

Dear Reader,

It’s fine, I’m over it. I’m laughing.

There: that’s your sneak preview of today’s happy ending. You’re welcome.

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I’ve been commenting recently on posts in which writers have asked their subscribers for their views on setting new years’ resolutions, and I have said consistently that I don’t make such resolutions because of my fear of failure.

Reader, I’m one of those silly people who’d prefer to not try than to fail, and big, daunting goals set at the start of a shiny, fresh new year have only ever served as sticks to beat myself with further down the line.

I fail at plenty of smaller stuff too. Last week I annoyed, astonished and amused myself in equal measure when after a session of post-polishing on Friday afternoon I published the post intended for Saturday immediately, rather than scheduling the time and date I had intended it to go live.

…..aaaaaaaaaaand THIS is how it made me feel! Picture by Jim Holden.

Reader, on Substack, depending on whether (or not) you’ve ticked the box marked ‘Schedule time to email and publish’, that enticing green button reads either ‘Send to everyone now’ OR ‘Send to everyone in a day/several days/an hour/a random number of minutes’ depending on the date and time you’ve selected.

Either way, there’s a ripe and juicy green button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen begging me to interact with it.

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What I did.

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What I’d intended to do, but didn’t.

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See my problem?

Since adopting my weekly Substack posting pattern in the summer I’ve been happy with my routine of scheduling posts for a Saturday morning. Saturdays are good for me, because I’m generally around, and that allows me to engage with my subscribers in the comments: the thing I enjoy most of all about Substack. Whenever I’ve got a post ready to go, I’ll schedule it for publication on the next Saturday.
Bish, bash and jolly well bosh.

For better or worse (yes, worse – and you’re welcome to remind me in the comments) I am in the habit of endlessly tweaking my posts after they’ve been scheduled, but – and I don’t know why I do this – after I’ve finished editing I like to unschedule the post that’s already been ready to go at 10.15 on Saturday morning…. and reschedule it for 10.15 on Saturday morning.

Reader, I know that Substack HQ’s beating heart of an engine room saves my posts as I go along.
But perhaps from my years working as a secretary, hitting ‘Ctrl S’ on my PC every two minutes as if my life – and not just the Word doc I was working on – depended on it, I like to actively tell a program to save the latest version of something. A habit I don’t need for Substack, I know.

(Humour me, and my need for belt and braces.)

Since last Friday, I don’t do this any more.
Here’s why.

With twenty minutes to spend on Substack on Friday afternoon before the regular live Zoom writing session¹ I like to attend, I’d thought I’d dive back into the post I’d scheduled for Saturday to polish it further.

Not enough Several tweaks later, and leaving myself with barely time to nip downstairs to make the cuppa that would sustain me over the following thirty Zoom minutes, I hit the green button. In a rush, with a lamentable lack of attention, I hadn’t reselected the time and date for the post to go live, so the green button was in its ‘Send to everyone now’ mode.

That was it.
It was sent.
Game over.
I’d FAILED.

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash

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But hang on… why was I laughing?

I was surprised, given my constant fear of failure, that I’d found my careless mishandling of my post so funny. I’d failed, in that I’d published it at the wrong time, yet everything was fine. In fact, I found it hilarious.

What was this telling me? Have I grown up? Become more resilient? Found some self-confidence as a writer?

I had a think about it. It’s because in that moment I’d learned something.

On Friday I hadn’t finished writing around my understanding of the navigational challenge I’d been trying to describe. I’d noodled around with it for a bit, and, although I was happier, I wasn’t entirely satisfied.

So, the post wasn’t as it should have been: I hadn’t quite written my way to a resolution. Heck, I wasn’t even sure I had a resolution to write about.

And it’s tickled me to see that this was clear to some of the readers of that post – the post published too soon – from their comments.
Just as it was clear to me that I was still just a little bit lost.

Reader, I never quite know where I’m going with a post. In writing it, I often find it works itself out. I could have edited the post after publishing it.

(I still could, actually.)

I am often lost: not in a metaphorical sense (although, actually, that too), but lost lost. The reasons for it – and the route home, the way out – are often not clear. I sometimes don’t find out how or why I got lost, or manage to identify where my route had gone wrong, and, as I learned last Friday, nor can I always tidily find my way to the proper conclusion of something I’m writing.

But that exploration in writing of a journey I didn’t understand, and its lack of resolution – resolution to my satisfaction, that is – represents the struggle that I go through when I get lost.

This was a huge realisation for me, and to honour it, that post remains unedited – unresolved – on purpose.

Yet if the scene I described in last week’s post ever makes it into the book I am not writing, I will have made sure – with the help of both additional ferry trips in the name of research and a lot more origami practice – that I have at last worked out how I’d lost my bearings on board.

Now, that will be some kind of resolution, won’t it?

Love,

Rebecca

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