Dangerous Day Job

I’m running into this problem where I make a change, then another change to the same part, then make another change, and then somehow that one is worse too, and by then I’ve forgotten the original and I have to revert to a previous version (thank goodness this is a feature) and it turns out what I originally wrote wasn’t so bad after all. I don’t know why exactly this kind of over analysis is so tempting, but yeah. I noticed the same thing happens in a lot of the products I use too, especially software. PayPal for example just cannot seem to land on a UI for more than a couple years. Every once in a while I open up the app and for no reason whatsoever they have moved a bunch of stuff around and it all looks worse and navigation is just confusing for a while. I almost sent an amount of money in the thousands the other day because they had changed the way decimal inputs work and I failed to notice until the very last second. It’s such an annoyance in my everyday life, and yet I still find myself committing the same error in my own writing. How weird is that?

One of the hardest parts of writing is knowing when to call it quits. Sometimes I just have to force myself to move on to the next chapter or the next project to prevent myself from making it all worse by degrees. I’ll have to do that with Jeffries sooner or later, but for now I’m still working through the first edit. Which reminds me, I need to send in a copy to my writing group. I have a reading tomorrow … Hopefully the feedback is useful. And not too critical.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley