Step One: The first step

"Even the longest journey begins with a single step"

Attributed to Lao-tzu (c 604-c 531 bc), founder of Taoism

The desire to produce something 'finished' - something honed and polished, that perfectly encapsulates my thinking - is the key reason why I haven't done something like this before. After all, it's been a loooong time in the gestation.

I guess the traditional way of writing, where the author writes, re-reads, edits and re-writes their work is laborious and time-consuming. And it produces something 'finished'.

But the perfectionist instinct goes hand-in-hand with a sense of procrastination or defeatism. "I can't possibly write anything, because I don't have the time to get it just right...and I'm not sure that I really have anything very interesting to say, anyway...." And so another 6 months goes by, without having actually produced anything.

So. For me, a new credo, a new set of blog rules:

1. Doing *something* not moderately well is much better than doing nothing perfectly
2. Get a stake in the ground. It may or may not lead-on to something else
3. Perpetual beta: It's OK to come back to something later, and continue to revise and hone it
4. Chronology doesn't matter. You don't have to wait until you have introduced the characters before writing about the action
5. Experimentation and play are the lifeblood of creativity
6. I'm more of an impressionist than a photo-realist. (ie it's the emotion you convey and impact that you have that counts. Technical expertise is not an end in itself)

Enough of the navel-gazing. Time to write...