Deadlines

This was originally written for a private blog with some writers who signed up for Wardrobe Refashion.

In the crafting community, especially knitblogs, there's a term for a phenomenon we've all experienced, that inability to keep going after you've started a project, especially the tendency to start and start and start lots of projects and never finish anything. It's called startitis.

I've recently been working on - in my writing life - a project I'm fairly sure I won't be workshopping this semester, and yet, despite all the other work I should be doing, I'm still working on it. In the meantime, my research paper and my craft presentation are idling, nearly unbegun. I've got startphobia for the work I should be doing, except it isn't really a fear but a lack of desire, an aversion. I'm not blocked, I just don't want to work on them.

In my crafting life, however, I'm experiencing a definite case of block or the inability to start. I have a pants-to-skirt conversion project planned. In fact, I have two pairs of slacks I want to do this to eventually, but one moreso than the other. And yet, I can't seem to get started.

I blame it a little bit on my setup - my sewing machine is in our disaster of a laundry room and inaccessible on three sides by my housemate's mess, on the other side by my own crafting things. But the issue is also a heavy dose of laziness. I could have worked on the skirt either of the last two mornings. I've been telling my other blog [that's you!] this project was next in the queue for weeks, but I haven't started it.

In the meantime, I have a crochet cap design I've been fiddling with. While I think I've got it down with only a few more rounds to go, after redoing the crown a couple times, I started a new hat yesterday rather than finish the first - startitis at its worst.

So, as works best with my writing, I'm giving myself a deadline. I want to wear this skirt and the prototype cap to the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert at the Rialto Theatre on Thursday, so I must finish them both this week. I'll forgive myself if either doesn't fit, or if the cap still needs tweaking, but I have to at least try, and Tuesday will be my big chunk of time at home for the skirt.

Nonetheless, this whole diatribe is indicative of my crafting practice, whether it be crafting an essay, or a photography project, or a design, or a crochet or sewing project: I love to start things, I love to get hit by an idea and run with it, I love to finish things (though I never feel my written work is finished as magically as a craft project), and I even love the work while I'm doing it. But I am often tempted away from one project by another, or driven to start four or five new things only to find myself coming back to an old, neglected project that has to be backed up and almost started over, not just resumed.

In some writing circles, for instance the world of NaNoWriMo, people are divided into two major work styles: pantsers and plotters. Those who fly through a project by the seat of their pants never knowing where it will take them and those who plan (plot) everything out in advance. I'm trying to learn, in life, to be more of a pantser, but I still need a certain amount of structure to keep me finishing, well, anything really. To divide us into these two types seems not to take into account how we start and stop, pick up and put down, shelve, marinate, sprint, and birth our projects.

The best laid plans...