Stephanie's Studio

So you made a mistake? Now what? Cover it up, fix it or apologize? How about…gasp, accessing the damage, learning what you can and then, moving forward? I don’t know where you stand with your Judge but mine is ruthless. She looks down her nose at me constantly, worse of all, my Judge is within me, always ready to chirp in, whether I request it or not. I say, as I look forward to this New Year: Judge, you are dismissed! Get lost. Piss off. I have made a mistake. Is it monumental? No. Will it hurt people? Yes. Most importantly, is it fixable? Yes! No one likes making mistakes, but they happen. I love the “I Love Lucy Show” (the original, in black and white) because Lucille Ball’s outrageously humorous touch invites us to see mistakes in a funny way. We laugh with her not at her, as she falls into one unexpected dilemma after another. Instead of saying to ourselves: this is terrible; we ‘feel’ in our gut: this is funny! What if our lives could be the same way? I k...

Recently, I surprised myself with the anxiety over submitting a manuscript excerpt to my writer's workshop. It all started rather normal but then took an odd twist into what I consider abnormal behavior. I always edit and revise. All writers do that. But this time was different. I edited the heck out of it. Maybe combing over it 15 times total and revising it each time, eventually nothing was left in my opinion accept for tweaking but tweak I did. This was to a work that had already been edited several times. I hope I haven't leached the life out of that excerpt. It is from my work-in-progress, "Out of the Blue." I am still filled with dread when I think about the upcoming evening of my critique, which takes place about a week from now. You know I've posted before about  Critique Anxiety . When I read over that post from last year, I see that the anxiety I blogged about arose because I was in a different workshop, about to present my work. I'm not this ...