That’s why I’ll never finish anything I...

I wrote 1,000 words on Wednesday. Yes, I would like a medal. You can engrave it with 'In honour of Lauren, who did something that one time.' And on the front I would like the image of an infinite number of monkeys working on an infinite number of typewriters.

The problem with this 1,000 words was that I wrote 1,000 words of something new, instead of working on the 45,000ish words that I've already got of a well thought out and pretty much almost finished story that I haven’t looked at in months. Or the 2,500 words of the thing I started writing last August instead of working on the 45,000ish story.

I have a long history of this kind of behaviour. So I now present to you some of the many things I started and never finished:

Learning guitar – I could do some stuff in tabs, but I never learned any chords. The guitar itself became more of a decoration after a while, then I decided it was probably just mocking me. Now it lives in my wardrobe. But if you ever want someone to play the intro to the song ‘Scotty doesn’t know’ from the film Eurotrip, I’m your gal.

Learning keyboard – see above. But change ‘Scotty doesn’t know’ from Eurotrip to ‘And so it goes’ by Billy Joel. Or ‘Mary had a little lamb’ by whoever wrote that.

Higher education – I got my diploma of Music Industry Business just to prove to myself that I could actually finish something. Then I dropped out of the degree. Twice. Then I changed what I was studying. And yeah, I’m like, totally a writer now.

That really rich and big piece of chocolate cake I had at the Beechworth Bakery one magical Easter – it was amazing. But I’ve always believed you should probably stop eating when you find yourself struggling to breathe.

Reading The Count of Monte Cristo – it’s… it’s really long. I got about a third of the way through it when I decided to take a break and read some other stuff for a while. I’m pretty sure I’ll never open it again. Since before I was born my mum has had a bookmark exactly 39 pages from the end of War and Peace and can’t bring herself to finish it, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Countless stories – I’m really good at coming up with ideas for stories, not so good at coming up with endings. The only ones I 'finished' were ones I had to hand in for uni, and they generally just ended in the middle of a scene, so I decided to pretend like I’m a trendy modern writer and that’s my thing that I do. Like the story about the leprechaun who was raised by humans and didn’t know he was a leprechaun, then struggled with the idea that he might be one, then eventually had to decide whether he was going to stay in his old life or follow that rainbow. What did he do, you ask? I dunno. It ended with him talking to his wife in a field. But I got an awesome mark for it.