Cheese jealousy

I apologize for the relative silence–I was traveled over the holiday weekend, and my friend an I had a date with finishing Dragon Age 2, which was delightful from a storytelling perspective, and…less so, from a blogging one.

I have a post stored up for later about driving long distances and the creative process, but my attention was diverted by an interesting bit of synchronicity in my daily reading: two apparently unrelated entries (here and here) both about what I privately think of as the Huzzah, bitch! effect.

(I must give credit to Renee in my writing group for that–I don’t know if she got it from someone else, but she told me it first. It’s when you congratulate another writer for accomplishing something by saying “Huzzah!” and thinking “…you bitch.” While laughing at yourself, of course.)

Deborah gets it exactly right, of course–readers aren’t a finite resource, and someone else’s success hasn’t stolen yours from you. I read that, though, and it struck me that I hadn’t felt quite that way in the first place, back when I struggled with the huzzah, bitch effect. And since it arose from a different source, I needed a different mental solution, so I thought I might offer that to others.

It wasn’t that I ever felt that people were stealing from my limited success resource. It was that they’d found it, so I knew it was out there, but yet I hadn’t found my own yet. You’ll laugh at my metaphor, but what it was most like was a time when I found a brand of cheese I loved at Expensive Grocery. The next week, I checked Cheap Grocery, and couldn’t find it, so I figured they had none. A month later, I spotted some of that very cheese in someone’s cart at Cheap Grocery. It was unbelievably frustrating! In no way did I expect that the grocery would have run out of that cheese because that woman had one mini-wheel in her cart. No, the frustration came because that woman had proved the cheese’s existence and yet I still had no cheese!. I was happy when I thought no cheese was available, but the moment I knew it was, I started to feel bad. How could I have missed it? Was I blind??

(To make the metaphor even more amusingly apt, I did ask the woman where she got the cheese, but her answer was so vague as to be useless.)

Similarly, when members of my peer group got published, it proved being published was available to people similar to me, but I hadn’t been able to find it yet. Why not??

So for me, what it took to calm that frustration was not knowing that cheese shipments will continue to come (which I never doubted) but finding the cheese. Which, in the real life version of the metaphor, I eventually did. And I was also eventually published, which relaxed me because having proved I could find the cheese once, confidence in my cheese-finding skills carried me forward.

So I think that perhaps it might be confidence-boosting to others out there like I once was to think less about the fact that there are readers enough for all, and more about the fact that your peer just proved that the opportunities for success or out there, you just have to not give up looking for them.