The Quantity They Seek, the Quality I Desire

Might as well get it all out now.  Nanowrimo is over.  I choked.  I did not finish.  I did not come close.  I pretended I would, but it didn’t happen. Now -- it must be said that I learned a great deal about how to get many words on a page that don’t really correspond to one another.  I experienced the power of the deadline and have learned that I respond well to such a firm goal, racing towards it, all pistons firing, albeit in discordant directions.  I will do nanowrimo again.  I will be prepared and I will finish with the best of them.  After this month’s hokey-pokey chicken-dance, I realize what hung me up – I knew I could write the 50,000 words, but I didn’t want to string all those words together knowing it was headed south.  I didn’t want to just jump in, headlong, and write merely for the sake of writing.  Just to eke out the number of words required. I knew if I had done a bit more planning (and, you know, signed up before the actual contest began), I would have written something I loved.  An inspired thread that I could pick back up again on December 1^st and finish it – an actual novel with fully-formed characters, plot and mood.  Perhaps I’ve been in too many writing workshops and I see the pain of reworking a mess.  I didn’t want to create another mess.  I wanted to do a bit of dancing and singing on the page.

So that’s that.

And then, at work, there’s this.

Actual job descriptions have been created because we are doing annual reviews.  Here is what greeted me under the header Required Abilities for Marketing Director:

"Fluency of Ideas -- The ability to come up with a number of ideas about a topic (The number of ideas is important, not their quality, correctness or creativity.)"

!?!?!?!?!?!*###%!?!

I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.  It seems the world is begging me for mediocrity. 

I will not comply.  I have too much singing and dancing (and jumping and running and cart wheeling) to do.  It seems an enormous waste of this wonderful life to spend it racking up points on a card that doesn’t offer any soul-satisfying rewards.