I do everything fast

There is a moment of my childhood that sticks with me vividly. I was probably about eight and my mom and sisters and I were visiting some friends. They had a trampoline and one of the requirements was that you had to take your shoes off to play on it. So my shoes were off and I was jumping and then I needed to go back in the house for some reason. I got off the trampoline and I was tying my shoes back on and I overheard the friends' mom say to my mom, "Wow, she ties her shoes so fast!" I laughed to myself because it really wasn't that fast but then my mom replied, "Yeah, she does everything fast. She talks fast, she walks fast."

Over the years since then I've realized that this has really defined my life. I do everything fast. I still walk at twice the rate of normal people, I talk so fast most people have trouble keeping up. I think faster than most people so I have to back track a lot to explain my train of thought. I can read a standard novel in about four hours. I type fast. If you tell me that something should take about two hours to complete, my first thought is, "I bet I can do it in half that time."

This is both beneficial and harmful. On one hand, school is a breeze for me because homework literally takes me half as long as everyone else. But on the flip side, if something does take as long for me to complete as it does most people, I lose interest and get frustrated. I guess you could say that my attention span is very short as a result of how fast I operate.

Case in point. On Saturday I was sitting on my bed chatting with my boyfriend when I decided that I wanted to come up with an idea for another novel. I spent that day brainstorming, Sunday researching and Monday and Tuesday outlining. Now it's Wednesday and I have a full outline, several character sketches, a complete idea of my plot and subplots, three paragraph summaries of the plot and one full-page summery. Five days after coming up with the initial idea for my novel, I'm ready to start writing.

Do I realize that planning and outlining a novel is supposed to take months or years to do? Yes. Do I realize that my plan to have the first draft of this novel done by the end of the month is ridiculous? Absolutely. Do I honestly think I'm going to pull it off? Definitely. I have to, because by the middle of next month, I will have lost all interest in this idea.

So I am going to go take a shower, maybe do some dishes and then I'm going to start writing my novel which I am currently calling, "North to the Klondike." I'm aiming for a final word count of 75,000.

Yay for being unemployed!