Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Of Iguanas and Their Cages

I have a young and very energetic colleague at CU who told me once that he thinks of himelf as an iguana. Apparently, iguanas grow to fit the size of their cages. Little cage, little iguana. Big cage, big iguana.

Ten minutes ago I met my impossible deadline and sent off book three of my Mason Dixon series: Mason Dixon: Basketball Disasters - the day after getting the final editorial okay on my revisions for Mason Dixon: Fourth Grade Disasters. Mason Dixon: Pet Disasters is already in production. Each book is 25,000 words long, around 130 pages in my nice readable Courier font. So I wrote close to 400 pages this year. I think they're good pages, too, and I submitted the pages for critique to my writing group and other friends, and revised the pages, and revised them again and again.

I am now a much bigger iguana than I ever thought I could be. Big expectations, big delivery.

We can all do so much more than we ever thought we could.

And now I'm remembering a little poem I loved as a child:

Plan for more than you can do - and do it.
Bite off more than you can chew - and chew it.
Hitch your wagon to a star, keep your seat -
and there you are!

2 comments:

  1. I'm glad you are a much bigger iguana than you ever thought you could be, Claudia, and thanks for sharing the poem--I'm going to go memorize it now!

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  2. Wow--congratulations on finishing all three manuscripts. That's amazing, and wonderful. Thank you also for the poem -- I too will have to memorize it (and teach it to my kids).

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