Whereby I commit to publishing nothing but complete dogshit for the next two months...

Boo! (Audible) Hiss!

ARE YOU A PERFECTIONIST?

Are you a perfectionist? And even if you are, shouldn’t you be better at it? Nay, mustn’t you?!

Perfectionism is a paradox. You could always do it better, but you’ll never do it perfectly.

Here’s a list of the most important things I’ve learned over forty years in the game:

• In all areas of life, there is one (and only one) perfect, correct idea, answer or solution. Until you’re utterly certain that you’ve found it, your head is best tenured in the corridors of Cloudworld University, rather than leading brutish, dangerous sorties into the world.

• You’ll always know more tomorrow than you do today. So it’s just super dumb to let today you make a decision. If you just put it off for 24 hours (or any larger and/or indeterminate amount of time), tomorrow you will make even better decisions. This is never not true.

• People are the worst. Especially about things. Given the ready and well-serviced modern streaming and scrolling options of hermitude and procrastination, it’s best not to risk doing anything or meeting anyone.

• The process of putting pen to paper and writing something immediately murders all but one of the things that it could have been. Writing and more broadly just doing things can be seen as genocide of ideas and potential.

• A life well spent ends on a perfect deathbed having reached the end of life having made zero mistakes. Zero loved ones around (too risky), zero kids (‘I don’t even understand myself!!!‘), and zero regrets (zero attempts = zero failures)

FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH SARCASM…

Of course, I mean the opposite.

I’m Yianni. And I’m a recovering perfectionist.

My second cousin Neo and I are both perfectionists.

It’s actually remarkable how similar we are.

We’re both ‘reluctant Cypriots.’

“Oh,you’re Cypriot.”
“Only genetically!!”

We both left our countries and cultures to move to the UK where emotional repression has been raised to a high art.

And we’re both perfectionists.

One time, after no doubt working up to it for months, he played me a song he’d been working on.

Rather than just letting me listen to it, he recited the Perfectionists’ Lord’s Prayer.

Oh godly pair of ears to whom I play this song.
Hallowed be thy name.
Forgive me oh Lord, for that bit in the bar in the bit in the middle that isn’t quite right yet.

As I hand over these headphones, my work, and my heart
I ask that you be gentle in your words.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.
For ever and ever. Amen.

After all that, and just before I slipped the headphones on, he added “Also, I haven’t done the mastering properly, so there might be an audible hiss.”

I listened and heard no hiss.

Perhaps there was no hiss, perhaps it was not audible. Perhaps it was SchrNEOdinger’s Hiss.

Yes, yes. Audible Hiss

Because we both do this tiresome bullshit, and to avoid it as we get older, we’ve started substituting “Audible Hiss” for ‘that whole palaver.’

Whenever one of us starts flapping on why the creative thing we’re now exposing to the cold, cold world isn’t perfect yet.

“You have to imagine it on a better sound system”

“It’ll sound different through a microphone…”

At this point, the other steps in, delivering a compassionate and gentle veto.

“Yes yes, audible hiss.”

My blog thus far has had been filled with more audible hiss than the lower snake stalls during panto season. Ditto my life.

So yesterday I had a crazy idea. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but what do I know about what’s perfect?

Here is a screenshot of a folder containing several pieces of my writing.

These are all pieces that I have enthusiastically begun writing, gotten ninety (NINE-ZERO) percent of the way through, before, like a complete psychopath, ghosting them at the digital altar in front of friends and family as I hit the road in favour of younger, hotter ideas.

If any of the titles read like something you’d like to read, you’re in luck. For the next two months, I have committed to the following:

1. Every two days I will publish one of them.

2. I’m allowed two hours AND NO LONGER on each one, to get it into a form that I’m happy to publish. After two hours, no matter what they look like, out they go.

3. I have two ongoing writing series that I’m very excited about and want to launch. They’re new, they’re sexy. They’re going to change writing, the world and my life. They are, as all of these dogshit ideas were at some point, the answer to everything.
   
   But as exciting as they are, it’s not fair to start on them before I make amends to my litany of jilted lovers.
   
   And so, I commit to the following schedule:
   

   • After I publish the fifth piece, I will announce the first hot new idea.

   • After I publish the tenth piece, I will announce the second hot new idea.

   • After I publish twenty of these (Seriously. I have over thirty), only then will start publishing these series, revolutionising writing and finally achieving self-actualisation and transcendence.

Okay, that’s it people. The first one drops on Monday. Excessive talking is for perfectionists and people sprung wanking.

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I’m delighted and petrified in equal measure. Anyway, I’m off to the shops for some paper bags.

Yianni