So, yesterday Cedar and I were supposed to go to a rodeo. We didn’t, because the day… went rodeo, in the metaphorical sense, instead! So no post about research, mutton busting, and trying to stay on top of the bull or getting back on the horse for y’all. Not just yet.

Instead, as my husband spent 6 hours in the hospital, I spent it hanging out with him, cracking black-humoured jokes and turning the laptop screen so he could lie on the hospital bed and watch our friends’ “live from the blanket fort” ramble with me. (The podcast was two days old, but a lot more entertaining than TV.) My poor guy kept trying to tell me I didn’t need to waste my day being bored with him… but he was glad that I was there.

Upon discharge, I hauled him off to a nice fast-food place (Braum’s), and he got a burger and fries for his first food in 18 hours, and I had burger, fries, a chocolate milkshake, and stole a bit of his soda.

Yes, it’s totally off-diet. Sometimes you just want food that’s hot, fast, available now, and tastes good. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough… and after a day like that, timely is a whole lot more important than perfect.

Today he’s doing better, but I was chatting with a friend, and they were… off. This was the second day they were off, even though yesterday I was too preoccupied to worry about it. Something ain’t right, there. So I grabbed some stuff I’d meant to run over anyway, showed up, took one look at them, and started running the Self-Care Checklist.

What can I easily find in their place that’ll handle hydration, electrolytes, and blood sugar in a go, and given they’ve felt so terrible they didn’t even have coffee yet, also covers caffeine? Well, heck, they keep a case of full-sugar coke in the drinks fridge in the garage for… well, for me, actually, because I’m the main one who drinks it when I need a massive hit of sugar and caffeine to assist with being social at a group dinner. Off to the garage, back with something that if they were firing on all six cylinders I’d get an eye roll and a firm refusal to touch.

Half a can and ten minutes later, the skin tone is far less gray, the eyes are no longer dull, the speech is no longer stumbling, and if they’re looking exhausted, well, that’s still better. And they are with it enough to be firm that my preferred drink is kinda nasty, way too sugary, and I’ll be finishing that off or taking it with me when I go, thank you.

Some days, I get words. Some days, I make sure others are well enough they can get words. It all works out in the end, right?

But to torture a metaphor, remember that while a burger, fries, and high-fructose-corn-syrup carbonated drinks are pretty much the antithesis of “healthy food” – sometimes it’s exactly the right thing for what you need right now.

So maybe your idea of perfection wants you to eschew adverbs, or no purple prose, or “show don’t tell”, or whatever of the thousand pieces of advice that are good in general and terrible in over-applied specific may be… but you need something right here, right now, that’s contrary to those rules?

Then break the rules. Story comes first, not rules!

Maybe you’re incredibly stuck on this one bit and you can’t figure out how to move forward without (X)? Doesn’t matter if it’s a character name or a battle scene – slap a couple brackets up with XXX in-between, and move on to the next bit. You’re unlikely to write XXX as a deliberate thing in your story (and if you are, change it to YYY. Whatever.) so it’ll be easy to find and replace once you’ve unstuck by working out the other things, or finally getting the research done on that.

First drafts never have to be perfect. They just have to be done… and sometimes even in the final edition, you’ll find that the readers don’t care, or it’s perfect right where and what it is.

Take care of yourselves, and be excellent to each other, my dudes.