Two Fears

I don't know Beryl Pfizer's work, but I can identify with this quote:
"I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend a lot of time looking for the paper I wrote it down on."

I have two big fears in my published writing. The first is that I will make a mistake. That fear is realized on a regular basis. But the fear does at least serve to reduce the number of errors. (Having a couple of other editors look it over helps even more.)

The second fear is that I will repeat myself. This happens too, but not as often. Yet, anyway.

I am much too vain to plagiarize (I always think I can say it better than someone else), but I never know where something that pops into my mind comes from. I have not yet found that a phrase or passage that I wrote was first used by someone else, but I have found that a passage I wrote on a given day was the same thing I had written earlier. It might not matter, except that a few readers out there actually hold on to the columns and editorials so they can point out contradictions. And they've been known to note the repeats too.

Having my contradictions pointed out is not nearly as painful as my retreads. The former challenges me to reconcile the two. The latter is just, well, boring.