Creative Differences

My daughter and I have been working on a joint writing project for the past few months and we are having creative differences to the Nth degree.

I am going to assume that in this case N is a very high number, like so high that if you have a disagreement with someone to the Nth degree, stealing their creative idea and running with it is completely acceptable and even encouraged.

Our joint writing project is super secret for now, but what’s important for you to understand is that she is being really unreasonable. I’m this close to cutting her out of the whole thing, except she’s the only one who knows how the computer works.

And I love her.

And I’m a little scared that she’ll cut me out of the project first.

And the whole thing was her idea.

But I was the one who had the creative spark and said “let’s do it together!” which she likes to remind me isn’t synonymous with “let me be the boss of this whole thing!”

Freaking native English speakers. Think they know everything.

Working together has its definite benefits– like we are spending time together discussing and planning and talking about things other than fashion.

But it also has some drawbacks, like her insistence that she can’t commit to working on it more than a few morsels of time here and there until school’s over because she has “homework” and “tests”.

“You don’t have to do a lot,” I tell her. “Just get me the fifth chapter after the weekend.” And she says that she can’t commit because she has a friend sleeping over on Saturday and she just wants to relax on Sunday, with some time set aside for whining about not getting Abercrombie & Fitch shorts.

And I pout a little and then I re-work chapters 1 through 4, and leap ahead to six. But chapter 5 is all hers.

It’s going to be worth the wait.

One year ago ...

• Winner - 2014