Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative. ~T.S. Eliot
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. ~Terence McKenna
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences. ~Anne McCaffrey
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. ~Robert Cormier
If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn't very vital. If you don't feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don't have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough. ~ John Irving
Sometimes making stuff up feels a lot like Coyote* running across the empty space between one rocky pinnacle and the next, and as long as you keep moving you're fine. When you stop and look down, it's suddenly all too apparent that there's absolutely nothing underneath and that you're keeping in the air by a peculiar effort of will.
And then a good day comes, and you start running through the air once again, and, if you're smart, you resolutely don't look down. ~Neil Gaiman
So everything's going okay until I get a call during my class (phone set on vibrate and luckily It's during the first break because otherwise I'd wait til break to answer) and it's my husband. Napoleon-girl (NG) apparently has been into the household cleaners. Did she drink some? He doesn't know. I drop everything, go running home (literally, since I live close to campus). Get home. NG is happy as a clam, though she cannot figure out why daddy's freaking. All she says is sorry. So we call the doc, then poison control. Turns out the cleaner she may or may not have drank wasn't that bad, and she'd didn't get much, if she got any at all. So we were to wash her down, get as much drink down her as we could, and watch her. After an hour, they checked back in and since she wasn't showing symptoms, called it okay. We kept watching her awhile, then put her down to nap. She's done very well since then. In the meantime, we rechecked all the childproofing and fixed what had become too loose.
On a more or less positive side, my dad came out of his neck fusion surgery okay. Loopy, but I got to talk to him. It was very nice.
Sympathies. The same sort of thing happened to me on Monday--the Plague of the Last-Born got into some medicine that was supposed to have a child-proof cap. Much wackiness ensued, though as it turned out he was fine. (I, of course, am still shaking whenever I think about it.) I'm glad your little one's okay, too.
Last fall, my one-year-old managed to eat some of the berries from the bushes out front. We didn't know how many, so thus ensued the frantic call to poison control. He was fine, but it still takes a few years off of you.