I handed him a plate of pancakes and then, as I opened up a new bottle of syrup and poured a little bit on, I made a rookie parenting mistake. With one finger I sampled the syrup and said, "Huh, that tastes different."
"Different how? What do you mean?" he said poking his pancake with his fork and looking at it like it might bite him instead of the other way around.
Realizing my error I backtracked. "Not different at all. It's delicious. It tastes exactly like our ordinary syrup."
He took one suspicious bite, chewed a minute and then spit it out onto the plate. "I can't eat this," he said (and he actually threw up his hands in disgust). "This is awful. It tastes like throw-up. I think I'd like jam instead."
"Okay, Paddington Bear," I said as I dumped his pancake into the compost bin.
He was lucky because he caught me on a patient morning. Maybe the reason I was feeling patient is because I've been struggling with some of my own perceptions and I'm fresh from the realization of the power those perceptions hold.
My writing process is usually linear. I start at the beginning and work my way through to the bitter end. I've always done it that way and because that's the way I've always worked I didn't think any other way would work as well.
But suddenly, with this WIP, I'm hopping all over the place. I wrote the beginning and then several scenes in the middle and now I'm back to the beginning. It's a weird way for me to work. Like new syrup, it's different. Unlike new syrup, I suppose time is the only thing that will tell if the end result is delicious.