The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

[Repost From Old Site]
I recently read Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, and well, it was an undisputed masterpiece.  It took me many months to read (I'm a slow reader, plus I mostly read in the bathroom), but I soldiered through some of it's more long-winded portions to discover that the entire book happens in the last two chapters. Fortunately, the events therein would be meaningless without the other 90% of the book.  What I thought had been a laborious and repetitive journey turned out to be a startlingly subtle technique of pummeling my brain with violence to the point that I'm desensitized, so that when the blood stops, I'm left breathless, chilled to the bone, and honestly... fucked up for life.
I once read a book called Ham on Rye  by Charles Bukowski.  It's almost like a more modern Catcher in the Rye, with a "later-on-in-life" epilogue that actually takes up almost half of the book.  I hated it, but I hated it so much that I loved it.  Because this wasn't the hate of a poorly written book, it was the hate of a real, living, breathing human being; one who, surprisingly, was entirely fictional.  The protagonist was one of those passive tragic types, the type of character who doesn't do, but instead is done unto. Such characters are infuriating to read about, as they utterly fail to move the plot along, and you're left feeling like nothing happened in the book.  However, occasionally, this can result in a brilliantly rendered character study as it did with Catcher in the Rye, and Ham on Rye. Now that I think about it, the bread choice in the title is probably not a coincidence.
I also once read a book most of you are familiar with, a little ditty called The Lord of the Rings. It's world was so thoroughly and beautifully imagined that I felt more like I was discovering a secret history of our world, rather than reading a work of fiction.
As a teenager, I read a book called Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates, and it's characters, five rebellious teen girls, were so complete, so real, that I find myself missing them as if they were real people, even as I write this.  Maddie may well have been the first girl I ever loved, which would make Legs was the girl I cheated on her with.
I've read extensively of the works of Asimov and Orson Scott Card, two brilliant plot-driven writers, who keep me on the edge of my seat with their cinematic and cerebral stories.  I've read Vonnegut, who makes me laugh through tears of rage and dotes on his readers like a candy-bearing grandfather.  I've been scared half to death by Dracula, infuriated with the careless meddling of Dr. Frankenstein, shocked by the animal nature of humanity in Lord of the Flies, died of thirst in the deserts of Dune, been a sailor stranded in Shogun's feudal Japan...
Voltaire but it best: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
I read these works of art, and it fills me with mortal terror.  When I picked up Blood Meridian, within a single paragraph I felt like it would be a crime if I ever wrote another word, such an affront to McCarthy's genius would it be.
But to paraphrase a spirit-lifting article I read recently, a novel can be a comforting friend as easily as it can be a brilliant teacher.  If every novel was a mind-rending masterpiece, can you imagine how exhausted you'd be?  We'd spend all our hours weeping in despair of the rotten condition of humanity.
So I say, simply, I don't have any pretension of being great.  I'd just like to be good.
...And I'd like to get published.  Please?  The little button on the dashboard of this blog isn't doing it for me.