Worry: That DS11 will never get his internal motivation to work hard at something, to do his best, simply because he wants to do well and because something must be done. That he will settle for 'meh, good enough, time to go play' in everything.
Joy: That after years of being a 'slow' and 'reluctant' writer, where all our efforts at creative writing have resulted in utterly simplistic works, after him never having truly put together a proper paragraph, after his summaries always being too brief, too random, too sketchy... After finally accepting that it wasn't worth pushing at this point in time and not doing anything formal writing-wise, and moving to drawing his summaries with minimal writing expected... But still that nagging worry...
After all that, this past week he announced he wanted to write a novel. He said he noticed that the novel he'd been reading most recently (slow writer, advanced reader) had a lot of descriptive language, and it inspired him to want to do that. Of course, he's read lots of descriptive language before, but this time he NOTICED it.
So far he's only added about a paragraph each day, but heaven's sake, it's GOOD! I mean, it's not Eragon, it's not the next homeschooled-kid-miracle-novel. But it's coherent, it's fleshed out, it has sentences like "the rain from the previous night glistened on the green grass"!!!
