No more coffee

The problem with writing what you intend to be a daily blog is that eventually you run out of ready-made ideas for them.  That happened to me, in fact, somewhere around a month ago.  I like to think I've written some pretty decent blog posts since then, but they were all cases where I actually had to think on the question of what to write about. 

See, it really was different at first.  There are many subjects asking to be described when you're writing about your first attempt at writing, and so at first the ideas came at me faster than I could commit them to the blog-o-sphere.  As with any new activity that you continue past its point of newness, though, writing became more routine and less discovery-laden.  Mind you, it's not that I think I've progressed to the point where I have nothing to learn.  It's just that I no longer sit and watch myself as I write, amazed at all the mystery.  Since the blog is intended to detail some of the discoveries, then, the natural course of it is to submerge itself into the "well, I wrote a bunch again" quagmire.  There, though, is somewhere I refuse to take myself, much less you. 

Besides, it's actually not that bad.  There really is always something to write about writing.   I just sometimes have to *gasp* work at it.  Which is, incidentally, what got me into a Douglas Adams book tonight.  I was sitting here looking at a blank blog screen, shuffling through nearly half a dozen really crappy ideas on topics about which I could blog, when I decided to just open a book and see if anything called out.

It did.

I've talked about how several different authors respond to the "where do you get your ideas" question.  Some, of course, are less artful than others in their responses, but it's such an oft-written about issue that it apparently plagues all, artful or no.  Douglas Adams is, to me, the pinnacle of artful writing, evidenced by the fact that I absolutely adore his answer in The Salmon of Doubt when asked, "Where do you get the inspiration for your books?"

"I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea."

Now, you'd have to be a writer, or a teacher, or a military person, or one of the other professions that lives off of coffee, to find that as humorous as I do, I think.  But if you are, and if you do, then...isn't it grand?  Simple, yet deep and insightful.  All that and entirely sarcastic at the same time (yeah, right...who ever heard of someone denying themselves coffee?  That's like not breathing till you get an idea). 

Funny where ideas can come from, then.  As it is, I've got ideas for more books than I think I have time to write, but the time will come, I'm sure, when I'll have to consider denying myself the grandest pleasures of life, like coffee, mocha, cappuccino, and all the others.  Not that I will, of course, but I'll certainly be willing to consider it, since it came from the writings of a Grand Master.

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