Writing isn't hard, unless it is

And now for my last (hopefully) discussion about frequency of posts....

I'm still goin', folks.  I like to post something to my blog at least every other day; it keeps my writing muscles energized.  Can't always do that, though.  I'm no longer nearly as sick as I was in the first quarter of the year, so that's a good thing.  But now I've set my own internal deadline of finishing my dissertation by July, and I'm still behind the 8 ball at work thanks to the limited efforts I was able to expend earlier in the year (again, thank you, lung ailment from hell).  Oh, and I'm still a publishing fool in regards to my fiction writing (published the novella yesterday, in fact).  

The post I finally sent flyin' yesterday, I started early last week.  I got to a certain point, though--and most writers, I understand, know this point well--where I realized that what I was writing sucked.  I'd started along a path that sounded great but I'd run out of steam.  As the prose wound on painfully, it bored me to write it, and I'm sure it would have bored you to read what I had done to that point.  It's like driving with a flat tire--have you ever done that?  I mean, we all know academically that you shouldn't drive on a flat because it'll ruin the tire and rip the car out of alignment and all sorts of other bad stuff, but even if it weren't dangerous at all it'd still be annoying as hell.  Ka-lump.  Ka-lump.  Ka-lump.  Okay, pick up a little speed--ka-lump ka-lump ka-lump lump ka-lump.  That's what writing boring crap feels like, honestly.  It hurts to write boring crap slowly and hurts even worse to write it quickly.  But instead of backing up and fixing it as I finally got around to yesterday, I only had the energy through the week to open the software and look at the boring-as-hell prose: "Yep, it's still flat."  I did, in my defense, have a major revision on Chapter 4 of my dissertation to do, and I was having about the same reaction to that revision as well. 

Then again, dissertation writing is supposed to be boring as hell.  Yes, I'm going to publish that one when it's done; I have to.  In fact, I have to pay to publish it, of all things.  No, you don't want to read it.  Trust me.

Writing isn't hard.  I love writing.

Writing what I don't want to write, when I don't feel like writing, though, is tough.  It's like swimming upstream in a river of mud.  Not that I've ever done that, but....

Well, you get the idea. 

And for now, with promises to continue putting out what I hope are great blog posts and either maintain or increase the frequency, I say Happy Monday!

-TOSK