Ummm

My maximum seven-day turn-around for posting on this blog passed two days ago.

In the first couple of years of blogging, I actually had a one- to two-month buffer of material. For the last couple of years I’ve been able to crank through ideas, writing each one out until I a). ran out of steam, b). realised I was going nowhere, or c). I somehow and/or eventually finished one.

Not this week.

The draft posts have either petered out or were ideas I couldn’t carry through.

Some projects can be like that. They make it through the conceptual stage and you whip up a document that tells any random but preferably connected reader that not only is what they’re holding a Damned Hot Property, it is Compleat.

Only it’s not. ‘Compleat’, that is. You know this because a). having had some sleep after your Ebullient Moment of Completion, the document you read the morning after is not the one you remembered from the night before, or b). one of your Trusted Readers has told you that your project is Tragically Flawed.

So you work it. Make notes about it. Play with it. Bulldoze it. Ignore it. Discuss it. Dream about it. Write bits of it. Share it. Lose sleep over it. And when nothing you do seems to have made it any better, you leave it —

— for another project. Where you go through the same shenanigans – likely in very different circumstances – but it can feel like you’re carrying some kind of figurative writers’ albatross, stalling/starving/killing each new or different project you turn to.

What do you do when the old quotes that once kept you pepped no longer ring true?

You keep writing. What else can you do? Whether it’s a project or a letter or a report or a blog – even if it’s about the process – it’s the act that’s important. You’re a writer.

Write.