Tag Archives: novel

After Staring at a Blank Screen

It’s not that I can’t write. It’s that I can’t write a blog post!

I wrote more than two pages on my novel while at work today. OK, maybe they weren’t good pages. Maybe it’s a crappy novel. These things happen. The fact is I sat there and wrote them with a bare minimum of staring at the blank page first.

So I sit down to dash off a blog post and nothing. What’s that all about? I know damn well I wrote something about how writing the blog every day was helping me to write the novel. Is writing the novel now making me unable to write the blog? That’s ridiculous!

And obviously not true, because, look, I just wrote two paragraphs (I don’t count the first one; it’s only two sentences). I do find it interesting, if a little snake-eating-its-own-tail-ish, to write about writing. I like to read about writing, too. A writing friend of mine said she stopped doing that, because she feared she was reading about writing more than she was writing. When she said that, I just looked sheepish.

I do have some Mohawk Valley adventures planned for the weekend, one of which I alluded to in a post earlier this week (astute readers will know it when they see it) (extremely clever readers may have already guessed) (now I’m being too coy; OK, I’m done). I may even write another post about Why I Can’t Write a Post, this time thinking of something more substantive to say. In the meantime, this is Non-Sequitur Thursday, so I have only to think of a foolish headline, and I’m done.

Hope to see you on Lame Post Friday.

Words Happen

I just looked back and saw that I did not do a Monday Middle-aged Musings, and that is good news for me. Now I can do a Midweek Musings and be off the hook.

The funny part is, I have two blog posts written that I could type in. The problem is, one of them will probably run over 1,000 words and I really ought to look a couple of things up before I start typing (does that intrigue you? I’m rather proud of it myself). The other is heavy on the half-baked philosophy and therefore more suitable for Lame Post Friday.

So, what am I left with, a post about what I’m not going to write a post about? Sounds pretty dull. The thing is, I haven’t been musing much this week, middle-agedly or otherwise. But I do have a question that just occurs to me: where do we draw the line between middle-aged musings and half-baked philosophy? Aren’t they awfully similar? And isn’t either one just an excuse for me to type whatever the hell I feel like for a few hundred words and call it a post?

You wouldn’t know it from this post, but I have actually been writing a lot this week. Yesterday I sat down and wrote the aforementioned 1,000+ word post, then worked on a new novel I had started on Monday. (Oh dear, didn’t mean to mention the novel. I hope I haven’t jinxed it.) This morning I wrote my Friday Lame Post, then worked some more on… that thing I wished I hadn’t mentioned. Can I just say, I LOVE writing! You do it, then suddenly you find yourself doing more of it! You write one thing, then you write something else! Words happen! (Ooh, good title.)

The irony is not lost on me: I am about to publish a singularly foolish post in which I brag about all this other great stuff I’ve written that I am, for reasons best known to myself (if that), I am not publishing yet. Let’s all muse on that for a while, shall we?

OK, we’re done.