WRITING: Non-Prolificality

Uh-oh…it’s gone. It was here in an unstoppable flow since September and now it’s dried up. Perhaps I just forgot how to write. Or maybe I’ve used it all up on this weblog—I’ve seen writers sign off weblogs with “It’s time to get down to the serious business of writing, so I am taking a hiatus from this daily journal…” and their blogs are left hanging in space with the last entry dated a year ago. Shall I check Amazon to see if their choice ended in a successful publishing venture? Do I dare want to know?

I’ve read my own stuff, read short stories from quarterly journals to inspire—no to poke forcefully back to life, but it’s not working. A story I’d been working on for quite a while because I thought it was such an improvement over my previous work somehow looks strange to me, as if it were written by someone else and I don’t have a clue where the author wants to go with it. Is it finished? Is it any good? I don’t know. It’s foreign to me now.

This blogging thing (why does that sound so much like f…ing thing?) that I’ve cheered as the greatest breakthrough for authors, is it merely sublimation? Indeed, the greatest dictionary description for sublimate is “to cause to change directly from a solid to a gas, or from a gas to a solid.” I’m finding the former rather than the latter. More on this later, I think.