If you look at my posting frequency over the last two months, you'll notice that it's been woefully insufficient. I know I've noticed. On one hand, it's a problem. I feel that it is in my own intellectual best interest to be writing every darn day. On the other hand, there's no real appreciable difference in my life if I don't. So it falls to the wayside. If I had a paper to write, writing a dumb story wasn't high on my list of things to do. Now, if I come home from a day of online work, there's a good chance that I won't want to sit at my computer long enough to produce. But when writing becomes a second-order priority, my own ability to write diminishes.
Now, when I try to pound out 500-1,000 words I find myself dragging, unable to come up with deep thoughts to support the veneer that actually makes it to the page. What I end up with is like an iceberg without any ice under the surface. Maybe it looks the same at first, but it's missing its defining depth. But that gives too much significance to crap like The Return of Android Steve.
However, disregarding quality, in the last three months my ability to simply produce written words has diminished. I can't write because I don't write. If I could start again, it would become more routine.
Maybe the point is not that I need to remember how to write, but I need to remember that writing isn't easy. Sure I can say that I know writing those dumb short stories took a lot of time, but I can say that with out internalizing the realization.
Thus I have resigned myself to sucking until I can get back in the rhythm of expending the effort. I will not put artificial goals such as one story a day on myself. Such promises -- bound to be broken -- will only provide an excuse to stop once the inevitable occurs. Instead, I simply offer myself this one hope: I would like to write more.
