Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Last week’s motivational chat to myself that I shared with you, worked. This blog, unknown to multitudes, ignored by many, read by the glorious few, serves a hugely worthwhile purpose in holding me to account when I have grown too lazy. Procrastination and delay can be addressed here via a self-directed pep-talk, or occasional lecture/frustrated vent.

So after last week’s acknowledgement/self-admonition, I broke through the barrier that had been holding me, wrote a new mini-section and incorporated it into the text, fixed repetitions around it (some of which actually existed beforehand and had needed pruning prior), and proceeded on from there. Huzzah!

Because of the time involved stuck at this point I flirted with starting yet again at the manuscript’s beginning to read through and edit, but have decided to advance from here and accept that I’ll be reading it over many more times anyway, and so shall administer fixes then as they arise.

Until the day you hit publish, you never stop re-reading. I really try to stop afterwards. Not entirely successfully.

I’m okay with that, as I have come to learn it is an occupational inevitability, rather than hazard. The words, phrases and scenes become something else at times; Picasso abstracts of their original selves, thickly painted cubes and strange proportions, nothing aligning. That’s when you know you absolutely have to stop: when your own words become alien. At that point all you can do is harm what you originally wrote.

But the point is: blogging is a valuable tool. You write something, anything, and stop the writing muscle from atrophying entirely. You hold yourself accountable, and gain motivation. Having even five people acting as potential witnesses (there are more on Tuesdays now, but I’m not setting the heather on fire (and why would someone want to do that? Chasing after three-legged haggis, obviously.)) is enough to flagellate me into forward motion. This is invaluable. A diary wouldn’t do it. To-do lists have not done it. Sharing my difficulty and vowing to do better has done it.

So thank you, my friends and the occasional relative, for helping me take a few more steps down this long road! A few steps closer to sharing this collection of words with you, with no abstraction involved unless done deliberately, and this is not such a book. Hmm, what would such a book look like? Ulysses? Just cracked it open, and the language sang at me. The language of thought at play. Not so abstract then.

And with that, my friends, I bid you adieu until next week. As an aside: if you want to enjoy it, don’t try to read Ulysses start to finish, drop in and read a page or two here or there. Anywhere in the text. Savor it. Speak it aloud in random accents and see what happens. Do the same with Infinite Jest, and see what strange rhymes may occur. Do it as a vlog (heh, does anyone vlog anymore? (says the man who still blogs!)), like fun with flags. Yes.