American Idle

When you don't get out of bed until after 1 PM and then spend the next few hours reading and responding to your email, followed by another hour or two of Warhammer Online, there isn't much to say when you settle down to writing about the day.

I'm back at Starbucks for the first time in a week. For a Saturday night it's actually quite quiet in here. I've spent the last hour playing around on FaceBook and reading through headlines on the web, hoping the whole while that some topic of interest will leap to mind. While I'm amused to hear that Siegfried and Roy are staging a comeback, it doesn't seem like a full topic beyond a few idle questions. (Will there be tigers? Does anyone go see this show for anything other than a freakish thrill?")

One article on MSNBC caught my eye. It was about getting laid off and then taking a vacation. The point of the article was not getting caught up in the negative impact of losing your job, but, rather, taking the opportunity to expand yourself. I'm down with that idea 100% and that has been my goal these last few months... but I haven't proven to be very good at it. I set lofty goals and then have trouble following through on them.

I tried explaining some of this to my friend Russell last night. For the last 20+ years I have been fighting a problem with my writing. I get lots of good ideas for writing projects— *lots* of good ideas. They inspire me to write great things. Then, when I actually sit down to work on them, my motivation drains away with the very first sentence. By the time I reach the end of what could be called a paragraph, I am empty of motivation and desire. The idea might even seems worthless. I don't know why this happens, but it happens every time. It's as if the mere act of typing shoots a hole in the bottom of my bucket— I'm lucky to get a paragraph before the idea drains away completely.

Currently, I'm trying to find ways to motivate myself differently, to find away to circumvent this issue. That's the big reason for the birth of this blog. My immediate goal is to get myself in the habit of writing daily, and my eventual goal is to transition this effort to writing for profit. I have also been reading different books about writing— not books about the techniques or craft of writing so much as the "meta" of writing. One book that I recently picked up, "The Tao of Writing", seems to hold some promise.

I'm particularly looking forward to bloggin while I'm on the road these next few weeks. There's nothing like actually getting out and doing something during the day to trigger topics for blog posts. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Until next time.

"Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living."— Gustave Flaubert