A friend asked me yesterday if I liked to write. That’s a great question. I do, sort of. I like to complete a writing project. I like getting thoughts on paper. I like having a finished product to tweak. But the act of writing itself is hard, and I, like many, tend to avoid hard work. (Steven Pressfield calls this the “War of Art“. I may not be close to the art side of that, but I understand the war involved in any creative endeavor.)
Because writing is hard work, it requires time. Disciplined time. Time I’ve not had much of over the past 3-4 years. So, writing, for me, as some of you will have noticed, with this blog as evidence, has slowed to a trickle.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t constantly have ideas of what to write. 
The screenshot, here to the right, is from the wonderful publishing tool I use called MarsEdit. Ideas for posts often get plopped into the ‘local drafts’ folder for later (theoretically) editing and publishing. In reality, they mostly go there to die. At last count, there were 216 posts waiting refinement or death, the latter being much more likely.
I’ll keep writing. It’s like talking for me, something I’ll only be able to give up if physically unable to continue. And if I find the disciplined time, I might begin by rescuing some of those 216 posts.
jenion
Short but very true! Happy to know your unpublished drafts WAY outnumber mine – I was beginning to worry because mine are now in the double digits! Writing is hard work, at least in part (for me, anyway) because my name and identity are tied to it – so I want it to be a good representation. Also, I would hate for anyone to think the BVM sisters at St. Raphael’s grade school didn’t instill perfectionist tendencies with regard to grammar, syntax, and spelling!
Randy Greenwald
But at the same time the sisters at St. Raphael’s might need to be taught that this is, after all, a blog and not a formal essay. Perhaps they could cut you a little bit of slack. But then it strikes me that perhaps ‘cut slack’ might be a bit too colloquial for the sisters. Whatever. (And with the use of that word and tone, the sisters are pulling out their hair.) One professional journalist told me not to stress over the posts, but to just ‘let it rip’. (911 has just been summoned to St. Raphael’s). I can’t do that – but I have had to relax a bit.