When I talked to my mother on mother's day, practically the first thing she said to me was wanting to know when I would start writing again, specifically writing about growing up overseas. I told her I would as soon as she got back into it also.

I said I really wasn't all the interested in writing about my wonderful adventures in Indonesia and Thailand. The main reason is because when I tell people about any of those most interesting times, they are generally not interested. I've found that I can just stop in the middle of talking about the elephant roundup in Thailand and no one even notices that I've stopped talking. She said that's because there is a huge difference between writing and telling. She's been to some "memoir" writing classes at the senior center there in Alexandria and what she's noticed is that more often than not, instead of writing, the people come together and tell stories to each other. If you don't write it down, it's not really a story, and it has a very different impact from when you talk about it.

I had to agree that creating your story on paper is quite a bit more powerful than simply telling it. My father was great at telling stories, but he hardly every wrote anything down other than official reports and analysis and things like that. I wish I could remember more of his stories.

So in the end I agreed that I would write some more. The last time I was actually productive in writing I was doing a weekly story for our local newspaper, about a thousand words. It would take me a full four hours to crank out those 1000 words, sometimes longer. Writing is a job like any other, and you have to discipline yourself to do it. "Writer's block"? no such thing, you simply write nonsense until things start to make sense again. Those four hours cranking out a 1000 words tended to be about 1/3 new words and 2/3 editing.

When I made my first serious stab at a novel, I held myself to a 4 hours a day and made pretty good progress. But there was an unhappiness going on outside my control, and my response, eventually, was to go out and become a wage slave again. and now still am.

But I do have interesting stories to tell. I am not some kind of guru of beneficent know it all, just a human who sometimes pontificates, once in a while cracks a joke, and hopefully entertains or illuminates more often than not. But it's all meaningless if it's merely vocal. So 100 words a day? 700 words a week?

But not a blog, I'm not going to do a daily blog. I will work on the writing like I work on my photographs, off line. When I like it, I'll put it up somewhere...

(Acutally I do have a short story on a short story site back from 97 or so. You had to pay $1.50 or something to read that last third. As far as I know, no one did. I've lost track of it, and I suspect it currently exists on some website where the owners can't wait for the orphan copyright law to come into effect so they can steal it. I mean, even the most cursory google search is going to show my main website and there's a link on there that talks about writing. But under the new law, going to google and if I'm not the first hit, they can claim they looked and didn't find me and that gives them license to steal my story...)