Mental Day Off

Excelling At Doing Not Much Of Anything...


Just in case you didn't notice, I'm pretty sure that I didn't write two dozen words yesterday.

I hardly read any (words) yesterday either, unless you count things like "Stop" and "Go", and "Men's" and Women's" and stuff like that. Single words...or just a few words standing alone all by themselves..phrases shorter than the 26 letters of the alphabet.

(trivial factoid of the day...my name has 26 letters and or spaces in it if you count the comma before III, thereby making it virtually impossible to fill in the blanks on most government forms when they demand that they tell you your "full name.")

Wait a minute...I did go shopping Saturday and had to go through the checkout at the dry cleaners and Home Depot and Kroger and also signed a couple of receipts for lunch and dinner along the way.

Any hoooo....The most significant thing I've learned through the years in "attempting" to develop some skills as a writer is that when it comes to "creative" writing, you can't force it.

Wait...OK...let me modify that theory while the ink is still wet.

You CAN force it, but the results most of the time will allow the stress and strain found in the process to slowly, insidiously ooze out onto your paper or computer screen, and your reader will detect the mental conflict and/or the lack of any real underlying substance in the manuscript and reject it out of hand go find something better to do with their time.

Here in the blog universe, I say that you can see that there's a lot of that (people writing with nothing to write about) going on at any given time, and it's even worse on places like Twitter and Facebook.

I don't consider writing the words "Getting dressed and going outside" or "believe I'll change my underwear and put on clean socks" worth blogging about, but you'll find stuff like that written all the time on Facebook.

And see how I was able to issue both statements here and get away with writing them because I have a larger point to make other than just blithering about freshly laundered underwear and socks?

It's all in the context of the discussion I guess, and making subjects like personal hygiene interesting to total strangers is an art form which escapes most everyone but Martha Stewart or your mother (or possibly your personal physician.)

And now I've attempted it ("it" being trying to make underwear and socks interesting.)

Hah...I got cha...now I've got to stop fooling around on the computer, since I really have nothing to say, and go put on clean socks and underwear and get into the shop and get some work done.

Talk to y'all later...hopefully...