On Writer's Block and Chinese Spam (And I'm Not Talking About the Canned Food)

I've been writing a little something for myself since last year; it's a book I hope to be able to have published when it's done, or failing that, which I am able to self-publish. It's a fiction book; writing law textbooks, despite my profession, somehow holds very little allure for me.

Lately, though, I've hit a bit of an impasse. I've always known it was hard to write when one has a lot on one's mind, but when I finally got back to work on my little novel over the Holy Week what took me aback was exactly how much time I'd been away from it. According to the time stamp I had last written there on the 28th of January, or over two months before I got going again.

I thought to myself; I couldn't possibly have been working that whole time, so what exactly have I been up to?

I got my answer when I went over my various blog posts, film reviews, and discussion threads over at my toy car collector forum. Long story short, not very much and a whole lot at the same time.

I guess it's easier to work around writer's block or write without any real inspiration when one is basically writing off the top of one's head, as one tends to do for stuff like blogs and online fora (though I recognize that there are much more serious bloggers out there who put a great deal of thought into their online musings); sometimes it feels easier for me to sustain quick bursts of creative energy than to go through the agonizing process of structuring a narrative. This was clear to me when I read the book I've written so far and saw that some of it was pretty engaging and some of it kind of just blundered along. My up and down days affect my ability to write a longer piece of work, unlike a quickie blog post, which is either great or awful reading all by itself.

One downside of blogs like this one and multiply is that people I don't know from Adam sometimes post all kinds of garbage. The latest batch I'm getting is a bunch of Chinese spam which, thanks to the google translator, I have determined is an advert for some porn. Good grief.