Sweating Blood

I used to have a piece of paper taped over my desk that said "Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until you sweat blood."

In reality for me, writing is a matter of pacing and thinking and muttering under my breath until my thoughts congeal into something that I can put on paper (or electrons as the case now is).

When I first started this blog, I had all sorts of advice and ideas floating around in my head awaiting a blank slate. Once the slate was in front of me they all fled like leaves in the wind.

I am not sure whether it is magnitude of the potential energy of a public form or the looming reality of small thoughts on a permanent screen. Perhaps it is a matter of the need for perfection before publication. The belief that a retraction is something worse than just another publication.

Perhaps it is procrastination. I find that I am very good at procrastination. Yet again, is it truly procrastination when my waking hours are spent mulling and sorting. Not working. But constructing the preparations for work without which there would be no work.

More likely it is the reluctance to soil the new sketch book with the first timid strokes of a pencil. As long as it remains blank the successes are unlimited and the failures do not exist.

What ever the reason, I find the need to make the first smudge on my page. I need to put some words out into this electronic medium. I give myself permission to fail and to set for myself the expectation that I will do better than that.

And you, having found my lonely little electrons, will know what to expect as well. False starts and bright hopes and perhaps a thought or two to catch your imagination and mull over in the darkness of a long hall.