21 August 2002

I got no writing done yesterday, damn it. Well, I take that back - I doodled out a couple of paragraphs in the staff meeting. But most of the workday was taken up with Actual Work, in which I wound up using a buggy tool to make the same four changes to twenty-odd separate files.

Should I mention that the buggy tool crashed about every third or fourth time I closed a file - and if it crashed, I lost all my changes, even if I'd just saved them? Someone gave me a tip around mid-afternoon that slowed down the crash rate, but didn't stop it altogether.

It was, to say the least, a somewhat frustrating day.

Then I went home, made the grocery list, went with Matt to the grocery store, and put the groceries away. I settled down for what looked like a nice, quiet evening. I was planning to write. I decided what I was going to write, and even opened a file and typed about a sentence and a half before the block hit.

I couldn't even finish that second sentence. I just sat there, staring at it.

Eventually, I gave up and closed the file. I got out The Princess Bride and Karen put her copy in as well, and we had a fine time for a little while quoting at each other and giggling over it. And not too long after it finished, I decided to give up the ghost and go to bed.

Most writers don't make enough from their writing to live on - most of them have to hold another, "real" job.

I don't know how they do it.

Maybe I'll start forcing myself to write some here at work. Save reading my "dailies" (comics and journals that I check every day) for the evenings, and write for half an hour or so every morning, and another half hour at lunch.

Though half an hour isn't very long, and if I get into a zone, I won't want to put it down...

Ah, well, I'll figure something out.

In the meantime... it's back to the grind. (Oracle sucks. Just in case anyone was out there who didn't already know that.)

--Liz