"Have you been writing?"

I went to a public lecture this afternoon and saw three people I know – from totally different contexts.  Two are faculty at Durmstrang (one of whom is my son’s advisor); the third is a guy I used to work with long ago at a past employer.  I suppose it’s inevitable that I run into folks I know whenever I go out: plenty of people call this a small town.  At any rate it’s a very small town for its size.

 

As I talked to my ex-colleague after the lecture he asked, “Have you been writing?”  Well, no.  Not exactly.  Not at all, in fact.  Of course I’ve got reasons: I’ve been busy and there’s been a lot going on and the dog ate my homework ….  But that’s all just chatter, and at least I had the decency not to make excuses out loud even as I rehearsed them in my head.  All I said was “No.”

 

So my friend started to talk about procrastination, and about how to tackle a big project by breaking it down into little itty-bitty projects and then knocking them off the list one at a time.  Of course he’s right.  He’s also the one who first encouaged me to start blogging, five years before I started writing under the name “Hosea”.  (The first things I ever posted, under my own name, are no longer on the Internet so far as I know, and the Internet is a richer place for their absence.)  So we chatted some more and then went our separate directions.  But all the while my mind was starting to murmur to me, “Get it in gear, Hosea. None of this stuff is going to write itself, you know.”

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if it did?