Block

Wow!  Sorry for all of the lack of posts lately! Vacation plus a massive tooth issue both threw me out of orbit and it's been hard to direct time back at the blog.  Oddly, I also had my first brief encounter with writer's block.

You see, at a panel at a panel at Norwescon, one panelist I saw spoke about writer's block, stating that most people who think they have writer's block don't.  Her point was that not writing is not writer's block. Writer's block happens when you have been writing and then you suddenly can't.

To put this into my own perspective, I usually operate with about 20 half finished blog posts. I'll throw them into my phone when I'm out in the community waiting at the hospital or for police or I'll start one in order to track an interesting thing I saw on the web. It's kind of like seed starting for gardens where you grow seedlings under a grow lamp and take them outside once they have sprouted. When I'm not feeling innovative, I'll grab one of those and type away at it to finish it.

Except... that wasn't happening.  I'd grab one with the intention of typing, but just sit there staring at it.  I'd type a line, delete it out of frustration, and give up on the post.  This started happening prior to the vacation. While it's really only a glancing blow of writer's block, it was genuine.

This then got lost in the vacation and then the haze of dental pain I've been in. Since the dental pain incident, however, this has not been writer's block but instead was avoidance. That's something I'm much more familiar with and just requires getting back in the saddle and writing. I'm not sure when the writer's block ended and the avoidance started, but I'm sure I'll get more used to identifying this kind of stuff as the blog rolls on!