A white blank page...

And a swelling ra~ge

Ra~ge

Or, to be more accurate, discomfort. I hate empty pages; they mock me, they taunt me, they toy with me. "Nothing you can ever write," they say, "will be good enough for our limitless potential." This is why I end up with so many empty notebooks, or worse, notebook with but one page filled.

I've been pretty good about keeping up my daily 1K; it's surely premature to go patting myself on the back for it just yet, seeing how we're not even a full month into 2012, but I can't remember the last time (other than NaNoWriMo) that I've managed to keep up that kind of word output. Previous attempts to institute a daily writing regimen have failed, somewhat miserably; thus far, I've managed to average a grand a day. "Average" wasn't the intention, lo those twenty three days ago; it was supposed to be one thousand, no exceptions, with anything over that goal point surplus and discarded in the great scheme of things. But life does what life does, and given the days I've felt like crap from long work hours or fighting a cold that keeps migrating back and forth between chest and sinuses, there have been times that I've only been able to manage 800, or thereabouts. But usually, if I can scramble out that many, I can manage the full thousand. There are a couple of completed stories under the belt, more blog posts than I'd originally conceived, even a long e-mail to my wife one day when I was caught up playing Morrowind and rolled my daily communication and daily writing project into one, while we were out to sea this past week.

I'm not entirely sure why today is so lacking in inspiration; work wasn't particularly stressful, with the day spent cleaning up my shop or doing SAMMS (Safety Afloat Management System... or something along those lines) checks on various firefighting appliances around the ship, most notably the fire dampers on the deep fryers. Nothing particularly stressful. I've been re-reading David Weber and John Ringo's "Prince Roger" series, and I'm about halfway through the last novel, "We Few" (and quietly mourning the fact that the series has been declared done by its creators, with no more to be had). There's a subgenre of military sci-fi that involves the heroes, working from a base of higher technological/strategic knowledge than their foe, proceeding to mop the floor with a numerically superior enemy; the Prince Roger novels, Eric Flint's "Belisarius" series, David Weber and S.M. Stirling's "Conqueror" series, and so on. I'm unsure whether it's the military adventurism aspect that appeals to me, or the element of building, improvisation, and creation necessary; perhaps, as with so many things, it's all of the above. My wife, bless her, purchased new undergarments for me, as all of mine seem to be mysteriously vanishing down the rabbit hole somewhere in the depths of the house. She then proceeded to cook an amazing dinner of slow cooked pork tenderloin and roasted new potatoes, both of them wonderfully seasoned; even the Squeakermonster ate her entire meal, although she did have to be coaxed along at one point when she thought she could skip straight to dessert. Five year olds, gods love 'em.

Lord knows, I have plenty of writing projects to take my attention. I'm a goodly ways stuck into my first entry for the Spire shared world project, and I'm finding trouble fitting the next scene together. Because it's so exposition-riffic - a necessary flaw or feature, depending on your view, when you're the lead creator on the team - I'm tempted to go ahead and slap it up for group review unfinished, but that violates one of the few group rules - namely, that we're not posting serial fiction here. Completed works only, please. Which, of course, means I should really be focusing on that, rather than this. Similarly, I've gotten very little progress written on my, um, "special" project - I haven't gotten any further reader/reviewer offers on it, so it's not like I'm keeping an audience waiting, but it's still an ambitious enough project that, if I'm going to do it, I should really get moving on it in order to accomplish, well, anything.

And, not at all least, my friend Joanna has suggested that I write an adventure story about a day in the life of possibly/probably insane young adult author and prolific tweeter Maureen Johnson - a deliciously madcap idea, but one that unfortunately didn't come until after I'd shut down Twitter and started working on this (and that I only noticed at all because my phone chimed at me when I got the tweet, and I'm willing to accept just about any distraction if it'll keep me from working).

Speaking of distractions, I just raided the pork loin again. SO. TASTY. It's so good, in fact, that I'm going to ignore all the dirty connotations of "pork loin" and take the high road of OMNOMNOM.

I kind of want to work OMNOMNOM into a fantasy or sci fi story somewhere, maybe as a monastery or something similar. I think it would be amusing... but perhaps a touch too obvious. Internet memes are everywhere, and even people who've never even heard of Zero Wing can recognize phrases like "All your base".

And on that note, I think I'm off to give someone an arrow to the knee.