Writing

Remember when you were in university and you had mountains of papers to write, hundreds of pages a semester, and somehow you just plowed through and did it? And, it’s not that it was easy, but the writing just worked, it flowed, and you got it done. Remember that?

Okay, maybe it wasn’t as easy for you. And maybe I’m remembering it a little more rosy than it actually was. But I really do remember a time when I could just sit down and write. And write. And write. Maybe it was because I didn’t have to come up with topics on my own entirely. If I was taking a class on science in Colonial America, that definitely narrowed down the topics available to me. I still had to decide that I wanted to write about Cotton Mather and his attempts to reconcile Newtonian science with Puritan theology but at least I had somewhere to start.

This whole blogging thing is a little different though. It’s pretty free range. I suppose that is, in part, my fault. I’ve always maintained this as a blog open to whatever I wanted to write about and I’ve never tried to limit it in any way. In the past, I often wrote a lot about politics. But most of those posts weren’t actually my own writing: I was mostly just reposting things that I’d read on other websites. And those posts almost never garnered any comments. My audience, I suppose, was never as politically-minded as I, particularly about US politics, given that the majority of my audience (two of the three of you that I know read this regularly) are Canadian.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I’m thinking that 2010 is going to be the Year of Me. Rather than writing occasionally here about how frustrated I am about my current situation, I’m going to do what I can to actually change it. I’m at wit’s end about what to do about my job situation, but at least I’m working. I’ll continue to apply for new positions but for the meantime, I’ll be standing at a hotel front desk 30 hours a week. I might as well try to use it. So, hopefully I’ll be writing more here. And maybe by just writing more, about whatever strikes my fancy, I’ll get back into that writing groove. I feel like I’ve said this many times since starting this blog anew almost two years ago. But, damnit, I mean it this time!

Happy 2010!