Writer's Block

I haven't had any ideas to write about. And it seems every writer or blogger suffers from a lack of enthusiasm or interest every now and then. Then there are days when you're just gushing with ideas you can't stop typing.

By chance I had been reading Bag of Bones, which I bought a few months back at a second-hand bookstore together with Whiteout. Having bought and read other books after, I had forgotten about it and left it gathering dust in my book shelf. Over the weekend I was looking at my bookshelf to see what I could do away with. Mostly I had old computer magazines that I could donate somewhere. My wife had already taken a few of the magazines and donated them to one of my son's therapists. I noticed Bag of Bones, stared at it for a moment and took it off the shelf. I started reading and after a few pages came to a discovery of sorts.

The story starts off with the main character saying goodbye to his wife, tragically not knowing it would be for the last time. Mike Noonan, a novelist, had suffered loss that will impair his writing for years to come. His wife had died suddenly of an aneurysm. He found out later that his wife was pregnant when she died. It was a tragedy in itself, as they had been trying to conceive for years with no success. He had suffered a writer's block after turning in his last piece of work, a half-finished novel at the time of his wife's death. Still, he was able to turn in a novel for each of the next three years. He revealed a trick he had discovered during his writing career. He had created 3 extra novels in-between his other works. And since he only submitted one per year to his publisher, he had these works stored in a safety deposit box just in case. Well, it came to be that he did need it. For three years after his wife died, he had submitted a finished novel to appease his agent and his publisher. The fourth year was the killer, he longer had a reserve and he still couldn't find it in him to write again. So the story continues from there.

That got me thinking. I mean that sounds like a logical way to regularly have something to post on your blog. If you're aiming to have an article a day, you can actually set aside time during the weekend to write up stuff and publish one per day. If you have a feature on your blog to schedule when a post gets published, like Blogger does, then you can actually set it and forget. So I plan on doing it that way, since there are times I actually have lots of ideas to work on anyway. The only thing I'd have to review would be the links. By the time I publish anything, I may need to check if the links are still up-to-date. Eventually, I will want to publish one article a day. That's my goal anyway. Wish me luck :-)