There's got to be a trick, a knack to this discipline stuff, this

making one's self sit down every day and work at the thing we want to do (to have done?) more than anything, but which eludes us and engenders no end of excuses. And even as we mouth the excuses we (I) know they're bullshit and the real answer is buried somewhere in the murk of the mind, possibly, probably out of reach of the waking search. Fortunately, I have convinced myself that it is real, and it is the right thing to be doing, and it is a worthwhile - indeed perhaps THE worthwhile - endeavor of a lifetime, else why would it be so persistent and not have gone away after all these years of neglect and diversion? "Perhaps you're just not a writer" someone said to me once. I sincerely tried to follow through on that notion, and several times got on the wagon, ignoring things I'd written up to that point, and trying to be comfortable with not writing anything more except in conjunction with business - tech writing, emails, etc. Well it didn't work, and it sort of felt like I imagine it would have felt like in the old days, being left-handed and suffering the corrections of a culture that saw fit to make left-handed people into inept and uncomfortable right-handed people. So the past few years have been a bit of a struggle but I persevere and sooner rather than later now (though it's already too late for it to be really "sooner rather than later") the pile of stuff produced will be a respectable corpus.