Drops of Blood

You know the old quote by Gene Fowler:

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper (computer screen these days) until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

Well that is pretty big exaggeration for my writing of this blog and actually I've found that I usually have something to write about but you may have noticed that my blog entries have been a little sparser in the last couple of weeks. We've been traveling some but even more than that....I've been drawing a blank when I sit down to write. I'm beginning to appreciate those newspaper columnist like Leon Hale, who day after day, week after week and year after year write a column. I mean how many times can you write about Semanta Santa and write something fresh and new. But Leon Hale always kept my interest up year after year as he wrote about things like Driving South to find Spring.

It is one thing to write in my journal and another to write in the blog. Trust me, the blog is censored and you should be thankful that I'm not spilling my guts to you. You really don't want to know! And I do try to make the blog interesting. Where the journal.....I doubt it will ever be read so it doesn't have to have correct grammar or any topic and I don't worry about controversy and I can write something one day and contradict it the next.

In my other life....my working life....one of the things that I did was write personnel policy and procedure manuals. I learned how to do it from a real pro, Bill Yeagin. Bill had worked for a large corporation that had unions. So he taught me that words like "and" "or" and "the" make a difference in the interpretation when it is read later. And that could be a big difference. I was reminded again this week of the weight of these little words when I read on the Personism blog about a wedding announcement in the New York Times where the bride was described as A writer and the groom was described as THE photographer. Oh....now isn't that a powerful demonstration of the power of a little article of speech. You just wonder what she will have to do to become THE writer.

At any rate, dear reader, I am trying to pay attention to my writing....watching those "ands" "ors" and "thes" (wow, that looks strange....one of those things that seems okay when you say it but not okay when it is written) AND I currently have five more ideas for blog entries on the notepad on my desk. So if they don't loose their relevance time-wise, I guess I'm okay for the rest of the week and you don't have to worry about drops of blood on my keyboard.