One of the things I need to learn is how to write when I don't feel like it. Today was a pretty blah day. I fixed the bug in my visualizations, took a couple of screenshots, and sent the results to my research supervisor. I met someone for lunch. I puttered around a bit with some drafts for an article that I've been meaning to write for a few months now. Argh.

I can understand why the article's so important, but I'm gettig paralyzed by the thought of my words being in print! Uneditable! Gasp, gasp.

I really should just whack myself over the head and tell myself that as long as I get _something_ in, that's better than nothing. This is not alwys true, of course, but it generally is.

Life is about showing up.

I need to break that article down into even smaller things. Lots of little blog posts on my internal blog, if I have to.

As long as I get it done.

The other trick I need to learn is keeping a whole bunch of ideas that I love writing about. I breezed through the ten speeches for the Competent Communicator certification because I had so many things I'd been wanting to talk about. If I have a file with all sorts of things I can write longer pieces on, then I can almost always write about something I'm passionate about - whatever that passion is at the moment.

<wry grin> I know! Maybe I need to stop looking for interesting people and start surrounding myself with the most uninteresting people instead. ;) That way, I'll be sure to be the first person in the lab each morning and the last to leave it each night.

Right. <laugh>

Must learn how to hack this. I need to be more in the mood to write, and I need to have the discipline to write even when I'm not quite in the mood to do so.

On Technorati: writing, research, ibm

Random Japanese sentence: Ａ ｓｐｏｔ ｏｆ ｓｈｕｔ−ｅｙｅ は、また猫のいねむりともいわれている。猫は１度に２〜３分しか寝ない癖があるからだ。 "A spot of shut-eye" is also called a cat nap because a cat is in the habit of sleeping only a few minutes at a time.