If there is no struggle, there is no progress

Part of me feels as though yesterday was a dead loss. I was supposed to write The Article (on RSS), and I spent most of the day, from around 5:30am until around 5pm, writing. I did take several breaks during the day, for lunch, cleaning my PC and my room (cleaning is the best procrastination device!), and hassling M. At about 4pm, as I read for the nth time the 1,200 words I had managed to squeeze out, I thought, why on earth am I writing yet another what is RSS article?

At that point, I threw my hands up in despair, and went and took the laundry off the line. M patiently listened to my rant about time wasting fools who start writing without knowing exactly what they are going to write about. By the time I ran out of steam and all the laundry was off the line, I had calmed down a bit and realised that the day had not been a complete loss, in that the whole process of writing (and ranting) had helped clarify what it is I am going to write about.

The article I was going to write yesterday – about RSS and how we are implementing it at work, will have to wait until the end of the year, or at least until we have something up and running and I can report on that. We have taken some steps, but it is not really enough to write about at this stage. In the meantime, because The Boss is not going to be happy unless I am writing something, I will have to keep doing more research and perhaps write an article about academic uses of RSS. I’ve already got some material, and the beauty of this is that I will continue to have a legitimate reason to read blogs (librarians’ blogs being very good sources of information about info sources and RSS) at work. Some of my wiser readers may be thinking that I should have figured all this out before I started – in my defense I will say that I did figure it all out – it just took me longer than I would have liked! 🙂

Yesterday’s writing was an interesting process. I found myself writing in the “blog tone”! At first I tried to stop myself and tried to write in a more academic voice, but I remembered Fiona‘s comment about writing as though I was teaching someone, and so I just relaxed and wrote. It isn’t hard to rewrite sentences so that they “read proper” once you’ve got something on the page (screen). I’d have to say that sticking with this blog has definitely been A Good Thing, in that I write practically every day now, and am a bit less anxious about my writing as a whole. I definitely recommend blogging as writing practice!

So despite the 11th hour angst the day wasn’t really all that bad. Just wish me luck when I tell The Boss that I haven’t written the article yet. I wonder if he will accept clarity of purpose (ooh it sounds so virtuous!) as an outcome for the time being…?

Categories: writing, blogging, RSS