Something odd is at work here. I like to write, I really do. You see, I have the tortured soul of an artist, the need to express and create -- as do most of us I suspect -- but I also have all the artistic ability of a gnat's left bollock. This causes me unbelievable amounts of misery and frustration. If only I could paint or photograph.
The only arenas in which I ever manage to successfully express a little art are programming, and writing. Just, just, oh-so occasionally, I manage a paragraph or two that I feel proud of.
And those times that I do manage it, I did it without trying; the words simply flowed onto the screen, almost without conscious thought. By contrast, the harder I try to write, the more contrived, turgid, dysrhythmic it is. Bleagh!
Which is all perfectly in order and in accordance with our human nature. I remember an article in New Scientist some time back on the superior reflexes and decision making of the unconscious self. I think that when we achieve that state known as flow, we must lose the conscious self to a large degree.
So, for a few nights' running now, I've sat up late and read blog after blog. And as midnight approached, and I was so fuzzy of eye and brain that I could neither read nor comprehend very much anymore, I started to write. And the words flowed, even if I had to squint out of first one eye, then the other, to read them. I even flew without a spell checker.
OK, it ain't art. BUT I WROTE. And one or two people have even been moved to praise.
And here's the great hope: if I do enough of this, relentlessly day after day, and go back and read it later which, strangely, I quite enjoy, perhaps it'll become easy. Perhaps, just as I can now rattle off in minutes the kind of Oracle SQL that one sees in advanced sections in texts and has support dudes quietly reaching for the manual, perhaps I'll be able to do the mechanics of writing quite without conscious thought. And then perhaps I'll be able to express the ideas flashing through my chaotic mind as they come to me, not spend an entire day trying and failing. Like happened today with my idea for a killer disruptive technology.
Stay tuned.
10:01:10 PM 
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