20141229.0910

The end of the year is approaching, and there is an impetus to look back over the year. There is an impetus to look back more generally, perhaps to this time a year past. Now, as then, I consider the writing that I do, spending time putting words into these pages instead of onto other pages where they might earn money for me and my household or else put me into a position to be better able to earn money for me or my household. Now, as then, I maintain that the few minutes I spend in putting these pieces together serve to prepare me for the other writing work that I do, that they help me order my thoughts and accustom me to writing for audiences other than me. However small they may be.

Writing is a curious thing, though. I write much, not only in this webspace and in the too-infrequent postings to such other projects as this, but also in my work as a freelancer, a scholar, and a teacher. I also write much for my leisure; I have noted being on staff for the online L5RRPG event, and since it is a play-by-post game, nearly all of the activity for it is written. The writing I do in that context may be viewed as "lesser," as not worth attention, particularly against the other concerns, but it is still writing, and it is writing with an audience; it offers practice in things that this webspace and many of the other contexts in which I write do not--and cannot. But that will be another discussion entirely.

Even with the writing, though, with all the practice in it that I do get, I sometimes have trouble finding words to say. I sometimes have trouble finding ideas to try to put into words--or into other words than I already find them. Sometimes, as today and other days I have noted but do not care to find again at this point, I have ideas earlier than I can sit down to treat them, and they vanish between the having and the treatment time. (I am sure I could dress this up in some lovely metaphor, probably a medical one that serves as a biting commentary on health care systems. That, too, is another discussion.) They leave their traces behind, but I am not a hunter to be able to follow them to the animal I have wounded or hope to wound for meat and a trophy. (I cannot escape metaphor, it seems.)

I am not alone in it, certainly. Words are symbols, simulations, and simulations always miss things. They have to do so to be able to be used as simulations--if they have all, then they are the same, and not similar. Words themselves lose, and none of us knows all the words. I and others search for the right ones, the best ones, ones not yet known, perhaps. But there are always better words to be found.