20181121.0430

I will readily admit that it's been harder to keep up on writing these little bits of prose than I expected. I mean, I had noted that it's harder to maintain a stream of these than the streams of poetry I had been writing for quite a while, but the task of writing chunks of prose like this one is more difficult than I remember it being. I suppose some of it has to do with the circumstances in which I write. Admittedly, I do have more time to write, as I've remarked, but I'm not sure I'm putting it to best use. And there's the issue of having to bring more in to put more out--and I've not been reading the way I ought to read, even if I've got more access to more time to read than had been the case for entirely too long.
Still, the exercise of doing the writing, in addition to the other writing I'm doing and should be doing, is proving to be rewarding. I am not getting much more readership than I had before, if any, but I am feeling better about the writing I'm doing. I know I'm writing short pieces that do not often connect to one another, unless through linked references I force into place. It's not exactly a literary masterwork over which I'm laboring, no Great American Novel, if there can be such a thing anymore--or if ever there could have been. So it is perhaps absurd that I am having any trouble at all getting the words together in my head and letting them come out through my fingers and the keys on my board, where they can lodge on the screen and wait for others' eyes to take them in while leaving them in place.
If it is absurd, however, it is nonetheless the case for me at the moment. And just as there are challenges to generating and sustaining a vision across hundreds of pages of prose, there are challenges in coming up with a new thing to say--and to try to say well--in a scant few hundred words. For this is an online piece, and readers online generally do not read with the same dedication that readers in print do; a full novel in a single post would be an interminable read, the medium not conducive to the longer work. We need the page-turns to help things make sense, to render them into small enough chunks to be taken in; the whole plate is not swallowed at a go, even by the largest of mouths and the hollowest of stomachs people wield. To make each bite its own course...so perhaps I ought not to feel so badly that a few hundred words at a time is not so easy as I might have hoped it would be.