Good advice can't always be heeded.
Many years ago already, the often quoted (in these pages, at least) Justin Hall gave some very useful advice for anyone hoping to post a personal web site. He wrote:
work on it every day.
put in just a half an hour
and see if you can keep yourself to just that.
I readily admit that I haven't followed this advice literally, though I've tried to be true to its general intent. I write differently than Justin (or so it seems), and after half an hour of writing I need to do about an hour of editing, meaning that writing these pages, and bringing them to the stage where I feel more or less comfortable posting them to the web, is a very time-consuming task.
But Justin's advice about writing every day holds an important truth that lies beyond the question of the quantity of writing being produced. Once we get out of the habit of writing every day it becomes more and more difficult to get back into it. In my case a family vacation more or less forced upon me a break in the writing of these columns. But after that vacation had ended, getting back into the habit of writing proved to be much more difficult than I expected. The Boidem really did take a vacation, and almost didn't want to return.
Go to: The Boidem takes a vacation.