{"id":973,"date":"2008-04-14T18:31:21","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T01:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/04\/14\/writers-block-coming-or-going\/"},"modified":"2008-04-14T22:11:12","modified_gmt":"2008-04-15T05:11:12","slug":"writers-block-coming-or-going","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/04\/14\/writers-block-coming-or-going\/","title":{"rendered":"Writer&#8217;s block: coming or going?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve managed to avoid blog posts that report on my own navel-gazing for a long time, but right now I&#8217;m ready to cave in and just write about belly-button lint.<\/p>\n<p>In a nutshell: I feel stuck.<\/p>\n<p>Call it writer&#8217;s block, call it cumulative frustration from constant interruption, call it an inability to visualize clearly&#8230; I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, let&#8217;s call it electrical gremlins, eh?  I&#8217;ve written before about how there&#8217;s something weird about my Pentrelew house, how it&#8217;s sited, its naughty L-shape (missing corner!) &#8212; and how all things electrical inexplicably fritz up, that appliances go on and off mysteriously, seemingly with autonomy.  (Naturally I can&#8217;t find the entry anymore &#8230;pixels seem equally afflicted.)  Whenever you take two steps forward on Pentrelew, you&#8217;re obliged within moments to take one step back, too.  &#8220;Pentrelew,&#8221; incidentally, is the name of the street I live on.  I&#8217;m told it&#8217;s some sort of old Cornish word that means &#8220;land which slopes both ways.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Uh-huh.<\/p>\n<p>The street was named for the now-demolished estate of the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Henry_Pering_Pellew_Crease\">Crease family<\/a>.  I guess they felt that with a name like &#8220;crease,&#8221; they could afford to live on a sloping piece of ground where you don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re coming or going, and so called their estate &#8220;Pentrelew.&#8221;  The acreage their property sat on is criss-crossed by underground streams (I once hired the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dowser\">dowser<\/a> who re-found neighbouring <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fernwood_%28Greater_Victoria%29\">Fernwood<\/a>&#8216;s public well, to map the underground streams in my postage-stamp backyard), and if one wanted to indulge in magical thinking (and let&#8217;s face it, who doesn&#8217;t when the moon is at a certain phase?), one could argue that there&#8217;s something fundamentally confused about the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Feng_Shui\"><em>feng shui<\/em><\/a> here.<\/p>\n<p>Pen-tre-lew: going in opposite directions at the same time.<\/p>\n<p>I have blog posts, plus project notes, plus correspondence, plus another article deadline up the proverbial yin-yang &#8230;and can&#8217;t write them out.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and about those gremlins?  They&#8217;ve invaded my online programs, I think.  Diigo bookmarks aren&#8217;t showing up as blog posts, even though they&#8217;re supposed to, which contributes to the bereft look of these pages of late.  There are a couple of good ones, though.  See my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.diigo.com\/user\/lampertina\">Diigo page here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s my navel-gazing complaining boo-hoo-hoo post &#8212; and I promise I won&#8217;t do it again &#8230;for a while, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve managed to avoid blog posts that report on my own navel-gazing for a long time, but right now I&#8217;m ready to cave in and just write about belly-button lint. In a nutshell: I feel stuck. Call it writer&#8217;s block, call it cumulative frustration from constant interruption, call it an inability to visualize clearly&#8230; I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242,1903],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just_so","category-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}