Pearsall's Books

One of the problems I am finding is just writing in normal hours. Since I've not been working for a little while (for those who don't know me, I generally work as a legal temp, I might go a week or two between jobs, but when I do work I do a lot of hours, I am also quite frugal so I tend to avoid financial problems). At university I had much the same problem with writing my essays. I could go out and do research in the daytime but trying to write in normal hours would be impossible. I'd stare at the screen, stare at my notes, wander off and talk to my flatmates, watch some tv, look out the window, fiddle about with music. Then there would always come that magic hour, when I was vaguely thinking it might be a good time to go to bed. Suddenly I'd get an idea about how to approach what I was writing about, something interesting to say, and, foom, I'd be off, hammering away for hours.

Writing this blog is somewhat similar, it seems that I can only churn out paragraphs of turgid gibber at normal hours, before I suddenly grab the meat between my teeth at later hours. Re-starting this writing process has, if anything, reinforced my respect for those bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum (to name just two) who seem capable of churning out thousands of words on a daily basis. Perhaps it's easier to write about current politics than the sort of pseudo-lecture/essays I've gotten myself into? I tend to spend a lot of time re-reading bits from the books I'm talking about, searching around Google and reading through various articles to see if they have anything that's worth linking to.

Well, anyways, this, I guess, can count as my 'blogger angst' piece...everyone has to write one at some point! I have about eight hundred words of the final Central Asia piece done, originally it was supposed to be just a standard 1000-1500 word piece, but I got carried away. Expect that to be arriving down the pipeline at some point tonight/tomorrow.

While I'm writing this, I might as well throw in a few links to some interesting things that I probably won't cover:
Japan Window - an excellent photo blog on life in Japan. For Dan.
Steven Malanga Why Queens Matters
Marc Cooper's interview with Christopher Hitchens