[L, diary, ephēmeris] 1) BLOG

"...in order to be a writer you must experience and learn to recognize and cope with periods of what Freeman Dyson calls stuckness.  In order to do creative work in any of the arts or sciences you must go through long or short spells of not knowing what is going on, of being irritated, and not being able to find the cause, of being willing to work as hard as you can and what happens isn't valuable enough, isn't good enough, isn't what you meant to do, what you meant to say.  Then you have to keep on working.  Then, if you can bear it, if you don't quit and move to Canada or call up Joe and go hiking for two weeks or quit your job or get a divorce or do anything else to relieve the pain, and it is pain, its really irritating, it puts you in a bad mood, you are irritable to children and can't focus on anything and keep changing your mind, if you can put up with it and just go right on sitting down at that desk every day no matter how much it seems to be an absurd and useless and boring thing to do, the good stuff will suddenly happen.  It may be twelve o'clock at night when you are doing something else or are in the bathtub.  It will be when you have given up and least expect it.  There it will be, the radium, the formula, the good short story, the real poem..."  

--FALLING THROUGH SPACE, The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist