There are two ways to keep a person from doing X.

A) Make it impossible to do X. Make it illegal or expensive or impractical, for instance; or

B) Fill up a person’s life with dozens of other obligations such that he or she no longer has any time to do X.

I’m dealing with B) at the moment. I have a dozen writing projects I’ve been working on, but I can’t get to them because I’m feeling exhausted with all the other things going on in my life. These “distractions” I’ve been doing for the past two weeks are important things that I want to do or I need to do (e.g., spending time with my children and tending to crushing duties at work, such as arguing appeals, writing a brief that was just filed with the United States Supreme Court and reconstructing my workstation at the law office after my hard drive died).

No one is telling me to stop writing, but the result is the same because of all of these other obligations. There are only so many hours in a week. I have only so much energy and focus, and I find that in order to do original writing I absolutely need blocks of several contiguous hours, at a minimum. Those chunks of quality time have disappeared lately. I’m frustrated, because I very much want to follow up on some articles and write some new ones. On the other hand, my life is full and good. I shouldn’t have any complaints, other than I have this urge to try to figure things out, and I do this much better when I write.

In moments like these I’m so glad that I decided to make this website a community of writers, an intersection. But there are also other reasons I chose to make this a community, especially the increased interactions with the other authors–an opportunity to learn from each other.

Bottom line, I’m sending trackbacks here and there to let readers know that I’m still alive, and I hope to be more active at this site soon.