Taking stock

I don't do well with resolutions like 'Spend an hour a day writing' or 'Spend an hour a day on kanji.' Of course I keep making them and then they don't work and then I get discouraged, yadda yadda. In fact the 'hour a day on kanji' (plus-minus) has worked fairly well since October, with occasional backsliding, because it takes the place of doing crosswords. I want to be holding a pen and writing something but crostics depress the hell out of me now. (Oddly, when they were an addiction a mere twelve months ago.) Writing kanji is a reasonable substitute, with the plus of that on crack kanji origins book, and the further plus of doing it in the side bedroom with a pile of pillows and a heating pad. I fancy that what I really want is to be drawing, but it's a mite late for that.

Writing... oh well. But I seem to be managing 'squeeze out two hundred words a day'. Ten days of that will result in 2000 words of fic. And I only do it so that my fic-writing muscles don't atrophy completely, along with the word-finding ones. It's probably not age alone that withers the vocabulary; in my heyday I'd spend an easy two hours daily writing, and that keeps it limber. But then so does reading English, or reading the right kind of English, like O'Brian, and I have to make room for that too.

There'd be much more room without online solitaire. Just sayin'