Yesterday's final word count was -80. I have a goal of a measly 333 words a day and by day 2, I'm farther behind than I would have been if I hadn't written at all. That's pretty typical of me.

I'm having yet more epiphanies as I fight this monster toward completion.

#1 - I only think I like to write. In reality, I like planning a story (all of that color-coding with paper and pens and tidy outlines) and I like having written. The stuff that comes between those two bits...not so much.

You're all lazy. You're the television generation, used to being spoon-fed your stories bit by bit. You want me to do all the work for you, right? Well, I have news for you. That's about to stop. From now on, I'm putting my notes and outlines on my web page and inviting y'all to imagine for yourselves what the story would have been like.

#2 - Inspiration is a gift for which I was insufficiently grateful when I possessed it. Writing without it is...painful.

This isn't writing at all. It's a shoddy construction project. All nails and tape and glue and wedging things in corners to keep the structure stable while you beat the support posts with a sledgehammer to get them into place. You hope that once you get the decorating touches* in place, some passerby will be fooled into thinking they like it, but you don't hold your breath.

I don't know whether to wish that other people do successfully write like this, so I don't have to suspect that I'm trying to turn a fiasco into flowers, or to hope that no one else has to suffer like this.

(* Sensory details like color, sound, smell, texture. Physical setting for those scenes that currently exist only as bits of dialogue or indigestible lumps of exposition. UST which has, so far, entirely eluded my grasp.)

#3 - If I ever wrote an unmixed metaphor, I might fall over in a dead faint.

#4 - Writing about writing is more satisfying than writing. I can sit here and babble on for three pages about nothing at all and enjoy myself thoroughly, or I can sit down with the story file and shoehorn a hundred words of limp prose into it and get nothing but aggravation.

#5 - I need a new hobby. This one was only fun when it was easy.

#6 I don't even think I like to write.