Writing

I was reading my old work the other day. I really like chapter one of Nellehseran and Angel Arisen (I would like to rewrite chapter two of the former, I think). Reading that stuff makes me want to write more, but I come home from work, flop down on the couch, eat some dinner, and play video games.

It's easy to justify a lack of productivity when you're working all day. I've all but stopped exercising, I don't write, I don't post to this blog (and you, gentle reader, don't get to enjoy my pedantic peramblings). To my conscience, to the world, I say, "Lay off me, I've been working all day."

That's unacceptable, though. I know that I want to write, I know that I want to think. The easy road is to cheat myself, to skip the arduous ardors of the writer's craft, to lay aside the deep and difficult thoughts that nestle within philosophy, to give pass to tiring physical exertion. But I am the master of my mind, and the rewards for fulfilling my desires are far greater than the rewards for fulfilling my wants (I use interchangeable words, but I think context and connotation make that sentence clear).

So, I need to master my mastery. I can not live a life of dull mediocrity, a perpetual comfortable rut leading only to the hope of a painless retirement. The man of thought, and I immodestly consider myself one, must seek, in the words of David Foster Wallace, "...to keep from going through [his] comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to [his] head and to [his] natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out."

So, I'm promising something to myself and to the internet: every Saturday, I will have posted something worth posting during the previous week. That is to say, by Saturday at 11:59 P.M., I will have published some bit of work with substance. Everything I post will be accessible from this blog, so you don't have to work too hard if you don't want to.

Onward, then, and let's hope I can actually maintain this for once!

By my hand,
~Michael Akerman