Thoughts while virtually away

If you ever want to feel like a really lousy writer, and face it, who wouldn't aspire to that lofty goal, try churning out three, five, seven articles a day.

Journalists can do it, but that’s because they're journalists -- they want to do it, they’re trained to do it. Besides, they've got their game face on. If you don’t have a game face and you’re a writer and enter into this line of work, even for a brief window of time, the sheer speed and volume of it all makes you cheat -- plagiarize and parody yourself, until after one very short while, you can’t stand the sound of your own voice. On paper.

But back to journalists. The daily grind journalists. They start a piece with some alarmist verbs, and then, when no one’s looking, kick off their shoes, pull up a chair, and settle back comfortably with a pipe and slippers while readers still sift through the wouldarewerewasis’s of the story.

I respect them, or envy them, or maybe both, maybe neither; does it matter?

When it comes to writers, and they are writers because they write, the daily feature fellas, online now, mostly, they’re the marathoners. No hurdles, pole vaults, high jumps from that quarter; but lord knows, they do go on and on.

Not much of a life for a sprinter, though.