Latest Posts

Some writers claim to have never had writer’s block, or to have found surefire ways to overcome it. A friend once told me her guaranteed method for curing writer’s block was to say she was quitting the writing game. And the concept of writer’s block can be a really hard one to understand for people who don’t write, for whom writing is a choice rather than a compulsion. Some writers are lucky enough to be paid for their writing but with great payment comes great responsibility and they often have to work under deadline—something that’s aptly named. Depend upon it: when a writer is facing a deadline in a fortnight it concentrates the mind most wonderfully.

For those of us who aren’t being paid for our writing writer’s block can be especially painful because, even though no one’s banging down the door demanding the wit and wisdom of our lips or fingertips there’s an internal pressure to produce and while we all have our mental prunes they don’t always get things moving.

Every writer has their own tips and tricks, though. Back when typewriters were still legal a writer told me he’d get distracted by having to put in a new sheet every few minutes but overcame that by using a roll of butcher’s paper so he’d have one really long page. Some always start a new project with a mental image. Some of us fill up space by paraphrasing clichés and quotes from better writers or mixing metaphors. Some bloggers ask questions they expect readers to answer in the comments, leaving other chumps to do their work for them.

I was inspired to think about all this by this video of actors playing writers facing writer’s block. So if you’re a writer what’s your trick for getting the ball rolling into high gear?

The best damn cherry cola I ever had was not that much better than the worst damn cherry cola I ever had, and both weren’t that different from the cherry cola that was fair to middlin’, an expression that I have to admit I’ve never understood because I always thought fair was middlin’, but I guess it was invented by someone who thought it was important to make a distinction between average and just below average, but that’s another story. And blindfolded I don’t think I could make a distinction between the factory brand cherry cola and the artisanal cherry cola that was made with hand-picked Namibian kola nuts, springwater-washed Rainer cherries, and sugar hyphenated with something, but somebody had to make both. It’s the only way to keep the economy viable. We live in a consumption-driven world and the only way to maintain market growth is to keep offering something new. Variety is the name of the game, not monopoly. Monopoly’s object is to so thoroughly destroy the competition that no one can buy anything, wiping out the economy and causing even money itself to lose all value. Even then though it’s still better to carry cash because in the post-economic apocalypse you can burn those little slips of paper to keep the zombie hordes away from your hotel on Boardwalk.

I’ve often said, and more often thought, that we need to be aware of the world around us, that we need to be open to experience and try new things, and it’s a good philosophy but it’s also one that can be easily exploited by those who are just trying to sell us a bunch of hooey. Admittedly expensive hooey is preferable to free hooey and on most days I find that inexpensive hooey can get me by, but it can be overwhelming. Sometimes I want to shut off all the noise, to escape, to not worry about what I’m being sold, to stop being a consumer and just be, and to that end I’m looking into how much it costs to rent a sensory deprivation tank.

The lesson here is that some of the best things in life are free and some of the best things in life are expensive and some of the best things in life are just fair to middlin’.

The wasps know me. This may sound like a crazy thing to say but I have proof. First, though, I should explain that I have a serious problem with wasps. Granted I don’t know anyone who likes wasps, and Craig Ferguson summed it up perfectly when he called them “the skinheads of the insect world”. For me, though, it gets weirdly personal because I have a strange affinity with spiders. Most people don’t like spiders any more than they like wasps, but for most it’s just a feeling of disgust when they see a spider. According to The Book Of The Spider by Paul Hillyard approximately 5% of people have arachnophobia, which can be a seriously debilitating condition. People with genuine arachnophobia think about spiders when there are no spiders around. They go to extreme lengths to protect themselves from nonexistent spiders. Just talking about spiders makes people with arachnophobia jumpy. And I’m probably responsible for giving some people arachnophobia because once in a theater during the film Arachnophobia a friend and I threw handfuls of rubber spiders into the audience, but that’s another story.

Hillyard thinks that there’s a spectrum—that at one end there are 5% or so who have arachnophobia and at the other end there are probably 5% or so who have the exact opposite. I’m pretty sure I’m in that 5% and while it seems like the term should be arachnophilia that sounds like something completely different. It sounds like I want to have sex with spiders. Even if that were physically possible I wouldn’t . Yes, Charlotte’s Web will always be one of my favorite books and, as I’ve said before, I wish Wilbur had been turned into bacon and sausage and Charlotte had been the one to live to a ripe old age, but I only ever wanted Charlotte as a friend.

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with wasps it’s this: wasps are the deadly enemy of spiders. Spiders mostly eat insects but wasps are one of the few insects that turn that around and eat spiders.

They’re also the skinheads of the insect world and even if I didn’t have such a deep love of spiders that alone would be justification for killing every wasp I see. And I don’t just kill wasps. I get brutal. I’ve emptied a whole can of insecticide on a single wasp. In my defense it just kept coming and even when it tried to get away I knew it might come back so I kept spraying and when that was done I stomped on it. Then I set it on fire.

That might have been a little extreme, but something happened to me that’s made me think the feeling is mutual on the wasps’ part. I was standing in line at the grocery store and I felt something tickle my neck. I thought it was just an ordinary itch so I reached up and scratched. That’s when my fingers brushed a carapace. Then I heard a buzz in my ear. I turned and saw a wasp flying away.

I still don’t know exactly when the sting happened but by the time I got to the car there was a burning sensation in my neck. By the time I got home I could feel it swelling. By the time the groceries were put away I had a pustule the size of a bowling ball sticking out of my neck.

In the mirror it was only a little bump the size of my fingernail but I’m convinced the mirror was conspiring with the wasps.

I applied a series of cold compresses and after an excruciating quarter of an hour the swelling and pain disappeared, but even though that was months ago every little itch makes me jumpy. And for a while my keyboard was making a buzzing sound that drove me crazy. I’m terrified of wasps even when there are no wasps around.

The scientific name for wasps is Hymenoptera so while it seems like the term should be hymenophobia that sounds like something completely different.