As some readers of this site seem to be able to discern from my posting rhythms, I've been pretty swamped the last week or so. I'm sorry…for myself as much as for you. It's a lot of fun to write things for this blog, at least when they're not about friends of mine dying. "Why do you blog?" is a question I get a lot and the answers (plural) have a lot to do with networking and keeping in touch with people but primarily with the same reason that a professional artist sometimes likes to just sketch, drawing what he feels like drawing, not what someone else is paying him to draw.
One of the things I learned from Jack Kirby — hey, there's a name I almost never mention — was the concept of commitment to your line of work. Jack accepted that long hours at the board were a part of the path he picked for himself; that having chosen to write and draw comics, he had to look not for reasons to not work (you can always find good ones) but for reasons to accept and even enjoy the grind. He'd complain about the labor and with good reason. At times, it was excessive and he was always underpaid. But had they suddenly showered him with dollars, he would not have quickly become a man of leisure. He would have continued writing and drawing…just at his pace, not their pace.
I knew I could never match Jack for the sheer brilliance of the output, nor could I come close. Few have. But it was and is theoretically possible for us mere mortals to work that hard. We can be that committed to finishing projects and assignments that meets whatever dubious standards we set for ourselves. So I write a lot. Dorothy Parker famously said, "I hate writing, I love having written." I've never understood that approach. Why become a writer if you hate writing?
Writers, for the most part, tend to over-romanticize their profession and I don't mean to do that. I've never thought whether my job is better than somebody else's except, of course, to decide that it suits me better than some other vocation might. So I guess the reason I blog is that writing is what I do and this is an enjoyable outlet for which to write. Maybe that's not the best reason in the world but I'm afraid it's all I've got.