I’m in Maryland visiting my brother and his family. Zanaya just went off to camp this morning, and I didn’t have the energy to drive back to Massachusetts today. I had thought for a bit about driving back this morning so I could go to Don’s barbecue, but I can’t face doing that drive two days in a row.

I’ve noticed, in my writing, that I have a tendency to write sentences with two independent clauses with a conjunction. I need to learn to vary my use of sentence structures. Maybe I need another visit to Strunk’s and White’s book on writing style. What the hell is the title of that book? Ah, who knows. Actually, it’s going to bug me until I look it up.

The Elements of Style. That’s it. Brilliant little book that hits all the high points of concise writing, written with great concision. This ought to help me work out a better repertoire of sentence structures. Again, I am striving for artful repetition, not repetition as a result of ignorance. I wouldn’t want to get bogged down in crafting perfect sentences while I am freewriting, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a more diverse repertoire of sentence structures at my fingertips.

But this all is more helpful for writing revision. I am not yet at the point where I am revising my writing. I have, though, copied most of my blog posts to a Word file so I can print it out. So far I have 78 pages of single-spaced writing to print out and begin to edit. My first step ought to be to find the bits of writing that work best, so I can build from there.

It may be helpful for me to decide just what it is I am writing: a book, a bunch of essays…nothing so far, more likely. You never know, there could be some gold in there. I didn’t have any plan in mind while I’ve been producing this blog. So far, at least. Maybe reading through the posts will suggest a direction for further writing. My attitude toward what I have written, ultimately, must be one of willingness to throw it all out and start over again. The real benefit of writing this blog is that I can write quickly and move on - I’m not that invested in what I am writing, so I wouldn’t mind throwing it all away.

One way or another, though, I need to make what I write more meaningful. I do need to have some plan as to where this writing project is going in order to turn this writing exercise into part of my professional practice. This is why I want to find some sort of useful writing within the posts I have already written. Even if I could use only five pages of what I have written so far that would be useful. I hope it will be more, but five pages will be c.2500 words of useful writing. That’s a start by any measure.