The art of writing when we don't have much to say.

Obviously I haven't exactly kept up on my goal of writing almost everyday, but it's still a fair amount of regular writing when I'm pretty busy in my life so I'm not entirely displeased, here.

One thing new I'm trying is I installed a small command line application called jrnl onto my home server, so I can dash off a diary entry from any of my devices (that have SSH capabilities anyway), like:

I'm trying to keep more documents in plain text and Markdown anyway for purposes of interoperability, and also because I am getting sick of application lock-in where even if I write things in plain text I can't easily share it anywhere else! Will this help me write more? Or is this just like fiddling with an app when I don't feel like writing? I do think it is fun though! And fun helps. Like when I was writing so much with my new fountain pen a few months back.

One major issue is that I write dozens and dozens of emails a day, a lot of which are the same generic "how to access your account" messages but I really feel like you can only produce so many words in a day, and the emails steal a lot of that. Sometimes I feel like a living LLM doing this kind of work but obviously I've got some kind of limit that they don't.

All my creative pursuits have really taken a downswing.

There is a very popular creative exercise where you need to produce a certain number of "freewriting" pages a day, and I’ve tried it before and got okay results but this was at a period of my life when I had no kids and no husband and really not any obligations outside of showing up to work. The idea is to increase output for all kinds of creativity which for me would include knitting, crochet, creative writing, photography I guess. It’s not going to give me more time actually out in the camera photographing though which feels like the big barrier for me. all those categories, really. Anyway I mention this because I'm considering doing it! But if I can't get even a blog post every few days done, what chance does even more writing have?

It's an eternal struggle, and I know not just for me.