Not Ready For Human Consumption

There is nothing wrong with having nothing to say – unless you insist on saying it. (Author unknown)

I posted a piece titled Friendly Competition the other day and then pulled it three days later. It just didn’t live up to my usual low standards. I didn’t have anything to say in the posting and couldn’t even manage to say it in an interesting fashion. If I didn’t enjoy the piece how could I expect anyone else to enjoy it? I was embarrassed by it, so I pulled it.

I keep all of my work in a single Microsoft Word document that is 159 pages long and contains 93,836 words. The first 50 pages are works in progress. The last 109 pages contain the 101 published posts and the 6 pieces that I’ve deemed ready for posting in the coming weeks. Friendly Competition has been banished from the completed section and now languishes in 50 pages of incomplete thoughts that are not ready for human consumption.

It really hurt to banish Friendly Competition. There are only 6 pieces ready for posting, so I am feeling the pressure to wrap up a few of the incomplete projects.

Last night I couldn’t sleep because I was worrying about how to approach a posting titled Exclude. I’ve spent several days and countless hours writing and re-writing the piece. When this happens I begin to worry that the problem isn’t my inadequacy as a writer, but perhaps lies in a more fundamental truth that the topic has no substance, or that I have nothing to say. That’s how I felt about Friendly Competition.

Friendly Competition wasn’t, and never will be, a deep meaningful posting. It was just an attempt to express my admiration for the sport of swimming, distance swimmers in particular, and the prevalence of sportsmanship within the sport. Having said that here, what’s left to write? Anyway, I hope that I can find a way to make Friendly Competition worth your time in the coming year.



Postscript –

Note well that my monster Word document sits on the desktop of my laptop. Every time I open the document, which is every day, I rename the file with the day’s date, and copy it to a thumb drive as a backup. I also email the document to my own Gmail account at least once a week so I also have a backup copy there. I hope that satisfies any concerns you may have about my backup procedures. If you have a better process in mind, please let me know about it.