Yesterday was a non-posting day, because it was also move-the-son-back-into-college day. Four hours there, four hours back, and a lot of running around doing paperwork and toting luggage in between — and that’s when everything goes smoothly, which it often doesn’t.
This time the car started leaking oil just as we finished the move-in process, and we only made it back home by dint of adding more oil every sixty to a hundred miles to replace the stuff that was running out. The car is now reposing in the local auto shop and awaiting repairs, and I am left reflecting upon the feast-and-famine nature of the freelance life.
Which is why I wasn’t thinking much about Writer Stuff yesterday, and also why I’ve argued my natural reticence into submission and added a tip jar to the sidebar of this blog.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 
Boo for cars behaving badly!
Hey, can we abuse the tip-jar and use it to buy topics for blog posts? I’d love to see a post that dissects why, precisely, stories of the ‘jar of tang’ type don’t work for readers. (I know they don’t work, I know I feel annoyed and cheated by one, but I can’t articulate the reasons in a coherent way.)
And I’d really love to see a blog post on how an author can push through the middle. Not the middle of a story, but the middle of the learning-to-write curve. Yanno. At the start, you’re so clueless you don’t even know there IS a craft, and it’s soooo much fun to just belt out prose for yourself because you’re too ignorant to know you’re writing utter crap. And at the end, you know how to write (because publishers have told you so with $$$ attached) so even though it can be frustrating and agonizing you know, at least, that what you’re writing is publishable (if you ever get the words out). But the middle: it’s where you know you’re writing crap but you can’t make it stop being crap, so you figure why bother writing at all because there’s no guarantee you’ll ever get to ‘the end’ where you’re writing non-crap. How does the author-in-training get through THAT middle section?
Feel free to abuse the tip jar . . . it’s a masochistic little thing, and won’t mind it a bit.
(Also, I like getting suggestions for posts. I’m pondering the two above, even now.)