Hiatus. A word meaning a long break. Yes, I do take long breaks. Not because I have nothing to write about, but because it is difficult to sit my lazy butt down in my chair and apply myself to the business of writing. I can stare at a computer screen all day, mostly using the WASD keys and the mouse. This is fun, entertaining, relaxing, lots of other words. It is not productive. I need to get into the habit of being productive. Writing, applying words to delineate concepts, is both easy and hard.
Easy, in that it is easy to write scads of meaningless blather about the weather, the state of $Celebrity's marriage, politics, religion, et freakin cetera. Hard in that you really have to think about exactly why you are writing what you are writing. What concepts are you trying to communicate to the reader. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Semantic content, practically zero (unless someone is learning to type).
With the rise of personal computers, it's now very easy for someone to create a beautifully formatted and laid out piece of text. Lowering the bar, so to speak. Whether that piece of text is worth reading... well, that's up to the reader. Which requires reading the text. At least with longer pieces (like novels) you can determine quite quickly whether you want the writer's preconceptions rattling around in your brain.
Case in point, I recently started reading a post-apocalyptic survival adventure novel chronicling the adventures of an American family. Five pages in, and the family is hidden on a hilltop watching a horrific scene of violence play out on the read below them. Bad people doing bad things to unlucky people. I cannot remember the details, mainly because I don't want to, but the author devoted more than a page to the details. The scene finishes with the teenage daughter saying "Shouldn't we do something to help?"
Her father replies "No, there's no point. They'd just kill us too." And the family goes on their merry way. And so did the book, to end it's maiden flight with a sudden impact on the wall. I do _NOT_ want to waste an afternoon reading nihilistic dreck about cardboard people surviving horrible events and scenes where repulsive characters do horrible things, that are described in great (I wanted to say loving, but that was rather inappropriate) detail.
I'd rather spend that afternoon reading about interesting things, people doing great things, with fun, humour, tragedy and heroism.
