I’m reading ‘bird by bird’, by Anne Lamott. It’s one of those annoying ‘how to write’ books that assume that you have the luxury to quit your paying job and write full time. It’s a recipe for frustration. Yes, I want to write full time, but I have to pay the bills, too. And I want to work on the Apache HTTPd docs. And I have some things I want to do with the PHP docs. And I need to rewrite my mod_rewrite book. And I need to finish building a bookcase, and learn how to cook gumbo and record the rest of ‘Jungle Book’ and … before you know it’s time to go to bed and get up and get the kids off to school.

Anyways, this book … it’s full of marvelous advice that has already made me want to spend hours and hours writing, which is, as far as I can tell, the central message or the book: Just sit down and write, and don’t worry too much about it. Get into the habit of writing, and don’t be afraid to write terrible stuff, because if you write enough terrible stuff eventually you might write something good.

Highly recommended.