Resistance

It's been hard to blog lately. I'm not entirely sure why, except that the pressures of teaching, writing, keeping up internet dialogs and ruminating on life choices have kept me busy. I wouldn't want to let a week go by without posting, though, so I'll offer up a few random thoughts/links here on a chilly Fresno Sunday morning.

A question - are you familiar with Steven Pressfield's The War of Art? I know that many of you likely are. If you're not, though, it's worth a look. Pressfield, of course, is the highly successful writer of Gates of Fire, Tides of War and the forthcoming Killing Rommel - to name a few. His province is mostly that of men at heroic war, but a few years back he penned a thin volume that was part creative autobiography, part self help, part craft book.

What I found particularly memorable about The War of Art was his focus on the concept of Resistance - that multi-headed, ever-changing and variously manifesting force that grows out of us and tries to stop each of us from achieving the things - often artistic things - that we most want to achieve. I found the theory made a lot of sense and was easily evidenced each day. I found that I consistently did time-wasting things for no good reason at all - other than as a way to avoid my writing work. It's weird how it works. Almost feels like I'm always at the verge of becoming a zombie that's led away from the computer out of some compulsion to weed the pathway or check the pattern of the coffee grinds in an old cup or reminisce about how cool it was when I dyed my hair blond... It doesn't matter what I'm doing, which is why resistance seems so sinister. It's a shifty bastard. But, after hearing Pressfield name and shame the thing, I was better able to confront it. His book helped me refocus again and again as I worked through Pride of Carthage.

I bring it up because I'm again thinking about resistance as I work on The Other Lands, the sequel to the first Acacia book. In addition to all the old time killers, now I have the blog, the forum, and ever more websites to suck my time away. I like all of these - and they're legitimately part of my career now - but it's an ongoing battle to achieve a balance. Also, though, I'm aware that I've set some other, overarching obstacles in place. Instead of just micro-resistance I also have some rather larger resistance constructs in place. I'm going to be vague on them for the time being, but once I figure out and overcome the obstacles I'll let you know.

Anyway, The War of Art is a good little book, one that you can learn from even if you have no interest in the sword and sandals adventures that Pressfield is most famous for. Okay, now, for me... I've taken, what, thirty, forty minutes deciding to write this, find the links, choose a few photos... That's enough. I've got a lot of writing to do today... I hereby banish resistance for the next, oh, fifteen or twenty minutes...