It’s amazing that I enjoy blogging, given that I spend so much of my time writing. The last two days have been very long days of technical writing, trying to finish a technical book, a book chapter, and other monographs prior to Christmas. The sad truth of technical careers is that you only get to do the technical stuff full-time when you’re a student (or maybe a post-doc) while the “real job” consists mostly of writing. I have found that I have to bribe myself with something in order to really work on the hardest parts of this, the boring editing and sorting out references and things. Today it has been DVDs of “The Secret Life of Us“. I’ve gotten two book chapters for two different books completely done in ten hours of writing today with the DVDs playing in the background (and I’ve seen most of these before, so it’s the perfect brainless background “music”). But it does strike me as funny that at the end of ten hours of writing I’d start to write on this blog.
In other news, it is truly turning towards Christmas here in England. I ran out to the store tonight and the floutist who busks on my corner was playing Greensleeves.
Not From Around Here 
“Busks”? You are becoming British. Never heard thta term before.
nah, “busks” is common in urban centers in the US – we used it often in DC.
I think it might have something to do with the kind of writing – writing on a blog is really different from technical writing. History writing is somewhere in between – more formal than blogging, but still more creative and wordsmithy than technical writing; when I’m doing a lot of writing for work I get burned out on blogging.
it’s true merry. we use “busk” in seattle all the time…since we have a professional busking culture that surrounds the pike place market.