Out of Cheese

The thought occurs that (semi-)professional writing would be much easier if I did it more than once a year. Or that it’d be easier if I’d done any real writing in college after the first quarter of my freshman year. Come to think of it, the last time I spent any significant amount of time writing was my junior year of high school.

While writing anything is certainly better than doing no writing at all — and that’s one of the reasons why this site exists, as I hinted at a while back — writing is one of those things in which you’re only likely to get substantially better if you receive good feedback and criticism. It’s especially important to get comments from people who care more about your writing than your content. That certainly wasn’t the case for the book I co-authored last year, where the publication schedule was so rushed that barely more than a week passed from the first draft of my chapter to its final submission.

I’m likely to be given the opportunity to do more professional writing soon. Hopefully this experience (or experiences, if I’m lucky) will turn out better than my last one, and my writing skills will improve in the process. With a bit more luck (and effort, but effort makes its own luck), perhaps I can make this a more regular effort than merely once a year.