Kramer's comment on yesterday's entry got me thinking about organization of writing. His "best of" is really quite excellent, a nice book to dip into now and then, and not necessary to read from front to back. I keep in in the "dipping" pile I have (along with Aurelius' Meditations and other stuff) for those times when I want to read for a different kind of reason (as opposed to novels and plays and histories)...not sure I can exactly explain it. Meditative, I guess.

I was originally thinking of subdividing my work into decades--the 40's, 50's, and so forth. But that's not how my life has gone, in neat sections by 10-year intervals.

So...childhood, high school, college, Europe--personal divisions like those? Sounds pretty unimaginative.

Or by political movements? Personal life-changing events? SOs?

One thing I won't do is set a certain number of words to be written. That has always seemed artificial and commercially goal-driven to me. I write, in a particular day, until the well has run dry and the spring that refills the words and ideas needs to recharge it.

If I can't get going, I look to previous journal entries for a jump start. Push comes to shove, I take a really delicious word ("flocculent" or "eructate" or "vicissitude" for example) and start writing from there. How can you let one of those polysyllabic beauties sit there, unloved and unwanted?

No, no, a writer must write (fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly...) when such a word presents itself.

Dictionaries are fun, too, like a squirt of ether into a diesel engine. Boom!