“How the hell can a person go to work in the morning, come home in the evening, and have nothing to say?” – the late great John Prine.

There are many reasons why this happens in a relationship, most of them unpleasant when it applies to couples. But it only applies to my book writing in this case. I’m simply feeling uninspired or unmotivated (not sure which) right now, for whatever reason. I guess we call that writer’s block, eh? I don’t panic when it happens, though, because I know from past experience that ‘this too shall pass’ – perhaps after a few beers with friends, or getting some exercise, or doing something special with the family (wait, already did that, recently returned from a family vacation), or playing my guitar (I’ve composed a number of songs over the years that are untainted by success), or completing an overdue home improvement project (nah, never mind, too much work)… Or after writing a blog post? Hmm… Point is, I know I just need to temporarily adopt the motto of the procrastinator (‘working tomorrow for a better today’) and stop thinking about it for a while; and then I’ll start to miss it and end up going back to it.

Meanwhile, I owe this blog a post; so even though I started out with nothing to say, I figured something might occur to me if I simply started writing. And lo and behold, something has! I recently finished reading (or maybe re-reading; can’t remember since it was so long ago) the fiftieth anniversary edition of a book titled “Speaking for the Earth” (by John Meier), which was the official book of the first Earth Day. It’s basically a litany of the multitudinous ways in which we humans have conspired to both accidentally and intentionally (through greed and shortsightedness) royally f*ck our planet and everything that lives on and in it (including ourselves) by poisoning the place with pollution and engaging in other inconsiderate activities since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. I found it illuminating to be reminded of how bad things were at one time and prodded to think about what’s been done about the situation since then (bottom line – many things are better now, but there’s still a lot of work to be done).

And now we go over to the Dark Side (as we should in this blog, right?)… This is morbid, I know, but reading that book also made me think again that maybe the best thing that could happen for Earth might be a virulent worldwide plague with at least a ninety percent human mortality rate. This was in fact a thought that partly motivated my Gerhard Dennis alter ego to start penning my “Toilet Bot Diaries” horror sci-fi novella series about a Roomba-like cleaning bot that becomes sentient. In “Cloacina Maxima”, the first installment, the A.I. bot has similar thoughts and begins to develop a ‘grand plan’ to do something about it.

But at the same time, under my Garrett Dennis pen name I’m also trying to complete another novel (“The Girl in the Porthole”) in my “Storm Ketchum Adventures” mystery series set on the picturesque islands of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. There’s still some darkness in those books, but there’s also some light. These projects make for a mental contrast, and I wonder if being pulled in these two distinct directions might be contributing to my current case of writer’s block. I like to think that I’m good at multitasking (which I was when I worked as a software engineer), but maybe in this new writerly life of mine I should focus on one thing at a time and ‘git ‘er done’, as they say (whomever ‘they’ are). I’ll have to give that some thought.

In the meantime, writing this blog post has made me acknowledge something that I actually knew all along – which is, if you want to overcome writer’s block, just sit your butt down for a while and write something (I guess that’s what I did just now, isn’t it?). What you write may be rubbish; as Hemingway supposedly said, “the first draft of anything is sh*t.” But it could be the start of something good.