Bustin' Through Writer's Block

Any tips on how to punch through a sincere case of writer's block? I'm more stuffed up than my nephew after rolling around in some dog dander. And the blockage is on all fronts, baby. Chick-litty work-in-progress, blog, e-mail -- my keyboard might as well be a thirty-foot high Cold War masterwork of concrete and rebar. Can't get around it to do the work.

What's up with that? The WIP, well, that one's easy to explain. I'm at the tail end of it -- reworked the final scene and everything -- and all I really need to do is take an hour to read it, then hit the revision process. That's when I can take it like it's a wrinkled sheet and snap it flat to fold it up into a neat little package. Where to find that time to read and edit and rewrite and re-read and edit and rewrite, though? My goal is to have query letters out by my birthday. If I have a deadline, I can usually find inspiration to climb over or tunnel under my own personal Dark Tower of Fruitlessness. Usually.

E-mail's another story. With that one, I put a little too much pressure on myself to scribe something witty, or intellectual, or both. Usually both. Inevitably, I send something out that was written in a state of delirium with many, many errors. Not spelling errors, because I take advantage of spell check, as all writers using modern media should. My errors tend to be of the I-used-the-wrong-word or I-straight-up-forgot-to-include-a-preposition kind of errors. Just the type of goof that makes people smile and think, "Wow, she must have been really delirious when she wrote this." I hope. Oh, Lord, I hope people think that and don't think that I have some kind of learning disability that prevents me from noticing when I skip prepositions.

Writer's block on a blog, though...yikes. LtW is an online journal for me, 'kay? And when I find that I don't have anything to write about, well, I start to think that maybe I'm not engaged enough with the world around me. Shouldn't I be fired up about the news? Well, I am, but other people provide better analysis than I. So go read them, I think. Regardless, my niche is commentary on pop-culture for the under-forty set, but the stuff that's been going on there is pretty boring too. I know, I know, rehab and jail are pretty juicy topics. Yeah, for a Lifetime movie.

And the stuff that's going on for me personally, well...life is sweet. Not a lot of conflict happening at the homestead, and conflict is the root of comedy and drama, yes? I s'pose I could talk about how the Boy is an exhibitionist and streaks around the house after a bath, but that's about as far as the story goes.

Blah. I'll figure it out. We've got a few events this weekend that usually provide some fodder for Ye Olde Blog. A dance recital and Father's Day -- let's see what happens, shall we?