This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Paul Vick. Original Post: Writer's block Feed Title: Panopticon Central Feed URL: /error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/rss.aspx Feed Description: a blog on Visual Basic, .NET and other stuff Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Paul Vick Latest Posts From Panopticon Central

When people haven't written a while they usually start off with some kind of apology like "sorry I haven't written in so long, but I've been doing xyz." My feeling is: blogs (with some exceptions) are strictly amateur hour, so no apologies are necessary for life intervening. That's just the way it is, and people should come to expect that from blogs - you get what you pay for.

That said, I'd really like to say that I haven't been writing in a while because I've been busy, but that's not really it. The holidays took up a lot of time and I spent a good chunk of the last month or so trying to get the VB Language Specification updated to reflect all the good stuff that we're doing in VB 2005. Even though, in theory, updating the spec is just a matter of merging individual specifications into the master specification, I tend to do a lot of rewriting to fit things into the general flow and because of the fact that I'm a latent control freak. (Rewriting the spec also helped turn up an interesting number of bugs in our beta compiler. It's amazing what just trying out what the spec says is supposed to work will produce.) Hopefully the spec will be available generally in the near future (I'm gunning for when Beta2 RTMs, whenever that is), but it's not like that kept me from writing.

No, I think it's just plain old writer's block. There's always stuff you can write about, but if you're not interested in or are not inspired, then the writing (and the writing process) is stiff and boring. Until the magic inspiration comes back, I figured the best thing I can do is work on other things and not foist off a bunch of uninteresting junk on everyone. Whatever the reason, it feels kind of like the mojo is coming back, so I'm hopeful that the words will start flowing again. If not, well, I guess this was just a blip...