Rebeca Schiller

As shown by Saturday’s post, Not Finding the Words, I was having one helluva time writing a book review. Actually, I was not having a good day at all.  I realize that there are days that you simply need to take a break and yesterday would have been ideal, but I promised to get the review in.

Sometimes I wonder whether writing will ever get easy. Whether I’ll be able to whip out a 1,000 word article without even blinking an eye. When the words are just spouting like water in a fountain. Honestly, I don’t think so.

Although I’ve been writing book reviews for almost two years you would think I’d be able to jot some coherent thoughts and be done with it. In some ways book reviews are harder to write.  For fiction, you’re looking at the plot, structure, dialogue, character development, style and

It’s Saturday and I’m supposed to be working on a book review. I’ve been alternating it with a rewrite of a chapter for Julius, and the words for either project are simply not coming together. So what’s a writer supposed to do? Take a walk, go to the gym? Have a drink? Watch a movie?

I know I should give myself a little reprieve. It is the weekend, but I promised that the review would be in by today. So here I am struggling to come up with at least 500 words, and right now I am 430 words short. Well it’s a start, you might say. Yeah, but I still have to come up with the 430 words, and I don’t know what to say.

Did you like the book? Very much. It’s beautiful.

Did I get anything out of it? Oh yes, I actually used it as a reference tool for

I realize now that I should have posted this once and titled it “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Writing.” It would have been my clever play on the novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, by Irving Stone (and the film, directed by Carol Reed).

Yesterday I wrote about how my guts get all twisted up when I work on articles. Today it’s all about the love. What makes me so pleased when I see my byline? The first thing is that what I wrote was actually publishable; that it wasn’t gibberish. And a great ego-booster is to get an email from someone who says the article was interesting and I’m a good writer.

The best part is that I learned something after I’ve struggled to do the research, the interview, and make it all come across