Writers should have no Muses, honor no myths, and follow no Sirens.

The job of the author is just that:  A job. 

There is a necessary pedantic dreariness to the writing process that must be honored and consumed on a daily basis. 

In a recent comments stream on another blog post, I said this about the book writing process:

You just have to sit down and do it and get it done. There’s no inspiration involved. No big thoughts. Just words on a page. There is too much danger of never writing another word if the process is too
romanticized. That’s what’s so great about writing four blogs — I need to come up with something good fast even if I don’t feel like it — that training comes in really handy while trying to pound out a book on a
hard deadline.

If we hope to be authors, we must hone that craft — notice I said “craft” and not “art” — all day every day with formal, public, writing that is open to feedback, criticism, and future indexing by the search engines.

Only that forced guarantee of “published” writing will keep us cogent, on point, and forever improving —  because the future, and the history, we make each day requires hard judgments against our best intentions.