writer's block

I have not been posting lately because I have been kind of working on an article for a magazine produced at my church. I say kind of working because all that I have really been doing is fighting writer's block. This typically happens to me when I do not have a precise set of parameters in my mind as far as what the final result should really look like.

This past semester I poured hours and hours of work into a paper for one of my classes, far more than I should have, because I was not convinced that I was following the construct that the professor wanted. In that class everyone got to see everyone else's paper, so when I looked through everyone else's work I noticed that I had written more than one thousand words more than the next largest paper, and I did not accomplish that by filling the paper with fluff. There was no maximum page limit on the papers and so I overcompensated to be sure I was doing the right thing. Looking through some of the other papers, it appears that most other people had a different approach.

With this article I am not completely certain how casual or spiritual it is supposed to be. My natural inclination is to type a step-by-step lesson, but that does not feel exactly right for this magazine. At the very least, this is not something that I expect to be obsessing about too much longer. My article is due on the third, and I think I have actually settled on a topic. Finally.