The photo below has been posted near my desk/writing area for at least five or so years. It’s from a road trip around Tasmania. I was 24 years old, had just quit a decent job, and was at the beginning of what would end up being a four-month backpacking trip around Australia, Thailand and Laos. I had no idea where I was going and what I would do with my life. All I knew was that I wanted to run to the end of land, climb up to the highest rock and launch my arms up into the sky.

The next picture is the background image on my laptop now that technology has replaced the need for me to literally hang pictures near my desk. It’s from last month, my yoga retreat to Guatemala. I like it because the inspiration is so different from the one above — I’m flipped upside down, rooted into the ground. If asked if I can do a handstand, I would say no. A friend held me in this pose, running out of the frame only an instant before another friend snapped the picture. But when I look at this image I believe I can do a handstand. I believe I can do anything.

It is way harder than writing a blog. And don’t get me started on writing memoir, which is perhaps the hardest kind of book, maybe not to write, but to live with writing. We’ll save that dumb move of mine for another day. But writing a book is harder than writing blog posts because I have to think about things like characters, description, narrative, plot, scene. Not just once, but like, in every chapter, for many, many chapters. Then, there are the words themselves, approximately 65,000. And I fondle all of them, even the little ones—conjunctions and articles–and I’m not talking one-night stand fondle either—I have full-on relationships with each word. My brain feels like mush, like split pea soup. And I can’t tell if that’s a metaphor or a cliche. Because I’ve lost all perspective. Which is why I’m deleting the next five paragraphs or random incoherency I spewed in the past couple days and ending this post. Apparently writing a book is so hard, I can’t even blog. At least not right now.