Theresa suggested a motivational post, so I'll try one and see where it goes.

Would compliments help? When I hear the quality of each of your writing, I'm continualy impressed and always want to hear more. I'm aware that you all have impediments to writing as often as you would like, but I hope you are all aware that the quality of your writing isn't something you need to worry about. When I look at so many published writers, I see talent, but I also see persistence: these writers have somehow risen above self-doubt and finished their pieces. I know that many of us could be published, were we to continue to work to be published. I continues to believe, given moderate talent, that publishing is mainly a matter of persistance.

Now of course, not all of us aspire to publish. Publishing is just short hand for attaining what you what from your writing. It isn't always that satisfying anyway to publish. But I think we could all reach further toward what we want from our writing without too much trouble, and we should.

I've been reading a lot of journalism in the past months. I've been infected by the sense that huge events are occuring before our eyes, and that I need to pay attention. But I'm not a journalist, and so I spend a lot of reading a model of writing that doesn't do much to help me write short stories. Of course after spending several years practising a very academic approach to short stories, I'm faced with deciding again just what form of writing I want to spend my time on. Perhaps we are all always faced with this decision, as we move from sentence to sentence. Every form is bound to fall short of what we want to use to present what we think and feel, but the attempt always seems worthwhile.