During the past few months I've found myself blogging less and less. I didn't manage a dozen entries combined during September and October and November wasn't much better.

I'm a slow writer. 1,500 words completed is a good day and 2,000 a rare miracle. But even for a plodder like me a brief blog isn't too time consuming. My problem has been a lack of ideas.

Some days I had no inspiration at all, or whatever fragmentary ideas I had wouldn't quite come together into a few concise and coherent paragraphs. Other times I was dismayed to realize I'd been about to repeat myself, to say the same thing I'd said the year before about the falling leaves or the cat's penchant for sitting on my lap. Subjects that hadn't exactly been riveting the first time around.

What good ideas I've had I've been reluctant to use until they're polished and fussed over. Or else I'll let days pass before using an idea to insure that I'll have at least one entry for the week, in the likely event it's the only idea I have that week.

Is attempting to write a blog a day the solution? Maybe.

I've noticed that ideas tend to defy the natural order of things. They can't be saved them up. When I reach into the back of my idea cupboard and I usually pull out a thought so limp and dead and devoid of interest that I can't imagine why I considered it an idea in the first place.

Not only that, but as soon as I start to hoard old ideas, new ones stop showing up. Maybe the old ideas fill up all the space where the new ideas should be forming.

On the other hand, it sometimes seems that for every idea I use, two new ones spring up in its place. It might be that the part of the brain that's used to write generates more ideas while in use. Whatever the reason, the best way to insure a steady supply of ideas is to be profligate with them.

Well, that's the theory. If I was sure I believed it I would never have run out of ideas to begin with....