I am writing a paper, and it isn’t going well. When writers face a losing battle, we often turn to little supports that we have surrounded ourselves with over the years. I know a writer who googles his name, to see if he still exists out there somewhere. Probably a bad idea for me. I have a little shrine in my workspace inspirational and encouraging notes and pictures that remind me of my place in the world. And many authors go back and read what they like, what has worked, to see what might inspire them. We all have our ways.

In a disturbing twist, I turned to my blog statistics and looked, mournfully, at the least viewed blogs. The upside of my personal torture is that you, fair reader, get to discover some posts that got lost in the forward motion of the digital age, where time moves forward not at 60 minutes an hour, but a billion bytes a second.

• “Natural Food for the Imagination, or Growing Up on Books.” Some read this summer 2013 post initially, but it quickly disappeared from public view. It is sort of autobiographical, how I was drawn into imagination and literature as a child through Shel Silverstein and King Arthur and Narnia.

When I say we grew up poor, I mean hand-me-down rubber boots caked in soil that would never turn a profit. So new books were at most an occasional treat. But growing up with the richness of imaginative literature, I never looked at first world poverty the same way again….

• “Castles in the Air: A Teen’s Dream of Publishing.” This is an early post, February 2012, as I was reading through the first volume of C.S. Lewis’ letters. I was at the point where Lewis was querying his first book of poetry to publishers. No one who read it knew that I was paralleling my own dreams here, splicing my own hopes into this historical post.
• Here is where I talk about Lewis finally getting published, and my own writing shrine (which I mention above): Lost and Found Writers at the Altars of Hope. It also has Stephen King in it.
• “Is There More Than There Is? The Question Before All Answers.” This is a philosophical post from March 2012, while I was teaching “Skepticism, Atheism, Agnosticism, and Belief” to undergraduates. I think, still, it is the essential question.
• “Shaking Off the Ailments of a Troublesome Term,” where “I sit at the end of an exhausting cycle… already starting to look back at the semester fondly.” This is sort of one of those non-apologetic unstated apologies for not blogging much last spring.
• “Telling it Slant: The Problem With Writing Conversions.” This is a relatively recent post lost in the summer lull. Initial responses were good, but this is a question that still haunts me: how do we authentically write conversions? I would love your comments.
• This is a very stupid post from January 2013: A Ham of Note in the History of Literature. Enjoy!
• And, finally, “O Foolish Writer: The Living Reality of an Author’s Work.” This is a quite recent post, and had a great initial response. It is, though, one of my favourites of late, and I’d love you to read it!

Note: the picture at the top has really nothing to do with anything. I don’t have writer’s block. But it is a wonderful picture, and I hear it comes from here: authorlorilotto.wordpress.com.