Amazon are already taking pre-orders for The Dust Run/The Trial, the latest addition to the Blake's 7: The Early Years audios. This one, featuring Carrie Dobro as Jenna and is written by the fighteningly fecund and swift Simon Guerrier.... the infallible Robert Sheckley cure for writers' block. He said he tried a drastic exercise to get things flowing again (an enema for the muse, as Nick Lowe liked to say): making himself type 5000 words a day, any words so long as he met the quota, grimly bashing out stuff like ... Oh words, where are you now that I need you? Come quickly to my fingertips and release me from this horror, horror, horror ... O God, I am losing my mind, mind, mind ... But wait, is it possible, yes, here it is, the end of the page coming up, O welcome kindly end of page....
After days and days of this, Sheckley made the great discovery that it was now actually easier to write a story than go on suffering. And so he did, quite quickly and happily. I have passed on this sure-fire advice to several aspiring authors who believe there is a Closely Guarded Secret to it all, but none of them ever thanked me. (Incidentally, it was Robert Silverberg who, when once asked if he'd ever had writers' block, said: 'Yes -- it was the worst ten minutes of my life.') [3/93]
Setting yourself a word target, say a Greene a day, is a very useful way of making progress, even if it is, as James Swallow says, like grinding your teeth down on a concrete block. If procrastination is more your game then you can certainly do worse than work way through the entire Ansible back catalogue - interesting, fun, rewarding and very, very time consuming.