In other news on the writing front:

You people are so nice to me.  All this time and nobody’s ever come up and told me what an overly-florid catastrophe I am.

Clearly, a major component of my writing difficulties lately is that I’ve reached a new point with my ability to critically perceive my writing and am still struggling to catch up with my actual “physical” writing skill, because recently I’m looking at my writing and going, “Dear God, what was I THINKING?”

There are always two parts to a skill: the ability to do the skill and the ability to see what you’re doing.  And your insight has to improve before you can know what you need to fix in order to do better, so they kind of leapfrog each other.

But it’s not just a matter of doing the new and better things, you know?  It’s also the bad habits you suddenly realize you’ve developed and now have to struggle to break.  I think that’s the harder part, because you keep DOING the wrong thing and then looking at it and going, “NO! FUCK, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?”