For years I've been telling myself the same old story

I'm reading a fantastic book by Annie Dillard called The Writing Life. It's completely fantastic! Seriously, all writers reading this blog, you should check it out. It's only a bit over a hundred pages, but it's great. 

Here's a couple of brief excerpts:

"To comfort friends discouraged by their writing pace....

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms."

(about Jack London):

"In subsequent years, once he had a book of his own under way, he set his alarm to wake him up after four hours' sleep. Often he slept through the alarm, so, by his own account, he rigged it to drop a weight on his head. I cannot say I believe this, though a novel like The Sea-Wolf is strong evidence that some sort of weight fell on his head with some sort of frequency-but you wouldn't think a man would claim credit for it."

Meanwhile, I finished the episode I was working on, and am working on the next. This one is giving me Numair-esque difficulties: Numair is just a hard POV to write!!! He won't let me leave him, either.