This post first appeared on aud.life

I was supposed to finish Teaching Machines this summer. That didn’t happen.

Instead of a summer of (book, idea) creation, I had a summer of great loss.

I was supposed to finish Teaching Machines in September. That didn’t happen either.

I had forgotten, I suppose, how debilitating grief can be.

I’ve (almost) finished off two of the other writing projects that have lingered on because of summer crises. They’re in editors’ hands now. Completing those was difficult, much more difficult than it should have been.

Any writing right now feels painful. The words just don’t want to come. The thoughts just don’t want to form.

I’m going to ease back into writing by doing the following: writing 500 words a day (give or take) here on this site. I’m writing here and not on audreywatters.com and not on hackeducation.com because this place, I feel, can be a rougher sketchpad for my ideas. Hopefully things I jot down here can be fleshed out into actual essays and talks and articles and book chapters. Hopefully things I jot down here will be worth hitting the "share" button. But there’s no pressure to do any of that.

For now I’ve just got to get back into the practice of thinking and making sentences.