For the last month or so, I've been mired in about the worst case of writer's block imaginable. Honestly, any time I've tried to put any words down, it's sounded like Mongo from Blazing Saddles ("Mongo just pawn in game of life...").

It's doubly frustrating because writing makes up a large part of my job, because I have reviews that desperately need to be written, and a column that may never see the light of day at this rate. To top it all off, those around me are hitting highs in productivity. A friend of mine is churning out chapters of a novel, and so far, it's really good.

This makes me want to write, badly. Makes me want to work on my own stories and such, but the commitments to reviews and columns come first, so I need to knock those out before I get back to rewriting the first chapter of my own novel idea for about the fifth time.

On a different note, I keep coming across the bio that I wrote for my friend Niel popping up all over the place. This is good, because it means Niel is getting his disc out there, and it deserves to be heard. Like anything I've written, though, I wish I could hack my way onto various sites and edit it. So many things I could have said better. But oh well, I'm happy with it and he seems to be as well, so all is well.

On the home front, it's snake season. I found a whopper of a five-foot skin hanging from a barn eave a few days back, and the missus found a much smaller skin in a pile of sticks she was picking up. And to top it all off, we were in the garden this evening when a hawk flew overhead with a pretty sizeable snake in its talons. Very cool.

Of course, all this means that I'll need to get into the habit of poking things with a long pole before I start moving them. One of the summer projects is to clean up the many piles of junk on our property; I wonder how high I can jump if I suddenly see a black snake two feet from my face.