I notice my blog posts have been getting longer and longer. That’s partly because I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write when I sit down, so I get to the point by writing towards it. Then I don’t really have time to edit what I’ve written, because it’s time to leave the house. That’s the current theory, anyway.

I have always written a lot. An obnoxious colleague in the department I chaired once referred to “another one of Delia’s essays” when talking about my emails. His taunts were always on target, which was why he caused me so much despair. I was trying to teach four sections of sixth grade and also supervise a department of 13 people, so when I wrote a department e-mail, it was usually during a prep period, when I only had fifteen minutes before twenty-two 12-year-olds charged into the room.

Blaise Pascal is credited with the phrase, “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” I don’t have the time right now to read the rest of the article where I found that, but I take it as my motto when it comes to writing.

They theoretically taught me how to outline my thoughts when I was in school. I have tried it a couple of times, and the results are excellent. Mostly in high school I wrote the paper first, then outlined it, and that worked just as well.

I wrote my first published novel while working as an office manager, raising a small child, and going to graduate school. This is not a brag. It’s because I worked fast and was very efficient, so I had to do something to look busy in my little office. Or maybe it’s because I was desperate, raising a family, and going to graduate school, and was telling myself a good story to relieve the pressure. Two things can be true at the same time.

However, I can’t use these excuses any more, and all the previous excuses are only true for a minuscule value of “true.” These days I don’t work at all, there is no pressure on me except Weltschmerz from the political situation and my constant feeling that I have done something wrong socially, I always have a good idea of what I want to write about, and I have forever amounts of time. I still write at length.

Maybe I just tend to ramble, as a default setting. This is possible. Another possibility is that I have “hypergraphia,” a term I encountered in a book called The Midnight Disease. It is not an explanation, however, but rather a kind of label that means “writes a lot.”

All I know is that recently, I wrote a one-line email to a corporation asking about something they were supposed to be shipping to me. I received six long, multi-paragraph emails back from someone whose name was probably not Sandra, telling me basically, “Oops, sorry, it’s on its way, seriously, it’s on its way, hey, we shipped it, look, it got delivered, hope you’re happy, fill out this customer satisfaction survey please,” and I didn’t reply because it was very clear something not human was writing to me. Yes, there is something out there now that can beat the pants off me when it comes to too much text. I should either step up my game, stop writing, or ignore the phenomenon entirely. I opt for the last choice.

I will close now, because I have to leave the house, and before then I need to write a couple of handwritten pages in my journal in my small, legible cursive, and if you could fill out this customer satisfaction survey which I am not attaching, I would be most grateful, and I quote from my faceless correspondent: “For any further questions or doubts, you can reply to this e-mail, I will be more than happy to help you. Hope you have a good day or night whenever you’re reading this.”