Now What? What Follows?

Such are the questions that every writer, even a blogger (and what could be more ephemeral than a blog?) is forced to ask not merely from chapter to chapter but from paragraph to paragraph, sentence by sentence. What's next? Where is this thing going? Serious writers--poets, novelists, scholars and the like (even mathematicians)--must have moments of blind panic when suddenly, from nowhere, comes the terrible thought that they don't know where they are or what they are doing there. For a writer like me, who writes for amusement merely, without obligations to anyone or anything, except The Truth which like a mountain can be acknowledged and admired from a distance (you don't actually have to climb it) or, like the ocean, can be examined bit by bit: such a writer, I say, can take short-cuts or avoid the depths (or, as Swift says, slurp up the cream leaving the sour and dregs for others to lap up).