Bricks Without Straw

I was reading Electric Spec's interview with Robert Sawyer , and paused over his comment regarding his WWW trilogy's Webmind character as being the hardest writing task he'd ever set for himself. That made me wonder about my own hard tasks. So, here's a quick rundown, unprioritized, of writing tasks of all sorts, set by myself or someone else, that were sometimes insurmountably difficult, and often resulted in failure.

Well, this is a first for me. I've resisted blogging for so long, hoping, I guess, that the medium would be just another passing fad. Ah, wrong again, it would seem. Why "Bricks Without Straw"? First, because if there's a hard way to do something, I'll probably find it. You see, in old-time brick-making, you could not make strong bricks without adding organic material like straw. When Pharaoh tells the Israelites they must gather their own straw, and still produce the same output of bricks every day, Moses complains, but the complaint resolves nothing. The idiom " bricks without straw " implies having to do something without appropriate resources. Second, when we were forming Metaformix Information Systems Inc. back in 1999, "Bricks From Straw Software" was one of the proposed names. So, while that wasn't really a saying in its own right, the idea behind it was that having "the right straw" we could help you "make bric...