my single biggest weakness as a writer

is focus.  I'm a big picture thinker, and as a writer I'm always instinctively trying to make my camera angle just a little wider, make the view a little more panoramic, to draw a few more connections and cross-connections . . . My first writing teacher in college chewed me out for this, trying to get me to trim the fat and simply strike the passages that were excess baggage.  It was then and is still now a difficult exercise for me.  I have probably as many drafts on my blog as I do actual published posts.  Some of those are certainly pieces that I started and which turned too personal for me to want to publish.  But most of them are things where I started to try to connect two or five or ten disparate ideas, or engaged on a long preamble to where I was trying to go and then ran out of steam or time or interest before I finished.  Maybe in future I should just start posting warning labels:  Attention:  Context and preliminary thoughts may be missing.