Occasionally, when I sit down to write this column, I feel like I'm having a panic attack, which I attribute to writer's block. I sit at my computer and stare into space or at an empty screen. I try to force my mind to daydream, come up with ideas, or find inspiration. This time of year, it is difficult without a garden to moan or boast about. I usually wind up playing a rousing game of solitaire.

A few years ago, this newspaper's editor (owner, publisher) gave me a bottle of Scotch called Writers Tears. There couldn't have been a more appropriate gift for these occasions. However, it's 10:00 a.m., and a glass of Scotch seems a little wrong. After all, Hemingway, I am not!

I start to ponder whether a fancy new notebook might spark my imagination. Perhaps leather-bound, gilded gold-edged paper, smooth sheets to write on, and let's even add my initials engraved on the front. Or maybe a better choice would be a cheap spiral notebook so I could start, restart, and tear out pages with abandon.

How about a new pen? I have some very beautiful pens that were gifts from insurance companies and a pen and pencil set that I treated myself to after winning a large and prestigious account years ago.

After some thought, I've concluded that fancy pens and notebooks aren't the panacea I had hoped for. So, next on the list is playing New York Times word games, Sudoku, Crossword puzzles, and other activities I call "culling for ideas." Others might call it procrastination; I admit they may not be wrong.

Next step: Read through many of the writing skills and grammar books I bought when I first volunteered (or was gently coerced) into writing this column. Not one idea was cultivated for an article, but I learned some interesting trivia. Did you know there are only four words in the English language that start with dw? Dwell, dwindle, dweeb, and dwarf. By the way, dweeb is a new addition to that list.

One suggestion I have come across is to keep a "clippings" file. Clip anything interesting from magazines, newspapers, etc. that might spark an idea for a column or, although not on my radar, a novel. I once had a job for a family friend, Rose, an extraordinarily bright psychiatrist with the most disorganized office. She tasked me with organizing her "clippings" files, where she kept hundreds of articles she planned to read.

Although it was an interesting and eclectic collection of clippings, seeing the number of magazines, newspapers, and scraps of paper she had accumulated was daunting. I am confident that even after everything had been properly organized and indexed, she never returned to read them. That job cured me of the "clippings file" idea.

To add to my trials and tribulations in finding inspiration, I have expanded my time playing tennis. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday games in the morning are followed by over an hour of singles with a gentlemen player I recently met and then more hours with a group of retired Whitman professors. I play singles on Tuesdays, sometimes Thursdays, and, of course, on the weekends.

Added to tennis, I still have my "real" work and the many mundane chores of life. In retrospect, I can claim a little fatigue as part of my writer's block. Maybe Hemingway was on to something. I'll pour a glass of Writer's Tears Scotch and let you know.