Not much blogging time tonight - I spent all day sitting in front of my computer, anyway, working on a manuscript for one of the chemistry journals. I find that writing blog entries is (usually) no problem, and writing things like my Contract Pharma column come fairly easily, too. But not scientific papers, that's for sure.

I think it's because there's not very much actual writing involved. The text of my article isn't much to look at - just a few paragraphs, really. But getting the figures and tables right, looking up all the data and resolving all the discrepencies - it's all finicky detail work. All the problems you uncover are probably about three years old, too, since that's the (youngest) vintage of stuff we can publish, and you can imagine how that helps resolve things quickly. The construction project can be enjoyable, but most of the time it's like building something with more parts than you're in the mood for.

But I'm going to get plenty of it this year, which isn't a bad thing. For various reasons, I have several pieces of work that have reached the, um, mature stage of publication-worthiness. I'd rather that they were reaching a sick patient in a Phase III trial somewhere, or better yet, a pharmacy shelf, but I'll have to settle for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters.