The philosophy of writing in a nutshell.

I've been cranking out an opposition to a motion for summary judgment, which kept me up until 1:30 a.m. to finally grind out the statement of facts.  The key is to lose yourself in the work so that your perception of time is episodic; you look up every now and again and realize that another hour has passed and that your legs may be experiencing some kind of deep vein thrombosis because you haven't moved them since the last time you moved from the aeviternal realm back into mundane time-space.

Apparently, I'm doing something right, however, as John Scalzi notes one of the basic rules of writing:

b) like most things on the planet, thinking about doing it is a lot
worse than simply sitting down and doing it. The writing wasn’t hard
to do, you just need to plant ass in seat and go from there.

It is true that thinking about writing a long piece is worse than writing the piece, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the reason thinking about writing a long piece is so difficult is because doing it can be so debilitating.