Post birthday celebration. A birthday — marking time, marking years — leads to reflection naturally, of course. The “tool” or place for that, for me, is my (not-public) journal, where this takes the form of sketches, fragments … whatever form it takes. I’ve kept journals since forever, but the impulse to do so is stronger now than it’s been say, in the last year or so. I’m interested to see where it goes. What about you, visitors to this post: do you both blog and journal, and how does that work out? Feel free to comment or email.
(Note: edited entry title to include hyphen; for some reason when I have a title with a hyphen it seems to get excluded first try. This happened before with the Co-opting tools of digital cultural post. Something weird I am probably doing or not doing…)
3 Comments
I have a blog and I have kept a journal for about 15 years.
I kept a journal all though my high school and college years, and up though several years ago. I should go back to it.
I just realized that I more or less responded to these comments in the Thinking About Audience comments section. Hope you don’t mind checking that out, rather than my being redundant here. Vera, why do you think you should go back to the journal? Do you think you get something different out of it, than you do with your blog that you are missing? You do mean that you would keep going with the blog, right? Paul, how differently do you use your journal than your blog? How long have you ever gone without keeping it?
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] A completely uneven day in a way that’s nearing intolerable. Dentist first. Then, after preparing for a conference call, when the time for said call comes and goes without the call, I find that I’ve gotten the date wrong. This is likely related to the fact of how I am, subsequent to post-birthday evaluating things, likewise making decisions about what jobs and clients I want to continue with and those that might be better served elsewhere. In this particular case, of the clients of the almost-call, I am really on the fence about what I want to do; my decision is for the time being to not decide. Which is all well and good, I guess, until a bit later, turning to fiction-writing matters, I find myself doing something similar — some time ago, a collection of my stories was short-listed for the Flannery O’Connor Award and I had told myself that this was the year that I needed to do something with that manuscript again… but then I found myself unable to work up the enthusiasm for the stories, told myself that this was because they were stories of “my younger writing self” and that I ought to just leave it at that, let them go. This seemed to free me up a little to get some new work in, and I had been I thought satisfied with the decision. But evidently not; reading over something I’ve been working on, finding my way back into it, I found my thoughts returning to one story in particular, which led to another and then I begin doubting my decision and wondering if it — making that decision to just write off those stories — was simply another (elaborate) mind-trick, a distraction, to keep from doing the work (of delving in again, revising, preparing for publication, etc). [...]