Journals and blogs...

I realized the other day that I hadn't actually picked up a pen to write in a journal all year. Not once. This from a guy who journalled pretty regularly.

It bothered me to see that kind of gap.

So, I did the 'year in a nutshell' catchup and started writing. It felt good. Much different than posting thoughts online. Oh, I still self censor a bit, but not nearly as much.

There's something therapeutic about writing in a journal. It's nice to be able to look at old one's and try and remember the person I was back then. Sometimes the changes are pretty drastic, but mostly there's the same old me looking out of the pages.

Usually, to mark a new start like this, I buy or make a new journal. This time I kept the old journal since there was plenty of room still left. Instead, I bought a new pen. That's it right there. Nothing but a fountain pen will do for a journal. It just feels right to slow down, drink some coffee and scrawl out some thoughts with an fountain pen.

In my journals, I seldom do any editing and the writing isn't thought out much. There's no attempt to tell a story in any way other than the straight forward 'I did this today' style.

For any type of writing beyond that, I can't work with anything other than a computer. I tend to make a lot of typos that I backspace over as I'm going. Despite this, I can still pound out some verbage rather quickly. Facing daily deadlines for a few years will do that. It will also make you realize that your writer's block is something to work through. You can't have writer's block and get a 400-word piece out in fifteen minutes.

Blogging is a bit different for me. It's a lot like writing for a paper I suppose. Usually, I just sit down and start typing. A little while later I'm done and I don't do much editing...until I see the typos or bad grammar that I've already posted. Ah well, I was never much of a copy editor, I was more of a creative editor. My friend Josh has cleaned up enough of my 'edited' copy to know that's true.

So, I was wondering how other people write. Do you just quickly zip it out? Do you labor over the words? Where do you type your posts? Do you use a word processor and then paste into the Blogger form? Do you write at home, or work, or school? Should you be doing something else?

And then, once you've posted something, do you just sort of forget about it, or do you check back constantly to see if there are responses? I tend to check a lot, but I have odd work hours and I can do that kind of thing...

And what do you get from all this? I think we all take something different away from this great blog experiment. But, what is that something?

Just wondering...