One Journey

~ ONE JOURNEY ~

~ There is only one journey: going inside yourself. ~
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Down to the Wire in 1491 ~ Thursday, January 25, 2007

Again, not too much reading of late, though I have been dipping into 1491 during breaks in my attempts to revise the final pages of my novel.

And indeed, I am in the final stretch. I've decided that my Susan Deefholts blog will document my writing travails. In other words, it will be where I post all my angst-ridden rants about how I'm stuck, or hitting a road bump and unable to continue. For now, it will be stuff that's of less interest to anyone else, but may be of some interest to me.

It's interesting--Tom raised the question a few days ago about whether my blogs had now supplanted my journals. It's true, in a sense. I still journal from time to time, when I'm at a cafe and without a computer. I also find that paper is often necessary for making notes about books, characters and plot points when I'm trying to break through a block.

But, between my various theme blogs (reading, writing and general--the latter being this one), it seems as though it has, indeed, supplanted my journal in certain contexts. It just seems cleaner and better organized to be able to air my musings on a given topic in a blog than it is to jot them down in a journal. It's also so much easier to find past comments on a given subject when the headings are conveniently posted in the archives, sorted by date and accessible via a searchable index.

All those advantages, I think, have ultimately led to a gradual migration on my part from journaling to blogging. It certainly wasn't overnight, since I had issues with the question of how public I wanted to make my thoughts (I still have "secret blogs" and instances where I just save my posts but don't actually publish them, if they're a way of keeping my own counsel). But ultimately, this particular form of technology has prevailed--in part because it makes it logistically easier for me, and in part because I can then air my thoughts on a given topic and subsequently direct a friend (for instance, my brother) to a post, and move into discussion from there.

Cool stuff. It feels almost Elizabethan (they way they used to circulate manuscripts and then discuss them). Make it "Elizabethan for the techno age" then and we'll have done.

Labels: 1491, reading