Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Mini Journaling

This is journaling I can do. It's called 280daily, and you journal each day using twice the number of characters of Twitter. Yes, very doable.


I quit counting the number of journals I've started and dropped. Some I've reread and torn out pages, mad at myself for the stupid angst I felt the need to tell the world. You see, private to me is something I don't want to tell the world, but putting it in a journal is . . . telling the world. I inevitably get frustrated at revealing myself, or bored at what I try to write by NOT revealing myself. (A shrink can step in here at any time, please.) The result? I don't journal.

But I like this. It makes you condense your day into a thought. Not pages of thought, just A thought. That's when you can pick one little moment of your day and memorialize it, or summarize the day as the wonder or bitch it was. But wait . . . this site gets much better.

You can search these posts. You can add a photo. You can ask to read a random post. And you can print them off, even create a book from them.

Okay, it's a new year. Maybe I'll give journaling a try again. How hard can a double-Tweet be?

3 comments:

widdershins said...

yeah! ... how hard can it be!

anarchist said...

Hi,

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but I couldn't find an email for you.

I'm an amateur author based in Melbourne, Australia.

I recently wrote an article on Creative Commons for writers. It's gotten some good feedback, and I thought you might want to have it as a guest post on your blog.

If so, please let me know by emailing me (news@apolitical.info) or replying to this thread.

Yours,
James.

Lyn Fairchild Hawks said...

Interesting! Though I guess I need to get used to "The Cloud." Something about posting my most private journal thoughts (currently in a composition notebook stuffed in a drawer) can't quite translate to cyberspace yet. Blogging gets me closer, but knowing someone else owns or hosts my thoughts, in a sense, is not the transition I'm ready to make. Perhaps everyone who uses it stays more superficial?

I've known since I read The Diary of Anne Frank as a child that journals were a sacred, solitary space. I think Anne inspired the child I was to get a diary and start telling my secrets. I write only when the spirit moves me (but that's pretty often) and wouldn't want someone stumbling on it. Yet, I remember as a child being perfectly comfortable with someone publishing my most private thoughts someday, for the edification of others. So maybe I'm not so uncomfortable with the "public" nature of this space. Maybe it's all in the timing of when it's released?

It's a lot easier to deal with controversy and criticism when you're dead. :-)

Lyn