journals, diaries

"Dear ILE whilst I was playing myself at Scrabble the other day I did two bingos VIZ! "WINGERs" and "SUICIDEs". ROCK!

I tried to keep one this year, just so I could remember stuff like where I went and what CD's I bought, the last entry is 19th January. Oh dear.

Here is the sort of thing I write:
"Oh no! I forgot to write for the last two days. They weren't very interesting days, so nevermind"

I don't try to write daily I just use it to write down anything I find interesting. Maybe mine is more of notes on things I do or think instead of an actual account of what I did.

LiveJournal's different. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the set-up encourages drama incidentally; seventy-something people read mine, and I only knew a third of them before they started reading. Politics come up easily in that sort of atmosphere, it's more like a message board.

I hadn't realised it was such a problem, though. It must get in the way of how you really want to express your views, but then as soon as one chooses to make anything public, a kind of inverse Heisenberg's uncertainy principle comes into effect, viz as soon as you know there's an audience, it'll inevitably change what you write. It's something I'm no closer to finding a cure for.

I'm making that example up, unfortunately.

But yeah, you can avoid the politics, in my experience. Might be tougher if you have friends who participate in them and you don't want to alienate/exclude them, I don't know.

I can sing a few bars of that. My journal starts with a comment about forcing myself to write 500 words every day, followed by two ~3,000 chunks of short story, then nothing. I haven't touched it in months.