500 Days Journal Streak, Ha!

After I finished today’s entry I was greeted by the following pop-up:

It’s funny when I think about journal writing and my writing in general. Since I began posting articles online, going back to the early 2000s, the vast majority of my writings have hardly been of a “dear diary” variety, but mostly reviewing some bit of media or technology or commentary on something going on in the news. But over the past couple weeks, as I switched to focusing on more long-form creative writing ventures and started doing some research that led to digging into my own “journal writing” history, I’ve been amazed at the frequency and candid nature of what I was writing back when I was writing for an audience of none (and sometimes my psychologist). Just from journal entries written from 1985 to 1989, during my post-divorce “adventures,” I clocked in with over 300,000 words and that doesn’t count any of the dozens/possibly hundreds of articles and papers I was writing while I was working on my B.A. in journalism at CSUF. Now, there were some lengthy gaps in my writing “habit,” which can be easily noted in the articles posted on my blog(s), I’m thinking in 2012 when I was dealing with my CIDP and over the past few years whenever the school year began and there was very little time left in my day for reflection or observational writing. But it is something that has defined me going all the way back to the 1970s when I started writing stories and poems with illustrations and cartoons, and accelerated my first years in university, in my English classes when I found that I had a supportive audience in my English and Religious Studies professors. Funny how all of that got so easily sidelined when I couldn’t discover a way to convert this art of mine into a means of making a living and even more when it might interfere with the desire to find that special someone and other “important things” in life.

Well, I’m back to my daily observations, reflections and questions in writing. It’s just you won’t see these words in public on a daily basis. But it is my intention that they find their audience hopefully while I’m still around to appreciate the experience. Either way, I don’t give a shit about anything beyond practicing my craft of writing and using the tools at my disposal to wrestle these thoughts into strings of letters that might make sense to the reader in the years to come. 500 Days… ha! You just wait until the more complete version(s) get published. JBB

Tags: daily random shit, daily writing, day one app, journal writing, writing habit