Journals

Do you keep a journal? Or have you gone the route of replacing the old fashioned, handwritten notebook for a computer? Perhaps your blog?

I've been keeping a journal since 9th grade, when my English teacher Ms. Dinwiddie required it for a class assignment. It continued with mandatory journaling in 10th with Dr. Schoen and Ms. Ramsey, and 11th grade with Mr. Payne. Yeah, I went to one of those high schools... every thing was mandatory. Four years of a language other than English, four years of math, science, art and/or music, blah blah blah. Anyway...

Even after the mandatory-ness of keeping journals was over senior year, I still kept one. It became a habit for me to jot down my thoughts of the day... what songs were significant to me... what happened on Young & Restless. Anything. And I kept it up through college, grad school, starting out as a young professional in higher education, and then through the early stages of my publication process. Pretty much every day. It's kinda cool to look back at the people, incidents, places I thought were significant (and at the time they were...), but now are just blips on the radar screen of life. There's just something special about keeping a record of your life. (And something kinda awesome, to see dozens of spiral notebooks with your life story in it... kind of a pain to pack up and move, though).

Well, since discovering blogging back in January of this year, I haven't written one page in my journal.

Not. One. Page.

It pretty much ends around the first week of January 2005. Crazy. And while I try to keep my blog to topics related to writing or issues of concern to me and the readers of my book, I miss the daily minutes of sitting with my notebook and just having at it... letting ALL my thoughts out. Without censoring. Without thinking I'm writing for an audience. Without wondering what I will write about for that day.

I'm wondering how many of you keep journals? And if so, has your journaling slowed down since the advent of blogging (that's if you blog, too)?

So while I'm going to keep up communicating with readers through the blog, I am also going to get back to the tradition I've had going for freaking ever... getting out a pen, grabbing the notebook, and writing my thoughts of the day. My private thoughts.
fs