Taking stock

Today I reread my S/SW posts, which is part of the fun of keeping a journal. I had a number of objectives with this exercise:

• Looking for any emerging themes. These came out: anxiety about the state of the world; ambivalence about contentious issues; interest in synchronicity; returning often to the classic existential questions of finding meaning in suffering and purpose in my life.
• Editing small typos: rather rare, which is good.
• Reading to assess my ability to be clear: I found that I sometimes assumed familiarity with a subject when it may not be there for a majority of readers.
• Checking for interesting prose: the writers I like reveal themselves, write in "active" voice, have fresh and original ideas, and have a sense of humor like Bucky, for example.
• Seeing how well the blog invites further actions from the reader: a good blog will entice the reader to follow any links, to read further-by giving adequate clues-and perhaps even to comment.
• Evaluating how well I did at regularity with posting: that's probably a B+; travel and technological ingnorance impacted my ability to be consistent.
• Getting an impression of my overall writing tone, my "voice:" it is rather clear what worries me; it is not so clear what I celebrate.
• Noting my technical progress made along the way: learning to link, for example, made my posts much more topical and connected to current thinking.
• Assessing my ability to avoid cliche's: not so good there. Resorting to a cliche to make a point is just lazy thinking. I certainly have the ability to be more original. We all do.
• Attempting to make an objective critique of my ability to be authentic, to keep good boundaries, and to add something of value to the Blogosphere: I surprise myself at times. Any writer just loves it when something just seems to "write itself." If once in a great while my muse appears like that, and I am in awe.

To summarize, my online journal is just that so far. It is not yet a dialogue. We'll see where it goes from here. For anyone who wishes to begin an online journal ("blog"), here is a good article.