The muse and the notebook

I have a reading bug, a fact which may not be a surprise to those who are regular readers of this weblog. However, not content with that, I now appear to have caught the writing bug as well.

The vast majority of what I've been writing is either hugely uninteresting to everyone who is not me, or an undirected heap of wittering ramblings, which is why I haven't posted them here. I've been sitting in front of the computer (my little ole laptop) and just pouring words onto the screen.

For example.

Yesterday I happened to buy a nice notebook. But last night I spent 1000 words writing in praise of my new notebook. [I had to doublecheck this just now, because I didn't believe it. It has to be seen to be believed.] The notebook is really rather nice, but not, I feel, deserving of quite that much attention being lavished upon it. I may post the notebook praise at some point, but at the moment I'm rather of the opinion that it may make me appear in a somewhat maniacal light, which is not really what I want.

I've used quite a lot of electrons musing about why I've started keeping a personal journal, why I bother to write it at all, what I hope to gain from it. A little bit of the "notebook" entry was about this, and about three thousand words last month when my inner muse first sat up and took notice, and a few other bits and pieces here and there. Due to the fact that a lot of these things of mine are written late at night when my mind's really not working too well I never seemed to resolve any of these questions. But a big part of the answer to "Why I write my journal" (which really isn't so much a diary-type journal as a blank page - alright, screen - for my thoughts to cover and fill up. I believe it's traditionally called "taking your pen for a walk") presented itself yesterday. Finally hitting upon an answer was very satisfying, since I've never quite been able to express the idea to myself before, and I was therefore somewhat miffed when I noticed that Laurabelle had reached the same conclusion three days ago:

Now I am keeping a paper journal again, and I write in it things that I can't write here. It is a letter to my future self. This blog as well is a letter, written to my friends but open to the world.

A letter to my future self. That's it. I write not just for the enjoyment of writing, or to have written, but to read at some future point. This also shouldn't have been a surprise to me :)

Vaughan also seems to have hit this particular nail on the head (although I don't know from what angle he was coming at the issue, or even whether it was the same issue) with his rephrasing of the question: "Who is your audience?" Had I read that a month ago, it could have saved my typing fingers a whole lot of work.