The Ink Gypsy is now posting on Live Journal!
http://inkgypsy.livejournal.com/
(THIS IS A SCREENSHOT - CLICK ON THE PIC TO GO DIRECTLY TO MY JOURNAL)
(THIS IS A SCREENSHOT - CLICK ON THE PIC TO GO DIRECTLY TO MY JOURNAL)
After reluctantly joining Live Journal to keep contact with an old friend a little while ago I've recently come to appreciate its usefulness and have been adding posts there regularly too.
Why?
Why add yet ANOTHER blog (essentially) to an already overworked workload?
It's selfish really. Inklings is my writing-focused blog and while it's been the easiest of all my blogs to keep active I still like to prepare for a post and spend time formatting it so it reads more easily and is, hopefully FUN (as well as informative and thought provoking of course).
BUT, in case you haven't noticed, I'm suffering from a little thing known as 'burnout' right now and the effort to write with any specific structure is often overwhelming. The only thing is I really need to (and want to) keep writing as I recover and to stay active on the web. Live Journal is helping me do this in two ways:
1) It gives me 'writing prompts' which I have the choice of 'replying' to, along with a whole host of other writers/journal keepers/bloggers and we instantly get to see all the weirdly wonderful and different things we're all writing on this one topic - this encourages feedback, which encourages community and keeps you active. This gives me permission to write any old thing I feel lik writing about, without needing to conform to a standard of presentation so there's no pressure, no 'deadlines', no stupid posts and that equals fun!
2) There are a LOT of writers on Live Journal - honest-to-god professional-and-known-to-me-writers-whose-books-are-sitting-on-my-shelf and they encourage commenting and community. It's both thrilling and encouraging to post a comment on a Live Journal community site (eg I'm a member of Urban Fantasy Fans) and not only get comments but get input from authors whose work I'm familiar with.
Although my blogs have more people reading them than I realize most of the time, not being a big web-celebrity or politically-controversial and notorious writer I don't get a lot of comments. The lack of comments makes you feel like you're writing in a vacuum sometimes, even though your stat counter is telling you that you have in fact had 50 new visitors today. Posting a comment on a Live Journal community forum often generates instant feedback and in turn results in people adding you to their 'friends' list. That's good for the soul!
So if you want to read random things I've been thinking about - or have been prompted to think about like today's post titled: I, the Object - go visit.
The nice thing is that I've managed to surprise myself with what falls out of my brain over there - and it's sparking some nice discussions in the places I'm visiting.
While I'm working on recovering from my insane tiredness and my posts aren't as frequent as usual, it may just be that if I'm not writing much here, there's a good chance I've been writing over there.
It's the writing I can do when I can't manage to write and that ain't a bad thing!
No comments:
Post a Comment