The first of what will be two or three blog posts on my own history of blogging, keeping a journal, and keeping my digital life organized: Workflow/Work Life/Life Work - 1.
@smokey I always forget about that, so thanks! I just checked and, yes, the posts are there and it turns out there’s an inaccuracy in the post on my blog. I started blogging in 2004, before I started I discovered Alas. So this year is actually my 15th blogging anniversary.
Again, thanks for reminding me about the wayback machine. As I was browsing, there are definitely posts I want to save.
@richnewman Hooray for the Wayback Machine! (That’s the historian part of my brain kicking in, remembering to check Wayback :-) ) Glad you’ll be able to recover key posts.
@richnewman Also, in thinking about this post in the context of the recent query elsewhere about writing poetry, I see a number of similarities—in the broadest terms—with my journey with writing poetry (and ceasing to journal, although I haven’t stopped to really investigate why that happened for me), which was both a happy discovery and a helpful way to frame my experience.
@smokey Yeah, I'm excited to go back and see which posts I can recover and which ones I think are worth putting back up on my blog.
@smokey That's interesting. One of the things I thought about while writing that work-flow-life post was an assignment that used to be pretty common, I think, among a certain group of college composition teachers, which was to write an autobiographical portrait of yourself as a writer. I never gave the assignment (though now that I'm remembering it, I might), nor was I ever given the assignment--it became fashionable after I graduated--but I do remember people talking about how so many of the stories were similar. I don't remember much more than that, but it's interesting to think about writing as a cultural activity into which people are initiated, that there are rites of passage, ebbs and flows of activities, etc. that follow certains kinds of cultural norms/narratives. I'm not trying to shoehorn your experience--of writing of reading my post--into this kind analysis. It's just what this comment of yours made me think.
it's interesting to think about writing as a cultural activity into which people are initiated, that there are rites of passage, ebbs and flows of activities, etc. that follow certains kinds of cultural norms/narratives.
Indeed. Certainly the broad similarities of the educational system in this country would play a part (for a certain group of people, at least) in the similarities of the stories, which makes me all the more intrigued about what circumstances or events lead to differences that present in the autobiographies—and probably other questions as well, which are not coming to me at the moment.