definitions
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a member of an amateur press association. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, here’s how this worked. Several people would commit to writing a certain amount in a given time interval. They’d give what they’d written to the person in charge of collating; copies were made, and collated, and given out to all of the members. Members would read each other’s contributions, and with their next submission, they would comment on what others had written as well as submitting their own new contribution.
Recently I was talking to the individual who founded the APA I was a member of, and the individual commented that one of the reasons they aren’t interested in LJ is that they ran out of interest in making every detail of their life public about the time they left the APA. But, the idea of an APA isn’t to make every detail of your life public; neither is the idea of LJ. Granted, there are times when what’s going on in your life is so all-consuming that it’s all you can think about; granted there are times that your mind is as barren as a moonscape and the trivia of day-to-day is all you can dredge up to put into words.
The idea of an APA is to write. The idea of LJ is to express yourself. If that means detailing the mind-numbing trivia of your life, so be it. And if people want to read that and comment on it, fine. No one is forcing you to write (or read!) anything on LJ.
For me, it’s a way to stay in touch, and a place to try out things I’ve written. So, sometimes I write about my life, most times I don’t. What’s mostly here is content, bits of things I’ve written and want to have out there where I can email someone a link & they can see it.
And things like this, that are more…dumping a thought out on the screen to get it into words, so I can see the shape of it.