One of the reasons that I chose this new journal with its new format and update system and all that is because I just felt constrained by the last one. I felt like each entry had to be witty, concise, informative, enlightening, and all that. I don’t think that way. Very few of the thoughts I have are worth preserving, and trying to come up with something that met all of those qualifications on a regular basis was far too much for my brain to take.

My Livejournal is useful for random thoughts and the occasional meme or survey result, and for communicating with my friends who also have Livejournal accounts (which is by no means all of them). But then I’d come up with something that I thought was too long to post into my Livejournal but not quite witty or pithy or enlightening enough to post in my regular journal. So here is my new journal, “Worlds in my Head”, which serves as a happy medium. I hope.

For example. Occasionally I want to just post writing updates, to let those who give a hoot what I’m working on and how much I’ve done. Perhaps people will read these updates. Perhaps they won’t. Doesn’t matter; the point for me is to have some accountability. I will be writing every day, and I hope that having this journal in place will help motivate me to do that. I could be wrong. Sometimes I am. We’ll see what happens. I won’t be posting exerpts from my daily writing output in this journal because of copyright concerns (I’m not afraid that people will steal what I write, but I am concerned about reprint rights for stories that are published on-line), but I may occasionally post complete stories to my web server in a password-protected directory which people will be able to view on request.

Anyway. Today’s writing update.

Today, my previous plans having fallen through, I decided that I would go to the next town and sit in Borders and do some writing. I like going to Borders to do this: I have access to coffee or tea, and I’m surrounded by thousands of books, which I find inspiring. And music, too; today I bought an album called Within a Mile of Home by a band called Flogging Molly; it’s Irish punk, which I love (see also Dropkick Murphys and The Pogues), plus a hint of country.

While I was at Borders, I did get some quality writing in. In my previous entry, I spoke of a short story that I was pondering called “The Winds of Patwin County”. Today, I got busy on it and wrote about 1700 words. I’m not entirely sure what the story is about or where it’s going, but it’s been an interesting experiment for me in writing style. Since the story is written from four different points of view, I’m trying to write it with four distinct styles. We’ll see how successful I am at it.

I also worked on the outline for The Outer Darkness. Since I’ve been doing some research for a class on “The Gospel According to Tolkien” that I’ll be helping Jennifer teach at our church, I’ve been reading a lot about J. R. R. Tolkien as well as reading The Silmarillion for the first time. The breadth and scope of Tolkien’s imagination is incredible, and I’ve been inspired by it in many ways. The Outer Darkness, I think, will benefit from my study of Tolkien.

That’s all the writing I did today.