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Now here’s a typo that turned out to have a deeper meaning than intended: journal injuries.
I was working through some thoughts about journaling, and I do a lot of that with speech to text because I talk miles faster than I type.
In fact, I’m going to write this post with speech to text and probably a lot of editing afterward.
But Google must think entries sounds like injuries because I looked down at my phone and that was what was on the page. It was the most appropriate typo I think I’ve ever seen in context of what was around it. So I took it and now I’m using it because it means something to me.
I’ve been journaling for most of my life. I’m not a daily journaler, but I do write a lot of journal entries because some days I write three or four if I’m feeling a need to clear my head. In the end, it works out to a significant amount of writing just to get things out of my head.
But a lot of those entries are about writing. I track progress, and use them to keep me focused, and just dump whatever I’m thinking into them.
The problem when I looked back at them was that so many of my entries are full of intentions that I never followed through on or goals I never reached. I’m not talking overarching work here. I’ve written and published more than 50 titles of fiction. I’ve made paperbacks, ebooks, and even one ill-advised serial. I write novels, novellas, and short stories. I have more than 20 novels published and more than 26 works in progress with most of those being novels and novellas.
But I also have a massive collection of journal entries detailing how much I’ve failed at: word count goals, publishing plans, writing challenges, and the list could go on.
Where’s my list of accomplishments? Where in those entries can I find talk about the story progress I’ve made, the books I’ve finished, the things I’ve published?
Nowhere.
Because I don’t detail those things. In the guise of accountability, I detail challenges and I’m not talking about writing challenges in the sense of goals. I’m talking about the daily challenges I face in writing. And those are legion.
So calling these entries journal injuries makes sense. That’s what they are: every time I read through them, I feel despair and hopelessness related to improving as a writer because I’ve defined improvement as speeding up and they show clearly that I haven’t sped up at all as I’ve become more experienced. In fact, I have quite a lot of evidence that says I’ve slowed down quite a lot over the years.
So journal injuries they are.
This is why I’ve quit journaling. And it’s why I stopped writing as many posts as I used to write here on the blog. Because this blog is also a place where I write about my daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly speed goals, and where I detail how I’ve failed at it, and where I don’t write about the things I’ve accomplished.
I gave myself an order a while back.
No more journal injuries!