Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I finally revealed this journal to my writing group today. Well, except to my friend Joel, but I have known him longer than I've been in the writing group. I thought pointing him to this work in progress a few months ago would make it easier to answer his question asking how I've been.

Of course I wanted to explain everything to them in the mailing list, but I realized I could do that here and save myself having to write a separate entry for today.

I was planning to announce this after having completed one year of entries, which would be towards the end of January next year, but I just responded spontaneously to the inquiry of Art, one of the members on our mailing list, who believed that I've been comatose literary-production-wise.

First of all, in November last year I found out about another writing group in Texas, optimistically calling themselves "Future Classics" (I'll post the site later when my net connection is faster) whose members also had online journals to update each other on their writing progress. After all, it doesn't seem to make sense to inundate a mailing list with the day to day progress or trouble that one is making while writing a short story, but it's perfect for a personal public diary.

I was thinking that our writing group could have the same thing, but I didn't want to suggest it until I could prove to myself that I could keep up something like that, as well as show the other members how it could be done. Which is why I started this.

After all, paraphrasing my favorite movie about writing, "Finding Forrester", which I still suggest our group to watch one of these days (I bought the VCD), the first step to writing well is to start writing and to keep writing.

This way, at least, if I churn out something regularly, I'm exercising my writing muscles. And as I said in a previous post, since I'll be talking about a fully fleshed out world, it helps me practice to focus on giving out the details that will make the scene I'm trying to portray project clearly in the movie screen of the reader's mind.

I learn to anticipate facts I might normally not include, that I would otherwise assume the reader knows about my past, which therefore prevents a new journal visitor from scratching his or her head in non-comprehension of what I've written. Thus, I could use this to provide sufficient background information about characters in my fictional works.

I'm not saying this effort could match any episode of Boston Public (in truth, I don't want my work to be that "exciting"), but who knows how tidbits of an continuing experience written in the course of several weeks would be worthy of being extracted as a complete story by itself?

Another reason why I did not tell my writing group about the existence of this journal earlier is because I wanted to see what direction I'd take if I assumed no one I knew could give criticisms about what I've posted (Joel, in fact, has only spoken once in the past months about something he's read here).

Now that I'll be conscious about my potential readership, I'm also curious as to how that will affect my future entries.

Well, here's to another ten and a half months.