Blogging is public, while journaling is private.

Blogging, in any form is a exercise of vanity. I don’t mean to disparage the idea of blogging, but rather to state the simple fact. People blog for one reason and one reason only. They think, however misguided they may be, that they have something to say that others have want to hear. Judging by my own examination, the cacophony of voices crying out from the blog-o-sphere, is wrought with those who hold delusions of relevancy. Indeed, I may be one of them myself.

In contrast, Journaling is an introspective endeavor. An opportunity for the troubled mind to shift some of the weight of emotion, angst or woe to ink and parchment; to heartily laud him-or-herself in private ecstasy when fortune smiles upon. Journaling is an chance to be honest about how you feel when you are unable to do so publicly as is often the case for those living under the scrutinous eye of publicity. It is also an occasion to ruminate and gather ones thoughts when they seem perpetually scattered to the wind.

Do not make the folly of associating the idea of journaling with the diaries of doe-eyed, pimply-faced little girls, pining endlessly for the attentions of their equally pimply faced male counterparts. I speak of journaling in the same fashion as did the likes of John Adams and George Washington as well as nearly every educated man or woman of notoriety in that time.

It is my opinion that the best way to journal is in the handwritten fashion. This preserves privacy from all who do not have physical access to your writings. I also find that setting aside a few moments a day to sit with pen in hand and write about my day or whatever troubles me is as cathartic an exercise as the writing itself. As a technophile, I found this difficult at first and still I feel the urge to put my writings in a digital format. I could write much faster and far more legibly; my hand has all but forgotten the elegant strokes of the script it once knew. But I think there is value in taking time away from this electronic taskmaster and sitting in contemplative quiet, pen at the ready.

If you are thinking of starting a journal, I recommend the following products. They are what I use and thus far have found them to be more than adequate to the task.

Moleskin Large Notebook  (Ruled)
Sakura Micron .1 Black Pen (Not very bleedy!)

It’s no secret that our local print news outlet, The Courier Journal, has a decidedly left slant to it’s reporting. I’m not sure they’d admit it but it’s there. The diamond in that pile of coal — wait. That isn’t fair. Coal is a useful commodity that provides energy to billions of people on this planet. The bright spot shining out of the black hole that is the Courier Journal has been the column of John David Dyche. John’s column provided a right thinking editorial on issues and events of the day. That was his job.

Was is the operative word because last week John resigned from the Courier Journal after his column offering was rejected. His story, leaked here, was focused on the media bias within the print/newspaper industry, specifically at the C-J. It appears this subject hit a little too close to home and his article was tossed. He resigned in response.

Couple that with the fiasco over at the New York Times where a reviewer (John M. Broder)  has been called out for his obvious bias against the Tesla electric car (read John’s rebuttal here). and you have to wonder if there are any media outlets left with any integrity. It would seem to me that the print industry would take advantage of the dearth of unbiased, uncensored news available. Americans, right, left and center, are clamoring for news that is honest from an organization they can trust. If the newspaper industry wants to know how to save print media (even if print means digital) this is how you do it.

Stop lying to your readership. Stop hiding the truth because it makes you or your interests look bad. Believe me, you look far worse when the truth is finally revealed.

The short answer to why is that there are other outlets for the type of content I’ve been posting here and I’d really like to reserve this space for posts related to politics and software development. Yes, I know those two don’t exactly go hand in hand but politics doesn’t really play nice with any other subject so them’s the breaks.

My writing related posts will find their way over to Diabolical Plots where they belong.

As I mentioned in my last post, my writing life has been all but consumed by our submission tracker tool over at Diabolical Plots.

We’re working hard to add new features while maintaining a solid level of stability. David will be making a post over on Diabolical Plots shortly but I wanted to talk briefly about some of the challenges this project has faced.

The Grinder was written to replace a much beloved and popular tool for writers that helped find markets for their work as well as allowed them to track their submissions. For seven or so years, that tool has been free or (donation supported). On January 1st they went to a subscription model and shut the door on thousands of writers who are either unable or unwilling to pay.

Our first major challenge was one of urgency. We didn’t want to put all this work into something and then arrive too late to the party. Our original goal was to go live with our beta on or before January 1st. We nearly hit this goal and as of this writing, we’ve beaten all other major players to market by nearly a month. This was no easy task though. It took great sacrifice from our families and ourselves as we gave up writing and time with our families in order to even get close to reaching that goal.

Now, Duotrope didn’t go to a pay model just to be mean as some folks reaction might have you think. They did so because there are costs associated with running this sort of site.  Besides the obvious costs of hosting and development, there are time costs. Someone (largely David thus far though we’ve had a couple nice volunteers) has to go in and update the listings for the 900 or so markets in our system. Additionally, even since we’ve launched on January 7th, some of those listings have grown stale. Markets open and close for submissions regularly and as currently designed, human intervention is required every time this happens.

So our second major challenge has been to design a system that will require as little hand holding from us as possible. David is a brilliant writer and I hope to be one when I grow up. As much as I love to write code, I’d like to be able to write prose from time to time. So in order to take the site out of our hands to some degree, we are working on features to engage editors and enthusiastic members of the community to help us out, all while preserving the integrity of the project and it’s underlying data.

The third and perhaps largest hurdle going forward will be finding the proper balance between working on The Grinder and our other endeavors. The good news is that have these things in mind now, as the project is still evolving. I have little doubt we’ll be able to reach our goals and provide for the writing community a useful tool for their utility belt.

In similar news. if you have been watching The Grinder evolve you know that we’ve been adding features and fixing bugs daily. One of the more frequent suggestions has been related to the visual design choice we made to go with Courier New as the font for the entire site. Courier New has a special place in the heart of writers and I thought it would be well received. Many people did like it actually but many many more found it hard to read and generally unpleasant.

So in an effort to not make our users revolt, I did a quick redesign of the look and feel of the site yesterday and today we went live with it. Here is a screenshot for those afraid of hyperlinks. Also, we now have a logo!

Stories Written: 18
Submissions (to date): 148
Rejections (to date): 125
Pending Submissions: 18
The Race Score: 18
The eRace Score: 0

The Grinder launched on Monday and has already grown very quickly. I’ve been slammed to new feature development and stability issues since then but the site is finally nearing the completion of phase one.  That doesn’t mean I can let off the pedal of course. We have loads of new features that we plan to add in the next phase along with catching up with market data and then keeping up with new markets as they emerge.

It’s been a wild ride but I really think we’re just cresting the first hill. I’ll post more about this soon but right now I have work to do.