One thing I've found blogging in the last year: Too often I'll have an emotion and a seed for how to form it into a blog entry. Sometimes I'll just tell myself to remember to blog it later (hah, right) and sometimes I'll write down just enough of it so I can remember it. A scrap of paper in my wallet, a sticky note on my desktop, virtual or physical, sometimes my hand, and sometimes money, if that's all available. Worse is when I leave myself a message on voicemail, because I never go back and check my saved messages, to gather the seeds and grow them into posts.

The main problem is that the particular emotional passion is fleeting, and if I hope to capture it in prose, it has to be in the moment I'm experiencing it.

To go on a slight tangent, this is one of the reasons I really liked the Two Towers: While most sequels call on actors to reprise their roles, and the actors review the original work to 'get back into character,' the three LotR movies were all completely shot before any of the cast got a chance to see themselves on an an edited reel. This (and the fact that they weren't shooting linearly, and might shoot a Return of the King scene the day before shooting a Fellowship scene at the same location) meant that the actors had to call on the memory of themselves actually playing their characters, not the memory of them watching themselves playing their characters. In a sense, it's the difference between making a second identical printout of a document, instead of just photocopying the original and getting a fuzzier copy.

Tangent done. My point is that trying to write a blog post based on a scrap of paper means trying to recreate the thought instead of simply relating it. No doubt this has resulted in a few posts with a softer focus than I'd have liked, and a good number of posts that simply were never written.

One of my New Years resolutions for 2003 is to be better about this. If I don't have time to write a full and complete 1000-word post on something, I'll just put down what I can. On the flipside, I rarely edit my posts nowadays, even the ones that are upwards of 2000 words. Since I'm restructuring the site to make themed content (dotcom storytime, project posts, movie reviews, etc) easier to find, both for the regular visitor and the googlists, I'm also trying to create different quality levels. I need to know that posts don't have to be perfect (or even necessarily cogent) to go up on Fury, while at the same time I should have a higher standard above a 'post' more like an 'article,' 'story,' or 'paper' that stands well on its own.

But more than anything this post is a requiem for those posts that were and yet will never be. It's hard enough to write from the heart; writing from a memory and an obligation to your former self is a lot harder.