Several friends have recently commented that they have too many hobbies, or that they don’t need another project, and I have nodded sagely. I, too, suffer from a surfeit of things I’ve been meaning to finish.

I have been especially bad at finishing writing projects. Other than a burst of productivity in November, my fiction writing has plodded along at a leaden pace for more than a year. My essay writing has been even more anemic. My personal blogging (other than Twitter, which isn’t really blogging) has dropped off precipitously.

When I was blogging regularly, I was also finishing more stories and essays. And I recently realized that in one sense this has always been true.

Before blogging, I was not the sort of person who kept a journal. But I wrote journal-like things. I had some friends with whom I regularly corresponded. We would write very long letters, discussing and discoursing on mutual writing and fan projects, updating each other on what was happening in our lives, and gossiping a bit. I was writing four or five such letters a week. As well as contributing regularly to a couple of writer/publisher-oriented APAs.

Before that, I had gigs on various student and semi-pro newspapers where I regularly had to produce op ed pieces and columns where there was an externally-imposed deadline. I ended up writing lots of not-quite-stream-of-conciousness stuff that never made it into those columns, and wasn’t part of any story or assignment. Thinking back, those things often took the form of a “letter to no one in particular, but someone who might know me” very much like a typical personal blog.

I think all of that extraneous writing, the correspondence, and the blogging performs a vital service in my head. It gets little things I’m thinking, worrying, wondering, grumping about out of my head. Because once it is written down, I don’t have to think about it until someone responds. With all the mental clutter gone, I could then focus on sorting out plot problems, writing new scenes, cleaning up dialog, and so on.

That’s my theory, anyway.

My other theory is that I am not using my existing Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, or Google+ blogs as much because each of them has become weighted down with various forms of disappointment and expectation.

So, I’m going to see if having another place—a new place, without the history and other issues inherent to those other blogs—to do that personal kind of long-form blogging that I miss, whether I actually use it. And more importantly, does it do that vital de-cluttering.

Wish me luck!