My blog has been quiet for weeks. Work. Art. The hol­i­days. Life. Blog­ging kept get­ting pushed fur­ther back on my to-​​do list.

In the absence of blog­ging I have redis­cov­ered the art of jour­nal­ing. I have jour­naled vol­umes from the time I was a teenager. Since the onset of the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion, I have jour­naled lit­tle. Instead, I have blogged, which has given me a won­der­ful out­let for writ­ing as well as con­nect­ing with oth­ers, some­thing my jour­nal has never been able to provide.

Writ­ing is a soli­tary expe­ri­ence. Blog­ging helps take the edge off the iso­la­tion. And yet the pub­lic nature of blog­ging means I am cre­at­ing con­tent with an audi­ence in mind.

Jour­nal­ing is a pri­vate trans­ac­tion. It is much more raw and uncen­sored. When I jour­nal I do not hold back as I do (and must) when I blog. I do not edit. It is streams of con­scious­ness writ­ing. What­ever bleeds from the ink onto the page is bleed­ing out of Me.

There are phys­i­cal aspects to writ­ing with paper and pen that the screen and key­board can­not mimic. The blots of ink on my fin­gers, the cool flat­ness of the paper as my hand glides down the page, the sound of the scratch as I turn some­thing from noth­ing…Writ­ing is magic.

I have missed my blog because I have missed You. There are no reader com­ments for my jour­nal. When I close it and place it back on the shelf, it remains there, my thoughts cap­tured like clouds in a jar and no one else will see the rain that’s come down upon those pages. Jour­nal­ing is a rit­ual for solitaires.

Like much of my cre­ative process, there is con­flict. I strug­gle in remem­ber­ing why I blog. I have been on the verge of blog sui­cide sev­eral times over the years, and This is Not That. I do not wish my blog­ging voice to die.

As I jour­nal and think more about my writ­ing strug­gles, I real­ize some­thing that other writ­ers before me have spo­ken of : The need to write for Me no mat­ter the medium.

I think 2013 is meant to be the year of ink for me. Ink for my jour­nal­ing — and blog­ging like I’m writ­ing with ink for the dig­i­tal hemisphere.

I’m not sure where uncen­sored blog­ging will take me. I may likely lose some read­ers as I jump into the wild river of unknow­ing. It is likely that I will blog less about top­ics on church and women’s equal­ity. I will prob­a­bly blog very lit­tle on spir­i­tual themes as these are famil­iar ter­ri­tory for me. I am lust­ing for the wild lands. I need to let my blog become a quest and just jour­ney on, leav­ing the safe mead­ows behind.

Jour­nal­ing has given me a few expe­di­tions into uncharted thought trails. As a writer — and a blogger! — I must fol­low where the words flow and stop damming them up out of inhi­bi­tion. Blog gurus say to write what your read­ers want, to pay atten­tion to your demo­graphic and stay in the sweet spot. I can’t be caged like that.

I con­cerned myself lately with “tak­ing my blog to the “next level. ” (what­ever that means!) 2013 is going be my year of Ink.

Thank your read­ers and the crit­ics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intel­li­gent, wit­ti­est, wis­est audi­ence in the uni­verse: Write to please your­self. –Har­lan Ellison