Using My Blog as a Writing Journal is Probably Not a Good Idea

Winter forest bathing?

Yesterday I threw out an idea here about starting to use this blog as a writers' journal, a place to work on preliminary writing and drafts.

"...if you go back to the early days of lit blogging," I said, "writers sometimes did use blogs as journals. Even writing journals for experimenting with writing." 

It seemed like an artie bloggie thing to do, to say nothing of being time and energy efficient.

"It would be a multiplier," I said, "one action that meets two goals."

I've Thought Better of That 

Then I remembered that many literary journals consider material used in blogs as "published" and will not consider it for publication themselves. The Medium platform accepts previously published work. In fact, it appears that some people there publish the same things on Medium publications and their private Substacks.

So, there's no issue with me starting something here, revising it, and submitting it to a Medium publication. I could even just submit this post you're reading right now as is.

But most of the other places I submit to, no. I am not confident that even just working on something here and refining it elsewhere would be acceptable in those cases.

Why, Yes, I Am Obsessing About This

Nonetheless, I won't be working here on the winter forest bathing essay idea I came up with after posting about the subject on Facebook yesterday. Posting on Facebook is also considered publishing by some publications, by the way. 

This situation inspired a writing idea, but I won't say anything about it. I've got to go write it down in my private writer's journal, the one you don't see.