Thinking with Therapist (1/x+1)

Last week, my therapist asked me to think about my long-term goals. To my shame, I didn't until I was on the way in, and confessed as much.

So instead I talked, a bit, about my writing. And that digression yielded some interesting fruit.

It was banal at first: another few posts on Andalusada, a sonnet I'd forced myself to write, started another letter to the woman I love - but then, at some point, I unpacked it a bit, and found a weakness to develop.

I think the question Therapist asked was, "What kind of things do you write?" After a bit of thinking, I came up with a taxonomy of writing that I do:

• Offline writing. In practice, there are only two kinds of this:
• My journal; requires nothing more than a pair of pens, one blue, one copper. This is more or less daily (Rule #1: "Every day, even if it's only one sentence."), and happens at a more or less fixed relative time: before bed.
• Letters to the woman I love. This happens at irregular intervals, and there's no fixed time to write them, either absolute ("at 8:00") or relative ("before bed.") Also unlike my journaling, love letters need a certain coherence and flow. They also take several days to complete, because I often write until I'm tired of writing, and postage being what it is there's no merit to sending shorter ones.
• Online writing. In practice, there are also a few kinds of this:
• Blogging Andalusada. The Andalusada blog is constant, more or less daily, happens at a fixed relative time (before the library closes), and has no necessary direction.
• Blogging here, which is much more sporadic, and probably the hardest writing I do. Part of the sporadic writing is because my blogging time overlaps with my Andalusada time, and Andalusada has inertia. A much bigger problem, though, is that on most days of the week I simply have no idea what to write about here. Soulblogging is one thing. Poetry is another. But this blog has almost no actual readers, as far as I can tell; it's my catch-all vanity press.
• Commenting at a few blogs and forums. This is irregular, because I don't actually visit all of them on any given day; truth be told, of the ones that I feel a need to actually contribute to, I've only visited one of them in recent memory.

"How much would you like to write a day?" Therapist asked; and that seems like a decent chance to transition to another post.