I've been extremely blog-lite lately. I've been working on two manuscripts in tandem, which is a lot of writing, and exam season has made College busier than usual. Then I was ill and had to stay in bed a while. Then I got better and my son was ill, so we had a brief spell in the wonderful children's ward. All of which has made for a thin couple of months at the blog-face.

I've blogged pretty consistently for nearly 5 years now, sometimes daily and never less than once a week. I started it because I had writer's block and needed a new writing experiment to get me out of that deep dark groove that goes nowhere. Friends Steve Taylor and Jonny Baker suggested that I start a blog and, after overcoming my technophobia, I quickly got the hang of it. I certainly never expected it to last this long, or to be so widely read. And three or four times I've pondered giving up the blog, but I keep doing it because (as every writer knows) if you are going to write, you have to do it every day.

My daily excursion to my hand-written journal is more personal and more stream-of-consciousness than the blog; it's also more portable, as you can carry a Moleskine in your back pocket. Handwriting is somehow more physical; you are forced to write more slowly than you can type, and there is something about forming the words with a pen that connects you to the words in a different way. And you write differently in a private journal than if you know that even one person is going to read your words. There isn't a great deal of scholarly stuff published on journal-keeping (I researched it once) but the single most interesting thing to notice is that the private journal is the only form of writing that is consciously written for no readership at all, and that in itself changes the form of the writing.  Brian Eno kept a private journal some years back, and around half way through the year his publisher persuaded him that the journal could be published. From that point on, Eno became aware that he was writing differently.

But while I love the physicality of daily writing in a real book with a fountain pen, there's a different kind of accountability with blogging. If I miss a day in my journal, nobody knows but me, but if I start missing the blog updates, people notice. It's a similar kind of accountability to a deadline, I guess – any kind of consequences of failing to show up makes it more likely that you will show up. Anyway. Here I am, with health more or less restored to my household. It's 6am and back at the blog screen, I'm happy to discover that readers have been here more than I have lately. Time to blog on.