How do I start a daily journal at this point in my life? Part of the problem is definitions. I've never been consistent about keeping a journal, but I've been jotting down my thoughts and observations quite regularly for years. One major purpose of this project is to inject some discipline and structure into my daily writing process. If a side-effect of that routine is that I get more work done on my novel (that is, finish it), so much the better. If it only gives me a single coherent place to keep track of all of my unfinished business, that will also prove useful. But this means that I feel like I have a backlog of issues to discuss. Even though the most recent episode of Enterzone has been out for almost two months, I still have typos to correct in the interview I did with Hunter and Anton about Zero, and I have unfinished or uncorrected documents attached to that interview to update as well. That's just one of many things that have been niggling at me from the top or the middle of my to-do list for fortnights now.

Then there's the odd situation of having another daily writing project appear out of the blue just a week ago. I started the Daily Barbie when I received a threatening letter from a lawyer for Mattel. The upside is that it provided a miniature spring training of sorts, to permit me to get used to this idea of producing something daily, of doing the sifting and sorting work through the artifacts and records of my day-to-day life, in order to build a coherent narrative. But this Barbie "problem" is open-ended, so I'm going to have two daily projects to update for who knows how long, not to mention chapters to write of the BeOS book I'm coauthoring with Kevin Savetz, revisions (for the third edition) of Internet for Busy People, and, as Nick would say "and on and on and on and on" or "dot-de-dot-de-dot-de-dot."

Ultimately, the deeper goal - I believe - is to get myself to (as we used to say in kindergarten) stop, look, and listen. Stop what I'm doing from time to time. Silence myself. Notice, pay attention to my feelings. Permit whatever wants to come up to well to the surface of my being, and then sing.

x

33 today, I thought of naming this journal "outliving christ," but that doesn't feel right. the nice thing about this kind of project is that even if it does one day build an audience (and the public nature of this journal is a fulcrum to promote honesty and self-revelation), there's sure to be just about no one reading it at first, besides a few well-wishing friends I've tipped off in advance, which gives me a little breathing room, a little.