Early drafts of this piece did more introspection on my writing confidence since day one of the weblog. That idea was edited out as I focused more of what I saw as advice for other writers who wanted some ideas they might want to throw into their work... obviously, a lot of those ideas come from staring at my stuff and trying to deduce what people liked in popular pieces.

And, yeah, early versions also ripped on LiveJournal. I clearly am anti-post-journal-thoughts, but I can't rip on LiveJournal because I've got some good friends who post good original content there. I also can't rip on journaling in general because writing is always good. Lastly, it's hard to argue with the LiveJournal (and MySpace) model as being anything other than successful -- clearly, there's a generation that is grooving on it.