User Blog:
Your Character and You: Journaling

 Livejournal, Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress and about a million other corners of the internet exist to help you journal. You, as a gamer who peruses the internet must see hundreds of journals related to gaming any time you open up your browser. Heck, you're pretty much reading one right now. You likely do some kind of journaling online yourself, from long personal diatribes on a Livejournal account you leave locked and share only with your closest friends to Tweeting what you had for breakfast to a photoblog chronicling every good roll you get updated live from your phone every game night.

But, do you journal for your character?

You should be. Especially if you really want to climb deep into your character’s head and get a better idea of what's going on up here. It's a perfect technique for long-term characters as a way to see the growth and change over the course of a long adventure. It's just as much for a one shot character as a way to remember and relive one night of good fun and lay the seeds for using the character or parts of the character again down the road.

Now, I'm not saying it's something you have to do online. A couple of personal Word files in a folder somewhere on your computer should suffice. Maybe drop them an email some time to your GM if prompted, but other than that, they can be a thing just between you, your character and Pehlor, (or whatever deity your character answers to.)

With some very special characters at games I know are going to be epic, I create whole character journals by pasting my sheet into a marble bound notebook and then fill it with in character journal entries, notes, sketches and anything else the character thinks to save. These things can become little works of art pretty quickly and easily satisfy any odd crafting urges I might find popping up from time to time. (Saves me the heartache of becoming a scrapbooker, because I know that pastime is like crack.)

You can surely do it online, but make sure you keep any character blogging separate from your own so as not to scare your Aunt Agnes who Googles you to find out what to get you for Christmas and sees you calling yourself Sabastian Darkstar while referring to blood drinking. (Trust me, not a mistake to make. That was one tense Thanksgiving.)