I think I'm having the opposite experience as you are -- having a place to work out ideas about characters and themes and such makes me realize I actually *have* these ideas, and can therefore put them into my fic, whereas before there wasn't much intellectual structure to my stories (not like they're rife with it now *g*). I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to think in such an in-depth manner about characters (requiring foot-noted essays, etc) without blogs.

But then, that's me -- not so much with the original thought, I guess. *g*

.m