Spring Break is here, so I will be blogging more and I won’t be blogging so much about ways to keep going when you think you’re about to crash and burn. Since vacation is here, I will be blogging calmly in my robe and my reindeer slippers. (This robe is great. A shop lady in Martha’s Vineyard bascially gave it to me so I could finish my novel. I wish I had her contact info to say thank you. The robe is not sexy, but it’s snuggly, and it helped me make it over the finish line.)
Anyway, a few months ago I blogged about wanting to start keep ing a journal. So many people recomended their favorite notebooks and a few folks even sent me journals in the mail. (Y’all are the best best best.) Well, none of the notebooks went to waste. I pressed them into service for various purposes, but I hadn’t yet found the journal for daily use.
Well, I have worked it out.
I have been using a thin moleskine notebook. It’s about the size of a regular sheet of paper folded in half. I use the pink one, but they come in lots of pretty colors, and there is always the moody black one. Dainty without being precious or fragile, it can easily be thrown in my purse, or even hidden up my sleeve! The picture on the right shows a hardcover, but I use the inexpensive paperback. Since it has only 96 pages, it only takes me a month to fill it up. Then, I just get a new one. This works for me because I DO NOT like to flip back through and revisit my old thoughts. It’s like listening to my own voice on a tape recording. Can’t stand it.
I write in the journal while I have my coffee. I wake up with my mind brimming and sloshing. I feel like an over-full martini glass. When I spend just about twenty minutes with the journal, I feel much more stable. Even though those extra minutes mean I have to get up even earlier on a school day, it’s worth it.
And here’s a little tip that I wish someone had told me before I filled several large hardcover moleskine journals (esp when I was recovering from my illness): give yourself room for a table of contents/index at the front! A couple of pages.
And number your pages as you write. Everytime there is a significant topic you cover in your journal, put the page # and what you’re writing about, at the front.
This will allow you to find what you wrote more easily, later on.
I don’t know if you’re aware but that journal-related entry you did a few months back resulted in gushing about all my journals on my own blog. And here I sit, having not written in my journal for nigh-on two weeks. I think it’s my attention to detail and historian’s need to capture it ALL that puts so much pressure on me. I feel like a puppy with her tail between her legs after long absences. And of course, I always feel like Queen of the world when I’m done.
(Singing My Journal and Me to the tune of “My Buddy”)