Tag: journals

Plotting


Haven’t written in this journal in a while. It’s a gift from Lynne that I use as a sort of character journal when I’m trying to figure out things in the Neverending Saga. I blurred out the thoughts I wrote down, and tried to photograph it in such a way that you could see what the dragonflies look like with and without their shimmer.


I liked the quote from George Sand because the character I’m writing is making changes to her life, her home, herself. To me, she’s a person who shines, but not every character sees her the way I do. That seems true to life. When I was young, I wanted all my friends, however different they were from one another, to know and be friends, too. Experience taught me how unrealistic that is.

Today I watched a 2016 film called Maudie which came highly recommended by a dear friend of many decades. I think she realized I’d like it both as a character study and a look into the life of an artist. It’s an odd kind of…romance…and it’s quite sad. Really, it’s both sad and somehow not sad. The character Maudie is played by an English actor, Sally Hawkins, who won lots of praise and awards for the role. Interestingly, the male lead is played by Ethan Hawke. My friend didn’t know it was supposed to have been my Ethan Hawke summer, so it was a cool coincidence. Sometimes people who know and love us have an intuitive sense not only of what we’d like, but when we need it. It’s a great part of friendship.

Random Saturday musings


Back in March of 2019 is when I think I posted using Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal for the first time. The page I chose to do involved fruit stickers, and it looked like this.

I may have added a few since then.

Here’s a new one I did this month. Another way to test my memory.

When I did it, I kept wondering what smelled so wonderful. Well, it was a couple of pages prior, done in April 2019, and still smelling as FABULOUS as ever: splashes of Chanel N° 5.

It took me more than five years to have the nerve to do this one. It is done as of yesterday.

Author Keri Smith warned it would be difficult.

Did you flinch a little when you saw that I did it? Even book lovers who read the cheapest of paperbacks protect the spines. (And most of us use bookmarks to keep from bending down the pages.)

No worry about cracking the spines or bending the pages when I read ebooks on my iPad, including this latest one from Carolyn Haines in her Sarah Booth Delaney mystery series. Of course, my iPad has fallen to the floor a couple of times and now has thin cracks across the surface of the glass. I don’t blame the dogs, who ran into power cords and pulled it down. I blame whoever makes covers for devices like this one. When my old iPad that I had for many years stopped working, it still had a flawless screen because of the great case that kept it well-protected. When I replaced the iPad, I couldn’t find a case even close to that one in quality or protective features. So I deal with those hairline cracks; it’s worth it to read my favorite writers. Carolyn Haines is certainly among that group.

Button Sunday


Found this button online, a steampunk theme with cursive writing. I do so little writing by hand these days that my penmanship is atrocious. But I do know how to write that way, and I well remember all the handwritten letters I received in my younger years (truth be told, I still have most of them, though I hope all the males to whom I ever sent letters have thrown all of mine away–or could send them to me, so I can roll my eyes at my younger self).

I already had journals and journaling on my mind when I was looking at buttons today. Yesterday, as I searched for my original essential oils inventory list, which I never found (finally just started a new one and input it to a computer doc, so I’ll know where to find it when I need it again), I opened a file folder that contained a tangle of embroidery thread and a ticket stub. I suspect the embroidery thread went with a cross-stitch piece I started back in the 1990s of a white cat sitting in a window (you can read about that in an old post here).

When the stitching remained unfinished, I finally wrote a poem about it and put the partially finished piece in a frame with the poem. It hung on my wall at The Compound for years, and now I have no clue where it is. I added it to my list of inexplicably missing items.

In the same folder, I found a ticket to a matinee showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi from February 2018. That faded ticket, at least, I could put inside my current Moleskine.

As you can see, I’ve rarely used my Moleskines for capturing my sloppy cursive writing.

Like the one above, the Moleskines (and some are Moleskine knockoffs) are filled with mementoes of all kinds, and they get very fat; too fat for shelving. So they have a bin they go into when they’re full. I do still journal from time to time, but I mostly scribble a day’s events or thoughts in whatever kind of day planner or daily appointment book I keep.

Do you still handwrite your letters? Do you journal or keep a datebook or diary?

P.S. I have now reread all five of the TJB novels. I was amazed at how many things I’ve forgotten and how moved I could still be by those characters and their stories. This book, in particular, required a box of tissues right next to me. I kept having to close the book and cry.

Now I need to get back to The Musician in the Neverending Saga before he writes mean songs about my neglect.

Tiny Tuesday!

I guess Tiny Tuesday is a good occasion to offer a decent goodbye to this pencil that’s becoming too short for me to scribble notes to myself without discomfort (arthritis in my fingers). So long, Peewee, and thanks for your service. Notice I’m replacing you with another of your kind because you Ticonderoga Noir No. 2 Pencils are the BEST.

Wonders of the world


Another little journal I found last year sometime and plucked off the shelf today, having forgotten it. This one I’ll call “Hey Thanks” is a guided gratitude journal. There are some exercises provided to help the journal keeper record what s/he’s grateful for, and sometimes topics are given.

I flipped the book open at random and did this one. I mean, there are a ton of wonders in the world, and most of them I haven’t seen. So I tried to come up with a geologic feature that stirs me emotionally, and animals in general and one specific, and then something purely selfish that might not seem like a “wonder” to others, but would open new worlds to me and help me write.

Hope this is readable. Any wonders you’ve dreamed of experiencing?

Is Wednesday really a day…

…when one can get over a hump? Time will tell.

The “Be Positive” coloring and writing journal that Lynne gave me–May of 22?–that I use for coloring and speculating about what I’m writing or should be writing and the inspirations and challenges involved. Today, after I wrote next to the page I’d colored, I closed the book and laughed at that name…be positive. Gotta say what I wrote today in the journal is maybe one of the least positive things I think/feel. The words I almost never say out loud because they would likely be misunderstood or else prompt advice or guidance that I’m not looking for. That’s not my Aries resistance to being directed or told what to do. It’s only that this Aries knows herself–myself–too well to pretend I’m looking for answers from outside when the answers within have been hard won.

On the other hand, the drawing I colored is pretty and untroubled.

Plus I have written today, and every bit of writing nourishes the Muse who in turn nourishes my creative drive.

While writing, I listened to really good music all the way around, meaning of course, music I like/enjoy/admire/feel.

Kicked off with Brighter: A Duncan Sheik Collection from Duncan Sheik, and great liner notes from James Hunter (from Rolling Stone magazine). Certain parts of Hunter’s notes resonate with me, and the music is good to listen to, write to, think to.

Tom and I were on a road trip many years ago when we stopped somewhere and bought a bunch of CDs so we could hear music we didn’t know, and that’s when we got Shinedown’s The Sound of Madness. I used to hear it a lot because I uploaded it to my iTunes library, but after my main iTunes computer stopped working early in the pandemic, the only songs that will play on my iTunes are ones I’ve actually purchased from Apple. We still need to either get that Mac fixed or figure out what we can grab from its backup drive. That task has been “on the list” since the world reopened in 2021.

Finally, The Best of Simon & Garfunkel. No explanation needed, right? WAY BACK when I was given my first record player, a Simon & Garfunkel album was one of the first three I received, probably for a birthday. They never get old, and their song “The Boxer” still does battle with Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” as my favorite song of all time. There’s a nod to the duo in the first novel in the Neverending Saga.


Shared before but always happy to show Becky’s First Record Player. There were times it felt like the only thing teenage Becky could count on. In the current novel in progress, a character has just received her first record player and a collection of 45s. Lucky little nine-year-old. I was a few years older when I got mine.

Intentions

The second week of August, I recorded some intentions in my “Inspire” Journal and posted them here.

A couple of weeks ago, I remembered and decided to revisit those. First off, I stared at the list and wondered, What is TC craft? What is TC song? What was I talking about? I don’t write songs. I have characters who write songs, but… Then I realized. Something happens with one of those songwriter characters in Topanga Canyon in the third or fourth book of the Neverending Saga. “TC” unlocked!

To update:

1. I did finish this craft piece based on the novel and gave it to Lynne when she was here in September. I think it’s hanging in her house.
2. I haven’t written the song, because I haven’t written in that character’s voice in a while. I’ll get to it maybe in the seventh book, or when the time is right.
3. The MagPo box is restored. More about that in a minute.
4. I’m not using the inspiration journal (different from the “Inspire” journal) to plot the seventh book because I’m using a big yellow sketch book Lynne gave me that I’ve been using since… 2019? to tape photos and jot thoughts and ideas for the series. Currently, it’s staying next to me when I write.
5. Schedule physical (routine annual exam). Completed in December.
6. Schedule fall vaccines. Done and received in September.

It feels good to know I completed almost all these goals I set for fall.

About the Magnetic Poetry box. It took water during the Harvey flood and subsequently began to rust.

I knew Tom was taking vacation time the week between Christmas and New Year’s and asked if he thought some Rust-Oleum® would help if he had time to work on the box. I explained that I wasn’t looking for perfection. I didn’t care if it was obvious the box had been restored. In fact, imperfections are part of its history. I just wanted the rust to become a thing of the past.

And so it has.

It made me happy enough that I pulled out my Healing Words MagPo kit to create a poem, a reminder to myself that it’s great to set goals; the challenge is in the work. (Sometimes, even if it’s asking the person who’s right for the job.)

Create everyday

I use that phrase a lot–“create everyday”–and I generally follow it. For a few random reasons, September is proving to be a high-anxiety month for me. There’s really no method like snapping one’s fingers or finding magical thinking to make it vanish. The best I can do is try to manage it. Some of the ways I once would have done that would only give me more anxiety these days.

But anything creative can occupy my thoughts and settle my feelings a little. I follow an artist on Instagram who provides quick and easy craft projects, mostly using watercolors, and I finally tried one of them. She drew a rhino last month, and for a dollar donation to her that would go to a rhino organization, I could download him. Her rhino had more of a space theme, but I did one I call “Boho Rhino.” I don’t have watercolors, so I improvised with watercolor pens and water.

Today, I wrote in the journal I use to discuss things related to the Neverending Saga, and then I colored the page opposite my thoughts. The reassurance is timely.

Here’s a photo of the journal page and the rhino. Whatever your circumstances, I hope you can find a creative way to get a little of the mental, emotional, or physical balance you need.

Inspirations post (delayed)


I keep several of my journals handy in case I want to use them for different things, and among those is a journal I labeled “Inspirations.” I created that one quite a while back, and here’s what’s in it.


The inside front cover page decorated with these stickers, because various birds in the corvid family are part of my inspirations.


The first page has this postcard of a Rothko painting. Seeing Mark Rothko paintings in person, reading books about his life, and collecting art books with photographs of all the paintings I haven’t seen all fall under the category of “inspirations.” I put a Rothko painting in Three Fortunes in One Cookie as an homage to Rothko’s work.

A couple of weeks back, I ordered some stencils with small patterns or shapes that I wondered if I could use on some of the wee canvases I paint, and I practiced with a couple of them on this page using gel pens.

That’s it! Those are the only pages with material in the “Inspirations” journal after all this time. Recently, as if I needed another one, I picked up this journal that appealed to me, also with the theme of inspiration.

The gel pens weren’t working that great, so I decided to try my fine point Sharpies.

And use the new journal to organize all the various creative projects I have in mind to do, working them into my writing schedule as well as other non-creative activities I need to take care of.

I knew Sharpies would bleed onto the following page, so I put a plastic sheet between pages. I don’t care if the ink shows on the page backs, because I’ll probably use those pages for mini collages that provide visuals of things having to do with characters or plot lines in the Neverending Saga.

Time will tell if this more disciplined approach toward balancing my creative projects works. I have lots of ideas of things I want to write, paint, collage, etc., and one thing I know about myself is that creativity begets more creativity. For example, there’s a project I began in 2021 related to one of the books in the saga. I’d put it aside to do other things, and this week, two years later, I finally finished it. I can’t share it because it’s a gift (as yet ungiven).

I can share this. Last Friday was Marika’s birthday, and since the first Spirograph painting I did (using INXS lyrics) was for her birthday in 2021, I was game to do another. When she asked about a possible painting using lyrics to “Wildflowers” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I decided to do something similar on a couple of small (3-inch by 9-inch) rectangular canvases.

I really enjoyed painting those.

I like the way so many of the things I attempt: doll fashion or dioramas; painting, coloring, and collaging; and the journaling, fiction, poetry, and lyrics I write, can all blend and overlap to inspire me.