on paper journals, recycling, processing, and OCD, in excruciating detail.

[dancinglights]

While going through yet another box of books and journals and class notebooks and sketchbooks today looking for anything I could let go of and recycle to free one more moving box worth of space in the house, I came to a bloody obvious realisation about my exacting OCD paper-journaling habit.

Comments

[dancinglights]

I keep trying to like spiral-bound sketchbooks for the possibility of scanning or pulling out any contents that turn out worth sharing and for their ability to lie flat even after pasting thirty or so thick pieces of paper and glue and textured paint and who knows what in them. I even have a few, but I can rarely bring myself to carry them around or use them. Er, no answer, but yeah, that, argh.

And while I have a lot of tagged snippets in lj about the garden, the paper journal has been immensely more useful for things like 'what do I start in mid-March again?' and 'what year did I have squash bugs, so when can I plant curcurbitae again to count as crop rotation?'. I intend to scan some of it and pass it off on a local if and when I move.

[peregrin8]

I do some of these exact same things with notebooks. Sometimes I have a perfect small-but-not-tiny one to carry around, and then I write enough important or sensitive stuff in it that I don't want to carry it around anymore; sometimes I do dissect the book, but other times I put a big ribbon or Sharpie-line in it and/or binder-clip the first section closed & it becoms a desk or dream journal.

I don't think you have a notebook PROBLEM! I think it's lovely, and the messy and chaotic elements are part of what makes them fascinating once enough time has passed.

[dancinglights]

This makes me feel so much better. Seriously.

And yeah, the non-garden 'public' one, small but not tiny, has a few Sharpie gummint-censored lines and strategic full-page pasted-over postcards in it because I stopped being comfortable carrying the information around. I like the binder-clip bit for private journal repurposing. I may well do that next time instead of excising pages and hoping glue holds.

[keyake]

I too have rather a lot of sketchbooks and notebooks lying around with anywhere from three to thirty pages full, uncomfortably untouched in the rest. Sometimes it's silly - I have a beat up spiral lined notebook that I've used so randomly for 10-12 years that I'm more amused than chargrined by it.

If I leave a sketchbook for too long, I tend to just carefully pack it away. There's one somewhere that has many unused pages; and all I want to do is put one last peaceful image in it and tape it shut forever because of the content.

Books like that are psychological tools. Don't feel bad. I too have repurposed mine to dream journals before, which is somewhat useful.

[illuviel]

I didn't initially respond because I wanted to have something more to say than "oh, me too!" - but have my own piles and piles of notes and notebooks I've not really done much to organize or utilize in a while, and have just started paper jotting and journalling after a long dry spell.

I have a few ideas, and thanks to this post and the comments, I feel a lot better about having multiple books-in-progress. The urge to 'finish the whole thing before I start another one' is strong, but I can see alternatives in better light now.

Thank you, Ms. Lights. Thank you, ladies all.