(no subject)

[coraa]

At the Expo yesterday, I bought the most gorgeous bound book, with a hand-sculpted cover featuring an Arthur Rackham print of Titania, from Figment Studios. (It looks a lot like this one, except with the Titania print instead of Waterhouse's Crystal Ball.)

The problem is that I can't use it for its ostensible purpose, which is writing in it, because it's too high-pressure to write fiction in a really nice book. I wind up feeling bad about my scrawled handwriting and my tendency to scribble out words when I think of something better to say. Writing fiction goes best in a cheap spiral notebook, the kind I get in ten-packs from Costco for a quarter each.

So I'm going to put something else in this one, except I'm not sure what. Options are:

* A quotation or commonplace book. (I used to keep one, but I lost it.)
* A book of poetry -- copied by hand, I mean, not written originally by me.
* A book of copied folktales/fairy tales.
* A dream journal.
* A garden journal (especially as the pages are designed to handle the mounting of photographs).
* A reading journal -- it would be nice to, at minimum, keep a list of what I read.

A cookbook/cooking journal is another option, but the way I cook, it'd be tempting to bring the book into the kitchen with me, and then I'd inevitably douse it in soy sauce or something.

*thinks*

If I start one of these and actually keep it up, rather than getting two pages in and then abandoning, I reserve the right to buy myself another to start a different kind of journal. ;)

(jmpava pointed their stall out to me immediately, and he was right: it was just exactly my thing. In addition to the sculpted journals, there were quill pens, little boxes, and Jack-in-the-Boxes for sale, and the table was beautifully decorated with a few shells and little apothecary bottles and stones set in an unfinished-wood pigeonhole shelf, and a pretty basket of dried reeds and feathers. Not too many, not cluttered, but a very country herbwitch look. I'd totally decorate like that if I didn't have to compromise on decoration by dint of living with someone.)

Comments

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Yeah...there are so many beautiful journals, but I fill them so quickly! I still haven't found a good use for them. I find it so much faster to type everything-- quotes, updates, etc. I tried to keep a journal like that for ideas, but even that didn't work because I spent more time fiddling with the journal than recording the idea. Good luck finding something to do with the beautiful thing. Let me know if you find something that works.

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

A commonplace book can be not only quotations but anything written by others that you'd care to remember, including poems and folktales. And expanding on the idea a bit by adding books read, especially if you add brief capsule reviews ("SF boy-meets-girl, except boy is chef and girl is a thinking vegetable. Good idea, bad execution, worse soup.") Think of it as external memory storage for odds-and-ends.

...dunno about dream, garden, or cooking journal; I have no experience with the first, and the last two strike me as being a bit messy for the nice cover.

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

* A reading journal -- it would be nice to, at minimum, keep a list of what I read.
I kept one for awhile but haven't found it very useful. Much more helpful to me has been open source software, I used Alexandria first, and I'm using Telco now. (Telco needs a bit more explaining and fidgeting to be a book database, but once you have it's really good.)

So if you'd want to ever look up, say, what your favorite historical books are, or what that one book with the tennis controversy was, a database is fantastic.