(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

[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.