Since I started a new diary yesterday, I figured it'd be a good time to talk about the notebooks I currently use.
From bottom to top, there's my scrapbook, my recipe book, my dream journal, my commonplace book, my diary, and my ideas notebook. I'll talk about them from oldest to newest.
ft. someone's phone number(?) that’s been scribbled on the cover for some reason
Battered and battle-weary. My first bookbinding project, from all the way back in high school. It used to have a cover, once upon a time. A lot of recipes cut out from magazines and food packaging that I never have and never will use, a lot of recipes written down by hand that I make at least once a month, this has been my trusty companion in the kitchen for many years(and hopefully for many more to come). I was gonna say something to the effect of hoping it gets passed down somehow but it's frankly unusable unless you know both English and Portuguese and understand what on earth I'm referencing when I write down “like that thing from Kitchen Princess” or “don't forget what Vanilla said in Yumeiro Patissiere” and so on
Mr electric kill him
I've had this one since I was 17. It's an A5 cheap school notebook that I bought at a store near my house and covered with this green velvet paper, because of the green-velvet-covered notebooks the characters in The Story Girl used as dream journals. I don't often remember my dreams so it hasn't seen that much use over the years. The paper is very flimsy and can't handle fountain pen ink (honestly, it can barely handle a ballpoint pen), so I write in it with a 2B pencil.
the cover’s all uneven but I'm still inordinately proud of this one
A scrapbook more in the Victorian sense of the word. I guess you could call it a gluebook? It's my second bookbinding project, also from when I was 17. The theme I decided on back then was printing out a poem and decorating the page around it, though over the years there's been pages where I just arrange and glue pictures together for the sake of it. My personal rule for it is that I can't print anything specifically to put in it other than the poems (though using defective pictures that my printer fucked up is fine), so all the collages are sourced from old textbooks, magazines, catalogs, food packaging, you name it. It forces me to think inside the box and use what I have, which is a lot of fun. I have to admit that I spend way more time cutting up magazines than I do gluing stuff down, which I should probably do something about eventually.
Old one on the left, current one on the right
My first commonplace book was one of three moleskines in a set I got from the trash and ripped off someone's physics notes out of before giving them a new life. The new one is a unicorn notebook that I had been using as my “ideas notebook” since I was 16 that I repurposed (and covered in green velvet paper that I still had leftover from all those years ago). The paper isn't that fountain-pen friendly but neither was the moleskine, and it's better than nothing. There's quotes from books, interviews, movies, webnovels, scientific articles, eroge, dictionaries—anything and everything that catches my fancy. In a way, it's a second journal—the entries aren't dated, but there's a record that in the past, I wrote down a quote about a certain theme and that made me remember another, and then another, then another…
In my high school years unicorns were as inescapable as capybaras are today.
Got it from my mom when I was 16, along with what would become my commonplace book. This one spent most of its life lost inside my closet—I have no memory of it, but it was apparently my “poetry notebook”. I needed a new “ideas notebook" so I unceremoniously ripped out teenage Winter’s forgotten unfinished wuxia epic and did my best to believe this notebook wasn't forever cursed. Inside it are mostly unreadable thoughts that eventually become what little reviews you can read on this site, plus to-do lists I always forget to cross things out of. It's my only notebook that gets to be a complete mess.
I've been breezing through them lately.
I never really got into the habit of keeping a diary until I started writing in English. Maybe it's because this way I didn't need to fear my thoughts being read by anyone else, maybe it's just easier to talk about myself in a foreign language. It's probably the latter.
Back when I was a kid, my cousin would give me one of those cutesy diaries with like 50 pages and a flimsy lock and key every year. I mostly used the paper inside them to pass notes to my friends and draw, and whatever got used as a journal barely ever saw two lines in a day. Only one of those survived, and it's the one I'll be using next, both because it's super pretty and because the paper works crazy well with fountain pens.
I'll be living that #heiseiretro life for the next couple months
As you can see by the time the diaries used to last, I only became an assiduous writer about a year ago, a little after putting moleskine from the trash #1 to use, when I got my fountain pen. I don't make a point of writing everyday, but I always regret it when I don't. My memory is really bad, and having a record that every day I saw, felt, thought something has been very helpful. Ever since I got back into journaling, I've also been making an effort to keep my entries less negative, since it'd be a pain to read back on them otherwise.
Before I found the unused childhood diary, my plans for my next journal were these offbrand red notebooks that I got in a set of two online after seeing some reviews from fountain pen users who had good results with the paper. I picked red because of The Chrono Jotter(though I couldn’t bring myself to spend money on a bottle of red ink to use in it). Right now I'm actually getting a bit of buyer's regret and wondering if I shouldn't have gone for a baby pink cover to put precure stickers on...
On the two red moleskines I didn't go a page without using stickers, on the small ones I used none, and the pages in this new old one are so cute that I (probably) won't need any stickers either way. It's nice because I've realized that if I do use stickers, I have no motivation to work on this website, because all my creative juices are going into making the pages look pretty (which is really fun!), but as soon as I change to a text-only format, my urge to put stickers everywhere gets channelled back to here. Maybe if I go back to using stickers, I'll stop retheming the index page every couple weeks...as you see, it's hard to strike a good balance (ᵕ—ᴗ—)
Other than these, I have tens of A4-size spiral notebooks left over from my high school career. I’m actually a real cheapskate, so I ripped out the pages that had writing on them and kept using them for college, but that didn't put much of a dent in the pile—which sucks, because I hate writing on those things. Now that I only write on notebooks I like (even if I had to rip out a stranger's homework from them first), just thinking about how ugly and unwieldy they are makes me a bit mad. For some people, just writing on whatever they have around works, but I am not one of them (^～^;)ゞ
Anyways, this is it! Taking pictures of all of them made me realize how boring most of the covers are. Maybe I have a thing for solid colors...