The Journal of My Journal

The various physical volumes of my journal
(or at least the ones I have tracked down)

If the word journal were to be defined based on my practice, the definition would be “a work of memoir for personal use characterized by suddenly breaking off in the midst of a notebook and then starting a new one.” I’ve used several notebooks for my journals, most of them end in blank pages.

I have used (at least) fifteen notebooks.[1] I started at fifteen and filled out (end-to-end) four composition books. I started a fifth, but I do know that I stopped making entries in it (at the moment, I am reasonably certain that this one is lost). That fifth volume, which had plenty of empty pages, was a harbinger for what was to come.[2]

I eventually started a sixth volume (and in the first entry, wrote about the lost three-and-a-half volumes). It’s a small volume, and I wrote on every page. By that point, I had been (intermittently) keeping a journal for a decade, and I had filled out five of the six volumes.

The next volume covers exactly nine sheets of paper. I didn’t like the paper. Clearly. Finally, I stuck a Post-It Note on the last page to show me where to pick up again. Then I bought a new notebook and used just three sheets. Oh, I must have really hated that one.

The ninth volume starts off with a comment on how much I love the paper. Yeah, that lasted for ninety-pages when I stopped writing in it. At that point, I abandoned paper journaling for a while and created one in HyperCard. Given that HyperCard saw its last update in 1998, you might not have heard of it. Maybe you could look it up on Wikipedia.[3]

I am not sure why I wrote my journal in HyperCard as opposed to a stack of text files in a folder or something. The single HyperCard stack (HyperCard files were called “stacks,” and they consisted of a variety of “pages”) did have the advantage of everything in one place, new entries were easily dated (I created a script that inserted the date when I created a new entry[4]), I was able to password protect the whole thing, and it was faster too. In other words, in 1990, I created a little electronic journal program in HyperCard.[5]

One of the downsides was that I could only work on my journal while sitting in front of my Macintosh SE/30. Not a very portable device. Despite its limitations, I used the HyperCard journal from 1990 to 2008. Not too shabby: eighteen years of sporadic journal writing in a single format, when I had kept a (also occasionally sporadic) journal for fourteen years prior to that. HyperCard went from computer to computer. As the application hadn’t been updated in a decade, it was showing its age.

Plus, even before I abandoned it completely, there were still moments of going back to paper. I have a few entries in one notebook from 1994 and and a few in a notebook from 1998, just a few pages each. I started a third in 2001, and when went to Italy, that supplanted the journal on my Mac. This twelfth volume (not counting a not counting a hard drive as volume[6]) got filled end-to-end.

I continued this with the thirteenth volume. Perhaps it was because both of these blank books were gifts. It wasn’t just my own money I was wasting, it was the generosity of a friend. I was obligated to fill out those pages. If that’s the case, then I made a tragic mistake in buying a beautiful leather-bound book in Italy, but that ends with just a few more than half the pages filled in.

Not bad!

And that’s when I went back to the computer. By this time, HyperCard was now inoperable. That tragic day when you upgrade your operating systems and a cherished piece of antique software no longer functions.

Earlier, I said that my my practice had been that the journal was for me and me alone, but in 2005 lots of people I knew were blogging on LiveJournal and it seemed like the thing to do. Sure, I couldn’t put things in there I didn’t want to share with other people, but it was an interesting experiment while it lasted.

In the end, I wanted to go back to things that were just for me, but I knew that I had done better when I was on something electronic (the HyperCard stack or the LiveJournal pages) than with scribbling in a notebook.

Let me be clear, I love the romance of taking a beautiful blank book, uncapping a fountain pen, and writing in my journal. I still look longingly at blank books when I see particularly nice ones available. I do ink fountain pens and write with them. I have not been all that interested in writing my journal with a stylus on a tablet. As I’ve gone though and transcribed old journal entries (an ongoing project) I’ve occasionally thought, “what did I write here?” Sometimes that has gone unanswered.[7] When it comes down to it, while the thought of lying in bed writing out your thoughts of the day sounds great, it’s actually a bit of a pain to write in bed.

Back to the laptop, so the obvious thing was to find if there was a Mac app for keeping a journal, and there was.

I wanted to like MacJournal, but I don’t. It just never sat with me. Sorry. Well, not really. I used it anyway, and when it came out for the iPad, I convinced myself that it would et me to write a journal on a more regular basis. Well, it’s a lovely sentiment, at least. Between March 2010 and September 2013, I have a total of 85 entries. Admittedly, in the past I’ve written journal entries that are nothing but a note that it’s been a month since my last journal entry.

In 2011, for reasons that totally escape me, I used a few pages of a Molskine notebook which had been resident in my camera bag for years to write out a few journal entries. No idea why.

Which brings us to the most successful iteration of the journal. After that, I downloaded DayOne, getting the iOS version on July 11, 2013 (I think Apple gave it away[8]) and then the desktop version on October 23. I won’t pretend it’s magic: it doesn’t make you write out an entry. It has made it easier. Instead of sporadic entries, I’m writing almost every day.[9]

I’ve been keeping a journal for forty-one years. Mostly sporadically. I’m delighted that I’ve found something that actually works for me. If you keep a journal, best of luck with it!

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1. Just writing these words makes me suspect I’ll stumble upon a forgotten volume. [After writing this, I found my journal for my trip to Italy in 2000, and had to revise the word thirteen to fourteen. After taking the pic and actually counting, I realized I had left one aside. Fifteen.]
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2. I have the vague memory that at one point I thought the fourth one was lost and that I had first three and the fifth. Or something. That said, I have a journal entry from 1992 in which I list it as the missing volume. (I have since begun to suspect that when I said, at the end of the fourth volume, that I'd start the fifth volume in the morning, I never did.)
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3. I did, to remind myself of some of the particulars.
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4. To dig down into it, I attached the script to a button, so I created new entries by hitting a button.
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5. I also created a cataloging system for my books in a different stack. I really should have gone on further from using HyperTalk, the programming language for HyperCard. Too late now.
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6. Even though it is a volume.
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7. Not that my typed journals are free of typos. [Note: in typing this, I hit the D key by mistake and wrote “typods.” Are “typods” typos made on iPads? As I said.]
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8. Thanks, Apple!
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9. Looking at the calendar view, I see October 2015 has only two entries. Thinking about it, that was the month I wanted to see if I could write four short stories. I managed it, but I did little else. Had I written entries they would have been “I worked all day on [name of story].”  ↩