Just got it, connie! I'll read it now.

Fuck the person who tells me what to feel. But I am curious about what they feel.

This, and I also want to know *why* they feel what they feel. I have a hard time explaining my opinions sometimes; I read criticism in part to enhance the vocabulary of my mind.

As for what to write in ... I have a composition book that I'm using to do writing exercises, and I think it frees my brain a little. Though of course, if I ever do anything worth keeping in there, I'll have to retype it (I can't handwrite more than a page or three before my hand starts to kill me), and that's never fun.

I like white, college-ruled legal pads. I get weird about pretty little journals, too, and I always try to make them for something specific, like only for ideas about one particular project, but it never works and I wind up writing grocery lists and odd snatches of other things, too.

I bought one for my dh, and each of my kids this Christmas, but as a gift with a twist. I wrote on the first page that it was a Give Back Book. They had to give it back to me, as soon as they read page one. Throughout the year, I will use the journals to write to or about each of them. Next Christmas, they'll get what I've written as a present.

And I thunked it up, all by myself.

(Now let's just see if I do it.)

t not really here, since I'm copyediting like a good girl

Throughout the year, I will use the journals to write to or about each of them.

I love this idea! When Jake was a baby, I started a Mother's Day journal, where every Mother's Day I was going to write about him, and being a mom, and what we'd learned or done or laughed about together.

It didn't last long. Then I thought I would do the same on each of the kids' birthdays. That didn't work out so well, either. Which was kind of why I decided to do the New Year's summary, for lack of a better word, about the family as a whole, but it's not very personal.

I resolve to try this again! Birthday books for each of the kids! (If you do yours, I'll do mine...)

t /not really here, since I'm copyediting like a good girl

that's a great idea, Cindy.

Connie, mine got here as a plain text attachment consisting of a few odd heiroglyphic squiggles, and nothing else. Wanna read, damn it.

No notebooks for me. I'm a computer writer, the same way I used to be a typewriter writer. I'll make notes in passing, or if I'm away from the computer, research notes and just sensations that will find their way in to the book eventually, but not prose.

These days, even if I did write that way, my ms-ridden wrists wouldn't allow it. Typing's just way easier and I write very quickly, a state of work for which the speed of the computer is a humongous plus.

Thanks, erika.

I resolve to try this again! Birthday books for each of the kids! (If you do yours, I'll do mine...)

I was going to be more structured about it, like Scott on Mondays, Ben on Tuesdays, etc., but then I knew it would feel like a chore. I do write about them each from time to time though, and think to write more, but sometimes, the subjects are too personal to them to post on the web. So, I figured now, I have a place to put it. Let's hope next Dec. 24, I'm not trawling through my own LJ, looking for something to desperately copy into the journals. *g*

The wife's speed awes me, as I've written many times, the inner Munchkin wants me to say I uh, make it up in stamina. But in every other way, Deb is me here. I sometimes miss the productive-sounding clicking of typewriters, too.

I have trouble handwriting a grocery list, much less anything longer. I've been writing directly on a keyboard since I was 16, which makes it upwards of 30 years now. I can't be creative writing by hand, because I practically have to think about making every letter, unless I'm making the messy, cryptic notes I take during interviews for articles. If I'm interviewing over the phone, I take the notes on the keyboard. I hated handwriting when I was a kid, and the last D I made was when they still graded handwriting. The day my parents gave me a typewriter was a great day.

When I get sludged up on the computer, I take a notebook and a pen or two to B&N cafe, open it up and put pen to paper and just write. It may be a snatch of dream I recall, the pattern in the carpet, descriptions of passersby, workers, shoppers, anything to get the pen moving across the paper. For as long as I can do it, physically. I may get up and walk around the store, have a cup of coffee, page through a magazine or two, and then go back and try it again.

Sometimes my desk and the computer loom, and are too importunate and demanding. A notebook, a pen, and a change of scene can help. Sometimes.

"Special notebooks" are rarely "journals" or "blank books." I bought several a few years ago by Pen-Tab, called "Pro". They're double-spiral bound come in half-size and standard notebook size, and they have paper that's wide-ruled, and heavy enough that fountain pen ink won't leak through.

Mostly what I use now are legal pads with a heavier-weight paper. I like pastels with shadow lines, but as long as the paper is heavyweight enough, I'm good.

I have a whole shelf of filled journals: blank books, spiral notebooks, and looseleaf paper I hand bound. It covers about ten years. The last notebook I never finished, and the last entry was in 2001. I've kept diaries and notebooks for periods all through my life. No doubt I'll take it up again sometime. I've kept them because it helps me to pull a volume at random, read through parts of it, and identify traits I've managed to either encourage, or fail to squash. Journaling was a tool for me, therapy, very useful. I just don't feel it's as useful at this point in my life.