My favorite habit.

A peek into my journals while I'm away.

I’m away this week at my favorite kidlit retreat, Kindling Words. For a few days I get to hang out with old friends, meet new ones and talk about books and draw pictures and it truly is the best. Since I will definitely be scribbling in my notebooks this weekend, I thought I’d share a bit about my journaling practice.

My journals/diaries/whatever you want to call them. Why do I write on the pages instead of the spines? No clue. But now it’s what I do.

I started journaling on a consistent-ish basis in late 2016. I think I was probably overwhelmed with life as a new(ish) mom who had just moved to a new city and needed somewhere to put all those feelings. My journals started out as “Morning Pages” ala Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and then morphed into writing and drawing as I started to develop a daily sketchbook habit along with my daily writing habit. At some point, probably around 2020, I split out my sketchbook from my journal and the journals became mostly morning pages-esque writing again.

Most parts of my life are extremely disorganized, but for some reason my sketchbooks are not. There is a color-coded system. Black for journals, green for couch sketchbooks, blue for book projects, yellow for classes, pink for life drawing, white for location drawing and brown for general studio/work stuff. Am I over the top? Probably, yes. But I like my system – and it makes it easier to narrow down where what I might be looking for is.

The middle notebooks have no stickers because this is a slide for a presentation and the title went in the middle. I am too lazy to redo this image, so for accuracy’s sake, just know, all of my notebooks are covered in stickers.

My journals are black, roughly 8 x 5” and are currently (although, I am feeling the urge to stray) Talens Art Creations sketchbooks – my favorite combination of cheap and decent paper for ink and watercolor – plus they come in a bunch of colors and sizes. I’ve also used Moleskine (too expensive, and the paper is not great), Handbook (ugh, people love these, but I hate the paper texture) and other random notebooks here and there. The Talens Art Creations sketchbooks have been with me the longest.

What my journal spreads look like when I am trying to be fancy.

While my journals have mostly been writing – ever since October, I’ve been trying something new. I got inspired by artists who do visual journaling and thought I’d give that a try. If you google visual journaling (or search on pinterest), you will be inundated with beautiful spreads that are planned out in advance. Sometimes, I attempt to do that (as above) but mostly it is just a lot of chicken scratch with drawings around it.

Some text blurred because, well, these are not usually for sharing.

I don’t usually have a lot of time to journal, I try to do it first thing in the morning, or if I’m still functional at night. So the drawings are not precious. They are quick, done without sketching first. They are there to illustrate a point, or to make me smile, and mostly to help me remember the trivial little details of life that I would otherwise forget.

Please tell me I am not the only one who has blown off work to read a book.

Or to record reactions to events that happen. I’m sure you can guess what day this was.

Visual journaling, which is to say, these little doodles in the margins of the record of my life, make me happy. Where I used to spiral in my thoughts doing morning pages and avoid journaling for days because I didn’t want to write about all the chaos swirling around in my head, visual journaling gives me a softer space to do that. I can write about the chaos, but then I draw something and it makes me smile or laugh and helps me stop spiraling.

According to the rest of this page, I did indeed have a productive day…never did change out of my pajamas though.

Visual journaling, instead of just dumping everything onto the page helps me focus on the positives instead of just the negatives. It’s a small change to the way I think about journaling, but for me it has made all the difference and I really love flipping back through the last few months in my journal and seeing what happened.

In case it is not clear from all the redacted text, both of my children eventually passed their white belt tests and life was good.

Journaling with pictures has made me more likely to journal every day and it’s been good practice for making this newsletter, which I also draw without sketching first, without too much planning.

An actual unblurred page of my journal so you can see what silly mundane things I write about most of the time.

Obviously I am a journaling fan and I think everyone should try it. Being able to look back on the last 9 years of my life in written form is incredibly revealing. Plus as a writer, it’s a lot of potential material to mine.

And, adding these little doodles to my journal is what convinced me that maybe, just maybe, I could make some comics, because if you squint your eyes a little bit and blur the edges, that’s kind of what I am doing every day in my journal anyway.

Hope you enjoyed this peek inside.

Til next week,