The Phenomenon of Bullet Journaling

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bullet journal, doug lane, livescribe, modern stationer, ryder carroll

How many of you keep a Bullet Journal? I don’t currently but the concept appeals to me. I first heard about Bullet Journaling on Youtube; can’t remember which of the many journalers I follow mentioned it. I just did a search on Youtube for “bullet journal” and it returned over 38,000 videos. And if you google the same you get over 34,000,000 hits. Quite the phenomenon.

It seems that Bullet Journaling is the brainchild of Ryder Carroll, and he has an excellent website describing his system. I’m not going to repeat it here, you can visit his website or Youtube or the millions of other blog posts about it. What I like about the system is the index, which I sometimes long for in my many journals, and the flexibility of the system, where some days you can write five pages and other days nothing at all. And it still all works.

Livescribe published an interview with Ryder Carroll in April of this year in which he discusses the system and the feedback he’s received. His system has had an especially positive effect on persons with learning disabilities and psychological disorders. At the heart, people respond to the method or they don’t; and he’s always open to people modifying his system to suit their unique needs.

At the end of the day, the big thing about the Bullet Journal is that it’s a series of methods so if a method doesn’t work for people, then I always advise not to use them. If they do work for them, great. And if there’s something they need the book to do, that it doesn’t, then they should go ahead and invent it. – Ryder Carroll

Doug Lane at Modern Stationer wrote a great article on how he learned to love paper again through this system.

…I find sitting down with my pen and notebook very relaxing. When I combine it with some music and perhaps even a Guinness, it is even better. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like me getting my shit together. – Doug Lane

I would love to hear from you how you use this system, if you do, or if, like me, you would like to and are thinking about starting yet another journal to organize thoughts and dreams and tasks. Whatever system you use, have fun journaling the night away.

Letters Live

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caitlin moran, guardian, letterslive.co.uk, matt berry, russell brand, shaun usher, simon garfield, stephen fry, the reading agency

Some videos for you to watch tonight. I recently stumbled upon Letters Live, a charity event put on by Canongate Books, to aid The Reading Agency in Britain. The event brings together high profile performers reading out “correspondence deserving of a wider audience.” They celebrate the power of a letter in a remarkable and worthwhile way. They also want to highlight two of their titles: Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, compiled by Shaun Usher, and To the Letter: A Journey Through a Vanishing World, by Simon Garfield. Both are available on Amazon.

Check out this year’s performers (including Caitlin Moran and Matt Berry): http://www.canongate.tv/discover/letterslive/ They are all worth watching.

Always remember that, nine times out of ten, you are not having a nervous breakdown. You just need a cup of tea and a biscuit. You would be amazed how easily and repeatedly you can confuse the two. Get a big biscuit tin.

And for some other video bits from Stephen Fry and Russell Brand on letter writing, check out this Guardian link.

The Fading Art

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handwriting, incowrimo, letter writers alliance, letters, new york times, postcrossing

Loved this article by Catherine Field in the New York Times. I share the author’s fears of what this generation’s legacy will be. Handwriting is no longer taught in schools. Young people claim they cannot read cursive. So I share the fears but I’m also optimistic. With websites such as Letter Writing Alliance, InCoWriMo and PostCrossing more and more people are turning to “old-fashioned” methods of communicating. I searched for “penpals” on Google and over 1.5 million results were returned.

A good handwritten letter is a creative act, and not just because it is a visual and tactile pleasure. It is a deliberate act of exposure, a form of vulnerability, because handwriting opens a window on the soul in a way that cyber communication can never do. You savor their arrival and later take care to place them in a box for safe keeping.

Our souls crave human connections, not wifi connections. I have faith in humans so handwriting will be around long after I’m gone. At least I hope so.

Paint If Empty or Tired

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brainpickings.org, handwriting, joan didion, journal, maria popova, mary gordon, new york times, notebooks, writers, writing

I started out tonight with an entirely different post in mind. Last week I received a notebook at work as a token of appreciation for Administrative Assistants Day. I am not what you might think of as an Administrative Assistant; I frequently refer to myself as an editor and that is how I am known in my group at work. My official title is Report Production Coordinator which involves quite a bit of word processing. Anyway however you want to describe it we editors were invited to join in on the Administrative Assistants Day fun, with a lunch and the presenting of a present; the afore-mentioned notebook. This is the fifth notebook I have received while working for my company; the others were presented as thank-yous or gifts for something or other. So I wanted to show you pictures of these notebooks but then I realized I forgot one of them at work (I actually do use one or two of them, at work). So that’s a post for another day.

In my despair at it being almost bedtime and my topic thwarted, I started reading this post from brainpickings.org. called Famous Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers. That was over an hour ago. So many great jumping off points in this article: Mary Gordon on the Joy of Notebooks and How Writing By Hand Catalyzes Creativity (omg was there ever a more perfect article for me?!?), Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook, and The Daily Routines of Famous Writers, just to name a few. This hopscotching through articles could go on for some time. I want to write everything down in my journal but that would take weeks. Months maybe. And my apologies if I’ve already touched on some of these articles previously on here. There are over 600 posts now and I find my memory failing. I seem to recognize certain quotes but not others. So be indulgent with me if I repeat myself.

I hope you have as much fun as I did reading these amazing and inspiring articles. And then go write in your journal and just see what comes. You’ll be happily surprised, I guarantee it.

[T]he point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. – Joan Didion

 

 

Kristen Stewart Pen Collector?

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tibaldi

Apparently this happened this time last year but I only heard about it recently: Robert Pattinson bought Kristen Stewart a $46,000 Bentley Crewe pen by Tibaldi for her birthday last year, when they were still together. I’ve googled and there are dozens of news reports about it, all saying that Stewart is an “avid collector” with a “substantial collection.” Who knew? Makes her more interesting to me that’s for sure. Him too actually.

Click here for some great pics of the pen. Excellent taste Robert!

Saying Thank You

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letters, new york times, notes, stationery, writing

Loved this article on thank-you notes. I remember looking forward to writing my thank-you notes for my wedding, eight years ago now. Last week I wrote a thank-you note to a local hotel for hosting my work colleagues and myself at a wonderful afternoon tea. And just this past Saturday I wrote a thank-you note to the staff of a local restaurant, who found my cell phone when I forgot it at one of their tables. Saying thank you is important. Writing it is a lasting sentiment that people will remember.

Was the Author Texting While Writing?

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grammar, punctuation, spelling, telegraph

I had to laugh when I read this article from The Telegraph entitled Texting is fostering bad grammar and spelling, researchers claim. Apparently the notion does not apply to teenagers exclusively, although I do not know the age of the writer of this piece. But I count at least three glaring spelling/grammar mistakes in the article, which is kind of ironic considering the subject. 

“Includes” is spelled wrong in the second paragraph. And the sentence just sort of ends. Not even a period. Sigh. Wonderful editing there, no?

Finally in the seventh sentence (I’m no longer calling them paragraphs because that just gives them more importance than they deserve) the use of the singular “text” is annoying; it’s either “texts” or “text messages”.

And there are probably more that I’m just not seeing. What has happened to spell check as a final step before publishing?

P.S. If you find any grammar or spelling mistakes in this post or indeed any of my posts please let me know. There are still people like me who care about things like that.  🙂

Just Because

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brainpickings.org, drew hoolhorst, george orwell, maria popova, medium.com

Okay so a couple of really great sites to share with you tonight.

Why you should is an offshoot of Medium.com, which is a collection of essays pertinent to modern life. I like the fact that they tell you how long a read each one is. I loved Why you should write by Drew Hoolhorst and will be copying the entire thing into my journal tonight. I hope you enjoy the site as much as I have.

… it should be enough to know that when you write something, anything, it’s like a lottery ticket. Someone could read it and could laugh uncontrollably for the best of reasons. Someone could read it and become violently angry at your view on something (or your “non-view” for that matter). Someone could read it and feel absolutely nothing.

And any one of those things is spectacular.

And then we come to Brain Pickings. This is a website that offers a weekly digest of great articles. And they recently published an article called Why I Write: George Orwell’s Four Universal Motives of Writing and Creativity by Maria Popova. Now I have read the original Orwell essay years ago but I still found this article interesting, especially because the amount of great info in the first paragraph alone will keep me copying into my journal for a week!

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

 

Forged Autographs and Stephen King

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autographs, handwriting, letters, stephen king, writers

I was reading this article on Tiger Pens and I love the line: Who says writing by hand is worthless? Who indeed. Those autograph scams can be nasty. I have a card that appears to be signed by Stephen King. A friend of mine picked up a copy of Desperation at a free book exchange for me; he knew I liked Stephen King but had no idea the card was inside.

I looked up his autograph and currently (if it’s real) it could be worth $100. He’s one of my fave authors and I just love having it in my collection.

It’s obviously machine typed, and I like how he capitalized the titles of his works. Christine was indeed published in 1983; April 29th to be exact. And The Talisman was published on Nov 8th of the following year. So the timeline fits.

I imagine him walking to the mailbox and dropping this off on a wintry Maine New Year’s Eve. Although I guess by 1982 he might have had an assistant to do stuff like that for him. Even if it turns out to be a fake signature I consider this a treasure. I was 12 in 1982; I was not living in Calgary then and do not know Christine Schippling. I wonder if she remembers receiving this in the mail – how thrilling for her to think that Stephen King just finished writing a book that shared her name!

Margaret Atwood’s Tribute to George Orwell

When reading this essay on George Orwell by Margaret Atwood in the Guardian, I was struck at how similar my experience was to hers, although I was not as young as Margaret when I discovered Animal Farm and 1984. But as a teenager I was still angered by the injustice of those books and inspired by such incredible writing.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

One of the best opening lines ever! And if you want to read more great opening lines, do so here.

If you haven’t read Orwell yet, as a writer and a human being you should.