Biographers--ha. Right.
Currently, I actually keep a few different notebooks I guess you could call journals. One (generally a smaller one, and the one recently up for replacement as another was filled) I use for recording mostly facts and events. For example, yesterday's entry would look something like this: "Daylight Saving Time--ugh. 'Slept in' until about seven. Cold when I got up--30-ish. Spent the morning continuing to obsess about guitar. Working on an arrangement of "Star of the County Down," hopefully ready to record next weekend--making videos may help me w/ performance anxiety, so I'm going to start doing that regularly. Went to 11:30AM Mass, then to Jay's Farmstand for a boatload of vegetables. Watching that old video of myself yesterday reminded me how out of shape I've gotten, especially in the last six months, and it's time to work on that. M called and talked for awhile, mostly about..." Etc.
The other notebook, I use for morning pages, exploring ideas, and whining. For example, yesterday's entry in there could look something like this: "Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Saving Time. I hate it. It's so stoooopid. From what I understand, it was originally done for farmers--as if yanking an hour from the beginning of the day and stapling it to the end actually makes the day longer, and as if they wouldn't just work with the light without caring about the time. The critters were happy to be fed an hour earlier, but man..." Etc.
The first type of notebooks get filed away for reference--it's kind of fun to check what I did a year ago today, for example, or read over notes from a trip. My other notebook often yields blogging ideas or story seeds, but once those are separated out, the rest is really so much chaff. I've taken to just recycling them.
It hasn't always been this way. I used to combine everything in one journal: events, dreams, rants and whines and wonderings. I do refer back to those at times, but having to comb through a zillion pages of what-worried-me-most-just-then in order to find one small note about my brother officially announcing they were expecting their second child...it gets old.
And frankly, those older journals make me a little nervous, just because they get awfully soul-baring at times, and I'm not sure I want anyone poking through them, now or later. I've thought about just junking them...but it *is* nice to have a record of when things happened, and at least some of my thoughts at the time. I toy with the idea of going back through and parsing out facts where I can, writing those down in another notebook, but I haven't yet made a project of it.
I'm not sure my current method will be the one for the ages, but it's working for the time being. Bonus: excuses to have more notebooks going at once!
Part 2 will discuss how I deal with keeping a journal when I'm too busy to keep a journal, and why this means I'm allowed to have yet another notebook.
