Welcome to Litsy!

I‘m back into my massive journal readthrough project, and I‘ve hit the part where I was obsessed with accurate book-to-screen adaptations. (A 6-page rant about THE BLACK CAULDRON preceded this paragraph.) It‘s something I‘ve thought about a lot lately because my opinion has totally changed. These days, I get way more excited about adaptations that switch stuff up but still preserve the source material‘s feel.

Journal update: I‘m at volume twenty-four in my read-through. Volumes eleven through twenty met the True Death today.

In lieu of a photo of burning notebooks, here‘re two poems 16-Year-Old me wrote. As you can see, I was a young genius deeply inspired by Great Literature and maybe also breasts.

Journal update: I‘ve now read through twenty volumes, the first ten of which have left this world. (I took photos of them on fire, too, but I chose a pre-flame shot for this post because I didn‘t want to shock anyone.)

It feels good. It feels right. Tomorrow I‘ll gather the ashes and put them in a jar, because that‘s what you do with sand mandalas and I figure a journal mandala deserves the same respect.

Journal update: I pulled ‘em all out of their trunk and put ‘em in order. Turns out, I wrote 132 volumes over 25 years. Not too bad.

So far as the read-through goes, I‘m at Volume 14 and Past Me has finally started to develop as a person. Hurray! Those volumes where I was extremely fourteen years old were real eye-rollers, lemme tell you.

Vol 14‘s also full of milestones. I finished drafting my first novel! I discovered Anne Rice! I ate salmon!

I kept a daily journal for 25 years. I‘ve now been journal-free and loving it for six months—and, to be perfectly honest, I don‘t want the dozens of filled notebooks any more than I want to continue the journal-keeping practice.

So I‘ve decided they‘re my 25-year mandala. I‘ll look through them, note down any really important stuff, and have myself a bonfire. Vol 1 had a fair few Moments, but Vol 2? Not so much. I expect that trend to continue.

I started keeping a journal on January 1, 1997. I‘ve written in it every damned day since then, aside from maybe four or five days when I forgot. As of tonight, I‘ve filled 23,000 total pages. And on December 31, 2021, I‘m gonna quit.

25 years is long enough to do a thing, I think. I‘m glad I hit a sorta significant milestone on the way out, but y‘all? It‘s time.

(Seriously, do you KNOW how much space all those frickin notebooks take up?)

Note to self, but do feel free to take it and pass it on as needed 💖