I journal like a lovelorn kid in middle school. And I've been keeping one almost since I was a lovelorn kid in middle school. My senior year of high school, I met a girl. I started writing poems about her on receipts, handbills, and other various scraps of paper. My writing about her was so prolific, I decided to start keeping it all in a notebook. I've been keeping such a notebook ever since. Around the same time, I started keeping a day-to-day journal as an extension of the poems. I've kept some form of both off and on ever since.
For me, journals are like asides that begin and never end, parentheticals or paratexts, running on in the margins of other projects. Though the writing and thinking there ends up in other pieces that are crafted for consumption, the content of the journals themselves is for me only. Mine are full of drawings, diagrams, lists, and quotes from dreams, friends, films, and books.
In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Walter Benjamin, discovering Paul Virilio, and the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I'd read what. So, I started a research journal. I've kept three different analog journals ever since.
For the past year, I've been keeping a digital one. I've always struggled with free writing, but I still try it every once in a while. Last November 17th, I opened up a Word file and tried it again. My typed-up thoughts quickly turned to the projects I was working on, and a daily digital log was born. There is weirdly very little overlap between this log and my regular daily journal. The same thing happened with the journal I kept to document my progress while writing my dissertation. Different states of mind, i suppose. One year later, I'm going back through my digital year: 99 pages, 31,019 words.
11/17/2020:
Tentative BIG Goals:
· “Real” job next fall.
· Place The Medium Picture.
· Write a script for something.
· Finish and place short stories.
· Finish Escape Philosophy.
The very first thing in the file is a to-do list of big projects. A year later, a few of these have been crossed off, but the biggest ones remain undone: I am still unemployed and my media theory book is still homeless. I have finished and placed several short stories (one, "Hayseed, Inc.," is coming out soon in this anthology from Cinnabar Moth), I wrote a script based on my short story "Drawn & Courted" (it had a producer interested for a bit, but ultimately didn't come to anything), and I finished Escape Philosophy (it will be out next summer on punctum books).
11/20/2021:
Last night I read Brian Eno’s introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of A Year with Swollen Appendices. He made a list of the words that have emerged since he wrote that book in 1995. His commentary on the list is, as always, more interesting than the list itself.
I thought of that because I was just thinking of the concepts and ideas that seem to be leaking from The Medium Picture as it sits unpublished. Aside from just the desire to be published, that’s part of the impatience. Its impact diminishes as others say the same things. Though I do believe it has a unique approach, it would be better if bits of it weren’t coming out of other people’s mouths in the meantime.
There are lots of notes for and comments about my media-theory book-in-progress, The Medium Picture. There are lots of notes for that thing everywhere on my hard drive, in my notebooks, in my head... It makes sense that some of it would end up here. It's kind of my baby, and I've been shopping it for a while now. I've gotten so many rejections that I made a compilation of them:
05/21/2021:
Collected comments from rejection letters from publishers regarding The Medium Picture:
"This is nice… What a great proposal, and your writing is a real pleasure to read... I found myself agreeing with you on most things within these pages… It’s good! Your writing is engaging, and the way you push on the meaning of terms from “archivist” to “affordance” is thought-provoking… Your chapters have given us much to enjoy and admire… One can readily imagine a reader being able to understand the central issues of the philosophy of technology more quickly from your writing than from years of earnest toil among the monuments… I can see that this will be a terrific book... I do hope that you find the right home for this… Sounds very interesting to me… It seems to do what it says on the tin very deftly… an exciting proposal, well-written, well-argued, and timely, I should think that a press with an interest in media studies and/or alternative politics would be interested… I doubt you will have to wait very long for somebody else to offer you a contract… I do think that this manuscript deserves to be published… It’s an interesting book, clearly needed, and I look forward to seeing it out in the world… All of which is to say that I am very reluctantly going to pass up the opportunity to work with you on THE MEDIUM PICTURE, but thank you so much for the opportunity to consider it."
Pretty funny to see it all together like that.
It's not all whining about book projects (though a lot of it is). Sometimes things get reflectively diary-ish:
06/26/2021:
I was walking in the woods at home one day during this trip. Mom was asleep on the couch. Dad was at work. I had a flashback to my childhood. Mom pregnant with my sister. Dad at work or school or whatever. The only thing missing was my dog... I remember my childhood solitude fondly, and I owe a lot of who I am to those early hours alone.
Weird what comes out when you write everyday.
More whining:
07/08/2021:
Another weird morning in a holding pattern. I have things to work on, but I’m so hung up on responses that I feel paralyzed. This is easily my main problem as a writer.
My journals used to be almost exclusively this kind of thing. One of the therapeutic things about journaling regularly is that you can acknowledge and offload stuff like this and just get it out of your head. You can see the bad habits you didn't even know you had and take steps to change them. I am typically regarded as a very positive person. My partner calls me "chronically happy" and "annoyingly supportive." I think dumping all of the negativity into my journals is part of how I stay up.
Well, I thought there'd be more to share from these 100 pages, but that's the nature of journaling: Though some of it ends up feeding the main projects (I've already shared a lot of things that were seeded in this file and other various journals), it's written just for you, so it can be anything you need it to be. I recommend everyone at least try the practice for a while.
If you have any daily processes, journaling techniques, or other planning tactics you'd like to share, I'd love to hear them.
Hope you're well,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com