What I do when I finish a notebook

Start the next one, silly

Left: My summer diary / Right: my new fall diary

Hey y’all,

The common advice for when you finish writing a book is to start, immediately, on the next one. It’s good advice that I’ve never followed.

In my Read Like an Artist zine, I advise to “always have a book queued up for when you finish the current book you’re reading.” I find this advice easy to follow with smaller books, but near-impossible after finishing a tome like War and Peace. After finishing a book that big, I often have to flail around a bit, starting and quitting several books before I can settle into one. (One of the reasons I just went ahead and read Anna Karenina late in the summer was because I couldn’t find anything as absorbing as War and Peace to read. Turns out not even Tolstoy can beat Tolstoy!)

The one thing I’m very good at doing is starting a new diary the minute I finish the old one. Part of this is thanks to a variety of silly rituals.

The silliest thing I do is The Notebook Way Out. (It should be “The Notebook Weigh Out,” but the AI transcription for Instagram captions never gets “Weigh” right, and I like the unintentional pun — the weigh out is the way out!)

I weigh the notebook when it’s new — the way in — and then I weigh it again when it’s filled and note the weight accumulated. I started doing this as a joke on Instagram Reels and then kept doing it and then other people started doing it, too, which I find hilarious.

After the way out, I write the dates of the entries on the spine of the notebook with a Posca Paint Marker:

(People often ask me if I re-read my diaries — all the time! I actually keep them in 1-year and 5-year increments near my spot at the kitchen table, so I can read what I was doing one year ago and 5 years ago. Recently, I’ve been keeping my diary from 2017 nearby to see how I was feeling during this administration’s first term. “Not great, Bob!”)

When the spine is dry, I shelve the finished diary and grab an identical notebook from a sealed stack I purchase in bulk — chunky Zequenz flexible notebooks, not for any great reason other than they sent me a big box of free ones years ago and I just kept using them.

I get the new notebook ready to go for tomorrow morning. (I write my diary in the morning with a piece of toast and a cup of coffee before I get the kids to school.)

I pick one or two stickers from my stash and decorate the cover. I usually keep the decoration minimal in the beginning, adding stickers as I use up the notebook, but for some reason with this new notebook I just went crazy and stuck a bunch on there, front and back:

The next silly ritual is selecting a “guardian spirit” for the inside cover of the notebook — a picture of someone to sort of give the notebook their blessing, start a vibe. I’m a Gemini (remember, we’re getting silly, here) so I often pick two spirits to sort of set up a creative tension. For my summer notebook I picked a picture of Napoleon (I was reading War and Peace) and a picture of Michael Palin with his bicycle from a copy of The Idler:

For this current diary — spooky season! — I just grabbed a newspaper clipping of the Universal Monsters out of my drawer of collage materials:

These particular notebooks have one more shiny page on the other side of the front page that I can’t write on, so I usually make a collage there before my first entry — this one includes a comic strip by the great Ed Steed:

Finally, I have to get the inside back cover of the notebook ready. I stick a little self-adhesive library pocket in the back along with a checkout card that has the information about the start date and start weight:

I use my date stamp for the card and a few DIY self-inking stamps to put my information on the pocket.

When I’m done with all that, the notebook is ready to be filled. What do I fill it with? Here are some previous letters on the subject, but I’ll share some pages from my last diary, below.