Working On: new year, new notebook

Hi friends. I hope that you are, like me, having a lovely and peaceful in-between-Christmas-and-New-Year-season, a time of year that I have seen the Brits calling “Twixtmas” - a little pause between celebrations and before the big change of tipping over into a whole new year.

I like the opportunities for reflection and imagination that this season provides, as you look back on the year just past and forward to the new year ahead. For some reason I often frame these as questions of identity: who was I last year? Who will I be next year? But I also try to be non-judgmental when I do this; after all, we’re supposed to be learning lessons here, not incriminating ourselves.

how I’ve spent most of my free time lately: curled up somewhere with my knitting

Last year a lot of people on social media seemed to eschew resolutions in favor of In/Out lists for the upcoming year. Even though I’m a pretty goal-oriented person, I have never found New Year’s Resolutions to be very effective or, to be honest, inspiring or pleasant to participate in, but I like the idea of setting a kind of personal trend for the year ahead - more of this, less of that.

Having not put much thought into this so far, my list at the moment consists of “more soups, more baths, more swimming”. But I have a few days yet to come up with more ideas.

One thing I definitely want to do in 2025 is to continue with my morning pages. You may remember that for 2024, I decided to write on plain printer paper that I would then bind into a book at the end of the year (I wrote about it in this piece). I folded my signatures as needed, filling them up at my leisure, and I’ve now got just a couple of pages left to write. Then I’ll stitch everything up into a book and put it on my shelf and probably never look at it again.

Obviously I have yet to finish the book itself, but I liked this journaling method so much that I’ve already started preparing for next year. (As my good friend Sara pointed out, a nice feature of building the notebook as you go along is that you never feel the stress of potentially having too many or not enough pages. Also, there’s no beginning-of-notebook paralysis, because the notebook doesn’t exist yet!) One thing I thought would be fun to do is to design a little cover for each month, instead of just writing “Month 20__” and turning the page, as I did last time.

I’m really on the ball this year, so I’ve already drawn a cover for January. (And I actually have another one that I made a few weeks ago, which I think I’ll use for February.) The inspiration for this came from a picture of a vintage book that I found on Pinterest - it turns out, if you search “Art Nouveau book cover”, you get tons of really good results, and I highly recommend doing so.

I’ll report back when I actually finish sewing the 2024 book together, but I have a good feeling about it. I’m very excited about this new direction for the 2025 journal too, and will keep you updated with my covers for each month! I am curious to know if anyone else has tried this sort of “make the book as you go along” type of approach, and how you felt about it in the end. Virginia Woolf, it seems, experimented with writing her diary on loose pages that were bound into a book at the end of the year, but she didn’t really describe how she felt about it - at least not in the abridged version.

It feels important to stress as well that I am not a highly-skilled or even very-much-practiced bookbinder. I haven’t made a serious attempt at producing a hand-bound book since I was about 16, almost half my lifetime ago. For this notebook, I plan to stick to the basics and I’m optimistic that it will turn out reasonably well. (If you have any interest in simple bookbinding or in writing a similar style of un-bound diary, please do let me know - I may do a slightly more in-depth post about how I end up putting the book together.)

OK, that’s it from me for now - just wanted to check in briefly post-Christmas and share what I’ve been working on recently. I’ll be back at some point with my December and all-2024 reading wrap-up - talk to you soon!

Best,