Wednesday, April 30, 2008

thoughts wrestled to the page

earlier this month, i bought a beautiful fabric-covered binder in (yes, you guessed it) bookbinder's design. actually, i bought several. it's a disease with me, i know. but, the purpose of this particular binder was to hold printouts of my blog postings from this blog (there were others for the other blogs!). to bring them out of cyberspace and onto the page. i have already printed and put all of the earlier postings into the binder. and i decided that i would make a monthly ritual on the last day of the month of printing the postings and putting them into the beautiful binder. and today is the day!!


it's a very satisfying feeling in some strange way, holding that stack of my thoughts in my hand, punching holes along the side and inserting them into the beautiful binder, between dividers the color of the rainbow, on which i've stamped the months. thinking back on the hours i spent composing the words (and some of the ones where i didn't spend much time, but just dashed them off). rereading and tracking my state of mind somehow made tangible there on the page in ink.

when i'm writing, i'm often surprised at where it takes me, often it's not where i thought it would when i sat down at the keyboard. there are days when i wrestle my thoughts to the page and others where they simply flow out my fingers in some automatic, almost organic way. but, it's one thing to see them on the screen and quite another to line them up in my beautiful purple binder at the end of the month. i can highly recommend it, you should definitely give it a try.

have i mentioned that i adore the blogosphere?

6 comments:

Barb said...

What an absolutely wonderful idea to print your blog and save in a lovely binder. Do you print it in colour? How do you print it - entry by entry or do you just the whole thing. I tried to print a little but found that printed from newest to oldest, so in effect when I went through it was backwards. I felt it should have printed from the start. Email me at barb.takeda@gmail.com and give me some advice on how to do this. I think it is a marvelous idea for my children and grandchildren to have my blog in hardcopy for the future.

Jaime said...

Wooooaaaahhhhhh...this is weird.

Just yesterday, I was at a friend's house, and she said to me, "You should get a binder and print all your posts out so you have them in print form...just in case Blogger goes horribly wrong and deletes your entire blog. You wouldn't want to lose this."

I thought that was such a good idea, until I realised how much colour ink I would go through if I printed every post! Even the purple banner at the top of each page would take up too much ink.

Any suggestions on how to avoid this? Because I would really like to have it in print form too. It's the closest I will ever get to having a journal I think.

What a wonderful synchronicity that you posted this today!

julochka said...

jaime--if you click on the month so that all your blog entries from that month are there, it only prints the banner once and for me, that's the one picture that doesn't print..it prints the ones in the entries, but doesn't print my banner at all. i'm using an HP Photosmart color printer, printing on an ordinary setting, not a photo setting, on ordinary paper, but think it's worth it to use up my cartridges this way.. :-) it just does something for you to have the words in hand...i don't really know what it is, but it's wonderful!!!

it does print them in "reverse" order--from the end of the month to the beginning, but as i explained to barb in an email, that doesn't bother me, it's more true to the blog that way, since that's how they are there...

Phyllis Hunt McGowan said...

I've got all my work saved onto a text file as well as a word file and pdf as well :) I'm a stickler. Blogger is a free service so at any time they could disappear and lose everything that's been done and we wouldn't be able to complain much. That's both the beauty and drawback of a free service. Still, I'm being careful and have backed up everything on the computer several times.
I think, though, that a binder idea is excellent. It's nice to see your work in print, to be able to hold it. For me I was just glad to have been saving it for the last six months. One of these days I'll think about having a hard copy too.

Danielle said...

It has never occured to me to print my thoughts. I have close to six years of blogging that i have never printed.

I laughed when a fellow blogger mentioned at tea how her grand father mailed out his blog to the family...snail mail.

There is something very nice about having it in hand. To read a book you lived.

Tara said...

What a great idea! And your binder is so pretty. You are going to enjoy that for a long time, I can tell.