✨ The Return of the Bullet Journal

and how I'm keeping a reading notebook!

Hello and welcome to a special 2024, brand-spanky edition of Notebook Treasure!

✨Notebook Treasure✨ is a monthly email I do where I share little scraps and doodles from my notebooks, hard drive, and brain. And this month is special, as I’ve started some new notebook habits.

There’s a good few new subscribers to the newsletter since I took a break, and so to all of you I wanna say a big ‘n’ beefy HELLO, and tell you what goes on over here. We got something for everyone:

✨🌈 A Constellation, Monthly Schedule ✨🌈

• 1st week of month: creativity issue where I write about music & the artistic process (posts like Here Is My Bottom, and Inside the Studio)

• 2nd week: notebook treasure (you are reading it right now!)

• 3rd week: geology issue, because I have written an album on geology which is coming out this year. The geo issue is where I share my amateur geology thoughts and stories from the earth’s history which makes us feel less alone (think posts like Sedimentary, My Dear Watson, and Typical Forever?)

• 4th week: pop culture guest issue (like our Steely Dan Bumper Issue)

If this sounds like your kinda mug o’ mulch, then subscribe:

📚The Inevitable Return of the Bullet Journal

After my email last year on notebooks and social media: What Can A Notebook Do That Social Media Can’t?, I made the promise to myself that I would start and maintain a bullet journal for 2024. Honestly I think I’ve had a bullet-journal-shaped hole in my chest for a while now, and I feel a bit happier with it back in my life. It’s less about organisation and more about creating a beautiful landscape for my week to fall into.

Here is how I have been decorating my pages lately. A lot of bullet journal people buy stickers and to be honest, I am so bad at buying things online and being patient enough to wait for them in the mail that I normally just opt for second-hand books or magazines to decorate my pages. I had a few images I printed out recently and had just been hanging on to, so they go in too. Gotta use all the coloured pens and make it fancy schmancy.

In addition to the bullet journal, I have been keeping another journal which I’m really excited about…

📓 I am writing about my reading!

As a songwriter, you’ve always gotta be several steps ahead. So even though I am finishing up the mixing process for album number 1, I’m already thinking about what I’m gonna write for album number 2. You can read about the beginnings of these ideas in my last email, Taylor Swift Makes Me Wanna Write My Next Album.

So I am in a gathering phase for ideas. You always gotta be on the lookout for a good idea! They can be tricky critters but very useful once you wrangle them down. I’ve been enjoying reading so much lately, that I decided to start keeping a reading journal. Instead of just writing about what I read and when, I’ve also tried to pull out themes and motifs from the books. Turns out I have been reading a lot of stories with stories inside of them, recently.

So there you have it. I like to take an hour or two every Sunday to sit and do this, and when I finish a book, I get excited to crack the notebook open and make some ~observations~ and pretty pictures.

Join me in the comments for a chat! ↩︎

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📝 WEEKLY QUESTION FREE-FOR-ALL

1. Do you, or have you kept a bullet journal?

2. Do you keep a reading journal, or a reading tracker?

3. What’s the a book you’ve read recently that you loved?

4. What’s a book you’ve read recently that you HATED?

Oofy-doofy! Want some more Olivia?

• buy a ‘Gneiss Guy’ tote bag on my Bandcamp

• listen to my music on Spotify and add it to your playlists

• forward this newsletter to a friend!

• and if you haven’t already, subscribe:

Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶