COVER OF MANY COLORS

When I first began journaling, I wasn't able to afford anything fancy to write in. Maybe it was a good thing. I have boxes and shelves filled with journals now--most done on 3-ring notebook paper, divided by months and, at the end of each six-months or a year (depending on how creative I was), bound into hard-covers via metal fasteners.

I have purchased small journals and managed to fill them but I tend to do my favorite work on loose-leaf paper, or those spiral notebooks purchased at back-to-school sales. The two fancy ones I have are decorating bookshelves with not a word written in them. I guess they're too intimidating.

Some people use a blog as their only journal. I don't think I'm ready to give up my paper journals just yet. Maybe it's also because I'm not ready to bare my soul with the world. That sounds rather presumptious, doesn't it? Like everyone is going to read my blog. Yeah, right! "Barb's Write Tree" isn't exactly the most exciting title, is it? Well, I did play around with the title "If (or When) Pigs Could Fly" but came to the conclusion that that was a little too out there.

I also name my journals when bound into the hard covers. Titles like: Snapshots, Promises, Stop the World and Let Me Off, Reflections. And I always add the dates included in the journal so that at a glance I can have some idea of what may be included. However, when I go back 15 years and read the old ones, I am not too concerned with the date. I want to know where my thoughts were then, what characters sketches I might have included; I find lots of first lines and titles for essays, stories or books.I have been known to find a completed piece right there in those journals. And several of them have been published.

I believe that journals should show our personality too. So if you read my journals, and maybe some of these blogs, you will hear my Southern voice and figure out that I am still a small-town Southern girl at heart. We gals are raised with manners; we should be soft-spoken, overly polite and sweet-tempered if what our mama's taught us has sunk in. A lot of that rubbed off but we also have a little touch of wildness about us too.

Have you ever heard one of us root for the Texas Longhorns or scream above the roar of engines at a Nascar race? We hope you will ignore the slight misstep in our language when we find our man cheatin' on us, or when we hit a six-point buck at midnight on a lonely road our husband told us not to travel on our way home from girls-night-out.

I do promise I will use some decorum in this blog here. Although Mama can no longer hear, or read me, I still owe her memory the respect of not being too "over the top." If I can't always follow the straight and narrow with my writing, I'll just save it for my purple spiral-notebook.

TIP: To become a writer, takes practice. All the things we write, including blogs and paper journals, gives us practice. Practice.

PROMPT: Write an essay, blog, or story beginning--"Abandon all Hope" was etched in the glass above the door.