July was another fun month, which involved more travel. Jay and I went on my family’s annual camping trip, this time to the Lake District. We visited Keswick and swam in the river Eden, which was lovely, considering how incredibly hot it was. It was a fun trip, but I came back extremely sunburnt! 

As it was a busy month, some of my stationery use fell by the wayside a bit, so I’ve mostly just been filling out my regular notebooks. My stationery highlight of the month, however, was getting to visit UK Stationery Fest, which was such an amazing event! My poor bank card must have felt like it was on fire, as I bought so much lovely stuff. If you haven’t seen my haul post, check it out here!

Obviously my Stationery Fest buys have been some of my most used stationery the past week, but otherwise I’ve mostly just been trying to keep up with my everyday notebooks. I realised I haven’t done a recent post about my daily notebooks, so I thought I could use this post as an update.

Whilst I probably have as many as twenty active notebooks at any one time, there’s only four that I’m in daily, and those are:

My journal

I finished my previous journal at the end of June, and so in July I moved into this B5 Leuchtturm1917 notebook. Because this is so much bigger than any other journal I’ve used, I’ve just been writing a page a day, but I feel like that’s a comfortable amount! This is, as you’d expect, just a record of my day, and my thoughts and feelings.

My Line-A-Day Journal

This is, as it sounds, a journal where you write a line a day for five years. I usually just write a brief paragraph about the events of the day, and now I’m in my fourth year, it’s so interesting to look back at what I had been doing on the same day in previous years. My life was actually really different back in 2023 when I started it, so the older entries are especially interesting! 

My Hobonichi A6 HON

I don’t use this as a planner: instead it’s a daily gratitude journal. I find I can be quite negative in my regular journal, so I try to stay a bit more positive by writing three good things that happened each day in here. 

Meeplus Slimpad

This is the most recent addition to my daily line-up, as I only started this in late June. But I’ve been using this Meeplus Slimpad as an ‘idea a day’ journal, where I try to come up with one idea for a short story, poem, novel, essay or blog post and write it in here. I’ve found this to be a good exercise, I just need to get back on track with my writing, so I can actually use some of these ideas!

Which brings me onto my July personal curriculum update…

Personal Curriculum Update

In July I decided to do a much more reduced Personal Curriculum to try and focus more on my writing project…and subsequently did absolutely no fiction writing at all! That was a bit disappointing, but I did manage to do some plotting of my novel project, and some research on some topics relevant to the story.

Otherwise I was reasonably successful on my goals. I completed my research project on Jane Austen, and finally got around to reading her novel Persuasion, which I loved. I think it might be my favourite of the four Jane Austen novels I’ve read! 

I also watched the fifth of Brandon Sanderson’s writing lectures on Youtube, and started listening to the audiobook of The Fantasy Fiction Formula by Deborah Chester, although I still have quite a way to go! 

In addition, I finished my cross stitch project too: the album cover for Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance. It was fairly simple, with just two colours, but I’m really happy with how it came out, and how it looks now I’ve framed it. Oddly, I finished this in the middle of a power cut, holding my phone with the torch on under my chin! I only had a few lines of stitches left, and I wasn’t going to let a bit of darkness stop me! 

Next month I’m again doing a smaller curriculum in the hopes I’ll get to my writing. I should have a quieter month this month, and I’ve no travel planned, so I’m hopeful! 

My goals for the month are:

• To do a research project on commonplacing
• To read the essay On Keeping A Notebook by Joan Didion
• To watch the sixth Brandon Sanderson writing lecture
• To continue (and hopefully finish) The Fantasy Fiction Formula by Deborah Chester
• To complete a cross stitch project (I haven’t decided which one yet!)

As you can see, a couple of my goals are actually stationery related, which should be interesting! I’ve been commonplacing for a while, but want to learn more about it and its origins. I did read The Notebook: A History of Thinking On Paper by Roland Allen, which was really interesting, but I’d like to delve a bit deeper into commonplacing specifically.

So how was your July? What have been your stationery favourites of the month?