A journal too many?

I have thoughts. I know, I know, what are the chances of that? Inspired by the GTD craze a few years ago, I started keeping a notebook on me at all times. Its been a source of ridicule by some, but its damned handy to have a mini-composition notebook with you when you need to jot something down. For years before that, when having a laptop wasn’t economical in my life, I started a collection of marble notebooks to record stories and ideas in. Mostly they collect dust and occupy space on my desk these days as I’ve moved on to more versatile media, but the notebook for thoughts I still keep handy.

So with that, there’s already a precedent for having notebooks around me. Now, over here in monkey world domination headquarters, we have a daily meeting to discuss what we did the day before, what got in our way, and where we buried the bodies. Having a notebook has come in handy, because I usually have either a horrible memory, or remember something ten minutes after the discussion is over. But I started feeling like I was cramming too much into this tiny micro-marble, between jotting down random MAC addresses, notes for the meeting, and story ideas, along with the usual grocery lists and phone numbers and what not. Yes, a super phone like a droid or an iPhone would probably solve this for me and let me record it in glossy awesomeness, but budgets are what they are, and data plans don’t come cheap.

So I found myself this week branching out into multiple notebooks. The mini I continue to keep with me regardless – its just damned convenient to have something to write in when you need to remember something (minus driving time, which I mentioned yesterday over here). But now I have a notebook (moleskine knock off from Borders with graph paper) for work notes, a notebook for journaling (I undid the GTDification of my moleskine so it was reasonable again) for proper journaling, and a spare marble for testing out notes and story ideas.

Granted, part of this has been inspired by my reacquainting myself with the beauty of having a fountain pen as my instrument of writing. Blame TV, or at least bad commercials, because I saw this fountain pen being advertised and unreasonably got it in my head I needed one back in my life. When I was a kid in Germany, we used cheap (BIC equivalent) fountain pens in our German class, and I’ve always had one kicking around with me since. In later years it got hard to find compatible ink cartridges, so I let it go, but being reminded of how nice it was to write with one got me burning to have one again. So sordid details aside, I picked up a cheap fountain pen this week, which spiraled downward into having not one but four (technically) journals in my life again. And the funny part? I’m still doing most of my writing on a computer – this is writing above and beyond blogging and fictioning (spell check says that isn’t a word, but I defy spell checkers!!).

The only thing annoying so far in this arrangement is that while I can certainly be more personal in my journal, I find a lot of the content would make better blog entries than some of the ones I’ve posted (like this one, probably). I think so long as I don’t count the mini notebook as a journal, and justify the separation of work and personal, I’m ok, but do you think I’m overdosing on journals? And if I could harness all these random words I’m letting loose into the journals, would I be able to finish writing a novel instead of blathering on here?