Eeny, meeny, miney, moe.
13 journals down to 1 book, how does one decide which pages are in?
It was a daunting task at first. What's the process like of sifting through years of journaling to find the entries that will hopefully speak to readers and show the most insight to my state of mind?
One page at a time.
Armed with post-its.
To revisit the origins of it all - the beginning of NYTFG was re-reading journals in an attempt to piece the puzzle together. How did I end up at my bottom? I wanted to get to the core of what I was thinking and feeling to avoid a repeat performance.
When it became clear that the exercise of going back through them was something more than an exercise for myself, I dug a little deeper. I went through each journal and tabbed pages (to the side) that stood out to me. A tab could be a good day, a bad day, an example of manipulation, maybe some self-sabotage, perhaps a little gaslighting…I covered a lot of ground over the years.
After the initial tabbing process, I’d go back through the marked entries and flip the post-it vertical if I believed it should be in the book. Typically, I’d write one or two words on the post-it so I could easily go back as I was writing and find entries that came to mind.
Some journals had 7 tabs, some journals had so many I lost count and simply used ‘start here - end here’ tabs. This isn’t a big spoiler; the more tabs, the juicier the content. Unfortunately, the juicer the content has a direct correlation to the worse I was doing personally.
Journals, as the book keeper of my life (I know, I’m so deep), would reveal the themes and guide the story. Even when the story is a lie, the daily reflections guided it and it wasn’t particularly difficult figuring out which ones would make the most impact.
When I began, I gave myself some guidelines for the number of entries explored from each journal. Originally I thought maybe 5 or 6 would be sufficient per journal. As you’ll find out in the book, I don’t do so well with rules. By journal 5, it was clear I needed more.
Unlike the rules I broke around alcohol, disregarding the rules for the book worked in my favor. To give an accurate portrayal of everything that was going on, I needed more of my journals in the book.
It didn’t need to be an encyclopedia and it also didn’t need to be a cliff notes summary.
In my mind, Ashley and I found the perfect middle ground between the two.
Exciting news friends! Our copy edit will be done this week and we’ll start composing the book for self-publishing. We’ll need some test readers in July, so if you are interested, email book@notyettoofargone.com and we’ll reach out when ready.
Talk to you next week,
- Mathias John
