2025: new year new notebooks
The day dawns upon a bright, cold morning, with the sunlight washing everything in gold. It’s the type of winter morning that chills your bones, the sun not more effective than a fridge lightbulb. Clouds roll in the distance, but none arrive. The streets look dry, nothing remaining of yesterday’s rain except for the puddles in shade that are frozen over. It’s my favourite type of winter day, it lets me bundle up in the thickest sweaters and take a walk in the sun that shows its face only a couple of times a month.
Happy new year everyone! With the winter break over and 2025 well underway, the highlight of my train rides has been reading the notebook setups. I had been thinking about mine too, and writing this blog post has been my way of gathering my thoughts together around what to use this year and how to handle life. What better way to put your thoughts in order than writing them down, am I right?
I like using my stationery to keep track of my life. Every year, I have three goals: read more, write more, keep my head clear. These are connected to four notebooks that I’m going to be using for the next year. Three of them probably will not change throughout 2025, and the whole intention of one is that it lets me experience new papers in a low-risk way.
I love new planners. I remember a time during middle school, where I would sit with my parents around the dining table and barter for the new planners they got as promotions or gifts. Our school would print an academic planner for everyone to use, but me being me, I always preferred my parents’ fancy planners. Since fountain pens became my primary pens, I’ve been even more careful about what planners I use. I’m going to trust this little notebook to keep my life together for the next 365 days, so it better make me want to write into it every single day. After using the A6 Hobonichi Techo last year, I realized that I missed the larger A5 size and the weekly layout that the Cousin has. Still, I wasn’t using all of the pages. Until a couple months ago, I couldn’t find a use for the pages where you have 6 months of the year in one spread. They felt a bit unnecessary, even the monthly pages sometimes feel like planning too much in advance due to the hectic, last-minute scheduling of school. Well, I saw a habit tracker for it on Pinterest, and I’m happy to report I’ve been successfully using it for 2 months now, and was ecstatic to see the layout is a little larger on the Cousin, cramming my writing less. This is the reason I like the Hobonichi Techo lineup, it’s structured enough that I don’t have to rely on my drawing skills to adapt it to my lifestyle, and it's flexible enough that I keep finding new ways to use the pages that are already in the notebook.
My planner and the journal are at the core my goal to keeping my head clear. One keeps track of my schedule and routine, the other is a place for me to dump my thoughts without filter. As a way of trying to make a ritual of journalling, I started writing morning pages. I try to write three pages a day, but my wrist has been giving me some trouble lately, which is why I had to decrease it to two. Last year I discovered that I like these mid-sized A5 notebooks the most for this, they’re thick enough to last me through some months while still being easy enough to carry around when I’m traveling. Currently I’m using Apica’s C.D. Notebook, and this is meant to change. I like changing my journal often as it allows me to see the behaviour of these notebooks over a considerable amount of time, with many writing hours spent pouring over it.
Before 2025, I never really had a system to keep track of the books I’ve read except for Goodreads. This year, my goal is to be a bit more intentional about the books I read, and think about them a bit more, so I wanted to start a notebook for it. Right off the start things started going wrong. I picked a wrong notebook for joyous fountain pen writing as everything seems to feather on this paper, even though I love the in-between size of the B6 for this purpose. Still, I want to stick with this to think about my reading, expand my horizons beyond bestselling science fiction or fantasy. I already even got a start to my checklist, Three-Body Problem is the first book I’m reading by a Chinese writer, though it can be argued that since it is a best-selling sci-fi book, it’s cheating. Maybe the checklist might need further refinement.
Writing is hard for me, as it requires me to exercise creative and problem-solving muscles are already strained during the day. Despite that, it’s my second favourite thing in the world, so I want to make sure that I capture some of my ideas at least long enough to sit down and organize them later on. I tasked a Traveler’s Notebook Passport size to act as a sort of a catch-all idea notebook. I’ve been starting writing stories and laying them out neatly in my notebook, but never finishing them, so the goal is to finish writing at least one story this year. Same with blog post ideas… I’ve been getting some cool post ideas, but whenever I turn around to catch them, I already find them gone. That’s why a catch-all notebook has been important for me, I can flip it open and write in it anywhere anytime.
Last but not least, my fountain pen collection deserves an honourable mention. Last weekend I sat down, pulled out all the drawers and organized all of it. The inks, the pens, even the pen cases. My goal this year is to keep track of what I use and what I don’t use as much. I always think that I have a pretty even use, pens don’t get forgotten in their drawers, so I’d very much to see how it goes. I started using Fountain Pen Companion to track this, including all of my pens and inks. So far, I’ve been making a weekly inked spread in old planner pages, but I’m curious on how others do it too. I’m sure someone has a better way of doing this…
All in all, I’m curious to see how many of these notebooks will keep me company throughout the year, and whether any new ones will be added.
Thank you for reading! I hope you all had a good holiday season and ate lots of turkey. I couldn't go to my parents' for the holidays and I missed my mom's turkey so much...