Bringing It Together

[qos]

One of the frustrations these days -- albeit a minor one -- is the way that my personal, reflective writing is scattered throughout many places. I have LJ, which has been an important venue for shared reflections. In addition to my personal journal, I belong to a couple of groups, and I comment on the journals of others.

Then I have a program called "Life Journal" which I use on an irregular basis, often to record my dreams. It has a nice tagging feature, a life timeline feature, and different formats for daily notes and dreams.

I have paper journals which have also been used on a not-so-frequent basis over the past few years. These have no tags, but the writing is usually more raw and immediate. It's also where I have the writing from times when I'm off by myself, away from computers.

Finally there is email with the special people in my life where important things are said and discovered in the course of conversation. I have folders dedicated to specific people, emails kept that need to be preserved. One of the big regrets of my journaling life is that the email record of my pregnancy is lost.

Consolidating what I have is possible. I could easily fire up Life Journal and Live Journal and enter, cut and paste, and tag in each venue, filtering Live Journal as appropriate. Then I would have a complete record, tagged, in separate venues for redundancy.

But that's a lot of work, a lot of time spent revisiting the past when I need so much to move forward.

At the same time, I really like the idea of having the record of my life in one coherent sequence, where I (or someone else someday) could sit down and just read through, or track patterns or people through the tags. I wonder sometimes what I've forgotten that I never thought I would, what a-ha moments have been lost along the way. I want to be sure to remember.

Comments

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Fret not, my dear...
http://www.ljbook.com/

[qos.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link -- but it still simply produces one more separate place for my records, it doesn't consolidate them. (Although I have pondered getting a paper copy of my LJ like that.)

What I need most is a confidential scribe who can go into my paper records and enter them all into Life Journal and Live Journal.

[rocket-jockey.livejournal.com]

If you get the .PDF file version, you can fairly easily copy text from the concatenated LJ document into your other electronic journal. That still leaves your paper journal, but that could be transcribed into your electronic journal.

Or, as an alternative method, you could generate a LiveJournal .PDF, save your Life Journal and emails out as .PDF files, and scan your paper journals as .PDF files, then use Acrobat to combine the pages into chronological order. I did something similar when I prepared my senior engineering project for publishing: created Acrobat .PDF files of the text, emails and notebooks and then combined them into a document ready for the printer.

[qos.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea. Thanks!