One of the most fraught decision to make when traveling (other than where to go and how to get there and where to stay and what to do when you're there and, of course, how to pay for it all) is what to bring for journaling supplies. (I wrote about this some in my Quebec City Travel Journal post.) For our trip to Puerto Rico earlier this month, I opted to go with a Sillman & Birn Zeta Series 5.5 x 8.5 landscape journal. The paper was the perfect balance of heavy enough to take a little water but not so thick and toothy that I didn't want to write on it. At 26 sheets (52 pages), it was the perfect length for a 10-day trip (~5 pages/day plus a couple bonus pages).

I'd been inspired by this series of sketches (above) that I saw at the Farnsworth Museum in the fall, and I wanted to try something similar in my travel journal. Unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture of the interpretive sign, so I don't know who the artist is (it was part of the "Joan Jonas: An Island Departure with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson" exhibition, so probably--maybe--Joan Jonas?) or what the medium was. It looks like a combination of colored pencil (or possibly pastel) and watercolor, possibly even watercolor pencil. I played around with watercolor pencils (which I already owned), and was able to create a similar effect, but the colors weren't as vibrant as I wanted, so I bought myself a set of Derwent Inktense Pencils and brought those, along with a water brush, a pencil, a few pens, a pencil sharpener (used once or twice but you'd miss it if you didn't have it), and my Ivy photo sticker printer, plus a few other items I never used (ruler, watercolor set, washi tape). The pencils take up a lot more space than a tiny watercolor kit, but are so much more manageable and dry much faster.

Before we left on the trip, I put a map of our destination on the first page of the journal, as I always do, but this time did it in the style of (possibly?) Joan Jonas. I love this loose, scribbly way of drawing. It's so freeing, and I employed it on later pages, as you will see. On our return, I added a photo sticker of myself in front of a mural at one of our guest houses and some pressed flowers, including a big, beautiful bunch of bougainvillea. 

I'm working on striking a better balance between text and images. Of course my journals lean more heavily toward words, because I'm a writer, but I'm pretty happy with where I've landed ratio-wise with this one. An interesting thing I've discovered, however, is that at the same time that I've tried to make my travel journals more visually appealing, what I write in them becomes less personal, because, I suppose, I envision wanting to share my sketches with others. Not that I imagine anyone would sit down and try to decipher my handwriting (or even care what I wrote about being irritated with one of my family members, as a totally random example). 

Most of this journaling took place in the evenings, after we returned to our apartment or guest house post-dinner. The boys would play cards and I would draw and write, which worked out perfectly, because only four can play cribbage, and by the end of the day I was tired of human interaction. I found it hard to draw on-site from life, because we were so often on the move, walking or hiking or snorkeling, so as a consequence, most of my drawings are from photographs. But I did manage a couple en plein air sketches:

In conclusion: I loved the Stillman & Birn sketchbook and will use these again. I loved using the Inktense pencils, sometimes in combination with pen, sometimes alone, and especially with this loose, scribbly style of drawing. I want to draw more from real life when I travel (I might need to go on a sketching holiday to make that happen). And I want to write more interestingly, if I don't feel I can write more personally.

I don't remember how I stumbled on Amy Stewart's newsletter, It's Good to Be Here. I've been a fan of her Miss Kopp lady detective novels for years, and have enjoyed many of her countless other books about plants, trees, and, forthcoming, birds. So when I did come across her newsletter, I was intrigued. And when I discovered that it was mostly about sketching, with a lot of emphasis on travel sketching, I was sold. A prolific writer of historical crime(ish) novels and books about nature, plus an inveterate traveler and artist? Yes please. (It's like she's living my dream life--or as she might put it, wrote my dream job description.

Her posts include a lot of thoughts on creativity, introduction to other artists' work, and a ton of tutorials on various aspects of painting and sketching, which I enjoy a lot, because they're short and down-to-earth, and she doesn't present only "perfect" works of art--she is happy to share videos of art attempts that don't go exactly as planned, and she has the perfect attitude when that happens: oh well. One of the perks of being a subscriber is that she will occasionally do a painting (and painting tutorial) from a photo sent in by a reader. I recently sent her this photo that I took from the wall of Dubrovnik on our last day in Croatia two years ago:

Here is the painting she did from the photo:

I love how she used red ink plus a very limited color palette. It really conveys the depth of the endless red roofs of the city with the Adriatic Sea in the distance, plus the energy of this ancient city. Her tutorial is here, and here's my attempt at the same:

I used a maroon Micron 0.5 pen, rather than a fountain pen, so I didn't quite get the variation in line, but I think it worked well enough, and I really love how the color is softer and earthier than black ink. I would never have thought of using purple for shadows, and it was liberating for me to sketch in the buildings in a slap-dash fashion, rather than using pencil and neat, straight lines (what in real life is neat and straight anyway? Certainly not a Medieval city!).

Here is the painting I did of a similar view (from a slightly different perspective) in my travel journal:

This was also done from a photo, after the fact (I gave up on drawing/painting onsite after the first couple days of our trip). This image was done in all watercolor over pencil--no ink--with a wet-in-wet technique. I like it fine, but it doesn't have the energy the other one has, the texture of the tile roofs is totally lost, and it took much longer to paint (wet-in-wet takes forever to dry!), so it would be impossible to do in real life. I'm excited to try some on-site sketching using a similar technique, with red ink and a few quick swipes of color.

In last month's newsletter, I wrote about my ambitions to both travel more and document those travels more regularly and skillfully. I've kept travel journals for many years:

Some notes about these journals: All in the top row are in Moleskine Cahier blank books. These are thin enough that I can usually fill them up in a week or ten days, and they are light and small enough to be portable while big enough to not feel cramped. But the thin paper is not great for watercolor. The first one on the next row is Field Sketchbook, with heavier paper, smaller in size but with a lot more pages (and a ribbon bookmark and elastic closure, which I love!). The middle one is a landscape oriented watercolor sketchbook whose brand I can't recall. Great for watercolors, but not great for writing (partly because I didn't want to "waste" watercolor paper with words). I couldn't keep up with painting while on this trip, which was jam-packed, so I ended up writing daily in a Moleskine Cahier and then I did watercolors from photos after we returned and summarized my notes from each day into a single page. It took two years. The third is a handmade blank booklet, about half the size of a Cahier, which I bought at a farmer's market in Charlottetown maybe the second day of our trip.

My mode of travel journaling is always to write a lot and put in sketches and ephemera in varying amounts. I really do love my past travel journals, especially seeing them laid out together like this. But I also want to up my game--more and better illustrations, more on-the-spot sketching (rather than after-the-fact), neatly lettered headings (since neat handwriting is probably too much to hope for at this point).

In preparation for a trip to Quebec City in August, I watched several online videos on travel journaling and urban sketching from Amy Stewart's newsletter It's Good to Be Here and The Piegeon Letters. I spent quite a lot of time looking for the right journal and assembling my kit.

I ended up with a very small (about 4.5 x 7 inch) book by Clairefontaine that has about 40 pages (of thin paper). I also picked up a pack of Tombow dual brush pens--and then a second pack, because I realized the first one didn't have a blue--as well as an Ivy photo printer (it makes the cutest little stickers of phone photos!). In addition, I brought many pens, two sets of colored pencils, a ruler, a glue stick, washi tape, a set of Vivia Colrosheets watercolors and water brush, two binder clips, a pencil sharpener, a kneaded eraser, two pencils, a white gel pen, and an envelope for ephemera. Plus a small shoulder bag for toting *some* of the supplies with me when we were out and about. 

​I brought *way* more stuff than I needed, and most of it stayed in the hotel room. 

The first photo shows roughly what I brought with me each day (minus the Ivy and the glue stick--those stayed back at the hotel), and the second photo shows what I brought in my backpack on our last day when we visited Montmorancy Falls.

I still did a lot of writing (that's not gonna change), and did most of my journaling in the evening when we returned to the hotel room. (It was hot as blazes the whole time we were there, so we usually declared defeat and retreated to cold showers and A/C by 6:30 p.m. This gave me plenty of time to document the day's events while C watched TV. Only once did we head back out into the inferno for dinner.)

I did manage to do *some* on-the-spot sketching: the street lights and wine glass in the second row (photos 1 and 3); the St. Laurence River from the quay on Île d'Orleans (third row, third picture), a spot in a formal garden where we stopped to rest and pretend the shade offered some respite (fourth row, middle picture), and Montmorancy Falls, which I sketched while we waited in line for a gondola ride to the top (sixth row, middle picture). 

New things I tried:

• Tombow pens: fun and more convenient than watercolors but not the color range.
• Lettering: still needs some work but much better than past efforts.
• Photo stickers: so fun! 
• Collage: also fun!

Thins I want to work on next:

• More sketching on site.
• Keep practicing 1-point perspective!
• Page layout.
• A more streamlined kit.

Every January for the last several years, I've made an annual I Did It! list, inspired by Lisa Romeo. Below is the list for 2017.

Writing I Did Its!
I finished a draft of the narrative part of The Book and put that narrative though one full round of revision. I still have a lot of research to do to fill in a lot of holes, but clearing that hurdle of getting those first round edits into the document felt good!

I continued to write and submit short pieces, especially during the first half of the year. My results:

Submissions: 24
Rejections: 26
Withdrawals (due to acceptance elsewhere): 2
Short-listed: 1
Acceptances: 7
Pending Publication: 2
Publications: 14

• “Monarch Summers” Nature Writing (republished), October 2017
• "Pugnacious Beasts" Zoomorphic, October 2017
• "Thru-Hiking en Famille" TrailGroove, September 2017
• “Individuality, Mutuality, and a Game of Twister” Multiples Illuminated, Vol. II, August 2017
• “The World in Their Hands” The Maine Review, June 2017
• "Jargon: Mountain Pass" TrailGroove, June 2017
• “A Conversation with Tomas Moniz" Literary Mama, June 2017
• “Toy Story” If Mom's Happy, May 2017
• “Five Hundred Miles” Mothers Always Write, March 25, 2017
• “How to Write with (or Despite) Kids” WOW! Women on Writing, March 16, 2017
• “How Being a Mom Helped Me Hike 500 Miles” Parent Co., March 2017
• “Post-Twin Stress Disorder” Multiples Illuminated, March 2017
• “No Fun” The Manifest Station, March 2017
• “I'll Be There For You” Grown and Flown, January 2017

The reason these numbers don't add up is because rejections, acceptances, etc. include a number of pieces submitted in 2016. Even though my submission rate was almost half what it was last year (24 versus 45), my rejection rate was higher (26 versus 20) and so was my publication rate (14 versus 8), but my acceptance numbers were down (7 versus 9). What does all this mean? I have no idea.

The low submission number has to do with me focusing on writing short pieces and getting them out in the world during the first half of the year and turning my attention to The Book during the second half (only two submissions since May!). I would like to find more of a balance between The Book and keeping short pieces flowing next year. 

Right now I only have two essays that are finished and making the rounds of literary journals. They're two of the best pieces I've ever written, I believe, and they're having a hard time finding a home. Probably because I insist on sending them only to paying journals. I've got a bunch of partially written essays on hold in the files and numerous short stories on hiatus. At some point I have to address the gap between essay and short story—why am I having more success with the former than the latter? Which stories in the queue truly have merit and which need to be retired? I also want to write more fiction, despite the challenges it poses.

Other writing activity:

• I applied—and was accepted—for a week at an artist colony (and it was amazing).
• I applied—and was rejected—for a writing grant.
• I entered—and have not yet heard from—a writing contest (not counted in submission #s)

I also continued to co-edit the Literary Reflections department at Literary Mama, wrote 90 blog posts (my lowest number since the first two years of the blog), started a monthly-ish newsletter, and created a new website. I attended a poetry festival in Augusta and an alumni weekend at my MFA alma mater, each of which was as good as a writing conference and much more affordable.

On the financial front, my writing balance is in the black! It's not much, in terms of trying to survive (or even buy the occasional cup of chai), but my income from publications and teaching workshops exceeded my expenses of buying books and office supplies and paying submission fees and alumni weekend registration, Duotrope and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance membership fees, and cloud storage costs. I've reached my goal of not spending more money on writing than I earn. Now I just need to earn enough to live on.

Travel I Did Its!
I took the boys on a road trip to Colorado and back home (via Utah, Wyoming, and South Dakota). This was the first time I went on a road trip as the only adult (though I had some driving help from M), and I think I did pretty great (we never ran out of gas and we never succumbed to a hotel room, camping the whole way there and back). We even survived a rare Utah Hurricane which threatened to float our tent away. And my kids had fun!

Crafty I Did Its!
Making things by hand has taken a bit of a backseat to writing this past year, but I still appreciate the satisfaction of creating a tangible and usable object—a different and often more immediate satisfaction than writing. A few things I made:

• Holiday placemats
• A quilt (top) for E 
• A quilt for Z
• An Egyptian skirt 
• Duvets for boys
• Pussyhats (recycled and fleece)

Art I Did Its!
I taught myself to watercolor by painting every day for 100 days over the spring and summer (and continuing not quite as religiously since then), following some online tutorials and attending a couple of painting classes at my friend's studio. Watercolor painting is something I've wanted to learn for years and this project not only got me started painting, but also taught me the value of doing something every single day—you actually get better!

Nature I Did Its!
I  taught a couple of nature journaling workshops and have been volunteering at a local nature center, helping lead groups of fourth graders through the woods and trails. I've also put my newly acquired watercolor skills to work in my nature journals. I compiled my birding Life List and went on several bird-watching expeditions, each of which added a few more birds to said list. C, E, Z, and I again did our Christmas Bird Count route. In general, I paid a lot more attention to birds.

Phew! That's a lot for one year! Can't wait to see what 2018 has in store, and I'm a little worried about how I'll keep track of it all if I'm not blogging next year.

Cross-posted at https://remainsofday.blogspot.com/2018/01/i-did-it-2017.html.