New journal page

Update: The journal page in this post is no longer available for download. For a selection of free, printable journal pages, please visit my Printable Journal Pages collection.

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So I've been gone for a bit.  Got a little lost there for awhile, I have to admit.  Ran out of ideas.  Happens, I guess.  For a long stretch, just looking at the computer made me anxious, so I started to avoid it and even when ideas started to return, I wasn't sure about coming back.

There are 37 individual journal pages posted here at Grace is Overrated (or at least there will be after this post.)  For a long time this felt like an evolving project, and I think we've come a long way together, but I've been feeling for some time now the need to steer these pages toward a larger goal.  What that should be, exactly, is still a hazy mystery to me and that drives me a little nuts sometimes.  Mostly because there are a lot of things I love about the casual routine we've got going here:  I love posting the pages individually as they are created; I love the thrill of giving them to you with no strings attached; and I love your reactions to them.  I've made a lot friends here, friends who've dropped by to say hi even though I haven't been around (thank you for that), and I don't want that to change.

At some point, though -- right about now, for example -- I'll have to move beyond casual.  Somehow, casual made sense at page 10, when I wasn't sure what I was doing or whether anyone would be interested, but now at page 37 when there are all these pages and no structure within which to make sense of them, casual just isn't enough anymore.  Also, casual is sadly unsustainable in a financial sort of way and I have to think about that too, even though I'd really rather not.

It's time to move forward, to experiment a little and see if we can't come up with something a little more cohesive and perhaps a little less formulaic.  There will be lots of experimentation involved and I hope that you will stick with me through the odd creative glitch here and there.  It's also time to open a shop.  So I'll be working on that too and letting you know how that goes.

What I've been rambling towards is this:  today begins an informal sort of countdown.  Page 40 is about as far as I'd like to go with the pages as they are.  Beyond that?  Well, there will be a lot of tweaking between now and then.  I'm not saying that the new normal beyond page 40 will be unrecognizable in comparison to all that came before it, I'm just saying that hopefully our journal pages and this blog will work better as a whole.

Today's new page is definitely forward leaning.  Bordering on plans, resolutions and other such things, but not quite.  Because I like to leave room for whim.

The full page looks startlingly like this shot here, taken in front of my back window because that was the only light to be found in the entire house . . .

As always, you'll find today's page here (no border) and here (border, colour-it-yourself) and here (border and a splash of colour).

Hoping you'll stay tuned, friends!