author guest post: holly christine

Author of the fabulous Tuesday Tells It Slant, Holly Christine was kind enough to address the issue of keeping a journal (something that Tuesday did, although she altered her past by creating new journal entries).

Keeping a journal at times seems unnecessary. We have cameras on our phones and text messages and Facebook to look back on, right?

My parents were preparing to sell their home a few years ago and I was faced with these old diaries (one had a lock on it and a unicorn on the cover). I started to read through them and became flooded with emotion. I could see the changes in my life in my own handwriting. It was powerful and entertaining all at the same time. I had forgotten what a gossip queen I was in fifth grade.

Back then, I wrote with the idea that recording my life in pen was important and timeless. For some reason, the emotional impact is much more extreme in pen. It’s quicker too. It’s a release, a physical release that stays on paper for as long as you like.

This moment of reading my old diary entries inspired the basis of Tuesday Tells it Slant. I kept thinking that it would be easy to erase these old memories that I had. Perhaps I wanted to forget that I fought with my younger brother. Couldn’t I just rip the page out? I had forgotten about that fight up until the moment I saw it in my diary.

Throughout the book, Tuesday changes her old diary entries, eliminating all painful memories. But in the process, she loses her self; her soul seems halfhearted and confused. Her diary, as it turns out, is like an extension of her existence.

But all entries aren’t necessarily painful memories. My mother kept a journal of her pregnancy with me and recently gave it to me. It is written in pen on regular notebook paper and it is a tradition that I plan to continue.

A diary is a gift to your future and your present soul. It can inspire the future while recording the present and is like an old photo of your emotions: timeless.