The letter c gave me some trouble. It's not that there aren't enough c words. There are. My 1983 edition of the Gage Canadian Dictionary* features 136 pages of c words while there are only 79 pages for b and 78 pages for a.
I made a list of the words starting with c that seemed promising and tried to ignore any I've used frequently in the past like curiosity, change, community, and conversation. (It was really hard to ignore curiosity -- such a great word and so much to be curious about!)
By the time I got to czar, my list had 95 words, which is plenty to work with. I wrote a bunch of a different journal prompts over a couple of days, but almost all of them felt forced or vague or complicated. Luckily, this is a familiar part of my creative cycle -- the part where I start to second guess myself. Maybe this whole alphabet project is too weird, plus it'll take too long and also it's too repetitive. And onward in that direction.
But there's another side. The truth is I'm really enjoying sitting with my ancient, coverless, yellow-paged dictionary on my lap and wandering through its thin pages. I love the challenge of working with new words and playing with letter shapes.
And your emails. Can I just say . . . they are awesome! No two are alike. You have your own wonderful perspective on the world and it is such a thrill to cheer you on in your journaling.
So I'm done second guessing. I pressed on with my list and put together 5 new prompts that I quite like and hope you'll like too.
If you'd like to journal the letter c, you’ll find it — and the rest of the alphabet! — in my e-book Journaling From A-Z. It’s filled with oodles of alphabet-inspired prompts to inspire your journaling and two bonus punctuation-inspired pages. I had so much fun creating this series. I hope you’ll love journaling it!
* This is the dictionary that lived on the family bookshelves when I was a kid. It's undeniably dated and I mostly use online dictionaries now, but I can't part with it. (The bookshelves, by the way, were floor-to-ceiling teak and featured an angled shelf for displaying magazines!)
