I’m over at Tweetspeak today, dear ones. I’d love for you to join me as I talk about what’s in my journal. Here’s a taste:

I am nine years old, heading out for my first ever week away from home. Summer camp. I am terrified. For my birthday, the week before camp, a friend gives me a diary. It’s a small padded book, filled with thinly lined white paper and covered in pink cloth with polka dots on it.

I take it with me and fill its pages with my fears (I miss my parents, I want to go home, the other girls don’t understand, they make fun of me when I cry) and my feats (I went down the big water slide into the lake! I balanced a bugle on my fingers for four minutes! No one else did it even half so long!).

And I am hooked. I never stop writing in journals, though over the years I move away from padded pink polka dots to sleek black Moleskines with creamy blank pages.

Read the rest.