The Book of Shadows (BOS, for short) are the notes Pagans/ Witches/ Wiccans have made along their journey of life and learning.
A Grimoire is a book of magic, spells and techniques.
People don't always know there is a difference. It's a pretty slight difference. The Book of Shadows would be less scientific and contain personal thoughts. However, both would have the facts and information about techniques for magic and spells.
If you also wrote for (with) the BackWash community network of writers/ columnists join us for a BackWash reunion.
Here is the content from the post above. In text for those who can't read it from the screen captured image above.
Spin your Thoughts with a Journal
Do you keep a journal? Sometimes its called a diary, I think that's the old fashioned term. What you write in your journal is up to you. Be creative, rant about your family, chronicle your life, or just spin your thoughts on the web.
Keep your journal in a secret place if you don't want anyone to read it. Or, if you feel like sharing you can read what you write to friends or even keep your journal online with sites like Blogger. Of course, you can do both. Have an online journal and another secret journal for just yourself.
Journals can be kept in plain notebooks or fancy lined paper books you buy in stationery stores like Hallmark. I like to write with a fine tip black pen but you can experiment with all kinds of pens and colours. Add stickers or stick in clippings from newspapers and magazines. If you really want to put in a lot of clippings have a look at scrapbooking. That's another form of journaling but there tends to be less writing and more drawings.
There are lots of websites about journaling and scrapbooking. Have a look around and see which appeals to you.
I write a diary. You could also call it a journal but I prefer diary because that feels connected to history and all the women who have kept a diary through history. Since the early days of writing on paper women have documented their thoughts, their lives and their ideas.
We write with someone in mind, a reader.
It may be a generic reader or you may think of an actual person as you write. I do. The person I write to has changed over the years. I think I wrote to myself when I was a kid. It's hard to remember and know for sure what I was thinking as I wrote so long ago when my mind was so much less complicated. Then I wrote for the people. I used to think my diary would be read long after I'm gone but it would be used for my biography, whoever took up the task of writing it.
At some point I began to edit myself as I wrote. Having that reader in mind, I started to think about how much I didn't want the world to know versus how much I wanted to write about everything in my head. Writing a diary is a release, a freedom of thought and a way to organize your emotions too. But, when you think of someone else actually reading all of that... your outlook changes.
Now I try to write just for myself again. Thinking too much about the reader took away too much of what I needed from the whole thing of keeping a diary. So, they all join each other in a big storage box as I run out of space to write. But, I don't know if anyone will ever read them. At least not until I am long gone and will never know (or hear) what people say about the real me in the pages of those hand written books.
The history of women is in our diaries, our letters and our crafts. I'm so glad to see the history of women being pulled from obscurity.
So few women managed to become a part of recorded history, other than being mentioned as the daughter, wife or sister of some important man. So much of women's history is lost. What was it really like to be a woman, daughter, wife, Mother or sister in the 1600's? Those were the days when North America was being discovered by Europeans. I'd really like to know about women in early, ancient and prehistory. In such early days we don't have history of any people but those who were politically important, enough to have been written about. Of course, in those early days of writing, it was rare for women to be taught to write.
I think about that sometimes. I don't take writing and being about write for granted. We record our own history, in our own words. That is something of value - our way of having a mark on the world, even if we aren't sure we really want someone else to read it!
Most people who keep a diary/ journal write with an audience in mind. They write to someone, even if they don't ever plan to let anyone else read what they have written.
Try writing a diary entry about your day, or pick an average sort of day to write about. Choose who your audience is. As you write change your audience to someone else about midway through. How does this change what you write and how you are writing it?
Found on Wikipedia :
Escribitionist – a term for a person who keeps a diary or journal via electronic means, and in particular, publishes their entries on the World Wide Web.
What to WriteAny time you are not sure what to write or just can't seem to get started - read back your last post to the journal and comment on it. Did you meet any goals, achieve something or did the day you expected turn out completely different from what you had written?
Take a break from the computer, sit in a different chair and use a different table when you write your journal. Buy yourself a paper notebook with blank pages for you to fill. Pick a pen with a nice flow and even a pretty colour of ink to write with. (Blue ink can be pretty - there are all kinds of shades of blue ink in pens once you try out a few of them).
There are endless books created to be journals. You can go to a book store and look at a display full of them. Pick something appealing to you. While you're there pick out a bookmark too. Not that you really need one but it's nice to have something to mark the page you last wrote and the new one where you will write again.
There is a nice feeling when you actually write with a pen on paper. Plus you will be practising your penmanship. keeping cursive writing alive and working through writer's cramp rather than losing those muscles and that hand dexterity.
There are those who believe a journal or diary must be written in every day. That's a lot to stick with. I know from my own experience how tough it is to stick with a schedule/ plan like that.
However, writing everyday does give you writing discipline. You can get into the habit of writing each day and then it does become easier. You will even find yourself composing your daily journal entry as you get up in the morning, on the drive into work or while you're doing something routine like brushing your teeth. Then all you need to do is sit down long enough to write it all out.
Putting thoughts on paper is a great way to sort out all the stuff going on in your head. We think about so many things, get so many ideas and plans and then poof, they're gone as we get busy with something else. Keeping a daily diary is a good way to keep track, solidify, and give more respect to your ideas, thoughts and plans.
As you sort out and give some real space to everything in your head you will find your mind become a little better at organizing everything going on in there. You can define your thoughts as you have to work out just what they are and how they could work in order to put them on paper.
Of course, there is no law saying you have to write in your journal or diary every day. So don't take it so seriously you end up not writing at all because you feel you haven't done enough with keeping the journal. It's there, waiting for you, when ever you come back for it. A journal is just a notebook, a collection of pages, it doesn't blame you or want you to feel obligated to it.
This is such a tricky thing. I did go back and edit some of my old diary posts. I regret it and yet, those edits are part of the history of my diaries now too. I still feel I should have just left them as I originally wrote them, however. I can never go back in time and be the person I was at the time I wrote them. It seems just a bit snarky to criticize or correct myself in any way.
Of course, some of what I wrote were not so much edits as comments based on how things turned out as time went by. The comments are pretty cool really. Now, even more time has gone by and I have yet another perspective on both the original post and the comments I made on it somewhere in between then and now.
One of the good things about keeping a journal/ diary on paper is that you can't so easily delete your old posts. Online you can make a quick decision to edit or delete something and it will be lost and gone forever.