My Moleskine Ritual:
1) I begin by stamping my Chinese red signature stamp in the center of the inside cover page. A missionary friend brought this stamper with my name (essentially, it is not perfect) translated. It has its own little box with a sliding door.
2) I write the number of the journal spelled out (one, two, three...) on the top edge of the pages (with the cover closed) using a Sharpie laundry marker.
3) I painstakingly write page numbers on the bottom of each page. I continue the numbering from the pervious book. This also gives me a chance to properly break in the binding.
4) I pencil in my name and address inside the front cover of the book, I usually write a reward amount.
5) I start using it.
I use Moleskines for a number of different things. I keep a reporter squared pocket size for work, I use it for all of my odds and ands notes. todo's etc. I follow David Allen's GTD workflow and this pretty much serves as my capture device. I use the Cahiers and Volants for specific writing things. I keep them for prayer journals, poetry books, quotes, story and writing ideas. I even use them to track the mileage on my car. They fit great in the glovebox.
I became addicted to the Volant series of Moleskine notebooks nearly the day they were available. Ironically, they discontinued production of these so I bought up as many as I could afford and pleaded with corporate to bring them back into production. They sent me a number of packets of old stock for free (shipped direct from Milan) with apologies that they had gone out of production. Some of the packs they sent were labeled for sale in Germany and other places. I recently saw on the Moleskine website that the Volant (means nimble) is being brought back into production. Just yesterday I e-mailed the company telling them thank-you. The company I buy them from here in the USA cannot get them yet though.
I give Moleskines as gifts to friends, I use them for everything I can, and I even surf the web reading blogs and stuff about what other people do with them. I thought that when I went on my medicine for OCD I would find out that this too was just another OCD-driven compulsion. It is not, I still like them.
Pens vs. Pencils in my Moleskins?
In my journals I use pencils because I enjoy the freedom to write anything I please knowing that I can always go and erase it later if I am afraid of someone reading it. Otherwise I use pens, my favorite pens so far are Fisher Space Pens. Small, high-quality, and skip free. The ink seems to do very well on the Moleskine paper. I do a bit of watercolor in a Moleskine sketch book and I now see they have released watercolor paper filled books too.
