Finish This Book: Start Here

I’ve not really posted much about my Finish This Book mainly because my Wreck This Journal is a lot more fluid and constantly changing, so I feel more inclined to document it because it’s interesting to see all the different changes that it is going through. Wreck This Journal is quite a quick little project as well, I can sit down for an hour or so on an evening and stick Ws onto a page and make it look entirely different to the day before, Finish This Book takes rather more time.

Virtually every page in Finish This Book has some sort of task that you must to in order to help complete the book. Some are relatively simple, whereas others take a little bit of time, thought and even research. Unlike my Wreck This Journal, you’re supposed to start at the beginning and work your way through it in the regular fashion. The first activity is on the page headed ‘Start Here’ so obviously, that’s where I began. I actually remembered that page from when I picked up this book and looked at it in Oban; it’s got a map of the world on it so you can mark where you found the book. I drew a little arrow pointing to roughly where my little island is.

There’s then a page for you to fill in personal information; name, address, contact details. You can give yourself an alias, I went with ‘Click’ and include a note of likes, dislikes and dreams.

At the bottom of this page is: PLACE YOUR FINGERPRINTS HERE (USE DIRT IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANY INK). Well, I didn’t have any dirt to hand and my fingertips were relatively clean so I dug out a pencil, scribbled on some scrap paper and then rubbed my finger on it. Made virtually no mark at all.

So I got some jumbo marker pens. I’ve had them for years and I wasn’t sure they would still work. They did, so I drew in black ink on each fingertip in turn, making a fantastic mess all over my fingers in the process, then pressed them down on each section on the page. I added a label above each one, just so I know which is which.

They came out quite well, though my left hand prints came out a little bit more wrinkly and faint than the right hand ones. My right ring finger has pretty much no definition in the centre at all but others, like my left thumb print, came out really clear.

Of course it was a bit of a mess to clean up. I couldn’t get out of my chair to wash my hands even because I had ink all over my fingers. And despite being washable markers, they were most definitely not! I went to work the next day with ink stains all over my fingertips.

It was a good start to the book because there was the potential for making a real mess here, which I did manage to avoid. Considering the fact that later in the book I’ll be chopping chunks out of it and things I think I needed to do this to ease myself into it gently!