I hit a fantastic milestone today, and one I haven’t been able to celebrate before! I finished a notebook! Entirely finished an entire 5 subject notebook! Holy christ, this is insane for me. In March of 2016 I found this thing blank with water stains all over it, and a year later, it is done.
So many good ideas came out of there. It’s been so much fun having something tangible to get things down on! I highly recommend you get yourself a trusty notebook. There are some advantages and disadvantages to doing so, of course. One of the disadvantages is that you can’t use any handy sites that count syllables or find appropriate near-rhymes for you, but that makes it a little more organic. Not so focused on finding the perfect word and more so on finding what you can make work. To be able to scratch things out and just write notes anyplace is a sort of freedom that is both indescribable and indispensable.
The last thing written in there is a poem about my high school art classroom, and its teacher, who I regularly visit. I’ve got a real rapport with that room.
I’m pretty sure I am also supposed to be starting and completing a nine page essay today at some point, but I am going to procrastinate the hell out of that into tomorrow, because I don’t wanna do it yet! I have a new notebook to start, and Ghost Recon: Wildlands to play! Sometimes when it comes to writing, not just academic, it takes some moxie to get rolling. Especially with a topic such as international relations and theories surrounding modern conflicts, it’s difficult to find the giddyup for. I gotta have sources and all that junk, too. Bleh.
Academic writing is incredibly fun when I have the drive for it. Just gotta get there. I’ve never had difficulty going and going and going until it’s done; writing’s pretty easy, it’s the getting started with motivation part that’s stumping. Writer’s block! Everyone’s been there.
My writer’s block just comes in the form of more writing! So it’s time to transcribe the last that came from my March 2016 notebook. Two more poems squeezed out of it. And now I’ve got two new tiny little moleskines courtesy of my former mentor to get cracking on eventually.
I have a backlog of something like 6 notebooks to get going on, not including the other moleskine I got for my birthday last year. Two of them are from my sister (who’s a writer[?], and activist of some kind, she also gave me my Canon); one’s a locally made, leather bound, milled paper thing; the other appears to have been made from thick paper and is Japanese-styled with an engraving of bamboo and a hummingbird on the cover. I have another notebook that’s got black paper, and two metallic ink pens to go along with it (see “Metal on the Black” for more info), which is pretty neat if I do say so myself.
I’m realizing as I type this that I have so many notebooks. Composition books, exotic ones, college ruled, and the sort. I have a lot of paper to fill…
If you have a notebook you haven’t touched yet, don’t be afraid to ‘ruin’ it by writing in it. It doesn’t mean anything until you’ve put a pen to it. And as I say that I realize I can write an entire other section of this entry about pens, but I’m not going to do that. Have to leave you all in suspense! Incredibly bored, skull-numbing suspense.
Consume Reality! 