Purple-and-blue Tie o’ the Day is one of my fave neckties. I don’t know why. It just is. I was wearing it last week when I decided to take a complete inventory of all my filled notebooks and journals. The final count? What you see here are 307 notebooks full of what goes on in my head. These writings are the sum of my notes, drafts of poems, story ideas, and other miscellany that I have scribbled in notebooks for the past 15 years. Except for TIE O’ THE DAY posts, I do not compose at a keyboard. I print wildly and illegibly on the pages of bound notebooks, for the most part. When I have gussied up a piece of writing into something that works, I then type it on the computer, before submitting it for publication.
As you can see from these photos, I am not a fan of spiral bindings, but I do make exceptions for spiral-bound notebooks that call out to me for some extra-peculiar reason—like my three, spiral-bound Joe Kenda: Homicide Hunter notebooks. I couldn’t pass those up. You’ll notice I fill up all sizes of notebooks. The smallest one you see on the table is about the size of a 50-cent piece. My preferred notebooks are the bound Moleskine brand, specifically the now-discontinued “Chapters” style. Fortunately, I can still find “Chapters” for sale on Amazon occasionally. Although I have storage bins filled with blank notebooks I haven’t yet written in, I think I should begin to pull back on writing new things. As I’m approaching my 60’s, I think it’s time to cull my already-written-in notebooks and concentrate more on arranging my ideas and drafts into completed pieces. Otherwise, when I die, my legacy will be mostly notebooks of illegible writings which will make sense to no one. For the next 15 years, I need to edit and polish and finish all the work I’ve already started. I think I’m done with first drafts.
