Thursday 14th January 2010, 3.40pm, Bcakpackers Bar - Hue
Gallivanting and Goodness is not my first foray into the writing world, I would like to think this is evident but am too woefully aware of my limitations and position as a novice within this forum. I used to be employed as a freelance director for a children's theatre company in London and I wrote a couple of scripts for them, I also collaboratively penned a play in my last year at University. I kept a journal between the ages of 13 and 17 which I can no longer look at: sometimes it's painful because of the cringeworthy teenage angst of it all and sometimes, well, it's just painful. I have a collection of around 40 poems, the first few draft chapters of a book about my experiences working for Social Services, 300 or so saved e-mails between myself and a couple of very close allies that I have started to tweak and embellish in the hope that they would become some kind of Bridget Jones-esque comment on contemporary female conversation and friendship, and pages and pages of planning, notes and ponderings for my unattainable first novel about a lonely writer and an amnesiac librarian. I very much doubt that any of it will ever see the light of day, which is a knock to my ego, but that's already functioning at a pretty low frequency level anyway so the non-disclosure of my writing is nothing it cannot handle.
All of these scribblings sit growning in ignominy in various notebooks scattered and hidden about my bedroom at home. Everything goes on paper first, only a few favoured notes have made it to the relative permanency of my hard drive. I am a notebook hoarder. Apart from the few that have seen the afore-mentioned jottings, I have a collection of many more empty notebooks gathering dust. Leather bound, ring binders, embroidered covers, silk inlaid, hard backed, parchment, margined, lined, coffee stained, frayed at the edges and tobacco brown or crisp and fresh with that new book smell, I have shelves of blank pages; the physical embodiment of writer's block. All of them beautiful in some way because this is the reason I would always purchase 'just one more'. Hopefully kidding myself that the quality and exquisite loveliness of this new notebook would entice and inspire me enough to write something of substance and gravity within it's pages. I mention this now because I am writing in a new notebook today. The travel journal which has served me so well is now ink tattooed from it's first to last sheets, and I, for the only time in my writing "career", have had to buy a new notebook not to encourage my imagination, but out of necessity. I have filled a WHOLE notebook!
This new notebook that I now set my pen to is conspicuous by just one case in point from all those empty books that await me at home: there is nothing remotely decorative or handsome about it. The only one I could find whilst wandering the foggy, damp streets of Hue today was A5, case bound, covered with black plastic and in the top right hand corner of the front cover is enscribed in gold lettering the word 'Business'. Amusingly then, I'm getting down to my sole business venture these days, christening this new notebook with a blog about notebooks. It is close to ugly and purely practical, but, I imagine, will come to encase stories and musings over the next couple of months that will far outweigh in substance and gravity anything I have ever written. Here's to the unsightly new notebook, I promise I will try to exceed the scripts in adventure, the poems in romance, the e-mails in wit, the working memoir in drama, the novel in characterisation, and the journals in honesty, however painful. Farewell blank pages, I have things to say.
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