Saturday Gloom and Notebooks

So I seem to have lost the ability to just sit down and blog at the moment, because the long stretches of silence means everything seems far to trivial when I finally sit down to start posting things. I want to, say, pop in and blog about the fact that I’ve just spent the day with my inner goth turned up to eleven, listening to songs I haven’t listened to in years while rereading the big ol’ copy of The Annotated Sandman, Vol 1, that I picked up on Friday night, which means it’s now coming up on nine o’clock in the evening and I’m surprisingly maudlin and in a bitter-sweet kind of mood that would totally result in me dying my hair black if there was black hair dye in the house.

Fortunately, there isn’t, so I’ll continue on as a vaguely normal person on the morrow, but you know how it goes. I’ve had a day catching up with a former version of myself, the one that used to gad about looking like this:

For the most part I don’t miss being twenty all that much, but every now and then it’s nice to remember that twenty-two-year-old Peter got a few things right, even among all the enormous cock-ups that I managed to achieve between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. And part of me still wonders when, exactly, I migrated away from the feather boa as a standard look and became a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy for whom a Hawaiian shirt counted as dressing up.

In some ways twenty-two year old me would be so happy about where I’ve ended up, but sartorially, he’d be so very disappointed.

In any case, I read a bunch of stuff and listened to a bunch of albums and ordered a bunch of CDs because the internet made it too damn hard to download mp3 versions of the albums I wanted, and now I’m here, trying to conquer my hesitation to blog, because these days my blogging impulses are all daily minutia or nothing. Every now and then, when the blog lies fallow, I get to thinking about the various ways I’d like to make it over and turn it into one of those valuable tools for writerly promotion that people bang on about, but if I’m honest that’s never going to happen. I can blog with a plan elsewhere, and probably will since work requires it this year, but around these parts the rule is simple: the things I want to share with the world are the things I want to share with the world, and I should probably stop feeling bad about that. 

I also plan on abusing the fuck out of italics, but what else is new?

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When I moved prior to Christmas, I moved three large boxes full to the brim with partially-full notebooks and A4 writing pads, and after getting them to my new abode I sat and looked at them and said “Peter, you do not need to buy any new notebooks at all next year. Just use the ones you have.”

It was a good plan, and one I stuck to for all of twenty-six days. Then I wandered into my local shopping centre and noticed that one of my favourite styles of notepad were being sold for less than half-price, so I immediately picked up a half-dozen in a range of colours.  Then, since I’d already broken my pledge to stay notebook free, I immediately went and bought a new notebook to take to work.

The problem, of course, is that I have too many things in my life that requires writing stuff down, and I like to keep said things in separate notebooks. Scribbled notes for stories end up in different notebooks to the stuff I write for games, and the games are further separated into different notebooks according to rules system and whether I’m running the game or playing in it. Heaven forbid a game actually end halfway through. My friend Colin started a D&D campaign a few years back that ended up falling by the wayside in an unofficial kind of way, and the half-full notebook containing my notes has been sitting on a shelf for the last three years just in case I should need it again. Even now, writing about it, I look over at the book full of warforge stats and treasure lists thinking I can probably throw it out, and yet…

And yet.

That’s always the problem with my kind of packrat mentality. I can throw out enormous numbers of things, and did prior to moving, but some things linger because every now and then I do end up going back to an old notebook and filling it completely. Or I’ll go through one and find half a story I’d largely forgotten writing, which actually serves as my favourite way of writing things since it means half the work’s already done by the time I get around to finishing something.