If you have been reading the blog long enough, you know that I have done a good amount of journaling in my life. You probably also know–or at least guessed–that I have a writer’s notebook that I keep with me or near me. I write a lot of drafts in longhand because it helps me focus (for some reason, typing drains my energy and being on the computer can be really distracting).

i’ve got thirty years’ worth of those writing notebooks and they all have been sitting in the same box in my office closet for years. And right now I have four separate notebooks for writing: one five-subject Five Star for my regular writing; and three separate composition notebooks for Pop Culture Affidavit, The Uncollecting, and my Star Wars project. So yeah, I think I have a problem.

Hey, it’s not my fault that arg3et carries college ruled composition notebooks on the real cheap every back to school season. It is my fault ofr buying so many, of course. I’ve stopped shopping at Target anyway, so this part of the problem is going to take care of itself. I also have remembered why I don’t like writing in coposition notebooks. I mean, they look cool and seeing the marbled covers gives me some serious elementary school nostalgia, but they are a pain in the ass to write because the pages don’t fold/flip over as nice as spiral-bound notebooks. But schmantsy journals are a similar pain and I use those for everyday personal journaling.

I contain multitudes.

I also just wrote an entire paragraph about notebook preference.

Anyway, I have decided that it’s time top go through those old creative writing notebooks. They begin with the fall of 1994 and run up to the present day, and I am sure that the first several years’ worth will take a while to look through and write about, but I figure that as I get into the last 10-15 years, they’ll just be full of the blog posts and podcast episodes that are already published. My therapist says that it’s a good way to “rewrite the narrative of the past” and I guess that’s true as well. After all, as I get older, those years do become more and more clouded by perception and I wonder what this part of my personal archaeology will bring.