Ok, I guess I needed something else to fill in any spare moments in my life - so I decided to buy a house. YAY!! I’m so excited! Then I open my eyes and see all the paperwork and I’m slightly terrified. So I close my eyes again AND I’M SO EXCITED!! And going in a solid eight different directions and needing coffee more than ever! Since sleep is just out of the question at this point. But then again….YAY!!!
I’m so past the “Is it Friday yet?” syndrome and am SO ready for sum-sum-summer time!! I want to walk barefoot on the sidewalk at dusk and feel the warmth still held in the sidewalk. Smell freshly cut grass and suntan lotion. Switch my margaritas out for mojitos and enjoy long, sun-lit evenings. I want to shed the sweaters and jackets and pull out the tank tops, shorts and break in a new pair of flip-flops, preferably with cute little jingling jewels that match the new shade of bright polish on my toes. And this yearning for summer has absolutely NOTHING to do with the fact that I’m a teacher with a classroom bursting at the seams with wiggly, hormone-infused, stir-crazy, are-we-done-yet-this-is-boring-can’t-we-just-watch-the-movie teenagers with attention spans shorter than a gnat’s blink. Absolutely nothing. I promise.
HA!
Notebooks that is. 
Sorry, not a love scene from one of my books. Though I did write a lot of sex today. But that’s a rabbit trail off the main path of this blog. I thought about what I had written yesterday and realized I didn’t have it exactly right. I can jump into a story pretty much wherever my brain has worked through a scene, but not on the computer. For some reason, when I type, it’s got to be “in order”. In my mind, those words echo with pompous authority the way a large and ancient bell tolls the hour for beginning classes across the lawn of a strict, Ivy-league prep school where all the students are required to wear suit coats and of course the hallowed halls are empty because tardiness is not allowed.
Wow. I’m really wanting to dart down those darn rabbit trails.
Anyway, I can’t type out of order. Maybe because rough drafts for me, lists of ideas, random wanderings, all fit more naturally onto paper. Where if I scratch it out, I can come back to it and see it, gather up the direction of inspiration, the starts and stops and AH HA’s!! even weeks or years from the day of writing. Arrows and stars and brackets and doodles all meander easily across a piece of notebook paper for me. But on a keyboard with electronic letters and delete, save, print - it’s gone, done, finished - even with the multitude of fonts available - it’s just not the same.
It’s not MY writing. I can look at something I wrote weeks ago and tell by the slant and shape of the letters what kind of mood I was in. From the complexity and number of doodles just how long it took me to pull a thought from my head in a manner precise and narrow enough for words. And I like to see my work spread out. I do a lot of flipping back and forth, moving whole scenes, descriptions, conflicts, paragraphs, and descriptions around. When I try to do that on the computer, I get confused because I don’t have the visual clues that I do on my handwritten pages. There’s no blue star with a number one in the margin and a note to call mom before the NCAA championship game starts (because of course, she won’t answer when the game is actually being played.) No coffee spill on page 62 or half-written poem along the margin where the scene being played out sparked inspiration for several other stories.
The computer is wonderful. I absolutely would NOT want to live a life in today’s world without it. It makes so many things faster and easier. (And in my notebooks, let’s face it - as much as I love them, they DON’T automatically correct my spelling when I’m rushing and forget the “i before e except after c” rule among others.) But there’s something about seeing words formed by your own hand that just draws me, entrances me. Keeps me reaching for that notebook one more time. When I hit a writing block, 9 times out of 10, I’m sitting at the computer. And 9 times out of 10, all I have to do is shut it down, grab a spiral and a colored pen, take a deep breath and dive into that clear, inviting page that’s been waiting on me.
I’m not a very organized person. I try, and “most” important things are under control. I don’t miss bill payments, I keep up with all the organizational needs of my work and my kids’ schedules and I remember most of my family’s birthdays - at least sometime during the correct month. (Numbers - in any form - dates, taxes, addresses, phone numbers, ages - just blur in my head. I write A LOT down. Finding where I wrote it….huh. That’s another trick.) But basically, life stays mostly in reach. Until recently. Lots to say on this, but today is about needing to get organized on one specific thing - where the hell did I write that down at?
You see, I do quite a bit of writing in notebooks in “stolen” moments. Much of my writing time isn’t done in a peaceful, distractionless office (I’m not sure if I’ve even SEEN one of those) for hours at a time. I run around living life with these stories blaring away inside my head and as soon as I can, I let them bleed out into the closest spiral notebook laying around (of which there are more than a few spread throughout my home due to this exact thing). I’ll scribble paragraphs down and then take the notebook with me to pick up my daughter to finish a thought and it will get left in the car. I’ll jot down a conversation in another notebook and stuff it into my computer bag to finish noting down expressions and background during lunch. I’ll write down ideas about setting while fixing dinner and then toss the notebook onto a shelf when I need the counter space to mix up a sauce. Are you getting the picture? Eventually, I do get around to putting it into the computer at a later date (at which point I am extremely thankful for my English background which makes the grammar and mechanics of writing mostly a given rather than another hurdle to jump before sending it off to my editor).
But my problem is FINDING the right notebook when I’m ready for it. Today I searched for nearly an hour trying to find the scene I had written down when Connyn first shows his “non-jerk” side to his mate. I needed that scene to move on. My brain wouldn’t process through to the next section until it had reviewed what I had written before. Apparently I have an innate refusal to just “jump” into a story at any place in it and start writing. I finally did find the notebook. In the dining room on a shelf under a stack of my daughter’s latest assignments brought home from school, a pizza delivery flyer and Optimus Prime (one of my son’s Transformers). And judging from the splatters across the bottom corner, I had been working on this while fixing last week’s lasangna.
There’s got to be a better way.
