The Notebooks

 This is a different sort of post from what I usually do but...it's my blog and no one's forcing you to read.

The notebook you see in front of you is a notebook that you can find at a bookstore like Chapters/Indigo. The one that makes this one special is a few things:

1) It's mine.

2) This was the last Christmas presents given to me by my sister, Stephanie.

It took time but this past Thursday night, I finally finished the final page of that notebook.

That's a lot of writing over five years. I probably could have done more but I'll admit I wasn't as driven up until a couple of years ago.

However, with this notebook being 256 pages and 26 lines on each page, that comes out to 6656 lines.

Needless to say, that's a lot of writing and most of the time I wasn't one to finish something two lines into a new page and then jump over to the next page. I wanted to maximize every line, every page, make sure I got everything I could out of this notebook.

This was the notebook where ideas started out as just words on a page and eventually became comics many people have seen and enjoyed. There are lines in here about how I might be able to turn the story of how I met Stan Lee into a short 10-page comic, paragraphs detailing comics that are currently in process, I could go on.

That notebook was given to me by someone I loved and I'm always going to treasure it.

But now I get to write in this.

This was a Christmas present I got in 2023, also by someone I love, however because they have powerful lawyers (And got me to sign an NDA telling me it was a birthday card; I should have been suspicious when I was told to initial and date certain lines), I won't name them.

I'm already on the second page, crafting a short period piece set in the 1950s. Whether I'll actually make a script with that and then get it made into a comic, who knows? The important thing for me is that I always be writing something.
Towards the end of his life, Christopher Hitchens would say in interviews, "Being a writer isn't what I do, it's what I am."

That's how I've been feeling over the last year. Am I paid professionally? No, not yet. But at the same time, I'm always working on something. The last thing I'd want to have happen is a professional ask me, "What are you working on right now?" and shrug, saying I'm waiting to be inspired.

In the last notebook, I started on a path that made old dreams become a reality.

I can't wait to see what happens from this notebook...