Cleaning And New Notebooks

Today I finally started tackling the project that is cleaning out my room. When I leave for Scotland, my mom is planning on renting out our house and going to Arizona. So, when I leave, I have to pack everything in my room, either in the suitcases that are going with me, or into boxes to be stored at my dad's. I'm hoping to get rid of a lot of stuff. Clothes, crafts, papers, trinkets-turned-junk. But one thing I am not ready to part with is my small library of books. They are in boxes, waiting for me to find my own place one day, where I have room for a bookcase. I'm only bringing my absolute favorite books with me in September. Probably American Gods, my favorite book, plus The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Maybe The Hobbit, since it belongs with the trilogy, and maybe The Silmarillion, which I've been meaning to read and which could be writing inspiration. But nothing else. For now. I want to be simplistic and take as little as possible.

On the subject of writing, I have an exercise I'm going back to. I kind of talked about this before in my blog, but I feel the need to share it again. I found the notebook I started doing "morning pages" in, where you write three pages, longhand, first thing in the morning. I had started it thinking I might fill it in a month, and here it is, three years after I started it (first entry was August '07), only half-full. I went back and read the first few entries and realized I started this notebook around the time I seriously started writing my novel. I wrote about how excited I was for my writing mentor to read my first chapter. I'm definitely keeping it, for nostalgic reasons.

So I decided to finish the notebook, since I tend to half-fill notebooks. It's therapeutic, and a good outlet for the rambling that goes on in my head (that's normal for writers, right?), for the strange urge I have to fill blank pages with words. Seriously, I'm a sucker for new notebooks, and clean, blank pages. When I was younger, I never knew what to write, but I was tantalized by blank pages. Now, I've practiced "freewriting" enough that I can ramble on about anything, any stray thought that comes to mind.

Long story short, I recommend journaling, freewriting-style. To anyone and everyone, whether you think yourself a writer or not. Let the words flow, don't take the pen off the page until your chosen time or number of pages. For me, a simple 70-page notebook like this one is perfect. If I go out and buy some fancy, leather-bound, gold-foiled notebook, I feel like I can only write leather-bound, gold-foiled things. It hampers my creativity. Simple notebooks let me write anything at all, whether it's crappy writing or not. Besides, then you can decorate the covers with sharpies and stickers, and you're left with good memories.

Photo: Lame, I know. Not my own photo. But this is what I bought the other day, a 6-pack of cheap notebooks (better for you than beer, easier to fill out than abs). Red, orange, green, blue, purple, and black... I'm already considering which one I'll use when the one I'm writing in is used up. Orange, maybe. You don't see many orange notebooks.