Ooh, writer porn! What notebook nerdery.

The wolf, it mocks me with its laughter.

As a kid, I was a nerd. I loved learning, and the scholarly aspect of my formative education was far from a burden -- with the exception of that damned section on quantum mechanics during Physics 2AP my senior year.

Anyway, I used to look forward to going back to school. It was a relief from the endless doldrums of summer, for one. Granted, I usually found plenty of time and energy to invest in writing, and going back to school sort of cramped that. And the actual interactions with my peers? No thanks, I could do without that.

But all the school supplies. Notebooks, and pens, and erasers, and mechanical pencils...it was enough to make me drool. And yep, it's that time of year again. I really didn't intend to go buy anything. I seriously didn't. I'd splurged on a hoard of writing utensils earlier this spring, actually, and didn't need anything. Really. Plenty of space left in the notebooks I've got.

I certainly didn't need these.
But they came home with me anyway. An entire rainbow of composition books.
That array was Not Planned. I'm dead serious. It just... happened. I got home and unloaded them from the bag and blinked in amazement.

Yeah, I still use good old pen and paper to write, at least some of the time. I am not yet to that point where I can justify purchasing a tablet that has the size and capability to have both ease of mobility and convenience of either my laptop or desktop computers. And sometimes my thoughts just seem to loosen up and flow more easily when I pick up a pen. Especially when it's a gel pen that just slides over the paper like silk bedsheets (which are terribly impractical, mind you, if you're at all energetic in bed--I like my sex sans contusions or fractures, thanks--or a mobile sleeper).
Anyway. Pens. And paper.

I have a collection of smaller Moleskin notebooks hiding about for potential giveaway material in the distant future, their content the arduous working material of a few different WIPs. These, though. The composition notebooks are my workhorses. Clamped with butterfly clips to bookmark content no longer needed, standard paperclips to separate notes for different projects that inevitably lump together in the same space. Inevitably, because I only carry two of them, and one is devoted to the tome of a book I'm working on, so all the others stream together in the overflow one. Stream together, because as much as I do try to focus my energies on a single story at a time, I'll have ideas for plot points, thoughts about character backstory or development, and it comes out almost stream of consciousness, all over the place.

These won't stay so pristine and lovely for long. I figured their cleanliness was worth commemorating. Much like any 'before-after' comparison.