Wee Notebooks

I have an obsession with tiny notebooks. I love the wee ones that you can stuff into a pocket or slip into your purse or jam down the front of your camera case. Maybe it's because of my old desire to be a reporter, or my imagined views of famous writers bent over moleskin notebooks penning out the novels that cemented their fame.

Whatever the motivation is, I have several of these wee notebooks. I keep coming across them in old purses and backpacks, stuffed behind books on the bookshelf, hiding under a bunch of socks. They just keep popping up and enticing me with their tiny cuteness. The best thing about finding these notebooks is that I've used them for such random things.

Case in point: Tiny green notebook, found in the utensil drawer next to the spoons. Floury fingerprints on the cover would lead me to believe I had a recipe written inside, but the only food related item I could find was a messy scrawl on one page proclaiming "DON'T EAT BUTTER!"

The first half of the notebook had been used as a notepad for Balderdash, the game where a word is read aloud and then you have to make up definitions for it. There are page after page of sentences with such things as "the last car in a pileup", "sound of a pregnant hippo exhaling" and "the inability to function when wearing pants". Each page makes me laugh, either at the silliness of the definitions or the remembrance of the games in which they were played.

Doodles line the pages of the center of the notebook, a few palm trees, a hibiscus flower or two. Apparently I was in a tropical mood during the use of this notebook, as leis and dolphins and coconuts seem to take up the majority of my doodles. I can't remember the reason for that phase, although I'm assured it's more like it was easier to draw than I actually expressed a desire to visit. Anything over 80 degrees and I get twitchy.

The last bit of the notebook is my favorite. Besides the dire warning about butter, this is chock full of a story that I was writing at the time. Scribbles in half a dozen different ink and pencil colors tell the story of Will and Amos Mattingerly, a father and son who try to connect with each other as the world changes around them. The words have faded into the paper in places and it's hard to make out just where I was going with the plot, but there are bigger issues that jump out at me. Sadly, they are issues that are fairly common for me in this genre.

Will and Amos are very girly in their speech patterns. I think that I struggled with the format of it being emotional scenes between two men and ended up making them sound overly emotional and flowery. That's usually how to tend to write anyway, but most of the time I can shift that dialouge onto a female character. It makes me want to work harder at my male characters. Also, I think that this piece runs the line of being too science fiction. There's a whole paragraph that describes the 'ralyon' trees outside the house. What moon they come from, the color of their leaves and just what primates eat their fruit.

Apparently my sci fi fics are all about weeping poetic men and primate-laden moon trees. Is it any wonder that I rarely write sci fi?