The closest I've ever come to writing a blog was an annual update on a miniatures gaming website showing off whatever I had been working on for the last few months. While I love writing and the format of journal entries, I'm horrible at keeping up with them. Once, my writing was prolific and streamed out of me faster than I could
think it. Stories were rare, but poetry, prose, and stream of
consciousness (like this) much more common. These days, I don't write nearly as much, though story seeds crop up much more frequently.
Stacks of mostly blank journals lie accusingly next to my nightstand along with the spiral notebooks that Tabitha and I wrote back and forth to one another in back in high school. There's a few simple journals, faux-leather wrapped folios of lined paper that would be indistinguishable from the hundreds just like it sold in big boxes across the US. The flowered journal I kept through high school, filled with poetry, lists of names of people I had met and their astrological signs, little bits of nostalgia crammed in the pages like flyers from the Fusion Cafe and concert tickets. Then there's the other journals.
There's a few specialty journals you wouldn't be surprised to see in a Barnes & Noble, like the Star Wars Journal (made pre-prequels, thank you very much!) whose spiral-bound, wide spaced lines are randomly indented by quotes from Episodes IV, V, and VI and silhouettes of the characters they're attributed to. It's fuller than most with my shoddy penmanship, the first half dozen or so pages with entries from my brief time living in Virginia with my father, step-mother, and step-sister, with the two or three entries written about our trip to New Jersey to visit my dad's family there. The rest is filled with characters, plot ideas, rules alterations or inventions, and the like for several of the Star Wars roleplaying games I've had the privilege of running.
Another would be what I call the Curmudgeon's Journal, boldly advertising it's intent to be a private vent for the well-adjusted sociopath on the cover. It's also interspersed with quotes from celebrities and historical figures regarding the stupidity of Man. It was a gift, well-received, from someone who's heard me rage against the ineptitude of the masses on more than one occasion. While there's no shortage of material for me to fill it's pages, this journal lies empty.
One of my favorite unusual blank books was purchased during my last trip to Disney World: a yellow fur-covered book with unlined, pale ochre construction paper pages inside, little black bead eyes and embroidered nose and mouth on the cover. Imagine the Evil Dead II Necronomicon crafted lovingly from the head of Winnie the Pooh by the Disney marketing department. That's how I think of it - a beloved childhood memory made into some thing. One time I thought to make it a photo album of the trip, but it's laid fallow for years.
Another favorite I picked out at a Ren Faire years ago. Dyed red leather stamped with a dragon design and held closed with a huge Celtic knot button and leather jesses, it is a beautiful work of craftsmanship and I'm loathe to dirty it's pages with anything less than the perfection it deserves.
That, I think more than anything else is what keeps me from writing, that fear of putting something on the page that's less than perfect. I find that I edit, re-edit, check grammar and paragraph structure, delete sub-par sentences, research more appropriate synonyms, edit again, et. al. in place of getting down what I wanted to record in the first place and it is this attempt at birthing perfection in place of crafting it that has kept those journals blank for so many years.
Perhaps that will change. I've got stories to tell, so long as I can let them be (in my own estimation) ugly and unrefined for a while. It's my hope that this journal without pages won't stay empty.
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