Notebooks... Lots and lots of notebooks.

I've done a lot of writing, but sometimes, I forget how much.

Tonight, I was performing one of my most important regular rituals: digging through piles of notebooks and papers, trying to find the story I felt like working on. I work on different things when I'm in different moods, which is probably why I have a whole bunch of almost, but not quite, finished novels. (and some really bad poetry)

So, these notebooks are in stacks, one in a big milk crate, and then a few others on shelves, which add up to about two more milk crates. I have large portions of novels, written long hand, punctuated by stray pages of things like songs I want to buy, poems to former girlfriends, half-written and unsent letters, some very odd, stylized drawings, etc. To find anything, anything at all, I have to remember what I drew or wrote on the cover of the notebook, and/or thumb through them all.

Some of the random things I found tonight: drawings of Japenese palaces; multiple starts at keeping a journal, initiated by some "life ending" problem, and quit right after the problem went away; a story about a guy trapped between his pro-choice friend and a bunch of pro-life nut jobs, both of whom are destroying his insulated small-town life; a poem inspired by a sad combination of Shakespear and Emily Dickinson, dedicated to a personification of death; a partial list of Van Halen songs for a "best of" tape I never made; a poem I wrote while selling tickets to a movie called (I think) "Last Call at Maud's," (which only maybe Frog will know,) with the "edgy" title, "Do Dykes Like Ice Cream?," which is all about our shared humanity (good idea, bad poem); journal entries about the girlfriend I couldn't live without, shortly followed by journal entries about the girl I had just started dating (and ended up marrying); the beginnings of a supernatural thriller about vampires; a drawing of some sort of odd pagan altar that I think was supposed to go with another supernatural thriller that I'm not sure I even started; a bizarre murder thriller where each character's expression of their sexuality represents some aspect of human nature and societal conflict; a portrait of Jimi Hendrix...

I could go on all night... But I won't... 'Cause you'll get bored... I already am...

Anyway, it's a lot of stuff. A whole shitload. What's really scary is not how bad most of it is. Other than the poetry, it's mostly really good. No, what's scary is, how much of it is worth doing something with, and yet I never have.

But then, my urge to share this stuff isn't as big as my combination of laziness and self-editing. I don't want to negotiate with some numb nuts over my work. I don't have the energy for cover letters, sample chapters, plot summaries. (In fact, I don't know if I could summarize most of the plots. They're really... out there.) Even if I could overcome my disinterest in the business side of writing, I'm also just reluctant to share. People are small minded and short sited. They lack imagination. They assume everything you write is somehow "about you," or worse yet, "about them." Every time I've shown something I thought was interesting to someone, they have responded with the standard, "Do you see yourself/me/the world like that? Is that who you want yourself/me to be?" I don't know that I have the patience for all the BS I'd have to put up with if anyone ever read some of this stuff. (And trust me, the best stuff is also the weirdest.)

At some point, I suppose I should do something with all of this. For now, though, I'm still trying to find the damn story I wanted to work on...