Going Inkless

     I dreamt I was in bed one morning, lying awake, trying to get the last few minutes of rest before the alarm would ring.  Lists of what I would do for the day came rushing up.  They compiled themselves in steady ticks like an old printer spitting out one line, then another.  Still, I determined to stay prone, squeezing out every moment to which I was entitled.  I planned to hit the snooze alarm when the clock would blare.  I calculated the number of minutes that would buy me, the number it would leave me on the other side of the morning- how long I would have to get ready for work, and what I could do to compress the necessary tasks into the new timeframe.  I knew I wouldn't sleep anymore, but I was stubborn and wouldn't compromise the sleep time even if I wasn't using it for the intended purpose.  But I was.  Sleeping.  Sleeping and dreaming of not sleeping and wishing I was sleeping.      Sleep deprivatio...

Ah, Summertime! When life becomes a full-speed tumble through weddings, graduations, picnics, and all sorts of social events that rush from invitation to "holy cow! That's tomorrow?  Wait, what day is today?" so fast you can feel the breeze as they pass.  Your evenings are spent with chores you couldn't get to on the weekend, and you barely have time to breathe much less compose a thoughtful blog post. What happened to the time when summers were long days filled with tree-climbing, bike rides, fishing and swimming?  When soft dark nights were right for stargazing, firefly hunts or crack-the-whip?  Then again, I guess that was just another kind of tumble. So, point one: I apologize for the posting delay, and the meager offering this time around. And point two: If I don't get around to another post as soon as you'd like, please imagine me with a jar of fireflies. And, yes, it's close enough to summer; my thermometer tells me so.

My notebook is well-travelled. This one has been with me for thousands of miles, taken along on road trips and camping adventures so it would always be handy when inspiration struck or to fill long hours with useful activity. It's been written straight through from the top of each page to the very bottom. Notes and rewrites clutter the margins. There are lines marked out and rephrased in half-height letters sandwiched between the usual rows. For clarity, I began the book by writing only on one side of each page, so that the marks wouldn't show through to muddle the other side, but when I reached the last page, there was nowhere else to go. So, I flipped the book and started a second pass. There are notes scribbled on the covers, and the whole book is so dense with ink that I imagine you could measure the difference in weight compared to when it was new. This current notebook holds chapters of the novel as they were when first conceived, scraps of other stories, outline...