In spite of all the cool electronic equipment Jerry gives me, for which I am incredibly grateful and in fact am using this very moment, I must admit that I am still old school and often find comfort in pen and paper. Blue ballpoint gel ink pen and college ruled 100 page spiral notebooks are my materials of choice for my “morning pages.” (And while I have been keeping journals since I was 10 years old, Julia Cameron still gets a lot of the credit for my continued interest.)
The thing I like about using pen and paper is the sense of accomplishment I get when I fill a notebook or empty a pen. (I used to think this was weird until I discovered that many of my friends feel the same way.) I’ve been pondering this concept a lot lately and realized the other day that what would be really cool would be to write in the last page of a filled up spiral notebook while at time empty a ballpoint pen. I considered how this would feel like the ultimate in accomplishments until I realized it would be something that could only happen by chance and luck is not something you can take credit for.
Then I started to think about this filling a notebook/empty a pen phenomenon in a really creepy way. What if on December 21, 2012 writers all over the globe fill notebooks and empty pens at the same time and POOF there will suddenly be a spiral notebook/ballpoint pen rapture and we will be reduced to composing prose on computers all the time. I suppose there are worse things that could happen on this date but I don’t think Julia Cameron would be too happy about it.
Um, I think this NaNoWriMo thing is making me crazy.