Have notebook will travel

Here I will introduce you to one of my greatest treasures (and eventually I will take some pics and show off the actual things I talk about but for now...). My notebooks. I carry one with me at the least everywhere.

They are used not only for rcording things of note in the world around me but also for reserch and project ideas and more in line with the topic today and of the last few days, story ideas.

Now I havn't always been the whirlwind of projects and activities that I've come to be lately, infact much of my younger days I spent trapped in the back of my own head. You might look in on me and see that I haven't moved in hours but my mind was gone off among ideas and other worlds.

Sadly many of those ideas and stories and adventures are lost in the mists of ages past. They disappeared forever. and thankfully I recognised it as a sad fact. Because that inspired me to change. I got notebooks to record these gems in. I review them from time to time but most often writing it down helps integrate it in my brain somehow that allows me to keep the oddest little bits around like legos or some other modular component. When a new idea occurs to me or somebody remarks something like "blankets where the ultimate sheild from mosters when you were a kid." My brain can link to that idea way back when, -frail man battles dark hordes using a forgotten technique and mystic cloth-.

Suddenly connecting those two things and working through some of my other techniques of making the character more realistic by having him grow and confront his flaws as the villain, suddenly you can have a story building itself.

That is a truely beautiful thing to have. Because once a story rippens to the point where all you have to do is write what you know about the story so far, and it speaks to you, it will tell you where the story goes from there.

The notebooks I have at time tried to seperate into catagories, such as day to day museings, and story ideas, and philosophy. But I've noticed that my philosophy tends to bend into story ideas and storyies come from daya to day events altered and played through a lens of philosophy. The ability to even figure out which location it belongs to anymore becomes something lost to me.

But the important thing is to record them, no matter how weird (santa useing vampires instead of elves because they congregate in the land of long nights) because even if you never even use the idea it gets it out of your head and makes room for more, as well as gets you used to recording ideas. Who knows, maybe I will make a filler or alternative story arc for a web comic that involves vampire labor at the north pole.

So there is my best advice right now, employ vampire labor... I mean write down your ideas. They are something you create and that in itself can make them wonderful to look at again weeks or years later. I'm fairly certain I'll never empty my journals of ideas to make stories from before I die, but it's going to be intresting to try.

Another post on the morrow.

Until then Take care of yourselves,
Roving Jack