Dragon's Teeth Sown Dept.

I lost a good part of the day moving stuff around — again — mostly to try and find out why some USB devices were working and others weren't. The whole thing involved excavating a sliding-drawer box from under some other things; it had been sitting underneath something else for so long the top of the box had squished down and made the drawer difficult to slide out. Small wonder I found something in it I hadn't seen in literally years: the Idea Diary.

The name should tell you what the book was about. I jotted down titles, story fragments, bits and pieces of things, and then put the book away and forgot about it for weeks on end. I'd then come back to it, glance over whatever caught my eye, and see what new trains of thought any of it inspired. One day I put it back in that drawer and forgot about it for a lot longer than I'd originally intended — and as a result it got buried, and I was preoccupied with other things anyway.

Now that the Idea Diary has resurfaced, two things struck me. The first was how the way I would wrestle with and debate the very things I'd write in it seems to be something that I've lost my touch for; getting back into the habit of doing that will probably be a huge help. The second is how many of the ideas that were a product of an earlier and less positive time just don't seem like anything I would want to bother with now. Maybe they seemed good at the time, when I was unintentionally pooh-poohing the idea of casting my net wide, when trying to shoot high just seemed like trouble.

The Idea Diary, by the way, is one gorgeous book: hand-stitched, bound in heavy boards, with creamy paper that takes pencil or pen beautifully. The mere act of writing in it is luxurious; it's as different, in the best ways, from typing this blog post as riding a bicycle differs from driving. You're forced to go that much more slowly, to plan your words and sentences in advance, to chew them over instead of simply stamp them out. Something we all need to learn to do, or re-learn. Me included.