White Pages

This week is the beginning of my final phase for Earth Mother .I.. With any luck, Part .I. will be finished soon. I've already begun writing notes for Part .II.; where my "outline" for its plot was perhaps twenty words in length at the time I threw down the entire Earth Mother idea, I have given a nice little synopsis of the events leading up to Part .II., and some of the events that will be included.

My handwriting how somehow gotten even smaller; I suspect that this is because I have misplaced my pen and now use a mechanical pencil to write in my notebook. I'm writing fifteen or sixteen characters per inch, which is probably smaller than an eight-point computer font (size twelve is something like ten characters per inch, while size ten is twelve per inch). The notebook itself has exceeded its sixtieth page; with the generally small handwriting of the past half-year, I am satisfied that Notebook Three packs more punch in every page.

A new sketch war awaits typing. I am unsure if I should post it, as it was the first after a long period of silence, and it makes little sense (in a bad way), but tomorrow will tell.

Speaking of the fine art of writing by hand, I was delighted to find something new in the local Barnes and Noble. For the past few months, this store has not stocked my preferred kind of Moleskine, the pocket-sized, unruled (plain) notebook. After a fairly thorough inspection of other book stores in my area, I have found that no one has it on display. Is the plain notebook that unpopular? Or are they burning all stock off before the coming of the new Softskines? Either way, I couldn't get a new notebook for the eventual succession of Number Three. So I looked around the store a little more, and to my surprise I found a series of small, softcover notebooks that is very much like a long-gone favorite of mine, the Moleskine Volant. The Volant softcover pocket notebook was my first kind of Moleskine, and really the first kind of notebook that I used for writing and ideas, rather than for the purpose of a journal or diary. It was an important milestone in my life. Well, the Volant has been off the market for two or three years now, and I wished I had snatched a few more up when they were still in stores. But the stuff I found from Nava is just as good: a set of twelve 80-page notebooks, one supposedly for each month in a year, in close approximation to the Volant style. That's 960 pages! I probably won't burn through 80 pages in a month, but the notebooks are simply numbered (one dot per month), not named (January, February, etc.). The paper is of high quality, and $25 (at least, that's what I paid at Barnes and Noble) for 960 pages is better than I expected for something of this type--the Volants vere about $6 for three books of 64 pages. Anyway, if you are interested, keep an eye out for Nava Design's "One Year of White Pages" notebook set.