Making a mountain out of a Moleskine?

A midnight post on a Friday night-- what an exciting social life I lead!  Not that it matters to me in the least, of course.  There are choices of all sorts to be made in life, and a quiet Friday night at the apartment suits me very well this week.

Today's post comes to you courtesy of a quick trip I made to Barnes & Noble the other day.  For the past few weeks, I've been having trouble sleeping, and often find myself at some unmentionable hour of the night (morning?), sheets pushed aside, staring out my window at the silent scenery, taking in the night sky and nearby trees, wondering about the secrets that they and I keep but never speak.  Look, there it is, the whole reason for my trip to B&N: my apparent need to wax lyrical at bizarre hours when I should be sleeping, but my restless mind has taken over instead.  And in order to wax said lyrical properly, to spill out my purple prose without the shame of having to subject another human ear to the insanity within my mind, I need somewhere to write it.

I have my poetry journal, of course, which is my main go-to whenever my thoughts are too much and I don't understand even myself.  Then, I allow for the greatest gift that writing has ever helped me to experience, where I turn my mind off and uncap my pen, and suddenly, words and thoughts and feelings I didn't even know I was having appear on the page, in rhythm and rhyme, and the poem moves faster than I can even begin to conjure up words to match it, but I don't have to worry about that, because it writes itself, and I'm relieved of my worries.  But that only happens occasionally.  When I have to force poems out, it's not nearly as much fun, and the poetry is never as good, and my nighttime musings call mostly for prose.

I have my dear OGTAD, always at hand, always at my nightstand, for me to comment on the good things that happened during the day before I try to convince my restless mind to sleep (and inevitably wake up needing somewhere to write).  As OGTAD is for what happened during the day, it is of little use to someone needing a place to store the stream of consciousness produced by the night.

I used to keep a journal, a regular journal, but it was filled with so much negativity and pages upon pages of me beating so many dead horses with so many sticks (hence the birth of OGTAD), it just doesn't seem like the appropriate place for a new way of writing-- not journaling, but writing.

So after a few nights of writing on scraps of paper found around my room, or worse, of thinking the thoughts but letting them slip away from me, somehow escaping out my closed window and floating off into the night, never to be thought of again, never captured on paper, I went to B&N.  I bought 3 Moleskine notebooks.  I've never used Moleskine before, but they intrigue me because they are so plain. In my youth (how pretentious of me, referring to my youth though I am but 21 pitiful years old, and yet there seems to be no other word to describe myself before my current journey), I always searched for the "perfect" journal, the prettiest, the one with the magnetic snap, the one with the fanciest cover, the one with the beadings, etc., etc.  A particular journal that comes to mind was that of red leather, a comforting smell, but soon filled with negativity, just like all the others.  These Moleskine notebooks drew me in because they were not journals, they were not decorated, they were not... desperate.

And there is enough subject matter on this topic for an entirely separate post, but to condense it-- I'm tired of journaling.  This blog is journal enough for me, but far too public for every private thought, and certainly too available for my midnight musings.  While I enjoy this type of writing, I know in my heart of hearts, and have known since a very young age, that I have a story to tell-- a book to write, if I may.  It frustrates me to not know what this story is or how to tell it yet, and I know I have a whole life ahead of me to figure it out, but I realized something the other day.

The perfect idea and everything that goes with it is not going to walk up to me and introduce itself.  Should I be so lucky to have that happen, consider this entry an ironic "Murphy's law" sort of post, but to be that lucky!  I almost laugh at how many years I spent with this idea in the back of my mind, that it will just "come to me", in so many words.  I have to keep writing.  I have to write, write, write.  Journaling is fine and dandy, but it's not the kind of writing I want to do.  I want to discover more of my own personal style, my own voice, play more with words for my own sake, and write it all down.  I want to capture the things that I think at night and figure out what I meant by them in the morning, for the morning always sheds a different light on things that we thought we understood by the light of the moon.  I'm so inspired by the styles of Laurie Halse Anderson and, as I read The Book Thief, Markus Zusak-- so very inspired, so very afraid to be siphoning off their words and ways when I have my own to pour out.  I just need to figure out what that exactly is, and I must write in order to do it.

So, three Moleskine notebooks.  Is this too much to hope for, to fill these books by the end of... the semester?  The year?  This entry in itself is far longer than I was expecting, but I am quite wordy, when I  go back and reread my things.  I have no set guidelines for these notebooks except to write.  I wonder if I have put these notebooks on a pedestal, perhaps seated myself along there with them, and feel quite silly about it all.  But when it comes down to the very core of my own being, I find words there that want to be brought to life, and it's time that I stopped hoping they'll find their way out on their own, and start writing them somewhere so that they can live.