TMI

There's always one within reach.  I carry one in my pocket.  There's one on my bedside table.  Any computer will do in a pinch.  Inspiration comes in spurts.

In fact, like a nocturnal emission, you can never predict it.  Notebooks are the writer's best friend.  That's because inspiration can't be tamed.

Even the notebook is no guarantee.  Inspiration comes voyeuristically when you're in the shower.  She likes to scream loudly when you're driving in the suicide lane of impossible traffic.  She whispers in your ear just when you're dropping off to sleep.

My notebooks are like traps set to catch her whenever she appears.  She's quick, however, and that idiot driver passing you on the right can take her brilliant idea with him, so that she's lost forever when you have a moment to scribble it down at the gas station.

In a former house I kept a waterproof noteboard in the shower.  When we moved, the sticky adhesive stayed behind.  Some of my old ideas remain scribbled on that plastic board.

At times it feels look too much information.  I filled up my fourth pocket notebook this past week.  I used to carry a scrap of folded up paper in my pocket for ideas.  They easily got lost or, as sometimes happens with paper, so smudged you could no longer read your own thoughts.

Eventually, if they’re ever to be seen, these ideas must make their way into electronic form.  Although reacquainting myself with old ideas is fun, typing page after page of them is tedious.  So many ideas.

So little time.  Work, for those of us not fortunate enough to be paid for our writing, can be birth control for stories that swarm your mind by the thousands.  Perhaps millions, but I can’t count that high.

So I carry notebooks.  Sometimes I catch only a glimpse of her.  A sparkle in the eye, or a foot disappearing behind a tree.  I’ve seen enough, however, to know that I want her with me always.