My notebook nemesis

I love notebooks. So why do I struggle so much to regularly use them?

For my birthday this year, my wife got me this beautiful, big teNeues A4 notebook. And a few Blackwing pencils.

My beautiful teNeues A4 notebook and Blackwing pencils… [swoon]

I don’t know much about either of these brands, but they seem to come very highly regarded. Something that “serious writers” use. The notebook is so big, so weighty, that feels like it also begs me to sketch in it. So something that “serious writers“ and “serious artists” use. It even has a spine that seems to disappear underneath it and allows you to open the notebook completely flat, a feature that a wizard must have contributed to the design process.

When I unwrapped it, it was like holding the future in my hands. Something that could be filled with endless possibilities.

And I haven’t touched it since.

I’ve thought about touching it a lot. I have great ambitions to write/sketch the future of the Every Day, Luv empire, complete with more books, live events that tour across the country, a children’s book, a PoemPalooza van that travels around to festivals, development deals with various studios and streamers to option individual poems for TV and movie projects, and tens of thousands of substack followers and paid subscribers.¹

Finding the right notebook can seemingly change peoples lives. There’s this guy Ryder Carroll, who invented this thing called the Bullet Journal. It’s the simplest, most incredible looking thing. It’s sexy AF. It actually seems to change people’s lives, if you believe the gushing testimonials. And it’s way too intimidating for me to ever actually consider using.

Instead, what I use is a plain, lined regular old notebook in which I occasionally make a to-do list. And I occasionally check in on it to see if I’ve done it.

This madness has got to stop. I’m just not sure why it’s happening in the first place.

As a writer, I’ve never really kept a journal. I always admire those who do. Those who do their morning pages, who look over what they’ve written at night and make a list to carry over to the next day, who have a daily record that they were here and that they tried to express themselves in a way that might make the world a little better.

And the teNeues A4 is calling…

“Come to me…come to meeeee…”

Perhaps this will be the one. The one that sees me and gets me and beckons me with its irresistible siren call to open it daily and write my future.

1. Yes, these are all things I will someday do. Perhaps when I crack open this notebook.