Private Notebooks

I have never been able to keep up with any of the various private notebooks I have bought over the years.

They have started as journals, scratchpads, lists, and simply a place to doodle and take notes. But none of them stuck in an enduring way.

I would scribble my way through the first 20% or so and then set it aside.

I wonder why that is? Perhaps it was just the youth of it?

Maybe blogging and my ability to persist met at exactly the right time?

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem