I’m never without a notebook. I have one here. I wear cargo pants a lot, so it’s easier for me to slip a notebook in. I always carry a notebook and at least two pens, in case one runs out of ink. I’m a compulsive note taker.
As it happens, last night I couldn’t sleep. I woke up at 3:15, and I went into the bathroom of our hotel room so as not to wake my wife. I turned on the light and put the seat down on the toilet, sat down, and I wrote a poem of three verses that’s for New Kid Number Five> that I’m working on right now - a book that has no other title yet. It’s about two dragons a little too macho for their own good. What happens when dragons meet and neither of them likes the other? I wrote that last night between three and five in the morning. So, I’m always writing.
I do most of my finish work at home. I’ve learned to write everywhere. I write in hotels. I write in restaurants. I write on airplanes. But sooner or later, I have to get it down so it’s legible and do the fine work, the tweaking. I do that at home. I work on a computer, so I have to do that.
But I have taken so many notes over the years. I have a stack of notebooks now that, if you piled them up, they would probably go way past the ceiling. I’ve been doing it for about 40 years, and I have a couple of drawers in a fire-resistant safe filled with them. I have this fear that I’ll lose them, and I still haven’t culled them. There are ideas I haven’t touched yet from 30 or 40 years ago. I’m going to have to cull them to do this next book, because I’m running out of new ideas.
