It was middle school when she realized that she was a writer. But she had decided at the age of about three that she was going to be an academic—figures. What, isn't that the way it always works? Paleontologist, astronomer, physicist, Egyptologist—wait. Artist. (Because she couldn't write well enough yet, and she didn't realize that she hadn't started to draw early enough, didn't have enough talent anyway, had no spatial sense.) Then writer. But too late for that—classicist, then. Fine. Writer on the side. Of course, by that time, four years without writing anything but the occasional poem, mostly awful. Trying to be "classicist, then. Fine. Artist on the side" and wasting time in Mrs. H's utterly unhelpful public-school art classes. AP Studio Art. Got the portfolio back, looked through it, realized that it was all utter crap to begin with. Damn.

So she spent a few weeks lost. She knew damn well that she wasn't an academic. She'd claimed it as her "last summer to be a child" even though she wasn't a child anymore. Too much time on her hands, acrylics and canvas tossed in the back of the closet. Finally, she stumbled across fandom, and then written erotica in general. Stubbed her toes on some truly awful writing. Ouch, ouch, ouch, wait, what? Good erotica. Hmmm, maybe I can write erotica. I won't post it anywhere… just write it. Try something new. Why not.

It was harder than she expected. She kept sublimating everything. Where the plot was supposed to climax at, well, climax, it kept climaxing at kisses. She wrote lots of kisses. Kiss after kiss, bland peach-tinted love stories, cloudy bits and pieces of ambiguous relationships. She started writing poetry again, the first time since that first abortive attempt to be a writer. (You know, when most angsty little prepubescent children try to write about slitting wrists? She tried to write about dancing in the sunlight. She tried to write about flying. She tried to write about stars and spirals. You can't write about those things until you've been wrenched away from them and forced to claw your way back. She still isn't back, and so she still doesn't write about those things. She tries to draw them sometimes anyway. She can't.)

Eventually, she gave herself a good slap in the face, got over it, and wrote the goddamn erotica. There. For a few months, she couldn't write anything but erotica. No good. So today, she is starting a writing journal—two pages a day, every day, all summer and possibly into the year. It can be two pages of anything, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, utter nonsense, it doesn't matter. It can be two pages on anything, two typed pages (size twelve, single spaced,) two pages of standard notebook paper, two Post-It notes, two typed pages (size forty-two, double spaced.) The Spiral Bound Notebook. Because spirals are still important, even if she can't write about them for now. Maybe they'll show up here, rough, unpolished, tossed off in a hurry like everything else here, eventually. Because the Notebook is just a kick in the seat of the pants, not a showcase. It's two embarrassing scribbled pages a day. The point of the Notebook is to make her write. It'll go anthropomorphic or personified or something, she just knows it. There's a ghost in the Notebook, and the more drivel she feeds it, the stronger it will get.