Scribbling in books

This is a scribble. In a book.

Actually, it's more of a doodle, I'd say. It's on the back inside cover of a book.

More specifics? It's a doodle on the inside back cover of a small red moleskine that lives in my purse. You can see the edge of the back pocket if you look closely. I made this particular scribble (and the one on the front inside cover, which I'm not going to share with you) when I got this particular book, in order to wreck it right away. It was sort of an effort to keep myself from getting all perfectionist over it, which I otherwise probably would have done.

Should I be explaining what any of this has to do with anything?

It's the back cover of one of my sketchbooks.

The doodle is a branching pattern, which is the sort of thing that tends to come back again and again in my olf brain. I've probably mentioned that before, if anyone wants to take a dive into the archives. I'm a patternish person, really.

There's one very unusual thing about this book, you know. Or you don't know until I tell you, so I guess I should just do that already.

The weird thing?

It's almost full.

In fact, I have three moleskines on the go right now which are each almost full, and that is weirdness in itself.

Hmmm. Spellcheck is telling me that there's something I should elaborate on before I continue this extremely exciting blather, so just a sec.

There. Moleskine. And fingertips, which one should always include when scanning the cover of a moleskine. They're much less blurry in real life, though, the fingertips. You're also seeing the ribbon bookmark and the elastic closure, which come standard on moleskines.

Hang on, again. Rather than me explaining all of this: moleskines. To be honest, I resisted these things for a long time. A sketchbook is a sketchbook is a sketchbook, right? And when a company advertises its "legendary" notebooks you have to know that it's all hype, naturally. However, I hated the boring paper in my field sketchbook so much that I finally got to that what the hell, let's try a moleskine point. And? Now I have three. Four, if you count my agenda book as well. But for the purposes of this conversation, three moleskines.

That are almost full, to take me back to my original point. Me, filling sketchbooks? Definitely out of character.

I tend to be the poster child for Short Attention Span, you see. I'm notorious for starting books, deciding that there's either something wrong with them (ahem, boring field notebook) or with what I've done in them (thus the intentional cover-defacing of our present subject at hand. Or in front of hand, in that silly scan), and then just leaving them in a corner somewhere. The fact that I seem to be developing even a little bit of a habit of using a sketchbook is head-scratching to me.

I'm not exactly filling them at record pace, I should probably say.

The current example's been on the go for about a year, which considering that it's a small one (my other two are a larger sketchbook and a large-version watercolour book) means yooooouuu draaaaaw slooooowly, Dee.

Well, I don't, so much. I just fill slowly, that's all.

And like I said before, the fact that Ms. Look! A bird! is managing to fill sketchbooks at all is something to wonder at. Nice to know that I can stick to a few things in life, anyway.





Let's hope that I don't decide the same thing about painting walnut shells, though. I'm hoping that there's only so much of that sort of thing a person can maintain an interest in...

[/especially pointless blather]