1999 (Sloppy Firsts #1)
And so it begins: A new phase of the (retro)blog.
Like my alter-ego, I do all my writing in a black and white speckled composition notebook. I started doing this when I was a junior in high school. For nearly ten years I used these notebooks to document my day-to-day life in the form of journal entries like those I’ve been posting in the (retro)blog since June 2005.
Though I had been writing comic coming-of-age vignettes in various creative writing classes over the years, it wasn’t until 1999 that I tried transforming that material into what would eventually become Sloppy Firsts. Once I began using my notebooks to create Jessica Darling’s journal entries, I stopped writing journal entries of my own. It’s as if all my real-life angst had been redirected for fiction.
(Or perhaps I was finally too happy to bitch and moan all the time.)
I still carry a black and white composition notebook wherever I go. Only now I use it to jot down ideas for my novels. Starting with the notebook for Sloppy Firsts, these are the pages I’ll share with you in the (retro)blog one notebook, one novel, one page at a time.
As you’ll see, some paragraphs came to me fully formed–they appear in my published books as they first popped into my head. More often, you’ll discover dropped plot-lines, scenes sketched but never developed, and a lot of nearly indecipherable scrawling that made a lot of sense to me in the moment. Sometimes I used my notebooks to prepare myself for real-life business meetings, or important phone calls. Sometimes I used them to make shopping lists for parties.
But most of the time, what you’ll read is the closest I can get to explaining how I turn my ideas into books. Enjoy!
