I’ve been harvesting ideas from my old notebooks for my screenplay. I started keeping a notebook way, way back in 1999. The beginning of that one is so sad. It’s all tiny thoughts (but it’s a small notebook so maybe that figures). I was 21 but still an infant. But, you know, I got the old brain muscle going and that book eventually got some cute ideas in. I never did actually fill that book up. I just sort of moved on.

In December 2001 I started the first of the good notebooks. It probably isn’t a coincidence that that was when I switched from the smaller book to a normal sized one. In March of 2002, exactly three years ago, my writing started to become more complex. I started writing short narratives. Now, I had written little stories when I was really young (see the Big Fight written on a piece of construction paper) and my brother and I had made some wonderfully awful comics, but this was something different. I can still remember forcing myself to do this—going from unrelated sentence after unrelated sentence to stories.

It was like magic.

Also, in the course of keeping these notebooks I started keeping track of my dreams. They naturally made their way onto the page.

Later in the notebook from 2002, in the summer, are a series of one-page stories that I wrote in one sitting. They were completely unedited, and, remain (until I finish one of my screenplays anyway) the acme of my writing. I would clear my head and wait for an interesting first sentence. Then I would lay there for forty-five minutes until the story was finished.

No one has ever read these stories. They remain these private, secret things that make me smile.

Maybe I’ll finally type them up.