UPDATE: My Blank Page Fetish

Introducing Hello, Blank Page – My Online Notebook

So, about this blank page fetish of mine. I’ve always been inclined to have it. It started with notebooks, probably in elementary school years, and surely by middle school it was a full-blown obsession because I’d fancied myself an artist long before I considered myself a “serious writer”. Sure, the guitar wasn’t too far behind, but I was drawing little miniature comic strips since sometime in the mid-1980s. And pinups of characters, invariably and inevitably “inspired by” (i.e. downright ripped-off) the X-Men and other Marvel characters I was reading on a monthly basis back then. I say all of that to say that, now, a couple of decades-and-change later, that obsession is a full-on fetish now and has been for a while — I’ve only just recently faced and embraced it. Months back on my website I wrote about nostalgia and finding some 60 notebooks/pads between my home office and garage. Was I excited to see all the odd notes and scriptures archived on those pages? You bet! But I was also in search of something else.

Blank.

Pages.

Why? Because a blank page offers the promise of erasure, the erasure of the empty space by new content filling it all up. So these last few months I’ve been writing – long hand with a pen – in various notebooks like I used to in the days prior to having a home computer. It’s actually been great, I don’t even complain about writing that way anymore (so long as it’s just for jotting idea notes, brief musings and short passages). However, as I’ve said before, writing is a performance art and a writer wants (needs?) to be read by others. No one’s going to read my chicken scratch in a notebook. I needed a public device with which to publish my (semi-) daily musings. Thus, my new blog, Hello, Blank Page. Yeah, I now, I could easily just post my (semi-) daily writings here, but as I explained yesterday, I needed something all-new, free of clutter and intended ONLY for wordsmith-ing, with the occasional image here and there for thematic purposes. No promos and plugging, no social media and the usual noise. Just brief, raw bursts of microfiction and creative nonfiction. Unhindered. Uninhibited.

Yeah.

Feed the fetish.

Postscript: now that I’ve mostly/somewhat put my journalistic leanings of the last three years behind me (okay, more to the side, I suppose), I am digging back into my fiction archives to review the good, the bad and the ugly (because nothing inspires you to get back to it more than your own good, bad and ugly writing) while also homing in on all the story ideas I’ve kept at bay to merely stew and simmer the last three long years. But that’s an update for a different day.