One of the ideas that has been on my list since I posted my first video in 2022 is a tour of my notebook collection. I started writing in a diary when I was 8 or 9, but that one is long gone. My collection, my archive as it were, starts in December 2000 when I opened up a 9x6 spiral notebook (that's not an affiliate link; I just looked it up for the size) and wrote out my Christmas list.

And then I just kept writing. I covered that notebook with stickers from my local radio station (my guess is that I grabbed a whole stack from their table at a music festival). The next notebooks have magazine pictures taped on the front with colourful electrical tape. And when I didn't have a new notebook ready when one was full, I grabbed whatever I could find.

That collection now lives in one long IKEA box under my bed and a second bankers box on a shelf. It's been a hard collection to wrangle because almost every notebook is different; they don't Tetris together nicely. There have been times when I've bought multi-packs to save money. One summer fixation on steno books. A bunch of years in university when I used the same daily page planner. That time I really wanted to like Field Notes (they're beautiful, just not big enough for me).

My last video was a tour of my zines, and it kind of blew up. By morning, it had more than 200 views. In 24 hours, it was over 500. Almost 10 days later, it's about to reach 1k, and 28(!) people have subscribed. But while the numbers are fun to watch, the comments have been incredible. The people, they love to see little pieces of paper.

A notebook video felt like a sideways sequel I could make. More paper (my elevator pitch: I'm a writer who makes art at the intersection of analogue and digital), and my notebooks are where all my zines start. Everything starts with some stream of consciousness writing, pen on paper.

That first YouTube video I made in 2022? It was about Julia Cameron's morning pages, a practice which has carried me longer than I knew her name for it. I just called it freewriting, and I've done it in whatever book was at hand, for more than 25 years now. There are a lot of good ideas in those books (a lot of whinging and complaining, too, I must admit). I filmed nearly 35 minutes and had to cut it down to 16 because I kept getting lost in the pages, silently reading notes from 2005, from 2017, from 2022, from 2000.

A whole life is in that box. Of course I keep them all; how could I let them go?