February 9 Posted by Tracy Lucas in Book Geekery, Life

The red marble, mystery notebook

It’s nothing too terribly fancy, but I love it. I can’t tell you why.

I found twelve of them at my mother’s house in a back room, drooled a little, and asked her where she’d found them. She said “Big Lots” and “a while ago”.

A dated church bulletin crammed down in between the pages of the top one on the stack revealed what “a while ago” means. We’re talking 1993 here, folks. (At her church, that’s two or three pastors ago, even.)

They’re slim, they’re comfortably floppy, they’re probably theme books, and there are hieroglyphics everywhere on the cover, but no company name to be found. They are each saddle-stitched in a (removable? Not mine, so I didn’t try too hard) vinyl slipcover, and there are maybe, maybe, 20-30 pages in each of these babies, max.

I want some. They make me want to write quick short stories with a definite ending instead of the long rambling stuff I always start in Word docs on my computer and never finish. They also would work with my left-handedness, and not many journals actually do.

Help me out. Where can I buy these?

(And no, don’t think my mother will give me one for a second. No dice.)