Counted the notebooks. Eleven, and one of them is finished, and it is…

Counted the notebooks. Eleven, and one of them is finished, and it is finished because I lost it for a year and found it again and filled the rest in a week out of guilt.

The pattern is always the same. First twenty pages: careful, dated, good handwriting, the sense of a project. Pages twenty to forty: real work, messy, the only part worth keeping. Page forty onwards: blank, forever, because somewhere around there I bought a new notebook.

I have decided to stop treating this as a failure of discipline. Twenty good pages per notebook is a rate. Twenty is fewer than I would like, obviously. But it is consistent enough to plan around, and buying fewer notebooks has never once made me write more.