The Stationary Fiend - Part one.

Dear reader, I have a problem. Well, to be truthful, I have many problems but time is brief, this blog is subject-specific and you are not my psychiatrist. Let's keep it all about the writing, shall we? Reader, dear friend, I have a stationary problem.

Hoarding has long been a problem in my family - like a recessive gene, the urge to stockpile has ensured every generation of my family has at least one room filled with things that we might one day need. However, just as twins skip a generation so has my own hoarding habit managed to dwarf anything last seen since my grandmother's post-war generation. I have a pen and notebook problem and I have it bad.

It's easy to rationalise, being a writer. If you don't write, you can't tell your story. If you can't tell your story, you cannot satisfy your most instinctive needs. If you cannot satisfy your most instinctive needs, you die. And you cannot write if you don't have paper and a pen.* Perhaps it's a question of, as I once told my a-level Theatre Studies tutor when my school bag vomited ink cartridges all over the classroom floor, "When the apocalypse comes I want to make sure I don't run out." Perhaps it's because of those recurring nightmares where I come up with a Pulitzer Prize winning plot/character/one-liner before realising, horror on horror, that THERE ARE NO SURFACES TO WRITE UPON, NOR IMPLEMENTS WITH WHICH TO WRITE! Or perhaps it's because I am somewhat fastidious and flaky, wanting all of my stories to be written neatly into individual notebooks before losing focus.

Skip back 15 years, to the day I start writing my first book. My mum had taken us to a strange junk shop in a dubious part of Plymouth, where 'things' were recycled and resold as other 'things' - and very cheaply too. Hence I snapped up some strangely shaped and flimsy notebooks with a yellow vinyl cover. I still have these.

Gloss over the various school workbooks which have been accumulated over my years as both student and teacher. I still have these.

Go back to 2003 when my friend, French teacher Flo, showed me a notebook with hand-made pages so delightfully quaint and old-fashioned that I immediately coveted it. In it she wrote poems, short stories, critical essays - all of them quite brilliant, she assured me, but all of them written in a language I don't understand so I had to take her word for it really.

Since that moment I have been eternally searching for the notebook, the one which will inspire me to write that elusive magnum opus, the notebook that will fill that aching gap in my soul. I cannot resist a good notebook. I have big notebooks, little notebooks, embroidered notebooks, rustic notebooks, medieval notebooks, pop-art notebooks, art deco notebooks. Notebooks which have style, notebooks that look well travelled. None of these have been filled. Only one or two has even come close.

I must have close to 100 notebooks. The irony is that I do most of my writing on my laptop or in cheap 99p reporters notebooks picked up from super-markets.

This week I intend to catalogue my notebooks. No, this is not procrastination - this is trying to find the page of my current MS that has gone missing. That's the problem - when you buy a beautiful new notebook you want to write in it, which usually means my stories are scattered like leaves to the wind. Or ramblings to the loose pages.

And pens! Oh, pens. I like to write with a Dr Grip pen. I have 4, plus approximately 20 refills, as they are very hard to get hold of these days. This is my favourite pen to write with - it fits the hand so neatly, writes so easily and smoothly on most paper types. I also have four fountain pens - one in blue, one in black, one in green and one in violet. Not to mention the hundreds of other pens utilized in the research process.

I'm starting to become concerned that I will run out of words before I run out of the means to record them.

*Technology is bunk. It won't last. Turn away from the laptop and be embraced in the bosom of the humble pen and piece of paper!