Morning Pages | 4 June 2025

I got tricked into writing my pages today. My brain's been quite flighty and I'm feeling pulled in creative directions. I wasn't feeling very upbeat when I got up and I ended up reading for quite a while—two chapters of Nervous Conditions. It's getting really good now at around p90, as the MC finds herself at her uncle's house to be educated after her brother's untimely demise.

Then I logged into Substack's Notes and saw one from Simon Haisell about the #1000wordsofsummer project on Substack. Then I was off, brain sparking here and there, clicking this, clicking that and finally deciding that I wanted to copy out author Hala Alyan's 1000-word essay about creativity in longhand. I'd been looking for an excuse to pick up my new A4 document folio and the three new notebooks inside it and this seemed like the perfect essay to copy out into one of the notebooks. I'm sure my fellow notebook lovers will know that feeling of a virgin notebook and the resistance of making the first pen strokes! The Clairefontaine B5 is now well and truly written in!

Here's an excerpt from Hala Alyan's essay:

I ended up writing my way into joining the 1000wordsofsummer project and I'm looking forward to participating and seeing where it goes. I'm sure I'll be doing it longhand, so I don't quite know how to count the words, haha.

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