I keep all my notes, outlines, random thoughts, and bits of dialogue in spiral notebooks. Before I even "finish" one notebook, I usually start another, so it's a lot of blank paper. In the past three years, I've probably gone through about twenty. They are scattered throughout the office. Last night, I was looking for one particular notebook where I had an outline for an essay I'm working on. I couldn't find it. I figured it was time to gather all my notebooks together and organize them. Or at least, put them all in the same desk drawer. I started looking through my old notebooks. It was cool to see what I was working on three years ago, ideas that never came together. There were at least three different outlines for the first issue of Karma Incorporated. Most interesting were the extensive notes I took on Buffy, as a model for how to tell story arcs.
