Getting started maybe

There exists the possibility that I may be spending the next two years on a huge project, one that is dear to my heart but which will tax my aging brain and body in ways that I have largely left behind.

I’m not going to say what it is at the moment — it’s a long shot, to say the least, and I’m not at all sure it’s ever going to get past the “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we…” stage. But even so, I have to plan, n’est-ce pas? To the WASTE BOOKS!

Here are the three I pulled out to consider.

The tall gray one is the brand I used for As You Like It and Midsummer. The pages have a gray dot grid, and they’re numbered at the bottom. It was easy to design in, and I used it as a rehearsal diary as well as actor notes.

The black one I picked up in Germany last spring: beautiful white paper, sturdy cover.

The tan one I got at MOMA several years ago. It’s by far the thickest, but the cover is flimsy, and while I love the cream-colored paper, a fountain pen tended to bleed through.

After waffling all weekend over the advantages of each, I think I’m going to go with the little tan one, even though it had the most cons of the three. Something about it seemed to say, This is the way.

I’ll have to make a leather cover for it so that it doesn’t fall apart before 2025, and I may have to switch to pencil or gel pen to stay tidy, but on the whole I foresee a lot of journaling ahead of me, and this just felt right.

The first thing I needed to do was to create a guide page for those times I want to write neatly in lines. (The paper is unlined.)

Off to the word processor, where I created a rectangle the same size as the WASTE BOOK, then a set of lines. It would have been possible to use the word processor’s rulers to space them, but Pages’ rulers are not very clear. Instead, I made a little black box and sized it to 1/4”, then used that to space the lines.

Pro tip: After you duplicate the line and move it into position — using the spacer to space it — select the two lines and duplicate those. Move into position, select the four lines, duplicate. Rinse, repeat.

Close-up of the spacer concept

How does it work? After I cut out the rectangle, I can put it behind the page I’m writing on and see the lines through the paper.

How will I organize everything, keep track of the hundreds of ideas/plans/suggestions/complaints? Here I fall back on my bar book.

As you can see, it’s a lovely little diary, and I’m filling it with cocktail recipes. (The ones with the asterisk by the title are the ones I invented.)

The first thing I did was number all the pages…

…and every time I add a cocktail, I add it to two indexes. First, the base liquor index:

Index for gin-based drinks

And then the alphabetical index:

One thing I learned as I’ve worked on the bar book is that alphabetical indices probably need two pages for each letter of the alphabet. (And more than two pages for gin drinks or bourbon/rye drinks.) As it is, the S’s and the gin indices instruct you to continue on p. 148 or some such. Not a huge deal, but I will try to be more savvy in planning this WASTE BOOK. For example, besides the alphabet, I will probably want indices for SETS, COSTUMES, PROPS, etc.

This is where it helps to have been a librarian for 30+ years.

More work is required. You have no idea how much work is going to be required…

But it will be worth it. Trust me.