The Ravens Nest

A notebook, a campfire, and why some thoughts are never meant for the internet.

Some people carry a single book everywhere.

I’ve carried a couple everywhere.

In the photo above are three of them: a Kindle, a miniature composition notebook, and the leather journal some of you have seen before.

Yeah, I have a phone, how do you think I got the pic?

These days the little composition book is the one that gets used the most.

There’s a simple reason for that.

Some thoughts are meant to exist somewhere that nobody else can reach.

Listen. Phones are great. I love mine too. It’s old and I still love it. I do a lot of browsing and music but I also have PDF files on my phone. I carry sets of dice, pen and paper at any time. We can literally game anywhere at a moment’s notice.

I do find it odd that there are no takers these days, nevermind that these are the same people love to talk about how much they’d love to play that thing they’ve seen in Stranger Things.

So, there’s a reason I wanted to show those things off and it’s because I wanted to show some of you something I’ve recently learned upon re-reading some of my older and even newer entries.

I’ve been keeping journals since I was old enough to understand what they were. I poured out half-baked ideas, thoughts, etc into them. I’ve had people try to access them in the hopes that they were getting something they could inevitably use and further the ostracism I was going through. Odd that I did call some of these people “friends” back in those days.

This is what started the tradition of burning the journals. One night, I took a notebook I was using, I finished it, went back and read through a few things. Then I emerged. A bunch of us were on a camping trip and I took my cheap notebook and walked over to the fire. I started tearing pages out and throwing them into the fire itself. My friends* all asked what I was doing.

Page after page went into the flames until the notebook was empty. Then I tossed the covers and the spiral in after it.

I remember watching the pages curl and blacken in the fire and realizing that everything in that notebook had finally served its purpose.

When they realized what I had been burning the reactions came fast.

“DUDE! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!” they screeched in those woods out in the middle of nowhere near a pond in the woods around a campfire that had consumed thoughts, they assured me they’d get to one day.

“Well, y’all wanted it so bad,” I said to them, “If you can piece the ashes back together you can tell anyone anything you found out.”

That was it.

Every journal ever given to me as a gift was filled and then tossed into a fire where I stayed to watch it burn because it was over, done and a chapter on my life was closed. The ideas and things like that were out of my head or being refined in some practical way.

Ever known a kid who sits by themselves and does nothing but write?

I was that kid.

Did I have friends? At school. After school, it was just Raven running around with his walkman on if he was out and about.

There were long walks. Long nights spent on the page. Scratching things out. Pouring out the darkest thoughts and the small moments of celebration.

In the end there were only two who knew the whole story: me and the blank page where my pen left ink trails.

And no one would ever read them. That was the point.

No one would know.

Fast-forward to today.

We opened a lot of these pages and weren’t selective about it.

If you want to know where the internet is going, all you have to do is go back about 20 or 30 years and see what the most popular form of mass-consumed media there was on TV before the Internet’s ubiquity; The Trashy Daytime TV Talk Show.

Doubt me?

Go on Pluto TV and find the channel called Nosey.

I’ve checked.

It’s an atavistic nightmare of the human condition under a microscope that escaped the lab and became a true pandemic.

It’s nothing but Steve Wilkos, Jerry Springer and, while it’s sold on nostalgia, there’s a deeper, underlying thing happening we never saw. Rather than seeing these shows for what they were (hopping on whatever The Frenzy Beast took up in terms of topics) we haven’t changed. We now demand everyone open up and air out their dirty laundry one way or the other and that’s primarily because we are now in a culture where some of us want to be on that panel.

Here’s the scary thing, being on that panel costs dearly. Something I’ve come to realize in the past few days of just mostly being offline and going back to the pen and paper again. It costs you your peace and there’s a gamble on whether or not your story will even make the slightest bit of difference. In truth, the odds are not in your favor and that can depend on several factors, but, the safest bet is to bank on one thing and it’s something you’ve heard before and I would like more people to assume this.

People say they want privacy.

What they usually mean is they want control over who gets to use their story.

The reason I’d burn paper journals.

The reason I never really talked much to people face-to-face.

The reason many of us are leery of opening up so much on the internet.

Anything you say…

can…

and will…

be used against you.

It’s true. Stop assuming this is just the police who are out to build a case against you, the stone cold fact of human nature (I’m not addressing a should, I’m showing you how it truly is) is that people, regular everyday people that you meet, are looking for something.

Go look at those talk shows again. Producers were stirring up the fights and the reason some of us religiously watched that is so that we’d look at our own lives and say “Yanno…things are fucked but at least they’re not that fucked.” and go on about your day, possibly even motivate you to maybe improve your station and separate yourself further from the outcome you saw on TV. Now, the entirety of the internet is this trashy daytime TV talk show culture (Or the 2000s-Era Reality Show and Girls Gone Wild) and we’re all scheduled to be in front of the camera…unpaid.

Some of us with nervous systems on high alert/hypervigilant scan whenever we’re outdoors, we don’t want to be on that panel, in the audience, in the room with the techs or even in the building. You can have that.

There’s been another trend, personally, that I’ve noticed. I’m getting away from the digital and ephemeral one bit of media at a time. Books (whether for gaming or reading) music, movies, etc, every bit of it is something where I’ve made a deal with myself, if I have the physical, I can have the digital unless I can own the file itself. My digital libraries are expansive and there have been calls from companies telling us “Store your files with us.”

No. Those cloud services might just get used for some convenience but they’ll never get anything that juicy and they can’t hack it because…it’s in a physical book now and it will be burned at some point, locking it away for good to anyone but me and that’s kinda the way I like it.

“It’s in the cloud” sounds comforting.

But the truth is simpler than that.

It means “store your files on our computers.”

Not the book that is kept, locked away, filled and then burned so that only the metal snaps of it remain.

Speaking of going analogue again with some things, the funny thing is that The Nocturneverse itself started this way.

Not online.

Not in some shared document.

It started with pen, paper, dice and a quiet room.

BTW, just an update on The Nocturneverse, Joe and I are still writing but we’ve had some new areas of research and a few new personal projects pop up. For now, that is all we can truly say about it but know that it does continue and, if they’re not coming fast enough for you, grab a book, some paper, a set of dice and a pen and start playing your own game and toss the battle report into story form into the mix and check out Hunter Conover’s book The Doppler House because that is Nocturneverse Canon for Dopplers/Dopplegangers/Changelings and that section of Fae lore. It all continues in his Substack called City of Faces. Also, he has huge plans for this series so go throw him some support, he’s a guy I know in real life and he’s a complete crazy insane freak who loves writing as much as we crazy insane freaks do.

That same process still works today. A notebook, a pen and a quiet room.

Back to the topic at hand, why go back to something like an analogue book and the answer is simple, that is where you can truly get your raw stuff out there without judgments. When you’ve filled that book burn it. You can let go of all the negative and it does tend to work.

I’ll admit that I really haven’t done paper journaling in over a couple of decades here and it’s mostly because I saw that I needed to hit the ground running when I moved here. There were many things lost along the way that I’m getting back in touch with because it makes the most sense to do.

That’s far from me leaving Substack, matter of fact, I’m still here, peeking in when I can. I’ve been making more time for the journaling, the exercises I’ve put together and, if Thousand Year-Old Vampire wasn’t a reminder to me of how great journaling can be, this definitely cemented it firmly in my mind.

Let’s face a couple of facts, not one of you cares that I had burritos for dinner.

None of you gives a straight damn how I take my tea.

Would most of you roll your eyes if I told you it’s my right leg that goes into my pants followed by the left and the same applies for shoes? Probably. I’d bore you to absolute tears and…it’s no one’s concern.

Fact: All you care about is final product and that’s okay by me.

The internet wants everything archived forever.

The notebook doesn’t.

The notebook just waits until you’re finished with it.

And then it burns.

Not everything needs to be shared.

Some things are written.

Some things are refined.

And some things are burned when their time is over.

Some things are just meant to be purged.

I’ve been doing this for about a week now and I’ve added a third journal with a black cover for a different project.

The notebook sees the unfinished mind.

The internet sees the result of time in the dark once it’s been refined…if you and you alone deem it worth sharing.

To Theresa, Sarun, Kim and everyone who ever gave me a journal or notebook, Thank You.

Thank goodness pen and paper never became obsolete. I’m never without them.

And if you think analogue tools are dead, will even show you that magic still exists in the humble, but mighty, typewriter.