So I got a Moleskine for my birthday. You know, one of those superfancy notebooks with a leatherlike black cover and a little ribbon for a bookmark. Classy shit – especially for someone who’s been using the cheapest ring notebooks on the planet.

It was so classy I was afraid to use it. After all, Moleskines are the Apple of notebooks! This was not the notebooks to make soap character sheets or keep studio count or hand out to my pupils to write their math homework in.

Whatever was going in there – it had to be me.

So I took a pen (a cheap bic, I mean, a man has limits) and I got to work. Now, two weeks later, it’s filled with the crazy ramblings of a madman – ramblings about pirates, trips through the desert and switchboards inside people’s heads. That’s right: I’m continuing my work on Caravan!

Caravan is a weird project. I’m completely enthralled by the idea, but I haven’t managed to write anything fluently yet. It’s very unlike me – I usually write like a freight train. This project is different. It’s hard. It’s long. It’s complex. And one of the scariest, most paralyzing things: For the first time since I wrote my graduation screenplay in 2012, it’s a story I really really really want to tell.

Usually, I start up Word, write half a page, stare at the words for a bit, loudly exclaim “NOPE!” and then delete everything.

If only there were a way to not be able to delete everything, I used to think.

Some way I can write the words down and they’d be permanent, I used to think.

Well, past me, think no more. Just take a pen and jot it down in style. Whatever you have written will be on the page forever, and ever, and ever.

Unless you burn it.

Maybe you should burn it?