Years ago I numbered these notebooks so I would know roughly what order they went in, but it’s more what you might call guidelines than actual rules. This one, #5, starts out with my junior year of high school — I can tell because there are three pages from a project I was working on for Theory of Knowledge — but then it jumps straight to my sophomore year of college. And I can tell that because I was finally taking actual notes in class.

In fact, the bulk of this notebook is dedicated to class notes, stretching across three semesters. But even if there were nothing story-related in it — which isn’t the case — I would still consider it fair game for archiving, because of what it shows about my development as a writer. The classes recorded here are Ancient Celtic Society, my Irish Gaelic language course, The Christian Revolution (on the early formation of the church), Shakespeare’s Later Plays, the history of folklore theory, Japanese history, and witchcraft. (Yes, I took a course on witchcraft. My textbooks for that had the most interesting titles.) This is characteristic of my education: I ricocheted all over the globe, filling my brain with bits and pieces of material from a dozen different cultures.

I hadn’t realized it began this early, but here we get the first scattered appearances of the mark I mentioned before, the thing I would put in the margins of my notes to let me know when I’d gone haring off the path of class material and into ideas for my stories. It’s a little MB, for Marie Brennan, and it makes obvious what otherwise would require inference: the fact that my classes were directly fueling my fiction. It’s possible that one of my other notebooks will even record the moment at which a folklore seminar gave me the idea for “Calling into Silence,” the first piece of fiction I ever had monetary success with. I’ve said before that I didn’t choose my majors (archaeology and folklore & mythology) with an eye toward what would be useful to me as a fantasy writer, but I don’t think I could have chosen better for that purpose if I tried. Here is the proof of it, with my college education dumping truckloads of fertilizer and seeds directly into my brain.

Story-wise, there are a bunch of things in here, starting with Old Project C (that can be the code name for the originally-fanfic-based-but-later-original thing I may revive someday in vastly altered form) and bouncing around through Doppelganger, The Kestori Hawks (my third and wildly unsuccessful novel, now trunked), the Nine Lands short stories, and Sunlight and Storm (my fourth novel, which may get revived from the trunk someday). I can see the moment where I started noodling around with the name that wound up becoming Shikari. There are some scene-bits for what would probably be the pivot point of a series I have not yet written, more than fifteen years later. There are diagrams and choreography for the plays I worked on, during the four years that I was basically the only stage combat person at Harvard with anything resembling training — early stratigraphy for Writing Fight Scenes.

There are also a few habits that are still with me now. The first is my tendency to randomly start writing in cursive, in a never-ending and perpetually doomed attempt to regain the ability to make it look good. Sketches periodically fill the margins; I’m not much of a visual artist, at least not outside of photography, but that hasn’t stopped me from trying. And every so often — more, when there’s a good reason — I’ll write bits of my notes in Japanese, again in an attempt to keep up my skill. Mostly what it means in practice is that I remember how to write dates, and my hiragana comprehension has stayed good, because I can spell out things I don’t remember/never knew the kanji for, and kanji (at least the way I write them) are often too slow for note-taking purposes. This was useful in the part of the notebook where I was studying Japanese history, because I could and did write about how しょとく promoted Buddhism in やまと during the 六の century, but a few scattered habits stayed with me overall; I suspect later notebooks will show me writing 人 for “person” or “people,” because that’s one of the few cases where the kanji is genuinely faster to write.

My fourth notebook dates to my senior year of high school (because there are calculus notes and Latin translations in it) and my freshman year of college (because there are personal notes in it, which I have no compunctions about tearing out before I send this off to be archived).

It is probably fair to say that my writing process has never been so well-documented as it was in this period, simply because of the circumstances of my life. In high school and early college I didn’t really take notes in class, because I mostly didn’t have to. (When the “lecture” consisted of the teacher going over the information that was already in the book, I didn’t see much point.) I just listened . . . sort of . . . and remembered stuff. But I needed to look like an industrious student, so I wrote stuff in my notebook, and sometimes it had to do with the topic at hand but most of the time it didn’t. The result is things like this:

Right there, documented for posterity, is the moment I had the idea of using the triquetra knot as the symbol of Starfall’s witches. There are countless little tidbits like that scattered through here: Poltergeist activity in Talman? says one page, a four-word query that led to a major scene in Lies and Prophecy. Another page has Five sections of witches. Name? followed by Ray in a different pen, as I worked out the structure of witch society in Doppelganger. There are worldbuilding tidbits that got abandoned, like the modes of address for the Primes; there are worldbuilding tidbits that got kept, like the top margin that has a few scribbled details on the psi-virus. There are two entire pages of me brainstorming setting details for the Nine Lands, evidence of me pursuing my goal of a world whose countries really were culturally distinct from one another — and given its placement in the notebook, after I had arrived at college, also evidence of how anthropology was feeding my brain.

I don’t know exactly when this habit ended, but I know it didn’t last beyond my days of taking classes, because it only happened when I was sitting around with a notebook in front of me for hours each week. These days my ideas sometimes get scribbled down on scraps of paper, but they’re more likely to stay in my head until they go into a story. There’s no record of the moment when I figured out the end of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, because it happened in conversation with Alyc Helms instead of when I was pretending to listen to a teacher. For years I had a tendency to jot down random names, phrases, cultural snippets, plot twists, and anything else that came into my head; eventually I developed a mark to put in the margin so I’d know which parts of any given page were about writing instead of class. It means I can watch myself think through things from back then in a way that just isn’t true of later work.

It reminds me of where certain ideas came from, too. For example, this notebook contains a lot of game notes: for my Vampire character, for my very short-lived Mage character, for Vampire sequel game I thought up and never ran, for the Highlander game I was running online. That latter had a female PC named Miryoko, and I remember that I knew “three syllables ending in -ko” was a common form of Japanese name (didn’t learn until later that it wasn’t that way in the time period the PC lived in), but I looked up “miryo” to see whether it was a legitimate Japanese word, and found it meant “charm or glamour.” Looking at it now, I’m pretty sure it means in the social sense, but it stuck in my head as the magical one, and yep, that’s how one of the protagonists of Doppelganger got named. The Head/Hand/Heart division of the witches comes from the comic book Elfquest, the three trials Cutter and Rayek go through when their rivalry over Leetah annoys her enough to make them fight it out with each other. Old forms of the stories get preserved: the scenes from Lies and Prophecy in here still feature a professor named Shields, because that was a perfectly innocuous name for Grayson until the plot headed off in directions that had a lot to do with shielding and it became a distraction. (And yet for all of that, startling amounts of text in here went almost verbatim into those first two novels.)

This notebook also features extensive evidence of a writing habit I had to kick before I could really make progress. It used to be that I would get an idea for a scene or even just a brief interaction, and I’d write it — out of context. Both Lies and Prophecy and Doppelganger got started that way, me hopscotching around to do the fun bits and then having to stitch them together into a coherent narrative fabric afterward. I didn’t manage to finish a novel, and I’m not sure I could have managed to finish a novel, until I made myself write more linearly, because that was the only way to make sure the stuff in between the fun bits was also good story rather than the bare minimum of connective tissue, and to make sure the key moments were properly grounded in the preceding text. These days I’ll sometimes let myself skip ahead if I’m really stuck and need to remember why I’m excited about the project — but even then, I usually write it in a separate file, to remind myself that any and all of it is subject to change once I get there properly. Non-linear writing works great for other authors, but not me.