Kami Kinard: Notebooks For All Occasions

I’ve written a lot of blog posts recently to promote my book THE BOY PROJECT (Scholastic 2012) but I’m not sure I’ve ever been this excited about guest posting because I have a real thing for notebooks. I LOVE them. I RELY on them. I COLLECT them. I can’t help it. I like them so much that I’m even jealous of Amy for thinking of this absolutely unique, completely wonderful, blog!

I guess you could say I got my first notebook as a gift from my first grade teacher, who recognized my love for writing. I still have it. Take a look:

Later my notebooks were really diaries. I kept a lot of notes and drawings in them. Some of these diaries inspired me to write THE BOY PROJECT. Here is a picture of them.

I’m not a very organized person, so when I started writing full time, I found that notebooks were indispensable to me. Not loose-leaf notebooks though! I needed the spiral bound kind… the kind that wouldn’t allow me to lose pages. Books with sewn bindings work great too, especially for poetry. This shelf is full of my poetry notebooks. 

You can see a poem I was working on in the one below. This poem was later titled "Snow Sentinels" and was published in JACK AND JILL.

When I work on my fiction, I use a different kind of notebook. Now that I’ve discovered Picadilly notebooks, I rarely use anything else. Here is my shelf full of them:

These are spiral notebooks, but their covers are hard, so they are easy to write in when you travel, or when you need to relax in a soft chair. It is kind of like having a little desk attached to your notebook. Below is a page from a Picadilly notebook I was working in when writing THE BOY PROJECT.

Eventually, I filled so many notebooks that I had to get a notebook to organize my notebooks! You can imagine now, how thrilled I was when my book designers at Scholastic, Whitney Lyle and Kristina Iulo, decided to make the spine of my book look like a notebook!

Now a bit about my notebook collecting habit… It seems that I can’t stop collecting empty notebooks. Especially beautiful ones. I’m very particular about the pages though. The lines can’t be too heavy. They need to be light enough to keep the writing neat, but not so dark that they dominate the words. This is because as much as I love notebooks, I love words more! I collect those too, in books!

Every empty notebook is a potential story. Every empty page is a potential poem. This is the allure for me, and why when I see a notebook that looks like it’s just waiting for its pages to be filled… I buy it.

To celebrate the wonderfulness of notebooks, Kami is giving away this beautiful blank book. Please leave a comment on this post to enter, and the winner will be drawn on Sunday evening, May 13.

Kami Kinard’s first novel, THE BOY PROJECT: NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS OF KARA McALLISTER, debuted from Scholastic in January 2012. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction pieces have appeared in periodicals for both children and adults.  NASTY BUGS, a poetry anthology edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins, included her poem "Tick-Tock Tick." A teaching artist on the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Roster of Approved Artists, Kami holds a MAT degree with an emphasis in English. She grew up in Camden SC, and currently lives with her family in Beaufort S.C.