Notebook 1 - Circa 2001

It was my finding of this notebook that prompted this series of posts.

 

When I found it again during my art studio clean up at the end of 2025 I remembered the notebook, but I couldn't remember when I was writing in it. I've seen it in my notebook piles for years and every now and then I've cracked it open to see if "past me" could give "current me" some inspiration.

Like a lot of my notebooks, there's artistic practice and drawing exercises scattered through them. This was obviously in one of my "stippling" phases, which I've gone through a couple of times after a few conversations with artists I've met of the years. When artists I respected like Keith Parkinson told me that they'd never been able to get the hang of stippling, it was probably a combination of hubris and spite that got me to practice the technique.

Other pages are sequences of worldbuilding ideas... this instance is the start of an idea about a sci-fi setting based in the outer solar system, where the distance from the sun means that vampires can "live" relatively safely and their extended lifespans means the slower turning of orbits and the vast distances between planets means little except for inconvenience. One of many ideas I'd love to have explored further, and one day I might.

Further pages in this sequence indicate that I was intending to focus this "space vampire" setting on a specific city, perhaps based on one of the moons of an outer planet. I ended up writing about seven fairly solid pages for this. After this point it starts working out how the setting might be applied to existing game systems, Cyberpunk 2020, Vampire the Masquerade, Palladium...basically my go to systems at the time.

The next page I open instantly sets the time for the notebook. Mid to Late 2001. I had more hair back then, and was in the process of growing it out longer. A big live-roleplaying convention was coming around and for the character I was playing I usually wore a wig, but I decided to get hair extensions for a while. I drew this picture and did my research before I took it into a hairdresser in Surry Hills (who were reputed to be one of the best places to get this done in Sydney at the time). I had them for about 6 months.  

Another part of the notebook for for about a dozen pages and describes the elements for a costume I built for another live action roleplaying character. It was in the Sabbat group of the Vampire games in the International Camarilla organisation. The character was designed as a Tzimisce vampire's guard dog. Inspired totally by Alien and HR Giger. The character was named "Number 6" working on the ideas that 5 other variants had been experimented on, but he was the first success. I think I played this character half a dozen times, but the costume was worn at a couple of cosplay contests, winning once and placing a couple of times.  

Another chunk of the book also goes on for a few pages, where I was trying to manually think through some fractal curves and draw their first few iterations by hand. I remember this frustrating me, then moving the work to a computer. I probably lost those files on crashed hard drives years ago. That's probably one of the reasons why I keep these notebooks around. 

 

The next opening leads e to something that I thought had some real potential. At the time I worked with a girl who performed as a dancer. I remember having a few conversations with her about choreography, because I was doing martial arts at the time. We discussed choreographic notation, and what techniques were used to archive movements on paper. My intentions here were two-fold, I was wondering if it might be possible to use that same choreographic notation to write down the moves of martial arts kata; and I was planning to write this into a comic with the main character basically being programmed through martial arts routines via scripts that could be depicted on the comic page. 

 

 This idea goes through a few different styles of choreographic notation.

Sorry, not sure why these pictures have come out upside down...

...but you get the idea. 

The only date I find in this notebook says "2010" but indicates that it is revisiting older ideas I've had. There's still plenty of blank pages in this notebook, and I often find one of my old books and add some details or new ideas into it to fill up the blank pages. In a lot of cases these ideas are heartbreaker attempt to fix I problem in an existing system, or play with a system in a new genre. Many of my more successful games have ripped these concepts away from their original systems and have cobbled a few of the different ideas together around a custom core. It's often why I dig back through these notebooks, because often an idea may be written at the wrong time only to find it's place years or even decades later.

I've even found things in this notebook from 25 years ago that might address problems I'm facing with current game designs.