My Raggedy Sketchbook from September 2024 to July 2025
Where I need to learn how to blog better and I tried to get used to using a fountain pen.
Well, here it is:
I’ve been wrestling with Substack’s image limits. Turns out, uploading eighty-one images is apparently a lot. So I’ve made the full sketchbook available as a free download on Gumroad, which you can grab right here.
Yes, it’s free. No, you don’t have to pay. Yes, I would still love it if you looked through it.
(there’s also a secret additional sketchbook from 2013 that is also free and available to download and gaze at and saw “aww!”)
This sketchbook was specifically chosen for portability. it lived in my pockets, my hands, my bags, flung on to the floor of my very very messy car as I braked suddenly to avoid hitting a plastic bag that looked like a cat. I’ve had to duct tape and glue the spine twice with pva glue and clamp it, then unstick all the pages where they got stuck.
I can’t recommend the brand (nor can I remember it), because it clearly was NOT built to endure the kind of abuse I put it through. Around this same time, I was also gifted my dream fountain pens (which you can find here and here)*, and I promptly began pushing them, and this little book, far past their limits.
Of course, I’ve censored some deeply important and unquestionably brilliant personal writing, mostly to mock you, the reader, for missing out on page after page of razor-sharp comedy and soul-shaking insights (and definitely not the scattered mutterings of someone who got their heart broken and tried to fill the void with mostly-mediocre make-up sex).
The sticker on the front cover is by Eugene artist Miranda Zimmerman, whose work I love. (You can find it here and here.)
The back stickers are from Shiv Games in Keizer, Oregon and Turtle’s Soup.
I really did want to show you everything here, but tech got in the way — and for a while, that stopped me from sharing at all. So this is me, finally letting it out:
Imperfect, and out there anyway.
Thanks for looking.
*I highly reccommend buying these from Jetpens, my faithful art supply store, where the Kawesco is $10 less, but as of me writing this, their website seems to be down.