My offical job, as it is right now, is mom. This is a nice gig, but it can be a frustrating one. You are the one in the background making things go.

Now that my kids are school age there is an added benefit. I have bits of time. It is actually less time then you might imagine. I still have basic housekeeping I should do in the 6 hours the kids are at school. The laundry, dishes, cooking, grocery shopping.

Suddenly, I find myself with little bits of breathing room. When the house falls silent. When things are still. And there is time.

Time is a magnificent thing. Without it I couldn’t do any of this. Time allows me to create. It gives me space. It allows my mind to wander. And I consider myself so incredibly lucky to have a little bit of it to play with and waste.

With a hot cup of coffee at my feet, I will pick up my mandolin and figure out how to put what I hear in my head under my fingers.

Then I painstakingly scribble it into my notebook.

In the beginning this step was hard. I know my notes, but I can’t hear something and just write it down. I have to take the time to translate the tune to my fingers. Then I write down the notes I am playing. I wish I could just write it down, and maybe one day that will happen, but it isn’t how I do it now. It is, thankfully, getting easier.

The rhythmn is entirely another struggle, but I’m getting slowly better at that too. Sometimes rhythmn can defy the writing process. The subtle clicks and thunks and mutes that would be such a pain to actually try to write down so I don’t. Then there is the problem of swing notes. Since I write a lot of blues there are lots of swung rhythmnic elements, and I just don’t know how to write them in a way that other people would understand, so I don’t try very hard. Just notes anyway. I am the only one who wants to understand them.

The act of writing is important to me. It allows a tune to integrate into my brain. Without stopping to write it down, even in a crude and incorrect form, the tune will slip from my mind into oblivion. Pencil to paper makes a record I can recognize. I thumb through the scribbles, triggering the memory, and I can hear the tune.

I love my notebooks. I’ve used different kinds at different times. I prefer quadrille because it’s easy to write out staffs or grids for chord charts, or even tab as needed.

The current one is a black moleskin with yellow pages. I started it last May and it is almost full. Another month max.

Words and phrases and things that caught my interest scribbled in my incomprehensible scrawl.

I started sharing snapshots of what I have been working on during the week on twitter (@MPN2btuned) and my personal Instagram. #fridaynightnotes. I find other people’s raw notebooks fascinating. It is a snapshot into the creative process. So I am sharing bits of mine, like unfiltered glimpses into my head.