Gnothing like gnomes

I procured not one but two gnome gnotebooks at a sale which was otherwise gnome-free. I definitely had a gnome phase back in the ’80s—it was all part of my Renaissance Faire/Anne Mcafferty/Stevie Nicks preoccupation—so this was one of those nostalgia-driven purchases. I kept one gnotebook for myself and sent the other to my old friend Anne, who was a dedicated diary-keeper back in the day, an 8th-grade Pepys. She had one of these gnotebooks and instead of addressing each entry "Dear Diary" as most middle-schoolers would, she addressed an imaginary friend--"Dear Courtney."

I wonder if that was a secret.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty imaginative. Anne also used to make up long soap-opera-y sagas about a bunch of attractive young people with names like Tory and Raven. She did this while endlessly bouncing a tennis ball against her garage door. Sometimes she'd type them up on her electric typewriter and read them to friends, with lots of dramatic inflection. If she still has any of the original manuscripts, I'd love to read them, if for no other reason than to remember what the guy character names were. Who was worthy of Tory and Raven?