Free The Voice of the Xenolith by Cynthia Pelman

will print them and make them into real books that people can buy and read. But for now, she says, they are her personal family stories and she doesn’t want the whole world to read them, just my dad and me and my brother Jasper.
    I still use the same kind of notebook for writing at home. You can get different sizes: I buy the ones that are small and can fit in your pocket, so that even if you are travelling you can take your books with you and add your notes whenever you find something important to write down. I have thirty eight of them now, all of them numbered, and each one has a title. I keep them in a chest of drawers in my room and I never leave them lying around; I always put them back in the drawer if I am finished writing. That way I keep them safe and they don’t get lost, and nobody gets to see them. Not even my irritating brother Jasper who is always trying to find the combination to the lock I have used, so he can look at my books. Those books have got everything I know written in them.
    The titles of the books are the things I am interested in. One is called ‘Fossils I have Found’ (number 23) and another one, number 31, is ‘Hidden in the Landscape.’ This Landscape book is for writing down the different signs which archaeologists use to decide where to dig a trench; sometimes it is marks in a field which they see from above, in a plane or helicopter, but sometimes it is a mound in a field which doesn’t make sense in the flat land all around it. So the landscape gives you a little hint, and you have to be aware of it and look for the clues; you have to get your eye in, otherwise you would never know to go and look deeper there. This is the kind of detective work archaeologists do. Another notebook is for writing down the titles of all the detective stories I have read.
    I also use my notebooks as diaries where I write my new ideas, with the date on which I first thought about that idea. One of the notebooks is for future stuff: specific fossils I still want to find once I become a palaeontologist, or places I want to go to which have special fossil sites, like the West Coast Fossil Park outside Cape Town, in South Africa, or Liaoning in China, which is called the Pompeii of the Mesozoic age, because of the huge number of dinosaur, mammal and plant fossils found buried there in volcanic ash.
    I also have a few notebooks, usually the bigger size, where I stick pictures of things I want to look at and to remember. Some of my favourite pictures are of sand dunes in Namibia, because each one is different, and they are always on the move, although not in a time span that you can see in one day or one week; but if you go back to a particular place later it will look different. I also have printouts of things which I have photographed with my USB digital microscope: pictures of granite magnified sixty times, and magnified pictures of sand grains from different places in the world which we have visited.

    I only ever use Moleskine notebooks. I never use exercise books with spiral binding, and I don’t like stapled books either, because you can never be sure if a page is missing or not and if you pull out a page it is lost forever. When a book is sewn, losing a page is unlikely. At the back of the notebooks, some of the pages have perforated edges, so you can in fact remove a page without damaging the book, and what I like about that is that the counterfoil always stays in the book, like in a cheque book, so you always know if a page has been removed.
    I don’t like my pages to get lost, because that means something important that I wrote is gone. And I don’t like it if someone says, ‘Can you just pull out a blank page for me, I need some paper.’ My notebooks are not for that.
    The books I like cost quite a lot, they are much more expensive than the ordinary exercise books you can buy in any high street shop, but that is what pocket money is for.

13
Granite
    This was the third paper I wrote for the