I’m like most writers I’ve heard of, in that I can’t get enough stationery.
Yes, I’d love new index cards or a notebook or pencils or pens, thanks. And no, I don’t care how many of all of those I already have.
The look of new paper, the feel and potential of those pages and writing tools to help me express myself in ways I haven’t even conceived of yet… it all holds a very distinct, endless appeal.
A couple of years back, longtime friend, illustrator/writer and sometime partner in creative plotting Deryk Ouseley introduced me to these great Pentalic notebooks, as seen in the pic above. They’re ostensibly meant to be for illustrators, but as he pointed out, they’re of course just fine for taking notes as well, plus with all of the pages unlined, they’re great for sketching out ideas as needed.
I’ve just filled my first one of these notebooks–full of whatever story or character or game ideas popped into my head–and have started on a new one, which I’m sure will continue that fine tradition.
One thing I’m not yet clear on is if there’s a convenient way to get some analog or digital summary of what the notebook contains so in two or five or ten years when I have several of these lining a shelf, I don’t have to hunt through every chicken-scratched page of every notebook to hunt down some details I wrote about an idea that comes back to haunt me later and I know I wrote down previously but I’ll be damned if I know when or where. Any suggestions for how to accomplish that would be warmly welcomed in the comments section below.