Category Archives: Notebook

I don’t like to write longhand. My penmanship has never been the greatest, and I absolutely loathe writing in cursive. When I had finally discovered the true infinite power of the keyboard while in high school, I’ve been a ‘keyboard kid’ ever since. Well, at least by preference. It was a while after that before I was able to write by keyboard regularly.

When I got serious about writing in the mid 90s, I had a crappy Brother word processor/typewriter hybrid that allowed me to seize the power of the keyboard. But it was a cumbersome writing tool and so I still had to rely on writing longhand quite a bit. After it went bye-bye around ’97 or so, I had to do my writing exclusively by hand until ’98 when I got a desk job and also when I got my first Windows PC at home (yeah, poor people are slow to these kinds of things).

So prior to that time I always had notebooks laying around, filled with story starts and ideas. Pack rat that I am, I still have them stashed away somewhere. Writing by keyboard is still my preferred method of writing, mainly because of speed and the ease of erasure (the backspace and delete keys are my best friends).

Well, after realizing recently that some of my favorite authors still use notebooks for either story notes keeping (Warren Ellis & Bob Thurber), or for the actual writing of stories before moving it over to the keyboard (Elmore Leonard & Stephen King), I’m giving some serious thought to using a paper notebook at least for note-keeping like I used to, though I doubt I will use it for proper writing stories, but who knows? Point is, I should probably stop keeping everything jumbled up in my noodle prior to getting it out on keyboard, especially since I can’t ever turn off my creative mind and my time for actual writing is so conditional these days with everything I have going on. It just makes since to start keeping a notebook and a trusty pen handy.

And there’s something about a blank notebook that inspires you to fill its lines with sentences and paragraphs. There’s a fetish aspect to it that I’d like to get back to. These may be out of my price range, but Ellis recommends quality notebooks by FIELD NOTES.