Having gone on at great length about my AI secretaries, I guess I should show you the…more analogue side of my writing process: notebooks. (Disclaimer: I do not use fountain pens and cannot vouch for whether any of these are good for fountain pens.)

I don’t generally “journal” in the conventional sense of writing about my day or my feelings or whatever. (Although this year I’m trying to do gratitude journaling as a Lenten resolution.) I do write up todos to myself, when I am really concerned, or notes after doctor’s visit, or notes when comparison shopping for major purposes. But mostly, I take notes on stories I’m thinking about writing. I collect a lot of cool notebooks, and I also make my own, with varying degrees of success. Below the cut, a couple of examples, with excerpts from the writing process that produced Pride & Planetoids.

This is a Chiltern brand notebook, with a cover design that matches their edition of Mansfield Park. They’re a comfortable size (4.9″x7.2″) midway between XL Moleskines and Pocket Moleskines, they have very cool covers, and they run a bit cheaper than the Moleskines as well. Paper is coarser though; fine for regular pens, but take some getting use to if you’ve been using a different brand of notebook for a while.

Inside the Chiltern, we have the start of a ten-page field-guide to asteroids, which I set down after a very long wiki walk/internet search, around July 2024. At this point, I had not yet decided I would set Pride and Planetoids in the Kuiper Belt.

This is a coptic stitch, home-made notebook which I just finished filling up. Cover and interior pages are Rite in the Rain brand, which are suppose to be water resistant. Cover design was midjourney art turned in to line art on a transparent background, drawn by cricut machine. Water based marker, which was why the paper didn’t take the design well. I stapled some flame shaped note papers in as tabs, when it was mostly filled in.

A piece of longhand from the climax of Pride and Planetoids. (Spoilers, but if you can read my handwriting you deserve whatever information you can glean from it). I wrote this out in late January/early February of this year, while watching something (probably Grimm) with some family members. I read it out loud to my dictation app, then ran the mp3 through whisper for transcription and Claude for cleanup. Then I revised and expanded, with Claude as a sounding board.