Notebooks

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.

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State of the Author, Start of 2025

My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).

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Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Bookbinding, Part 2

The third bookbinding project in this kit was somewhat more complicated. It involved sewing multiple signatures (sets of folded paper leaves) together over linen “tapes” using something called a kettle stitch. The end product was what the instructions called “an adventurer’s journal” and I called a naked text block, ready to be “cased in” (bookbinding term for putting a cool cover on a fully assembled text block). Not everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but a fair amount did…

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Weird Wednesday: Adventures in Book Binding, Part 1

So, sometime back I watched this video and it got me interested in bookbinding and rebinding. I looked at a few videos, and tracked down a self-contained kit on Amazon. Thoughts and pictures below.

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