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The internet shows me a lot of content about notebooks. I’ve always been interested in notebooks and pens (how else do you think this ended up being my job? Chicken or egg question…), but since I’ve found my staples, I don’t venture out into the unknown much. A new-to-me black felt-tip pen set? Sure. New notebooks? Absolutely not, and it’s a kind of loss: I used to find so much hope in the possibility that a new notebook would change my life. The problem is that I found the new notebooks that changed my life and now I don’t see any reason to deviate. When I want a new notebook, it will be a sign that something is wrong.
Every notebook person has put Joan Didion’s words from “On Keeping a Notebook” on her LiveJournal, part out of self-aggrandizement but also because it’s extremely true, offering recognition not found in the real world:
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
I’ve been on the Louise Carmen train since 2018, and this system of having three separate notebooks in one leather sheath has been the thing that has fixed me, so to speak. I use Baron Fig cahiers to refill it, and each one serves a distinct purpose: weekly to-do list, with intentions and meeting or other notes on the opposite page; a meal planning notebook that used to be my recipe notebook, until I stopped regularly developing them; and finally a journal and brainstorming notebook. One keeps me organized, another keeps me sane about food, and the other is where I am free.
Here, I’m explaining how I use them, my to-do list philosophy, and a link to a page of writer resources that I’ll be consistently updating.
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