![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
little rituals
Aug. 4th, 2006 04:42 pmSo today I finished my fifth Moleskine notebook* (in less than a year). There's a little ritual that goes with finishing one notebook and beginning another. The old notebook gets dated and numbered on the spine (in this case #32, 05/21/06-08/04/06), and the new notebook gets its vital statistics written in the front and its pages numbered (that's the only thing I really miss about the National Brand lab notebooks: they came with numbered pages). And I transfer a certain necessary amount of information from the end of the old notebook to the beginning of the new. Sometimes it's transferring whatever fictional genealogy I'm working on, or carrying over a sentence or two of the story I'm writing. (Sometimes I compose at the computer, sometimes I write longhand; I don't seem to get much of a say in which one's going to work for which story.) In this case, my project list (24 items and counting) and the notes I make when I'm dithering about where to send short stories next.
This is, as you will no doubt recognize, a ritual of the highest possible magnitude of writerly geekiness. But, you know, it's comforting. And sometimes it pays off. Recently, I got asked to do a revise and resubmit on a story I'd originally written a couple years ago, and I was able to go back through my notebooks and actually find the notes I'd made when I was drafting it. This saved me much mental wear and tear. (I hate reinventing my own wheels. Even if they're lousy wheels that wobble and squeak, I'd rather be able to make that judgment for myself instead of living with the nagging feeling--it's a lie, always a lie, but that doesn't make it go away--that the way you thought of first was better.)
And now I have a new notebook, all clean and innocent. And I think I'm going to end this entry before my parentheses rise up and take over the world.
---
*Originally, I was using National Brand lab notebooks, but they went and redesigned them to have fewer pages and these horrid lurid purple covers instead of decent denim-blue. There was also a brief fling with Levenger's Notabilia notebooks, but they're (a.) too big, (b.) softcover (c.) a fraction of an inch too wide-ruled. Moleskine's advertising may be rather twee (and not 100% George-Washington-honest), but damn they make a good notebook.
This is, as you will no doubt recognize, a ritual of the highest possible magnitude of writerly geekiness. But, you know, it's comforting. And sometimes it pays off. Recently, I got asked to do a revise and resubmit on a story I'd originally written a couple years ago, and I was able to go back through my notebooks and actually find the notes I'd made when I was drafting it. This saved me much mental wear and tear. (I hate reinventing my own wheels. Even if they're lousy wheels that wobble and squeak, I'd rather be able to make that judgment for myself instead of living with the nagging feeling--it's a lie, always a lie, but that doesn't make it go away--that the way you thought of first was better.)
And now I have a new notebook, all clean and innocent. And I think I'm going to end this entry before my parentheses rise up and take over the world.
---
*Originally, I was using National Brand lab notebooks, but they went and redesigned them to have fewer pages and these horrid lurid purple covers instead of decent denim-blue. There was also a brief fling with Levenger's Notabilia notebooks, but they're (a.) too big, (b.) softcover (c.) a fraction of an inch too wide-ruled. Moleskine's advertising may be rather twee (and not 100% George-Washington-honest), but damn they make a good notebook.
