Well, I promised to post again today, so here goes. Not sure I could keep this up daily, which is why you won’t see this feed filling your queue with a 100+ messages after a weekend.
Unless, of course, you do 🙂
So, for years and years (10+, actually), I have used marble composition notebooks to write in when I write freehand. Granted, I do less and less freehand writing these days, because I type ten times faster than my hand can write, and there’s no edit feature in the notebook. Nevertheless, there are occasions where its just the right way to get a thought down. Or the only way.
For the last year or so, I have read a lot of buzz about the moleskine notebook, mostly on GTD sites like ZenHabits. “Used by artists and thinks for over two centuries, including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Bruce Chatwin,” or so the rhetoric goes. So when I had some spare cash at my birthday, I splurged and got one.
Now, I’ll give props to the subtle marketing of these things, because when I bought mine I expected to have words leap from the mind unformed and pen themselves. I mean, come on, Hemingway used one, and look at his writing. (Turns out I like the stories about Hemingway more than his actual works. Go figure.) My first impression, once I made a selection from the dizzying array of options (a plus), was….meh. I find the paper a little too starched, the size a touch too small, and the overall effect less than thrilling. Rather than being driven to write more in it, I found myself on a keyboard more than ever.
In a Google search for this post, I came across this article at stuffwhitepeoplelike that is both funny and true, too, too true.
And so, there it sat, unused. Or, unused except for one long first entry. Then a week or so ago I read this article on the Art of Manliness about making a Moleskine PDA. Like many articles on AoM, its a condensation of other people’s work, more of a starter reference, but it worked. I went out and tracked down related articles, feeling pretty dumb for not having thought of this before. Moleskine in hand, tabs and a pen at my side, I split my notebook up into sections. I chose to dedicate the Moleskine to writing related topics and entries, which seemed appropriate, even though most of the actual writing process occurs in yWriter still. But I can definitely see setting up a similar system (though not, I think, with an almost $20 moleskine) for work.
And the marble notebooks? Well, after I finish this moleskine, I’m probably going back to them. At a buck or two a pop, and a size and comfort (so long as its the right rule of paper) I’m used to, it serves my purposes best.
Now you may be reading this thinking, wait, what’s the point? Well, like me, you may have a moleskine in need of a rescue or purpose in life. Converting it to a manual PDA is as good a use as any I’ve seen. By the way, if you missed it, that article at stuffwhitepeoplelike is well worth going back for 🙂