Notebooks

Warren Ellis has posted up some notes on how he tends his notebooks that I found rather interesting – although I admit I’m a bit of a creative process voyeur.

I’ve also moved back to doing the majority of my brain thrushing with pencil on paper, despite my trusty tablet laptop. My notebook travels snuggly, provides an immediately accessible interface for both text and diagrams, and allows for weird spatial change ups that a word doc can’t carry off.

The truth is though, in the end I need to have everything digitized and skimmable, (most of the actual construction work still happens at the keys after all,) so I tag most of my entries: Scrap, Journal, Blog, Idea, Fodder, etc. My handwriting is tremendously unreadable, but by making a little effort in keeping the tags legible I can use my scanner and some OCR software to translate things into a relatively easy-to-search interface.

Anyhow, his post also reminded me that I’d meant to point towards Lovecraft’s Idea Notebook, which is another enlightening stroll through someone else’s noggin.