Notebook Mojo
Last week, I ran a bunch of writing workshops for Villanova College here in Brisbane. Four workshops spread over three days, focused on writing a crime story in 900 words. My year of producing original short fiction for Patreon came in incredibly handy, since I have a lot of thoughts on how to curtail your word count after doing that. An interesting side-effect of doing a lot of workshops: I do not go anywhere near a computer while running them. All my writing work gets done in notebooks, scribbling details by hand, rather than firing up a desktop and working in Word or Scrivener directly. Partially, this is a practical concern—notebooks are transportable and easier to flip open when you’re filling a half-hour between sessions in an unfamiliar space—but it has benefits beyond raw pragmatism. I made the switch because I operate from a baseline level of social anxiety, and it rages out of control when I break my routine.
