Journal

I really did intend, when writing my last blog post, to keep using my computer for writing purposes right up until I started my writing-in-notebooks experiment on September 1st. I figured I’d finish off the projects I’d started there, keep using the notebooks for notes, ease into the idea of doing everything longhand, you know?

Turns out, not so much. I shut off the computer after my last post and leapt into the notebook world whole hog, only turning the laptop on once in the last seven days (and that was to type up the story I’d written for a friend’s birthday, so I could post it on his Facebook wall).

And now it appears that I can hit 10 pages of handwriting a day – somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 words, depending on the notebook and my handwriting – pretty consistently. Books are taking shape, stories are getting written, my hand is not hurting from the endless scribble. There’s something aesthetically pleasing about writing in notebooks and, well, the portability.

Oh, god, the portability.

Weekends are usually Kryptonite for me and regular writing processes. I wake up on Saturday morning wanting nothing to do with keyboards and computers, preferring to stay in bed and idle the hours away. Sunday is just like Saturday, except I’m even less inclined to work.

When I’m in that kind of mood, any distraction will do. And my house is full of neat distractions.

So, this morning, when I was tired and getting grumpy about how hard it was to write things and starting to consider how much I really didn’t want to spend the entire day in my flat, I picked up my notebooks and caught a train into the city and distracted myself by wandering around after every page or two of writing.

Four hours later I came back with my ten pages of writing done, a page of notes scribbled down about the project I’m going to kick off next, a belly full of Vietnamese take-away, and a substantially better mood (also, books. ‘Cause when you walk past a bunch of book stores…)

I took a bunch of photographs. ‘Cause you don’t notice that Brisbane has some very pretty bits, when you walk through it during the week and you’re primarily interested in dodging your fellow commuters.

And for all that it was always possible to do that with a laptop, in practice it would never happen. The laptop was always heavy to cart around, battery power would be an issue, and it’s hard to be discrete about what you’re doing when you set up a computer in the corner of a cafe after ordering a flat white.

I’m still not sure I’m a permanent convert – I’m well aware that this burst of consistent productivity could just be the novelty – but it’s going well enough that I’m optimistic about the results.

Home again, after four days of traipsing around northern Queensland. Nowhere near as wrecked as I should be, given I just spent four days delivering workshops and travelling, which may well mean the post-teaching/travel exhaustion I’ve come to expect in recent years is another one of those things that connected to the apnoea.

Still, it is good to be home.

I’m putting serious thought, post-trip, into abandoning the computer as a first-draft tool. A few weeks back I made the decision to abandon all digital screens after ten PM, turning off the computer, the television, and my phone a good two hours before I finally went to bed. This started putting a serious crimp in my productivity, but there was no arguing the fact that I was sleeping better and it stopped bad habit of staying up past bedtime in order to mainline a TV series or play a marathon game of Civilization.

Instead of writing, I’d use those two hours to edit print-outs of existing manuscripts and brainstorming ideas for new work, which meant I started digging out notebooks for the first time in ages. And since I carried all those habits with me, when I went away, the notebooks came along for the ride. Since they were easier to use than the computer in airports and such, I’d occasionally dig them out and scribble away in my scratchy handwriting.

Then the fine folks at iWrite in Townsville gave me a seriously pretty notebook as a thank-you for doing the session. We’re talking hand-stitched binding, lovely paper, one of those things that’s a joy to write in. And then today, when I went to Write Club with Meg Vann, I found myself getting bogged down tinkering with things I’d already written instead of moving forward on the projects I was working on. Not exactly unproductively, but noticeable slow.

Well, I thought, that was all kinds of bullshit. And when I got home I hauled out the notebooks I used while travelling, and proceeded to write another ten pages of stuff in half the time I spent at the computer.

I have some theories about why this was easier than typing, and I clear all the work I owe people by the end of this month, so I think I’m going to test my hypothesis by spending September going analogue. All notebooks and pens, all the time, for thirty days, in what’s easily the most disruptive month of the year I have in terms of writing.

If it works – and by works, I mean clears 30,000 words without feeling unnecessarily arduous – then it may be time to look at making a big change to the way I’m writing stuff. If it doesn’t, well, I haven’t really lost much. September is destined to be a pants month for writing anyway 

I wrote a different post earlier today, but it appears that wordpress ate it and refuses to give it back, so you miss out on my moments of wit regarding the hazards of sleeping with a CPAP machine while you have a head cold (here’s a hint: ew).

Now it’s later in the day and instead of catching up on some pretty miserable stuff, I’m back from a quick trip into the city where I shopped at Pulp Fiction bookstore, perused the Night Noodle Markets at South Bank, ate Pumpkin Pie at the South Side Diner, and went to see Ant Man.

The Noodle Markets broke out the pretty for me. Case in point:

Ant-Man was far better than a movie about Ant-Man should have been, especially given the departure of Edgar Wright from the project. And while a lot of people talk about seeing the Wright-isms in the film, I think that takes a lot away from replacement director Petyon Reed’s contributions.

Reeds not as obviously stylized in his approach as Wright would have been, but he’s done some pretty solid work. You can see echoes of the man who delivered Bring It On in Ant-Man, and he’s not entirely without an aesthetic approach to cinema. Given a solid script, he produces good work. Given a not-so-solid script, he’ll at least produce something interesting.

I’m with pretty much everyone who would have liked to see Evangeline Lily’s Wasp a feature of the film, rather than a quiet extra that’s tagged at the end.

Back to writing now. One novelette draft finished and in need of editing, courtesy of a hardcore writing stint with Meg Vann earlier today. One novelette draft yet to be finished. A small pile of work for Altered standing by, waiting for a stretch of time where it can get my full focus. Four days until the end of the month, when I can finally collapse in a pile.