Journal

When I started my PhD they gave me a cubicle at university, ostensibly a quiet place to work and store books and be close to research tools. I’ve done a few tours in the post-grad world and they’re almost never that–put enough postgrads into a room looking to procrastinate, and the distractions will come thick and fast.

My little work space was relatively heavy with distractions, so I worked from home a lot of the time. All my stuff was already there, and there weren’t so may distractions.

Last week, I got the news that my post-grad desk was being relocated to a bank of cubicles on the top floor. A slightly larger space, less of a thoroughfare, and with about three times the number of post-grads around. Fewer people who went through their initial study at the same time that I did, though, which means I’m largely a stranger who can wander in and just…work.

Not sure whether that will tempt me to use it any more than the last spot, but it has the potential to serve as a going-out-to-work space that doesn’t actually require me to buy a coffee or food court snack. That’s a thing worth keeping in mind until something happens to change it.

Because I have blog stats and know what you folks are showing up for, here’s a picture of Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall for your general perusal and admiration.

It’s astonishing how much colour she managed to find in our flat, given our general decorating preferences.

Astonishing, also, how much of her belly fur is still growing back after she had some surgery prior to coming to live with us.

This week has been all about regrouping after the latest life-roll to disrupt my year (the third, and hopefully, the last). My brain is heavily scattered at the moment, and my anxiety gets to drive a lot more than I’d like, so I wanted to create a space where I could just sit down and get my priorities in order.

Part of that meant dragging out all the work spaces on my desk and taking a close look at them. Which, inevitably, means dragging out a veritable mountain of notebooks and taking a look at everything that’s in progress, then looking at the current unfinished projects on the digital front.

I had assumed I was in a notebook-lite workflow just prior to doing this. It would appear…not so much.

That said, it looks worse than it is, as not every notebook represents an active work project. There are two finished Bullet Journals in there, left in place so I can reference details and notes from last year. There’s two full-length notebooks containing a novel draft that I really need to get around to typing up. There’s two of the smaller notebooks which are filled with notes for the Keith Murphy series and the various fixes and new works I might choose to do (and, at this stage, may not). Two notebooks for my superhero RPG campaign (you can see the rulebooks poking over the top of the pile on the left), and one for a campaign that I’m planning when SMAX wraps up in a couple of weeks. Two research notebooks–one for PhD research, one for another project I’ve poking at. One notebook that is just for the morning brain dump.

What’s really surprising is the way my tastes are shifting as I work at dekss more often. After years of working in hardcover notebooks, I’m starting to really use a lot of the softcover Moleskine Cahiers which tend to come in three-packs. My preference for RPG planning is the grid-ruled Cahier in the beige colouring–the smaller sized, 80-page notebooks for general notes, and a larger sized, 120-page notebooks for broad worldbuilding details.

Writing is increasingly taking place in blank notebooks of various sizes, depending on the project (I’m increasingly fond of the green ones, which makes for easier colour-coding of writing and gaming work).

Either way, a good day of sorting and figuring out what’s still useful has allowed for a more organised approach to storage.