Paper and Pen

I wandered down to the bookstore yesterday and paused in the stationery section (oops, I almost committed a faux pas there: stationary means standing still, stationery is writing paper) because I want to get back to work on my novel Ratbreed. So, I had to get a nice new notebook for writing in because nothing puts me in the mood to write like a nice new notebook. Plus, all the typing I've been doing lately has caused my right hand to start hurting and I don't really need to add RSS to my list of woes. (That's Repetitive Stress Syndrome, if you were wondering.)

That's when the influence of Toiler struck me, because there at the front of the stationery (look, I did it right again!) section was a display of Moleskine notebooks. Drat the man, after hearing his enthusiasm for his notebook-of-choice I had to take one down and have a look at it!

I have to admit it is a nice notebook. (Yes, I bought it, what were you expecting?) The thing I like most is that the paper is delightfully smooth. Any writer that's ever written on cheap paper knows the unpleasantness of frequent paper cuts, especially when you're packing up your materials quickly or paging back through your work to figure out where you thought this story was going three pages ago when you started it. No risk of that with this baby!

It also lies nearly as flat as a spiral-bound notebook, which is a huge plus. Frequently book-bound notebooks are worse than cheap books in that you can't actually write in them unless you have three hands or you crack the binding terribly, at which point the pages will probably start to fall out. Once again, not a problem here. Granted, this could probably be solved with a reporter-style notebook, but I hate those because you have to turn the book upside-down to write on the back of the page, and being the awkward person I am this usually means that eventually I wind up writing on the back of the wrong page and my notes are never comprehensible after that.

It's also delightfully spare in appearance. The one I got is plain black without any sort of ornamentation. If you found this notebook lying around, you would just have to open it and read it because anything that monastic-looking would have to contain strange writings of dark and eldritch purpose.

Oh, and I got a pen, too. It's black.