I’m pretty sure if you ask most writers they have a fairly substantial pile of notebooks lying about. Whether they’re book bibles, or on specific research subjects, or simply inspirational journals, I would guess that most of us keep them.
To be honest there’s nothing quite as satisfying for me as buying a fresh notebook. Starting a new book or story can be hard – those first few empty pages sometimes feel intimidating until you find the story’s rhythm. But notebooks are easy, simply because they give you permission to pretty much do anything.
I tend to keep one with me at all times, usually because I never know if I’m going to be stuck somewhere and using the time for brainstorming is helpful. And as chaotic as I am, I’ll use the same notebook for multiple projects, just split up a bit, since I never know how inspiration will strike.
At any rate, I’ve been branching out into other tech ways of notekeeping too. I obviously use DropBox like a fiend, but I’ve also got EverNote and OneNote. I use them all for different things, but I like them because I can access them from my phone, my laptop, whatever, and there’s something comforting about that.
But the issue is that I often want to transfer some of my notebook notes up to the cloud – either for sharing purposes, or just to organize things better, and sometimes that can be rather time consuming.
Enter RocketBook – which is a fancy notebook I backed on IndieGoGo a 
while back and finally got a few a couple of weeks ago. I gave one to K.A.Krantz, who was kind enough to come visit the other weekend and brought me tasty ice cream and signed a copy of her novel, Larcout – which you should all run out and buy, btw. ^_^
Look –> fancy ice cream!!
<– Look! Larcout! Go buy it!
In any case, the whole thing about the RocketBook is that you can reuse it. So you can take notes in it and when you fill the notebook up, you microwave it and the ink disappears and you’ve got a fresh new notebook all ready to go.
But, even more interesting is that each page has a series of symbols on the bottom. Using the RocketBook app on my phone I can associate each symbol with an account – an email, cloud software, whatever. When I’m done with the page, I simply mark off the symbol I want, take a picture of the page with the app and the page gets sent directly to that 3rd party account.
The concept in my mind is very cool – especially when it comes to sharing via Dropbox (I’m thinking Fox & Willow stuff of course, since I have a tendency to just brainstorm on that pretty much all the time and this way I wouldn’t have to transcribe everything in the short term while allowing Aimo to get a good look at what I’m talking about.)
But I’m also thinking about worldbuilding stuff – drawing maps, doodles and the like – that’s a bit harder to do on the fly and this would make things much easier.
Now, I haven’t really put the RB through its paces yet, so I’ll give it a couple of months and then see what I think about it. I don’t expect it to take the place of my project notebooks completely. Not everything needs to go up to a cloud account and to be honest, sometimes it’s really nice to come across an older notebook and go through it.
Lots of memories there, even in the doodles, and I’m not quite ready to give that up.
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