Twelfth Notebook

A notebook with a beige cover and a plastic sleeve. The cover has pencil drawings of forest animals, like an owl, a deer, a fox and some rodent. There are also lots of plants and mushrooms. Some of them have splashes of colour. Among the plants and animals, there's a ribbon with the words "let's meander and wander and maybe get lost".

It’s been longer than a year since I last posted about my notebooks, and a few months since I finished this one, but at long last I had time to write about it.

I bought this notebook way back in 2016, when I visited London with a friend before Brexit would make it more difficult. I didn’t start it until Autumn 2020 because, as I’ve mentioned before, I used to be inclined to use smaller notebooks when I was away from home. Since the pandemic made me stay indoors, I decided to make the most of it and use the bigger notebooks instead.

I really enjoyed using this notebook by Paperchase. The pages have several illustrations as beautiful as the cover, so I was even more motivated to keep writing in order to see all the beautiful animals. And the plastic sleeve kept the notebook safe and clean while making it much lighter than a hardback.

In this notebook, I tried to focus on a few projects instead of sprinkling words all over the place, so I mainly filled it with notes for Academy, Sanctuary, Brothers, Oracle and research. In fact, a quarter of the notebook was just filled with notes I’d taken at an online conference for and by Spanish writers, which I count as research because they talked about structure, dialogue, fear, routines, revisions, action, characters, diversity, representation, psychology, historical fiction, sword-fighting, query letters, irreverent romance, smut, and magical realism. Yes, there were over 15 speakers and it lasted 10 hours, but it was amazing, I laughed and learnt a lot, and I would do it again.

If anyone is interested, the videos can be found in Spanish on YouTube, so just let me know which one you want and I’ll send you the link.