Longhand

Last night was a very happy time for me, and also a great relief. Yes, after three months of searching (sometimes halfheartedly and in vain) I found one of my long-lost notebooks.

This particular notebook is not just any old notebook – this one is a Moleskine notebook, and I have been searching for it ever since I unpacked all my belongings from the move to the big city. In it I wrote a ton of research for a hopeful fantasy series that I shelved in order to work on some horror. Imagine my shock when I was all unpacked and the notebook wasn’t with all the rest of them!

Well, as you can imagine, it was terrifying to think about having to remake all that information. I hesitated, and thankfully I won’t have to rewrite any of it. Most of the information is names and genealogies for characters and families as well as names and descriptions of different places that I came up with over the course of a few months.

Where was this notebook? Crammed between two massive tomes on the bottom shelf of my bookcase. Why did I put it there? I have no idea, but I am very happy to have found it.

This made me think about the act of writing and the different mediums we choose to do it in. There’s the longhand way on pen and paper which I usually prefer when I’m on the go, and there’s also typing digitally which is much faster, but also dangerous because files need to be backed up and can be deleted or corrupted without a moment’s notice. I thought I was avoiding losing my writing with notebooks, but this escapade has proven to me that writing longhand in a notebook can be just as dangerous as typing on a computer or an iPad.

I think in the future I’m going to have a shelf dedicated to my notebooks so that this doesn’t happen again. Moleskine notebook, it’s been way too long!