Could a Real Big Notepad change it all?

Experimenting with the opposite of a microplastic

I develop a semi-hostile relationship with every medium I’ve ever used for my unpublishable writing. I can’t help it. From my first diary to my frankly chaotic approach to drafting today, my relationship to my writing implements ends up resembling my relationship to state vehicle inspections. I hate them, but I stay in the game.

Recently, though, I found what might be my savior, and it could be yours, too. Everything I’ve learned from my past notebook relationships has led me to one huge development. But first:

Where I’ve yapped, historically

Here’s a roughly chronological breakdown of the things I’ve written in, how I’ve used them, and my beef with each.

Various novelty spiral notebooks

My first journals came from stores that primarily sold CDs.

What’s inside them only counts as writing by the most generous definitions.

Heros Heros

Beef: Too flashy. I never wanted to write anything sensitive in these because I felt they were just begging to be read by prying eyes. I made up a secret code which offered some protection, but a) it took forever to write each symbol (my own fault) and b) I kept the key to it in another equally obvious notebook.

Moleskines

My first time encountering the Moleskine brand was magical. I was 12. Their Barnes & Noble standee was considerably sparser at the time, very Serious and Writerly looking. I also didn’t know how to pronounce the name, which added to the appeal.

I was an adult, and I was going to make some goddamn art. Moleskines were the only notebooks I used for the next 10 years.¹

The softcover pocket size was my go to. My hand would cramp up, I’d need a large writing surface underneath, the paper was thin, it generally kinda sucked, but it was WORTH IT because, again, adult, art, slay. These ended up being part poetry archive, part straight-up diary, and part scrapbook. I rarely revised any poems in these. I was very precious about them.

Besides this entire blog, my Moleskine methodology is also the most straightforward evidence we have of my neuroses. I was pre-numbering all the pages, always in red. I was making tables of contents for each notebook. I was specifically titling things in the table of contents in weird cryptic ways to try and throw off intruders.

Beef: A litany of beefs:

• These hurt my hand so much to write in. Moleskines were either too small, too stiff, or too bendy. (I also had yet to realize my hand tendons are just a little fucked up anyway.)

• All my poems looked the same because they were filling the same amount of physical space on the page.

• The admin!!!!

Fully-locked-down LiveJournal

My foray into web-based storage ❤️ LiveJournal overlapped with my Moleskine era and was the first time I had to juggle 2 sources of truth. I set it so nobody could see any of my posts, effectively turning it into a collection of Google docs.

I’ve lost access to my account, but I remember it being the first time I felt definitively alone with my little drafts. Intoxicating.

Beef: Formatting was rough. But other than that, not much to be angry about. I tried to go back, but it sucks now.

Field Notes notebooks

Field Notes, my favorite brand for straight people, eventually blew Moleskine out of the water in terms of construction quality and ease of access. These have been my go-to physical notebooks for a few years now.²

They lay flat easily, making them ripe for washi tape and stickers alongside various lists and content that I now realize with horror can only be described as gratitude journaling.

God.

Beef: I like their low profile, but they’re SO floppy that I need a dedicated clipboard to use with them. And again, hand pain from their small size. After I decorate the pages, these offer even less real estate than Moleskines, so I rarely use them for things other than lists and brain dumps.

Notes app not connected to the cloud

This has been a constant in my life ever since my hand-me-down Blackberry in 2011. I will never stop using shitty notes apps.

Beef: The problem with homogenous line lengths again. I also keep doing this stupid thing where I’ll put a draft at the bottom of a page that also contains work notes, random URLs, or a particularly complex shopping list, so it’s hard to swipe through everything and find what I’m looking for.

Too-long Google doc

My Google storage is currently at 89% capacity, and it is due to this document, titled “all my bullshit,” which is now 8 years old, and which I sort-of-but-not-really clean out every couple years.

Whatever!!!!! I will probably never stop using this doc, but I’d like to change my strategy to only contain stuff I’m more serious about revising.

My % of storage used matches the page length of this doc. Cute!

Beef: While this one offers the most freedom of line length, I refuse to pay for digital storage. I will not be examining my aversion at this time.

Procuring the Real Big Notepad (RBN)

Since all my writing implements had been either digital or too small, I decided to go analog and very big. I wanted to feel like I was writing on a paper-covered table at an Italian restaurant.

More specifically, I needed the RBN I brought into my life to be:

• Real big (at least 10x10”)

• Stiff enough to not need a clipboard/writing surface

• Spiral bound

• Unlined

• Not prohibitively expensive, since I’ll ideally be repeat buying these for a while

Jerry’s Artarama³ once again came through for me with this baby, and I decided to take my chances.

It’s a sketch pad with pretty basic but quality paper, a thick front and back cover, and a humiliating declaration that I am an Urban Artist.

Prognosis

It’s only been a few days since I started with the RBN, but it has, in fact, changed it all.

I love it.

Benefits so far:

• Bones not mad—It doesn’t hurt to handwrite with this one! It’s easier to keep my wrist and fingers in normal positions! Understanding my hypermobility and how it’s OK to like… make changes so that I’m not in pain doing my hobbies????… has been a very helpful shift over the past couple years.

• Side-by-side drafting and edits—The width of the pages has made revisions and rewrites so much easier with less flipping back and forth.

• Genre mixin’—The paper width and type supports everything from pencil scribbles to art markers and oil pastels.

• Theft prevention—Though I’m no longer as obsessed with secrecy, it’s nice that the RBN is so huge that nobody in their right mind would steal it. It’s like how high school teachers would attach the hall pass to a Big Mouth Billy Bass.

• More diverse poem structure—Varied line lengths and spacing decisions are not just for the Google doc anymore!

• Taking up space #feminism—Yes queen! But there actually is so much freedom in letting myself fill up grotesquely large pages with whatever I want, in whatever layout I want, and being more physically comfortable in the process.

Maybe I’ll eventually grow to hate the RBN too. But so far, it’s glorious.

Anyway buy Mall Water

I got author copies of my book in the mail today. I am, in the words of Walt Whitman, gooped and gagged.

photos taken on the floor behind the couch as the lord intended

I’m so excited and also sick to my stomach to share this with people!

You can preorder it here. Here are some nice things people have said about it.

Release day is only 10 days away❣️

(And if you preorder, one of those chihuahua illustrations could be yours…)

1. Feel like I should mention this coincides with the period when I primarily wore brogues to school.

2. Field Notes were a little too Wes Andersony for me at first. Like… what field??? But my friend Tate changed my mind when she pre-decorated an entire notebook for my birthday :’) ty bb

3. Strongly believe in store-with-rotating-sculptural-sign supremacy: