Some weeks I spend a decent amount of time searching through old photos or searching around this office/house/yard for an appropriate image to accompany my weekly post, but this week I had no problem finding a suitable prop for a photo. That’s because my office is brimming with notebooks.

I have notebooks of all different varieties and sizes. Some of them are very fancy and pretty, and I feel that I must reserve those for very important writing of some sort or another, but a majority of them are like the ones pictured above. They are plain spiral notebooks that you can usually pick up for a ridiculously cheap price during the month of August as retailers try to lure in back-to-school shoppers. Even though it’s been a long time since I was in school, I’m still a sucker for a school supplies sale.

Whether it’s a fancy one or a cheap model, there’s something magical about a blank notebook. It’s brimming with promise and possibility. I get a little thrill of excitement cracking open the cover of a blank notebook. However, most of the notebooks in my office are not blank. While they might have many blank pages contained within their covers, they also have copious amounts of writing on their pages.

Many houses have junk drawers, and for me my spiral notebooks are the authorly equivalent of a junk drawer. I use these books to plot out the novel I’m presently working on, to jot down ideas for other novels or short stories, to write random lists, even to jot down a rough draft of one of these posts. Many times a single one of these notebooks will contain a little bit of everything. Does it make it difficult to find things? Does it ever!

That fact was driven home for me this past week, when I went digging through some of the random notebooks scattered around this room in search of something I was sure I had jotted down in one of them at one point. I can’t even remember if I found that note I was searching for because I got distracted when I stumbled across something else in my search.

While flipping through the pages of a notebook I came across several pages of scribbling where I had jotted down some ideas for a book I had been working on at the time. I guess while trying to get the first draft down I had become a bit stuck and had broken out my trusty notebook to try and work through some details. Notebooks and hand writing can be good for that sort of thing.

This note was written some time ago, I know that because that particular book has progressed from a rough first draft to something that’s very nearly publishable. Then I stumbled upon this notebook and my random scribblings, and I felt a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach because I realized this book that I thought was more or less done, was not. For whatever reason, I had scribbled these notes down on paper but never bothered to transfer them over to the Scrivener file I was using to write my book or even actually remember them.

Last week when I stumbled upon those pages in my notebook, I realized that my scribbled ideas were way better than what I had actually used for the book. Revisions need to be made. It’s not the end of the world, and won’t entail an insurmountable amount of rewriting, but I’m still annoyed with myself. If I had a time machine, I would go back in time and make sure my past self digitized those scribbled notes so they wouldn’t get lost in my junk drawer of a notebook. This is funny to me because said book does in fact have a time machine in it.

Will I learn from this mistake? Will I do a better job in the future of keeping track of my notes and being more organized? I would love to say yes, but, guys, I’ve been down this road before. I’ve spent hours flipping through notebooks and random scraps of paper looking for something that I think I wrote down once vowing to come up with a better system for organizing my notes, and yet here we are again.

Maybe a little chaos is needed to create the perfect novel/short story/insert creative work here. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. I mean, I’m pretty happy with how my nearly finished time travel book came out, and while I now have to go back and change some things in it, perhaps if I had not lost and forgotten that note I wouldn’t have managed to get it to this nearly finished state. Perhaps I needed to lose this note to get to this point. I mean, it would be nice if I didn’t have to go back and do all this extra work, but in the long run I don’t think it’s such a big deal.

So, I’ll get this extra work done, and tuck this notebook with all its random notes somewhere only to dig it out years later when I’m looking for something else. I’ll flip through it’s pages and come across one where a very rough and confusing floorplan has been sketched out, and I’ll say to Ron, “Hey, remember back in August of 2024 when were trying to figure out what to do with that wall and window in the basement of the house next door?” Hopefully, we don’t decide that the ideas we sketched out were better than what we ended up doing over there, because fixing a few chapters in a book are a lot easier than fixing a house.

Wishing you a safe and happy Labor Day and thank you as always for reading!

— Alissa

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Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: The Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide by Neil Nathan

What I’m Watching: Homicide: Life on the Street

What I’m Listening to: “Good Luck, Babe” – Chappell Roan

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Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com

Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com

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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.