Since going to the beach in South Carolina appears to be my winter routine, I want to be productive during that month, or two. But I also want to spend time refilling my creative well, and just enjoying looking for dolphins. So I write longhand while sitting near the water in a low beach chair, pausing often to stare at the waves. I’m trying to keep the habit of daily writing longhand that I amped up last November. To help, I bought the ‘right’ notebook. Turns out that I can’t use recycled paper
and a fountain pen. Not only can I not write on the back of the page, but the next page will have ink marks. I don’t want too thin of a notebook. Unfortunately, I don’t like writing in ones that are small enough to fit in my pocket. It feels constricting and I don’t want constrict my writing flow. These are all good problems to have, I know.
While I don’t always have my notebook and fountain pen with me, I am very rarely without paper and pen. Glad of it this morning when after a quite pretty sunrise, a stranger said to me, “That sure wasn’t disappointing.” It seemed like such a strange way to view a gorgeous vista of sand, water and sun. Like, did she go to the beach expecting to be disappointed? Yes, some mornings the clouds obscure the sunrise, but even then, I don’t necessarily think of it as disappointing as the sky is still interesting as it lightens. I was able to record her comment on a piece of paper I keep by my kindle.
I use my kindle a lot for editing. I walk and edit a chapter, then spend some time with the computer inside to make the corrections. It works best when I’m not thrashing out just one chapter, since then I need to download new versions constantly, but I’m usually going through the whole novel when editing.
I also do a lot of reading of other novels. I miss taking note of interesting lines from other books (my NaNoWriMo challenge from 2020), but there’s
only so many pots I can stir at once, so I had to let that one go. At least for a while.