Jottings…

To be honest, this could just be a Helen Lowe hazard of the life literaire.

You see, I know I should just have one notebook, preferably a large one, and write down all m’terribly important writerly thoughts in that.

But I don’t.

No, I not only have a variety of notebooks but also loose pages of paper, the backs of envelopes, and/or scraps of paper torn off other envelopes or documents whenever an idea grabs me.

Yet even then what I jot down may not always make much sense later. Partly that’s because of my handwriting, of course, which is execrable. In fact one erstwhile colleague said that my writing looked like “a spider had crawled through an inkwell and then ran about all over the page.”

I mean to say! (Hint: he was quite right.)

The other part is because I jot down the idea but not the context. So recently I found a line that said “development of the love interest.” Huh?

I was pretty sure that it wasn’t a reference to my current work-in-progress, The Chaos Gate (aka The Wall of Night Book Four.) I thought it might be a reference to a book I’d been reading, but it could have been related to any one of several films recently viewed…

All in all, as random jottings go it wasn’t very helpful and I resolved to provide better context next time. “Watch this space”, as the saying goes.

However, I suspect “Yeah, right” may prove more accurate. 😉