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Useful Gifts for Writers: Various Kinds of Notebooks

Buying a notebook for a writer? There’s so many to pick from, and you can opt for the one that best suits your recipient’s writerly type.

Writers who love the muse will appreciate fancy leather-bound ones. Ones to write spells and incantations in. Ones that tie up with a leather cord and whose thick pages drink in the ink. There’s a ton of these on Etsy; here’s a particularly nifty-looking one. Here’s a vegan alternative as well.

Writers who like to make lists may enjoy notebooks with graph paper. These are good notebooks for your list and bullet-point writer. Does this writer love spreadsheets? Give them this. Or if they’re a gamer, get them a hexagonal one.

Nostalgic writers may like notebooks that call up memories of classrooms and scrawled pencil writing. Notebooks that could have held treasure maps or lists of the books you wanted to buy from the Scholastic catalog. Here’s a supercute little one for the programmer in your life.

Artist’s sketchbooks for those lucky writers who can draw as well as write — or maybe who just love a big blank page. Get ones with high-quality paper, where ink won’t bleed through. These are for your doodlers, the people whose notebooks have little faces and flowers in the margin. Poke around and look at different sizes. Maybe get them something huge or else so tiny they can slip it in a pocket.

Notebooks for pen lovers are usually ones with paper that take inks well, but actually, just get them pens of their favorite kind. Or perhaps a nice holder so they can carry their beloved pens about.

Notebooks for those writers conscious of their literary posterity should be a bit more formal. Get them a lovely personalized notebook with their name embossed on the cover. Or make your own by buying a notebook and decorating it for them. Write little notes of encouragement in the margins. Tell them how much you love their stories, how much you want to read them.

Are you a writer not sure what to do with all those notebooks people keep giving you? FInd out how to use them to spur your creativity and write things worthy of them in Fran Wilde’s online workshop, Journaling for Creativity, which happens next on Sunday, December 20, 2020, 1:00-3:00 PM Pacific Time.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Very little writing writing done, but the second to last and much of the last read-aloud pass done for the current manuscript. Lurking in the background is the sequel, which is halfway drafted. One 6k word story finished.

2 galleys checked; 18 queries sent; 3 reviews written; 2 stories rewritten; 6 submissions; 2 reprints appeared; 4 job apps; 1 unsuccessful interview because recruiter had misrepresented my experience; 2 guest blog posts written.

Plans for April: Crank on sequel, keep freelancing where possible (HelloSeattle, mainly). I have two manuscripts I need to finish notes on (Hi Lilah and Alicia :p) and three reviews to write. I’ll be at Norwescon April 22 through 24 and at Penguicon in Troy, Michigan, April 29-May 1, where I am a “Nifty” Guest.

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What I'm Currently Working On

The rewrite of the first book, whose tentative working title is Beasts of Tabat, is off to Seth the fabulous agent, so I’ve started messing with the second book. It’s got the love triangle I mentioned in an earlier post, and I’m contemplating the somewhat odd strategy of having it start, chronologically, at a time point somewhere in the middle of the first book, and show some of that action from a different viewpoint. Crazy? Maybe, but I think it’ll be interesting to try.

At any rate, once I gathered up all the stuff snipped out of the first volume, I found myself with a solid 45k worth of words, and it’s encouraging to think that puts me halfway to a first draft. The second is tentatively titled Hearts of Tabat and while Bella and Teo make appearances, there’s some new voices as well. I hope you all will enjoy them as much as I have.

Other stuff includes a story rewrite that I need to finish up for Glitter & Mayhem, another story that’s due in a couple months, and the usual slew of other stories I should finish. Blah!

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