Tag: creativity

How to Use Your Notebooks in 2026 to Improve Your Life

From top to bottom: single project notebook (blog drafts), single project notebook (study notes), single project notebook (D&D planning), work-in-progress notebook, work planner, personal planner, journal

Hi there, do you have a big stack of beautiful, brand new notebooks just waiting to be used? Do you have goals and plans for the new year? Do you want to improve your life in many different areas? Great! This post is for you.

Go grab a handful of those notebooks. We’re going to take the dust off them and get them to work for you. Remember: a beautiful notebook looks even better once it’s full. Notebooks are meant to be used as tools, not stared at like art objects.

Here are a few kinds of notebooks you should keep in 2026:

  • Journal – this is an absolute must for everybody. I know it’s hard to be consistent – believe me I struggle with it daily – but journaling is a habit that is guaranteed to pay back dividends. I start mine daily with a list of things that I’m grateful for, and end with a mini review of the day (did I fulfil my five ACT values?). In between is a running log of the day, and sometimes a section where I work things out on the page. Don’t post your opinions and thoughts on social media – write them in your journal instead. A journal will give you peace of mind, perspective, joy and a safe place to vent. Don’t take it out on people, put it on the page. I currently use a Stalogy 365 B6 for my journal, though for years I have used limited edition lined Large Moleskine hardcovers, and I may yet return to them.
  • Work In Progress notebook – this is the newest addition to my notebook rotation and I wish I had started a notebook like this sooner. What is a Work In Progress notebook? It’s where I spend time working on things in my life that I want to reflect on and change. You can do this in your journal, but as I’m dedicating time and effort this year to make some significant behavioural changes I wanted the place to work through these things. This is also a place where I reflect and take notes about the non-fiction, history, philosophy and self-help books that I’m reading, and it’s a place where I take time to consider my values and purpose in life. Heady stuff that we’ve been encouraged to abandon in this cynical and commercial age – much to our detriment. You can change and evolve, it’s worth investing time in trying to become a better version of yourself, and consistent daily work and reflection in this area is worth doing. I highly recommend keeping a notebook dedicated to this endeavour.
  • Planners – I believe that the best planner is the one that you customise for your needs. This is why I recommend not buying a pre-formatted planner, and instead making a planner yourself. I keep a work planner and a personal (home) planner and I recommend that you do the same – keep work at work and home at home whenever possible. Take into account that you’ll have to experiment to see what works for you, and that there will be a level of compromise that you’ll have to grow comfortable with. There is no “perfect” planner – there is a planner that works for you. Planners don’t replace reminders or calendar appointments – they’re there to give you a broader view of your week, month and year, and let you make some long term plans.
  • Single Project notebooks – “Single Project” notebooks are exactly that – a notebook dedicated to a single project or area in your life. It can be a hobby (I have one dedicated to my D&D plans, and I used to have one dedicated to my running), an actual project that you’re working on (I’m studying for a certification so I have a dedicated notebook for my study notes), or an idea that you want to develop. I try to select a notebook that fits the project that it’s dedicated to in terms of size, format, cover and number of pages. My running notebook was a Field Notes, my study notebook is a Midori MD notebook. If it’s something that you’re working on for a while and that’s important to you, I recommend dedicating a notebook for it.
  • Daily To Do List – I don’t use a notebook for this at the moment, but I used to use a large squared Moleskine for this. I currently use Kokuyo KB A4 loose leaf paper that I cut in half to A5 size. These lists are disposable to me, so I have no problem crumpling the daily list away and tossing it into recycling. You can use a notebook, index cards, loose leaf paper – but I recommend keeping a hardcopy, analog version of your daily to-do list. Why? Because to-do apps give you excuses to pick up your phone, because writing things down makes you stop and consider what you’re committing to, and because you’ve got all those pretty notebooks and pens and it would be a shame not to use them.
  • Scratch pad – keep one at hand to doodle on, for quick capture and to test out pens and inks.

Hopefully this will help you get more enjoyment and use out of that big pile of notebooks in your closet. Let me know if this helps or if you have more ideas on how to use your notebooks.

Pelikan Hubs 2025 and On Being A Female Pen Collector

Yesterday was the 2025 Pelikan Hubs event. Pelikan is so wonderful to organize these events, so generous and thoughtful with their gifts, and I love the company and their pens so much that I’m really heartbroken that this isn’t just a glowingly happy post.

This isn’t Pelikan’s fault. Their organization was as usual, impeccable. Their gift was tremendous – a beautiful box, with the Edelstein’s ink of the year Apricot Achat, a postcard and a notepad. Everything was so well designed it was breathtaking to open the box and see it all laid out perfectly.

The box

Here’s the open box and the postcard:

The open box and the postcard

Here’s the notepad. You can see the design on the cover better in the next photo, but the paper is smooth, thick and perfectly fountain pen friendly.

Small notepad

I love the design of the cover of the box, the postcard and the cover of the notepad. It’s playful but elegant, and it works well together and ties in well with the typography and the design of the Edelstein box. That’s a 10/10 for design and quality.

Everything that was in the box: postcard, Edelstein Apricot Achat ink, and notepad

The that we received is the Edelstein Apricot Achat, which is the ink of the year 2025. The bottle is gorgeous, and the ink is non-shimmer this year, so it should be easy to clean out of pens.

Edelstein Apricot Achat

The ink itself is indeed an apricot ink, with a hint of shading. It’s bright but light – a tad too light for me if I’m honest. I think that this exact ink just slightly more saturated would have been the perfect orange for people who like their orange right in the middle of the orange spectrum – not too yellow or too red.

Swab on Col-o-Ring

I filled a Pelikan M215 Rechteck (rectangle) with this ink, but I chose poorly, forgetting that it has an EF nib. Pelikan EF are on the wide side, but this ink would fare better in a medium or even a broad nib. I will still enjoy it as it works well with the other inks I currently have in rotation, but if you are looking to use this ink I’d suggest wide and generous nibs for it.

Writing sample on Kokuyo paper.

I tried it on the Postcard. The paper isn’t coated but is still rather sleek:

The postcard with an ink swab and writing sample

So thank you very much Pelikan for organizing this worldwide event and for your wonderful gift! I am actually considering buying the matching M200 because I like the look of the ink.

Now for the sad and ugly part:

Pen collection has a misogyny problem. I have experienced it during the previous Pelikan Hubs, I have experienced it when I tried to buy pens in brick and mortar shops, in flea markets, from pen makers. I experienced it during this year’s Pelikan Hubs and I’m tired of it, and kind of tired of all the talk about how wonderful and welcoming the pen community is. It’s wonderful and welcoming if you’re a guy, and time and again I have seen it close ranks and snarl if you’re a gal.

Just during yesterday’s event, where I stayed on for less than an hour (and even that was just to be at the edge of the group photo), I was told several times that:

  • Women don’t collect pens.
  • Only men collect pens.
  • I am not a real pen collector.
  • I can’t possibly be a pen collector.
  • I can’t possibly have enrolled to the Pelikan hub.
  • I am there as someone’s plus one.
  • Women don’t understand pen collecting.
  • I am a rare bird, the exception to the rule.

They had facts to back it up, they said. Their closed pen collectors group only had three women in it. That proved the point. I eye-rolled so hard. I had met and talked to one of the other female collectors at last year’s event and I fully understand why she didn’t brave this treatment to collect her gift this year. It’s because nobody wants to go out of their way to spend their precious free time with a bunch of *holes.

There are women collectors, they have every right to enjoy this hobby, and if you’re a guy and you don’t see women in your group, it’s not because they don’t collect pens. It’s because you’ve created a group that women don’t want to join.

Do better.

End of rant – and to end on a more positive note, I did manage to do a few 2-3 minute sketches while I was waiting for the group photo:

Sketched with Pelikan M805 Ocean Swirl F nib and Montblanc Maya Blue on a Pith Kabosu Sketchbook
Sketched with Pelikan M605 Stresemann M nib and Sailor Ink Studio 123 on a Pith Kabosu Sketchbook

Thank you again Pelikan for the wonderful event. I intend to return next year even if the menfolk find my presence abhorrent. There were a few nice fellows that were willing to talk to me, and I will not let the trolls dissuade me from participating in a hobby that I have been enjoying for close to 20 years.

The Cancer Project: Alphabet Superset

In April 2022 I sat down and wrote the first part of what was supposed to be a long term writing project, the toughest one that I wrote yet. It was called “Hair Part 1” and it was part of something that I called “The Cancer Project”. The plan was to write a series of posts, all taken from my personal experience with cancer, and the point was to open a window into a very scary disease — humanizing it and the people who go through it, and arming the reader with information. 

I didn’t post anything beyond that first snippet of a post, and I didn’t draft any more posts in the project. I was 4 months out of treatment when I wrote that post, and it was excruciatingly difficult to write. After I posted the post, I decided to focus on writing about other topics, easier topics. Topics that anyone else could write about, if I’m being honest. Sure, I could write a pen review from my own unique perspective, and of course people would read it because it’s useful and interesting to see different takes on the same thing, but then again… “so what, who cares?”

That challenge, “so what, who cares?” was something one of my professors used to say, and at the time it drove me mad. The point was that we didn’t have to make an argument, we had to make the reader care about the argument, we had to explain why it was meaningful and important, not just why we thought it was true. Pen and ink reviews are awesome, but every time I post one nowadays, I feel guilty. I know that I could be writing about other things, things that can maybe help people. 

Last week this video popped into my YouTube feed, from the wonderful Struthless channel. Campbell Walker is starting a new community challenge meant to get people creating and posting their creations. It’s called Alphabet Superset, and the idea is to pick a theme, pick a creation medium and a publishing medium, make some aesthetic choices to limit yourself, and for 26 weeks create and post something that fits this framework — one piece a week, with the topic being tied to a letter of the alphabet. I looked at the schedule, and quickly realized that I won’t be able to follow it, but that didn’t matter. The challenge presented an opportunity, and more specifically a framework. I no longer had a giant abstract monster of a topic to maul, I could break it down to smaller chunks, albeit somewhat arbitrary ones. 

Running through the 26 letters of the alphabet proved to me very quickly that my issue won’t be so much finding a topic that would fit the letter, but having too many things to cover per letter.  “Ah!” my brain said, “an excellent reason not to start!” As you can see, it’s going to be a struggle between my need to write this project and my brain’s resistance to it. The odds aren’t in my favour: my brain, and specifically my PTSD, has shown itself to be a ruthless and tenacious opponent. It’s going nowhere, and it *will* fight me all the way through. However, I plan to dodge, feign and crawl my way through this one way or another. My PTSD may be persistent but I’m STUBBORN. 

On to the practical side: I will be running through 26 letters of the alphabet. As the next three months are travel heavy, I won’t be able to stick to the “one post a week” schedule. Each letter will get at least one (maybe more?) blog post, and perhaps also a comic that I’ll create (no promises). I will clearly title all the posts in this project “The Cancer Project” so if you are one of those people who is absolutely terrified of cancer to the point of being incapable of hearing the word, you can avoid reading them. I do encourage you to grit your teeth and read them though. It may end up helping you, it may up end helping you help a loved one. The reality is that almost all of us will encounter cancer face to face at some point in our lives — whether as caregivers for a parent, sibling, spouse or child, or as cancer patients ourselves. So it’s useful to remember this:

Knowledge is power, and knowledge saves lives.