I am a notebook hoarder. I can admit it. I see them on shelves in bookstores, in Costco packs of three for $12, and before I know what’s happened, I have another one or several in my shopping basket. The pandemic has done something to lessen my collection if by only keeping me from spending a lot of time browsing, and by altering my habits. I spend more time around the house and yard these days and less time wandering shops because I have time to kill before running off to this place or that. Still, as a writer, I tend to keep several notebooks on the go at once.
I have a bullet journal for organization (with my ADHD, it is thus far, the only system I have been able to use for several years without forgetting about it entirely and then tossing it onto the ever growing pile of failed productivity aides). I have a personal journal for thoughts that need out of my head, but are not fit for public consumption. I have a notebook for stories and story ideas (indexed so that I can find those ideas later), and I have a small pocket notebook for any random thought that has no other place, but feels like it should be recorded. I have learned recently, that this last book is often known as a Commonplace Book. I also have a notebook where I collected all of the exercises from Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass so that I can work through them at my leisure. All told, that is five separate notebooks that I use every single day (and we aren’t counting the fact that I also keep a little pocket Commonplace Book in just about every purse, bag, and suitcase I own). Adding in that I prefer to read hardcover books to paperbacks or e-readers, you can imagine that the whole works gets quite cumbersome, and everywhere I sit down is instantly cluttered.
Being in my early 40s, I am what is known as a Xennial. That cusp time just at the tail end of GenX and the dawn of the Millennial. I grew up in an analog world and watched it become digital in my teens and 20s. I learned how to write in cursive in the 4th grade (though I was never very good at it), and I practised ‘prettifying’ my penmanship through high school whenever I was bored in class (because laptops weren’t really a thing yet unless you were epically wealthy). I have a soft spot for paper. Hard copies are what make a thing real in my world. We had a set of green canvas covered encyclopedias growing up, and they were a repository of knowledge where we all went whenever we had a question that my mom couldn’t answer. “Look it up,” she would say, and I did.
While now, looking something up requires asking a digital assistant or a few taps of the thumb, there is a layer of critical thinking required that there wasn’t when I was a kid. The encyclopedia could be out of date, but it was never filled with propaganda or outright lies. And thus, it held a sort of sanctity, that I think knowledge has lost with its move to a wholly digital space. But I digress. While I could wax poetic about how the journey from analog to digital has lead me right back to analog, I want to instead talk about the little hybrid that offers the best of both worlds. The ReMarkable 2.
My partner has been singing the praises of this e-ink tablet for a long time, and at first, I was uninterested. I have a phone and I have a computer, I really saw no need at all for yet another device. I even gave my iPad to my daughter because I couldn’t see a use for it once I bought a new laptop. If I wasn’t near my computer, I could just use my phone. E-ink, however, is something different. It isn’t for techie people. It doesn’t do email or social media or videos or music or sound of any kind. It doesn’t even do light. It’s a notebook, but with endless pages and a basic file system to keep everything separate and organized. It’s designed for people who write longhand, but has the option for a keyboard as well (you can either use the onscreen keyboard or purchase the keyboard folio and have a physical keyboard — no bluetooth, though).
Not being an e-book person, the whole concept of e-ink was new to me, but I was intrigued. I love my paper, but I love my back too, and carting around a half dozen notebooks is a lot. Plus, I don’t like waste, and editing novels on a computer screen is the sort of thing nightmares are made from. The ReMarkable seemed to be designed exactly for people like me. People who know how to use technology out of necessity, but generally prefer not. I don’t like unnecessary complexity and I don’t like things changing just for the sake of being able to change. If you have ADHD, then you know that the more of your life that works on autopilot (aka routines), the more headspace you have for things that are important. Being a small company, however, the ReMarkable was remarkably expensive. I decided that $12 for three notebooks was a better deal than $900 for a tablet, and I put it out of my mind.
Then, this year, we got a notice that ReMarkable had started selling refurbished tablets. Their prices had come down as their company grew, but I am also a sucker for refurbished tech. Planned obsolescence is my bane, and the slow turn back to making things that can be repaired rather than discarded is a trend I am 100% on board with. I decided I would give the ReMarkable 2 a try. It’s still a fairly decent chunk of change, about $200 more than a base level iPad, but within reach, and with tax return time just around the corner, I thought, why not?
It was meant to arrive a week ago Friday. It actually arrived that Wednesday, and I haven’t really been online since, other than to read articles about the various features of my new device. I didn’t purchase the case or stylus from ReMarkable. I have a pen company I like for fountain pens, lucky for me they also make a stylus that is compatible the ReMarkable 2 (shipping is a little slower from small stationary companies, so it hasn’t arrived yet). In the interim, I picked up a case and a base stylus from Amazon for about $60 total instead of the roughly $300 it would have cost to buy the same from ReMarkable.
I’ve used it daily for about a week. In that time, I have retired 3 of my permanent notebooks, and I have started importing my digital notes from my notes app (which could be a rant all on its own. Notes apps = blinding rage) to my ReMarkable 2. They advertise that writing on the ReMarkable is like writing on paper. It isn’t. Not really. On paper, I have to worry about my hand smudging wet ink. If I misspell something or lose my train of thought mid sentence, I have to cross it out and start again. Sometimes if I have left my pen sitting for a while or if I have been writing in an awkward position, I have to scribble to get the ink flowing again.
But, when it is quiet, I can hear the stylus on the screen. It sounds like writing. I have access to a variety of pen tips, some that are tilt and pressure sensitive (like the pencil), that can be used for drawing and shading. I find I have defaulted to the calligraphy pen. It reminds me most of my fountain pen, and it has 3 different nib sizes for if I want the letters to look fancy. If not, I just use the ‘thin’ nib, and it looks like regular fountain pen writing.
So far, I have about 10 different folders for novels, short stories, journals, my bullet journal, and even one for recipes that I have decided to actually start writing down. It can convert my handwriting to text so that I can add my longhand thoughts and story bits to my Scrivener project files. It can email to my computer or I can pull direct backups from the desktop and mobile apps. Conversely, I can upload pdfs to the ReMarkable for reading and/or editing, or if I want a cute notebook cover image or a personalized template to write on. I haven’t yet used this feature for novel editing, but I am looking forward to giving it a try. A comfy chair, no eyestrain, and no lapful of 300 printed pages to keep track of? It almost makes editing sound like a treat rather than a chore.
It’s not paper. I will still probably keep a pocket Commonplace Book that doesn’t need a charging cable, will never need to be restarted, and can be written in with any pen, pencil, or dirt covered stick that comes to hand. But I have to say that going from five notebooks to one pocket-sized book and an e-ink tablet (that in its case looks remarkably similar to my usual style of notebook), is pretty impressive. I do like that each page in any notebook can be ruled, graphed or not as need dictates. Am I convert to this new style of analog nostalgia digital device? Sure, partly. Am I giving up on analog entirely? Ask my manual typewriter. The real test will be longevity, but given the simplicity of the ReMarkable 2, I have a good feeling.
Infinite Monkey Theorem 