I Stressed My Notebook Out

A few days ago on Instagram, I shared a picture of a pink notebook. Nothing flashy or fancy, just a cheap pink notebook I’d picked up and decided to fill with every new idea I wanted to flesh out and bring to the page to do something with.

Because 2025 is my Indie Author Era Intro and I am so so sooo excited.

Some were fully fleshed out ideas, ready to go. Others were shells of ideas to save for later, but didn’t want to forget.

And I wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more until one day I opened up the book to notice that the binding was coming apart. Not yet fully detached, but enough to make me realize that I had stressed this little notebook out to the point where it was literally hanging on by a strand.

It wasn’t enough to stress myself out, I apparently had to put my notebook through it, too…

I wondered what to do. To hang on to my gapped pages of creativity…or to transfer it into a stronger bound journal, to give myself a chance rewrite and catch things I’d earlier missed, to make looser ends come together.

I’d like to compare this to those moments where we think we’ve saved our work, and when we reopen the document to discover nothing had saved at all. For a moment, our souls leave our body and momentarily mourn all of that effort we’ve just made to string words together comprehensively and sound halfway good. Because it’s the effort that counts and not perfection.

When this happens, consider this a chance to improve your concept and make it better. Despite the fact that none of my work in this case had actually been lost, I treat it as an opportunity to make it better. Because one day, while writing in that pink notebook, the binding will completely come undone and pages will loosen and fall out…and then everything’s a blur trying to fit them back in the order they were written in.

I don’t consider rewriting anything to be a waste. I revisit and I revise.

It’s more than okay to start fresh. Second shots make for stronger entries. So the next time you reopen your document to find your work gone, don’t fret! It’s not a waste, it’s a chance to improve.