How do you Remember?

You know when that fantastic plot-line jumps into your brain? And you're not sitting in front of your computer/writing pad... How do you remember?

1. In the middle of the night:
a) get up, go to desk, and write/type the whole thing down, dialogue and all?
b) turn on the light, and make detailed notes in a moleskine*-by-the-bed?
c) fumble around in the dark for a pencil/pen/lippy and something to write on?
d) spend the next hour constructing complex associations until convinced that nothing will be forgotten, and then it all is.
*insert favourite brand of notebook here.

2. During the day:
a) keep a notepad and pen handy at all times.
b) have a dictaphone/mobile-with-voice-record.
c) carry a BlackBerry®/palm top into which everything can be typed on the spot (and wifi-ed to the computer at home)
d) Do nothing, it'll all be remembered/forgotten anyway.

Later:
a) Every detail is remembered/recorded.
b) Every detail is forgotten, other than it was a Really Fab Idea.

I'm a middle-of-the-night girl, with a notebook by the bed. What are you?

Notebook Heaven

The Moleskine, the traditional notebook for the likes of Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Picasso and Chatwin, is actually bound in oilcloth and cardboard. I say traditional (and the Moleskine website calls them ledgendary), but the name Moleskine was not coined until 1986, and not registered until 1996.

The 'original Moleskine' (the notebook so favoured by the intelligensia) was made by a French bookbinding business that supplied a fashionable Paris stationary shop; but production ceased in the mid 1980s. The modern Moleskine, now printed in China and sewn in Italy, did not come into being until 1998. Since 2006 the brand has been back in French ownership.

Moleskines feature a handly elastic strap (for keeping your space pen in place), and a spine that allows the book to be laid flat. Many different sizes and colours are available, although 'traditionally' Moleskines were black.

According to their blurb, "red is the new black", so, clearly, some clever marketing men are in charge of things now.

For more information see the Moleskine website

Bedside Writing

I might not have a Moleskine by the bed, but I do have a Fisher space pen (my 2006 birthday present), and can recommend one such to all insomniac writers. The space pen, so called because it works in zero gravity, will write underwater, over grease, in any temperature between -20°C and +200°C, and, most usefully for the rest of us, it works upside down.

It was developed by Paul Fisher in the early 1960s in response to NASA's need for a pen that would work in space. The urban myth - stating that the Americans spent $1m designing a pen, whereas the Russians used pencils - is (sadly) not true. The Americans had found that broken pencil-leads tended to float into people's eyes, ears, noses and also into electrical circuits. They were also highly flammable in the pure-oxygen environment of a space capsule.

The space pen's ballpoint is made from tungsten carbide. The ink is hermetically sealed in a pressurised reservoir, and is forced out by compressed nitrogen at a pressure of nearly 35psi. I find that all this technology makes it invaluable for writing on the back of my hand at 3am.

See Fisher's website for more information, where, incidentally, they advertise the Moleskine as the perfect space-pen companion.