Here’s a writer who is an enthusiastic advocate for using a pocket notebook, in his case, a Paperblanks.

What I’m advocating is having a small notebook (and a mini-pen — those things don’t break when you sit on them, and can fit in a front jeans pocket) ready with you so you can be ready to write rather than NOT write, which is infinitely easier. Whipping out your pen and notebook is much faster than rifling through your laptop or mini-laptop case and waiting for the computer to cycle on. In many of the instances I described above, firing up a computer would be impractical enough that you’d probably leave the writing for later.

I rediscovered notebooks while my family and I were wandering around the art museum bookstore in Cincinnati and I saw a display selling 3.75 by 5.5 notebooks. They were lined, the pages were sewn into place so they’d be less likely to fall out, and the covers were slim but durable. They were small enough to slide into my back pocket, where us American men-folk often keep our wallet. It was a spur-of-the-moment purchase of something I didn’t think I needed, and I actually felt a little guilty spending the money. I haven’t felt guilty about the purchase since. I swiftly learned that I had found an ideal writing tool.

It’s obviously working for him: Howard Andrew Jones is the managing editor of Black Gate, a blog and print magazine about fantasy literature, and he’s published a lot of books!

Read more at Black Gate » Blog Archive » Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper.