Yesterday I reached something of a milestone. I filled the Volant Moleskine notebook that I was using for my morning pages. 94 pages of writing. It feels like I’ve finished a warm up to NaNoWriMo. I didn’t write every single day and I didn’t always write 750 words, but on most days I did fill my quota. The notebook itself contains roughly 24 days of writing. Not bad.

When I started this I set myself a couple of guidelines.

• I only write during the week.
• I aim for 750 words a day which is roughly four pages worth of writing in the Volant notebook.

Writing during the week is easier than writing at the weekend. At the weekend the kids aren’t at school or nursery and so the mornings become a great chance to kick back and make something decent for breakfast or it’s a dash to get them out the door. Clearly not a great time to write. Now you might also suggest that I get up early on the weekends before these little monsters wake up but to be honest I rather sleep for an extra hour. The time of the writing is working well so it stays the same.

750 words a day is easy. Especially when you’re typing. Hell, I could probably manage 1500 words a day if I was typing, but I’m trying to distance from myself from technology for this exercise. I spend enough time glued to the my laptop that I don’t need to be sitting at it writing for half an hour before putting in an eight hour day in front of it. So I decided to do it the old fashioned way. Pen and paper.

I picked the Volant Moleskine notebooks mainly because they were thick enough to hold a good number of days writing without being too big to write with. I have another notebook that’s 250 pages thick that I started writing with a few months ago. It became rather uncomfortable to write with due to the number of pages in it. At 96 pages thick the Volant notebooks are ideal. I’ve been using a number of different pens for this. I don’t think I’ll ever stick with just the one.

With this notebook then I’ve been able to write about four pages of writing. The length isn’t a huge problem, but I usually start this after doing the school run and before my client work begins which gives me a 30 minute window. Typing 750 words in half an hour is easy. Writing them? Not so much.

So the question I asked myself is this.

Do I want to keep up writing four pages a day at a slightly rushed speed or would I rather write two or three pages at a more manageable pace?

I’ve decided to decrease the number of pages I’m writing to three. Writing four pages is fine when the morning is your own and you can devote a whole hour to this, but I’m using my morning pages to outline and draft pieces. I’m not too worried about fitting a single draft into one day, but I would rather take the time to draft a single piece of writing over a couple of days. Rushing this exercises feels counterproductive to what I want to achieve. Scaling it back to a number of pages that I can manage at a comfortable pace is the better choice because I’ll have the chance to write.

I’m glad to have made it to this milestone and looking back through my notebook there’s a few things in there that may feature in future pieces. Let’s hope the second notebook yields even more writing to use.