Tracks of Stories and Myths

“…the trails he followed were the invisible, glimmering tracks left by stories and myths, and instead of animals he hunted doors.”

I’m back using Evernote again. 

I was an early adopter of Evernote, kept using it as it grew, added features and bloated. I abandoned it once or twice, came back once or twice, then ended up using it to hoard paper receipts that I never referenced. Before last week, my latest addition to my Evernote archive was in 2018. What happened my first few times around, is that I began to use it as an “everything box”. To Evernote’s credit, it will hold everything but once it goes from a narrowly-focused idea bank/commonplace book/spark file (my original plan), to a giant over-stuffed suitcase, it stops doing its job. I’d forgotten what I’d first asked it to do. I lost the thread and built a giant ball of undifferentiated yarn. 

Why have I now come back? Caroline was intrigued by an online course on building a “second brain” and we decided to do it together. It preaches the relatively straightforward idea that if you’re reading things, highlighting passages, saving links, jotting down odd little brainstorms, and saving cool pictures, you should be able to use all these later on to make your own things. 

I like that.

Evernote now is kindling. It’s spell ingredients. It’s my Hexenkessel that’s burbling away in the background building its own invisible creative links. It’s a series of doors that lead in ten thousand different directions. The only point of Evernote now is to help me make more work - more collages, prints, blog posts, newsletters, zines, anything. Things go into Evernote and they come out as creative projects. 

Here’s whats in my Evernote now:

Book highlights. Magazine highlights. Poems. Books to buy. Ideas that aren’t yet projects. Half-sentences that could maybe fit together into full sentences if the moon is full and it’s a Tuesday. 

Here’s what’s not in my Evernote:

Recipes, receipts, beer and wine reviews, a picture of the ink cartridge for the printer so I remember what kind to buy, an address that I never added to someone’s contact card, a journal, 60+ gigs of reference photos.(Technically the reference photos could live in Evernote, but it’s just not built for that. Too slow with that many pictures.)

The quote at the top the post is from The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

I read it on my Kindle last year, and found that highlighted passage in my Evernote this morning.