Notebooks. No, not the gizmoey kind.

As a journalist it is imperative that you always have a notebook to hand. You never know when that amazing, rare brainwave for an awesome feature might hit, or that big news breaking story that will propel you into the stratosphere of media fantasticness. I am still waiting for both of these things to happen on a regular basis, which is why I have several notebooks strategically positioned so I'm prepared at any given moment.

Thinking about it, I do have a lot of notebooks, but each one has a different role and I use it for a different purpose. They are as follows:

• Handbag notebook - for shopping lists or jotting down notes when out.
• By the bed notebook - for quickly writing down randomly brilliant ideas I have when half asleep in bed, or when I wake up in the morning.
• On the desk list notebook - this little fellow is an A5 size pad and is simply used for making my 'list of the day' or taking notes when I'm on the phone. This notebook did actually used to be my autograph notebook and contains the signatures of Simon Pegg, Jessica Haynes (then Stevenson) and Edgar Wright. For this reason it's very valuable, but I went through a severe dry patch of meeting celebs and so now it's a list notebook.
• Feature pad - possibly the most important of all. A4, lined note pad, upon which I plan, sketch, jot out, draft all of my features/writings so I have some physical sense of what I'm actually doing/writing about.
• My diary - yes, I do keep a physical paper diary and have done ever since I was a child. This is obviously the most important of all my notebooks.

So, as you can see, that's quite a few. Probably a good thing that the boyfriend's family bought me five new ones for Christmas.

There was a time when I only ever had one notebook, which was my diary. I'd write in it everyday, but then I guess life starts to demand more and more so keeping order of it all invariably means adding to the clan. Understandably, you wouldn't want to pen your inner most thoughts next to a list of groceries. Sort of detracts from the importance of it really.

Anyway, between these many notebooks I somehow manage to organise myself and it's funny how it's gone from that one diary, in which I used to organise my thoughts, to being sprawled out everywhere.

There was a time when I only had one Internet, computer, social profile too. I think the first ever one I signed up to was on Freeserve chat. Is Freeserve still even a company? Well, whatever, in order to organise my online life now, I have Twitter, Facebook, Blogger (thanks for stopping by, by the way), two email addresses so an MSN identity too, Gmail or GooglePlus account, I believe I have a LinkedIn as well but I'll be damned if I know how to figure that out and I haven't even got round to understanding what Pintrest is. However, for me, more recently I have started to jot in a new electronic notebook:

http://www.rosemcrompton.com

That's right, I now have my own freakin' website with my name in it.

Now, you may be thinking, "what point are you trying to make here Rose?" Well, it's a simple one: on scale I think it's safe to say that in comparison to how I spread myself all over the Internet, it makes my crazy obsession with notebooks look pretty damn tame. Also, I just really needed to get a post in here bigging up http://www.rosemcrompton.com and this seemed like the simplest way to do it.

If you feel duped, I'm sorry. When I first thought of doing this post there was some profound connection I made and thought, "shit yeah! That'll make for a really poignant post and be a great way to tell people about my new portfolio site http://www.rosemcrompton.com "

I've slept, twice, since I had that original idea though. Sorry. But, hey, you know. All's not lost! At least now you know about my site, right?

Rose -x-