I come up with the best lines when I’m naked in the bathroom. Or at 2:46 a. m., when I’m in that half-fuzzed twilight between awareness and psychedelic sub-consciousness. Neither situation is conducive to preserving the brainstorm brilliance to text file since I don’t shower or sleep with my laptop.

Needless to say, I’ve lost a lot of great stuff to the ether world of steam and sleep.  I mean, a serious lot of stuff, and it’s starting to piss me off. I’m generally an actions speak louder than words kinda gal (something I bark at my spawn multiple times a day, BTW), and since a lot of pre-plotting for NaNoWriMo is rattling around my brain lately, I really need to DO something proactive to keep from losing it.

Not losing it, i.e., go postal and launch a stapler at someone’s head, but losing it, i.e., thoughts be gone, son, and they ain’t coming back no more.  Call it peri-menopausal CRS (Can’t Remember Shit), or scattered brain syndrome or just too many mom-balls to juggle in the air, but it all boils down to here-a-thought, there-a-thought, everywhere a thought-thought *until* I’m finally able to sit down at my laptop and wrangle them into a cohesive piece. Then all those thoughts cackle through my empty skull and mock me with whispers of what they were, without the screaming clarity of before when I was naked and useless to capture them.

That needs to be done with. Anyone who knows me well knows I hate to be mocked. It makes my stapler finger twitch. And we all know what happens next.

Well, last time, Betsy, you told us all to gather up post-its and napkins and scribble away those pre-NaNo notes, so why aren’t you taking your own advice, you dumb bitch, I hear you all asking.

Because, seriously? What type of person keeps little notepads all over their immediate world-space on the off chance they’ll need to jot down some brilliant piece of prose?

Certainly not me.  I was just spewing the mantra of the chirpy advice-givers who chime in, as they always do, when I’m pondering problem-solving.  Hey, it might work for some of you! Who am I to judge? But, as usual, I don’t do chirpy myself, because that sort of pedestrian slap a Band-Aid on it solution makes me irritable.

Oh, that’s not to say I haven’t tried it a couple of times. Sprinkled my world with sparkly notebooks and pens with floofy feather butts. Big mistake. Gazelle Girl immediately claimed said notebooks and pens. Pictures of unicorns, rainbows, and I heart Justin Beavertooth filled the pages before I could even fumble blindly at the nightstand to scrawl whatever wisp of a plotline haunted my dreams.

(And speaking of scrawl… on the rare occasion that I *do* write in longhand, even *I* can’t decipher it days later when the distance between the note and the thought has passed to oblivion. My handwriting is truly heinous to the point where even doctors point and sneer. I must resort to painstakingly preschool printing to leave notes for my spawn, lest they claim they could not perform whatever task I’ve set on the grounds of my illegible chicken-scratch. Squirrel!!)

What to do? What to do? Can’t keep the laptop next to the bed. Ambient light drives me nuts. (Yes, I AM one of THOSE nut jobs. Thank you for noticing.) Can’t take it into the shower, either, for obvious reasons. So how can I keep from losing those pesky stray thoughts? What, in this modern day and age, solution could possibly be at my very fingertips (besides my stapler)?

Cue the ever-present smart phone!!  You all have them. I know you do. Mine never leaves my side. Never. (Everrrr, everrr, everrr – TayTay earworm, beware my stapler!)

My vice. My noobie. My electronic umbilical cord to the mother internet.  And, it has apps!  I don’t even have to thumble type my thought gems into the notes section where my Rule of 20 lists reside. I simply tap ‘voice memo’ and speak! This allows me to listen later and translate my slurred dictation to text. Voila! No lost thoughts!

Smart phones aren’t judgy-pants. They don’t care if you’re naked, drooling, or taking care business on the porcelain throne when you’re using them.  So no excuses! No lost precious ideas! Ta-da!!

Unless of course, you prefer sparkly notepads and feather-butt pens. Perhaps you don’t have the covetous spawn problem I do. More power to you! Follow the chirpy advice. Whatever works – whatever saves your gray matter from slipping down the drain.

As for me, technology and numbers get me off every single time.  They are the first things I turn to when my brain is stumping on a problem. I rely on them heavily and would curl up into the fetal position and perish should the show Revolution ever come to pass in real life. Color me dead if that happens, people. Color me dead.

That being said, are you gearing up some good notes for NaNoWriMo yet?  Have you gone and signed up to be my buddy? Do it now. I command you.

So, what’s your go-to gadget?