But then I started thinking about how that would look. That wouldn’t look very good at all. Plus, part of the aesthetic is that I’m writing this as if I were writing a journal at the time, and handwriting in a small journal helps me get into that mode. Paradoxically, despite the relatively small amount of writing I have to do by limiting myself to “entries” in a “travel journal,” it still takes immense effort to write just a single day’s worth of events and thoughts.

In short, I don’t think that digitizing my handwriting will make this book see the light of day any faster. It would certainly give me more freedom with the layout (you can only lay out scanned journal pages in so many ways before you lose the effect you’re going for), but the main issue I was addressing in this post was “designing as I go” vs. “writing first and designing later.”

I love to pick nits, so I will. Regarding your last sentence: I wasn’t giving “advice” to anybody. I was elaborating on my internal debate over how to go about building a book.