She had messy notebooks and unorganized scribblings of her work:

Christie’s notebooks show that stories didn’t spring forth fully formed from her head and that her famously recognizable writerly voice was entirely constructed. They also show it was no less authentic for that.

Do anyone’s stories or ideas come out any other way? I know I have ideas for projects, blog posts, and even tweets, strewn about in a slew of different places. When something pops into the little grey cells you write it down wherever you can. But no doubt, Agatha could have benefitted from cloud computing. (Via Kottke.)

Chris Bowler:

[W]e should all be making every effort to ensure that each sentence, each word, each character we publish, is done with the utmost care and thought. Each link, each photo, each small piece of Internet miscellany we pass on to our readers is done so with the understanding that the attention of our readers is not a resource to be squandered or taken lightly.

Amen, and amen. Good writing, Chris.

Astounding. The SR-71 was in commission from the 1960s to the 1990s as a spy plane for the US and is now on display at the Smithsonian. It could fly 2,664 miles an hour.

This guy’s stories from his 400 logged hours of flying the Blackbird are absolutely captivating — definitely worth a read. Here’s just one:

One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. ‘Ninety knots,’ ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. ‘One-twenty on the ground,’ was the reply. To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was ‘Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,’ ATC responded. The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of Walter’s mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice, Walter startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ‘ Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.’ We did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast.

(Via Rands.)