Alicornutopia

First thread!
This is just generally to discuss your efforts at it and so on.
I had a few questions regarding it too but feel free to skip them.
1) What does thoughts being wispy mean? Because I'm either really terrible so as to not notice these at all or so good as to always notice them. I have observed story ideas being wispy but not thoughts in general.
2) How does notebooking/processing even work? I seem to just write "Song z stuck in my head, thinking about what would happen if I had a coin of x size," etcetera etcetera. (Note: seeing a hypothetical notebook of a character I know would help)
3) Are the ciphers Bells use real and/or learnable?
4) What does 'moving parts'/taking thoughts apart mean?
5) How do I decide what I want? If I try to do this for anything complex it turns into charts and diagrams and still doesn't get anywhere.
I am led to believe I am very good at changing things. I now like a lot of things I used to hate.
I am terrible at choosing (what do I want? ...Magic! Other than that? ... ) and terrible at getting to know my brain.

1. It means about the same thing for a thought to be wispy as for a story idea to be wispy, except also sometimes you aren't directly thinking about the thought.

2. I don't actually notebook in the way that Bells do (I invented that as a way of making them more conspicuously luminous). I do most of my processing socially. I've occasionally in glowfic written out bits of Bell processing in some depth but I don't remember exactly where.

3. No.

4. This means, more or less, "under what alterations of circumstance would I think differently about this, what do all the words in the succinct statement of this unpack to". Like, "I believe that my parents love me, but I wouldn't if they ever... in reality I don't expect that since... I doubt it sometimes because... I suspect that 'love' here means... this differs between the two parents thusly..."

5. I am mostly really natively good at noticing what I want so I'm not sure I can help you bootstrap that very much? ("It would make me happ(y/ier) if... almost as good would be... unless... this is complicated by... it would be fine if... I want the result but not the process of... I want the process but not the result of...")

For 2, the best places I can remember watching Bells notebook are various places in Luminosity and when Stella teaches Alice (around the time she gets magic).

Does Aya get a good notebooking scene with like a butterfly drawing?

Re: 5, I suspect that there's a range of experiences that are all normal or at least common, in terms of how wanting things works for people, possibly including some mental setups where wanting is a very minor factor. You might do better to look at your intuitions about what things are aesthetically pleasing or in-some-sense Correct, instead; that works better for me.

I am even less capable of 5, but for both 2 and 5, I think this (very) recent blog post by Malcolm Ocean might be useful