Amwriting on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

Fountain Pen Addendum: Neil Gaiman made me do it

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 18:47:33 -0400

In a recent blog, I shined a little bit of a light on something that I found both curious and validating. No, I’m not mad for wanting to try writing a serious literary work with a fountain pen. Neil Gaiman does it all the time. But that seed took root and bore sweet fruit.

The Pilot Custom 823 had been on my radar before, but like most other pens over $25, it wasn’t likely to happen. My cheap pens write pretty well. Some of them write very well. But I was indeed looking for a pen so comfortable that I could write with it all day without tiring, and with such a high ink capacity that filling it up at the beginning of the day would hold all the ink I could need no matter how much writing I did that day.

Neil Gaiman writes books with fountain pens?

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 22:30:10 -0400

Yup. His tastes are a bit more expensive than my own, though both pens are fantastic and I’d write with either/both if I could stomach spending that much on a pen.

https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/677320386053144576

When he originally tweeted this, I was pretty pleased with his taste in pens. For myself, I’ve given some amount of thought to investing in a Pilot Vanishing Point, in large part because of the Extra Fine Nib that is available with it for long writing sessions in one of my notebooks. Most of my pens have medium or stub nibs, which can be a bit thick for my tastes if I’m writing long form (at which point I wish to write smaller).

Reading & Writing Updates

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 09:44:22 -0400

During this calm before our family Christmas storm, I thought I’d drop a fresh State of the Nerd report. This one was going to be all over the map, as I’ve been very busy with a lot of things. But it became clear as I was writing it that it would be too long even if I just narrowed the scope to what I was reading and writing.

Reading Stuff

I’m back to my old habit of parallelized reading, so I’ve got a number of in-progress books right now that I’m jumping back and forth between.

NaNoWriMo 2015: Strolling to the Finish Line

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 19:55:04 -0400

I’m eighteen days into NaNoWriMo 2015, a writing challenge to help aspiring authors to finish the first draft of a long form novel in one thirty days. And I’m going to finish tonight. Even though a real novel is closer to seventy to eighty thousand words or more, the goal here is a mere fifty thousand. It’s more like a healthy novella length. I’ve got over forty-eight thousand words committed to my first draft now, and my story is nearing its end.