Nanowrimo 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.

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.

NaNoWriMo 2015 Update: The Final Battle

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 14:48:03 -0400

Last week was an inconsistent yet productive week for writing. I had a lot going on, between fighting a virus and having multiple health & well-being type appointments to keep up. I ended up having one sub-par writing day, and two non-writing days.

Yet I wrote over 7,000 words yesterday and only stopped because I have a day job that I have to sleep for. I didn’t feel pressured to write to make any kind of quota or anything. I just felt the story inside of me clawing its way out. So I let that happen as long as I responsibly could.