Climbing the Third Stair

Having missed three days in a row of writing on my NaNoWriMo novel, I really really need to hit the 2000/day mark if I am to finish on time. Trying to stay calm about this.

Yesterday I inked up the fox pen! I used Diamine Sepia, because that is the first in sample I came across that coordinated with the color of the pen. The pen itself feels nice in the hand, which makes me happy. The ink, on the other hand, is very blah. I think I'll try switching out the fine nib for something more dramatic and see if it helps. If not, I'll just make an entry in my ink log and dump it. I have too much ink on hand suffer through one I don't want to look at.

I also tried the Franklin-Christoph Dark Denim in my Black Ice pen. I like the color, but it seems like a very dry ink--the nib just kind of drags, and I know from previous experience that this is a smoother nib. I'm tempted to add a pin-prick of dish detergent to the converter and see if that helps.

While browsing a writers forum over breakfast I came across a post that broke down just how impossible it is for a new writer to get a short story sold. At least now I can tell myself that it isn't me, it's just the numbers. And DA started life as an experiment in writing first-person, so I still got that much good out of it.

Now on to a busy day of housework and NaNoWriMo.

I'm doing this via my new tablet, so this will probably be quick. As I am not one of those people wedded to their cell phone, typing with only two fingers is slightly unnatural.

I was reading FPN over lunch and became irked at a young man who announced that he couldn't possibly date someone who used BIC pens because obviously their thoughts meant nothing to them. Having written most of my L5R fiction using a computer and cheap ballpoints I could not possibly see how this could be true. I posted a terse rebuttal which may have included the word "horse-hooey". I hope I don't get modded, but whatever.

In unrelated news, I have a new pen in the mail. I am hoping it arrives before my new Ink Drop samples do.

I'm very tired; still carrying sleep debt from Monday. I had gone to be early last night to try to catch up, but since I got four phone calls during the course of the night from my new baker this didn't help as much as I would have liked. (First call was a little after 10 pm, last was around 4 am.) This is part of the training of new bakers; most of them go through a period where they feel nervous about what they are doing and I take pains to let them know that I'm available for them if they need help. It's part of my job, but it isn't helping me sleep.

My Ink Drop for April arrived today, and I'm feeling a bit mixed about it. Three of them are in the yellow/orange range, which is my least favorite part of the spectrum. I have some faint hope that the PR Shoreline Gold really is more golden than orange, but I'm not liking the looks of the Diamine Coral at all. Oh, well, you put your money down and you take your chances. I have one more month of Ink Drop and then I'll decide if it is entertaining enough to keep up.

Last night I went hunting crochet hooks, and confirmed something that I already knew: you can't get a 7mm crochet hook at your local big-box craft store. For reasons unknown to me, crochet hooks in the US go from 6.5mm (size K) to 8mm (size L) with nothing in the 1.5mm gap between. I haven't decided yet what to do about this, though pleading emails to my non-American friends are not out of the question.

Today I canceled the apocolypse by calling up the library and convincing them that yes, I had returned that book on Korean cooking at the beginning of the month and they could take that $35 library fine off of my account. Go me!

I did a fair amount of cooking, so I have lunch for the next day or two. I really need to be better about taking my lunches to work, because even though a burrito is only about $3 at work, it all adds up and Gencon is coming.

I managed to write empty five pens this weekend. Not that I started with them full, but still it was nice. I'm trying to get all my pens empty before I leave town, or else I'll have to have my apartment-sitter write with them every day so that they don't dry out. One of the pens I emptied was the Pilot Metropolitan that Yoon sent me, and as I started to clean it out I felt the urge to refill it. I didn't (see beginning of paragraph), but that is a strong sign that I liked writing with that pen. I have the black one, and I like black pens, but I think that someday (meaning, not right before Gencon) I'll pick up one of the gold versions. For as cheap as it is, it is of amazing quality.

This is going to be a busy week at work and I am kind of dreading it. Lots of things to do, some of them fairly stressful. I know I'll muddle through, but that doesn't make it more palatable. Some days being a manager sucks! Also, this afternoon I learned that one of my bakers broke her toes. I am not looking forward to the monkey-wrench this is going to put in the bakery's production plans.

I bought myself a TWSBI Vac 700 tonight. This was entirely unexpected. But I had gotten through my annual evaluation today without wanting to stab myself, TWSBI was running an interesting sale, and I happened across a review of the Vac 700 which said, basically, that this was a pen that put functional design over pretty styling and I was sold. It also helped that the pen has a novel filling system that excites my inner physicist!

I ordered it as a demonstrator. I'm neither hot nor cold on demonstrators, and the smoke version of the Vac 700 is very stylish, but in this particular case I'm buying the pen because of its engineering so that's what I wanted to see. I'm looking forward to putting ink in it, though due to its filling method it looks essentially useless as a way of using up ink samples: I'll have to feed it from ink bottles only. Not that I lack for those....

So the last day of 2012 has been weird.

Work was weird for two reasons. The first of which was that I just had a three day weekend, I was going to work for a day, and then have Tuesday off. That makes for an odd day of work. Second something happened, or more accurately I was informed of something that had happened, and that thing is odd and mysterious. I can't go into details, but it has me scratching my head over what is going on.

Then this evening I've had an extended run of fountain pen trauma. ( Read more... )

The last, or possibly first, weird thing is the perfume I'm wearing today. Last month I had ordered a flight of imps of various dragon's blood-based scents from BPAL. I did this because I had previously fallen in love with one, Dragon's Eye, and I was curious to see how the basic note of dragon's blood changed when combined with other scent notes. Today I wore Dragon's Hide, which BPAL describes as "dragon's blood, leather, and smoke". Leather and smoke are not normally things that interest me as a perfume, but I've developed a tertiary interest in matching scents to fictional people and this sounded like an ideal combination for a particular character. What's weird is, I like this. I think. I mean, it's not pretty like Hymn, and it doesn't beat me over the head with a rosebush like Red Rose, and it doesn't make me want to ask me for my phone number like Spellbound does, but it's such an interesting scent. I can catch the dragon's blood, but it's heavily modified by the other notes. And it doesn't smell of leather or smoke, except when it totally does, but no sooner am I aware of it the dragon's blood springs back into view. Err, smell. Five minutes after putting it on I was wondering if I needed to go wash it off; ten minutes after I was wondering if I needed to buy a bottle. Weird.

My Serwex MB arrived today, which pleased and surprised me. It is a fountain pen of Indian manufacture, and I bought it from a company based in India, and I didn't expect to see it until next week. But it showed up at work today, which meant it traveled from New Deli to Lincoln, NE in only a week. It is an amazing world.

With this pen I now have a complete collection of Serwex pens, by which I mean I have a complete collection of all the Serwex pens that Fountain Pen Revolution sells. I had hoped that this would slake my thirst for Indian fountain pens, but now I find myself eyeing the Airmail Wality page at FPR. Luckily for me, some of them are really ugly so I'm not inclined to collect the set. (Few of the Serwex pens are beauties, but the worst of the lot still manage to attain a pedestrian dignity.) Even luckier, even the most expensive Airmail is still cheaper than a Safari!

Now that I have the MB I want to ink it up Right Now so I can see how it works. Part of me thinks this is not a good idea, due to the number of pens I already have inked up. Part of me thinks that this is a dandy way to make me write more! (I don't quite trust that part of my brain.) The good(?) news is that it comes with the same ridiculous tiny slide converter that the Serwex Executive came with, so if I do ink it up it truly will not take me long to work through it.

In related news, I decided that I had used up enough of the cartridge in the Pilot Penmanship to declare it empty and rinse it out: the nib unit is now soaking in a glass of water. This technically takes a pen out of the Inked pile, but I will have to reink it because it's my only Japanese EF nib and I need it to write in the margins of books. (Came home from a shopping spree today with Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman, The Confessions of St Augustine, and The Interior Castle (Study Edition) by St Teresa of Avila.)

I could eyedropper the Penmanship at this point, but I think I'll play it conservative and just refill the cartridge. I could use one of the Pilot cartridges I have on hand, but what's the fun of that? Also, I think it would be best to save the cartridges for when I'm traveling and need emergency refills. I think I'll sort though my ink samples and see if I have any of Noodler's X-feather; two of the books are Dover Thrift Editions and the paper shows it.

This morning one of my new bakery employees, M, expressed curiosity in my fountain pens. It seems that she had experimented with calligraphy and dip pens in her teen years (which were not in her distant past, I note) and thought that fountain pens sounded cool.

Like any good fountain pen user, I was more than happy to start corrupting her help her gain some fountain pen experience. When it was time for her break I lent her the Serwex piston-filler I use at work and the charcoal Safari I keep in my purse and told her to try them out. At the end of her break she came back and told me she had enjoyed using them, which I found gratifying. I happen to have multiples of the Serwex (a result of my hunt-for-decent-cheap-pens phase), and I don't like it enough to need more than one (it's a little thin for my grip, though for the jotting I do at work it's not a strain) so I offered her one, if she was interested.

She accepted, so tomorrow I'll take it to work. I'm still going back and forth on whether I should ink it myself, or bring her a vial of ink to go with it. I'm leaning towards inking it myself; it holds a fair amount and by the time she gets it empty she will know if she wants to continue using it. (And then I can give her a vial, and a link to Goulet Pens.) Having sorted through my collection I've also decided to bring her a Platinum Preppy and a cartridge or two, because it has a wider body and will show a contrast to the Serwex.

I selfishly hope that she ends up liking them, because then I will have another person to discuss pens and ink with! But if she doesn't, she doesn't. That's life.

Things going on in my life: I got a new portable space heater this week because October has been cold and annoying, but not so cold and annoying as to make me want to turn on my furnace. It has been approximately 8 weeks since I bought a fountain pen or ink. (Mostly this is because I still haven't managed to try out one of the pens I got at Indy, and I'm desperate to play with the supply of samples I got earlier in the summer. Not to mention my bottle of Scabiosa. Though I was really tempted by that sale on hand-made pens from India.) I finally got my mother's birthday gift sent to her, thanks to Licorice International's website. (And honestly, considering that postage would be about the same amount as bus fare, I might as well just order for myself and have them mail it to me. I could use some good black licorice right now.)

I got into an RPG game late in the summer; it's a hybrid thing using the Forgotten Realms setting and the ruleset of Savage Worlds. As a player I tend to be unfussy about both setting and rules, so I have no particular issues with this. I'm still trying to make my character click, but that's my issue and eventually things will work out. (I actually got a moment of roleplay in last Thursday's game: it was thrilling. It even involved one of her disads!)

The problem with this is that playing in a game has reminded me of all the amazing possibilities rpgs offer in terms of storytelling, and that's collided with the current swirl of ideas in my head *and* merged with my own mental version of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, thus spawning a desire to run a game of my own. This is very, very dangerous. Games take time, but they offer a lot in return. I'd have more social contact, which is always good, and (potentially) some interesting group story-telling. And a reason to keep my living room clean. (I'll have to find more chairs, and find homes for all my books. And groom my plants more often.)

I've gone so far as to make inquires on possible rules systems. As 99% of my Facebook friends are gamers, it wasn't hard to do that! I was originally thinking of doing the game in the FUDGE system, and still might, but I've gotten pointers to similarly rules-light systems. (As a GM I'm really not interested in reproducing reality, so a system that takes every possible detail into account is of no help to me. Also, I hate memorizing large amounts of rules.)

I'm not sure how far this project will get--I'm about to run headlong into a bunch of L5R deadlines--but I think I'll keep toying with it. At worst I'll have some groundwork done for the next time gaming fever hits me.

I don't like the way 'epic' gets used these days, but when dealing with a 15,000 word review of a fountain pen that covers everything to its relationship to Braun razors to how to completely field-strip the pen I think it's a justified use of the word. This review is epic.

Lamy 2000 and the Origins of Lamy Design appeals to me as a growing Lamy fangirl, but there are sections that I think would be relevant to anyone interested in design issues. And it has Neil Gaimen quotes, if you are into that kind of thing. :-)

It's only flaw is that it doesn't explain why I would want to completely field-strip my pen. Honestly, the idea terrifies me.