Tag: writing

Organizing ink

January 15th, 2021

As I may have mentioned before, I’m a little enamored with fountain pens right now. Some time in 2020, I realized I could purchase ink samples instead of full bottles. I’ve… accumulated a few vials of ink.

As the collection of vials grew, they tumbled all over each other in the little wooden box I stored them in. They wouldn’t stand up or stay organized. This was super annoying. Also, I couldn’t tell what the ink would look like on paper just by holding the vial up to the light; the color of ink in liquid form does not translate to the color of ink on paper.

I researched options for storing these ink vials, and I saw several tutorials for making racks. I knew I would not do this. I’m not going to measure and drill and be precise. I want to write with ink, not learn how to woodwork. The place I buy my inks from recommends test tube racks. These would work, but I wasn’t thrilled about the way they looked. Nor did I want to order and wait for them.

Last week, I explored to see what kind of storage doo-dads might be available. Surely there was something out there. And there was! There is! I found the perfect solution: cosmetic organizers. Specifically, lipstick racks.

Ink samples in lipstick racks

I also bought white circle stickers for the cap of each vial and a box of cotton swabs. Today, on this rain-sleet-snow-y day that I took off from work, I organized my inks. Using the Q-tips, I swabbed each vial’s ink on an adhesive white dot for the cap. I also swabbed each ink in a pocket sized Leuchtturm1917 notebook, since that is my new favorite paper.

Ink swab once it’s loaded in a pen

Ink swab not loaded into a pen yet

Now I know exactly what each ink will look like when I load a pen to write in any one of my many journals — book log, garden log, well-being log, regular old daily life log. I guess I have a lot of journals.

Once I organized the inks and cleaned out my pens, I reloaded them to match the colors I see outside this time of year, including the brilliant coral of clouds at sunrise, which I saw this morning.

Colors currently in pens

Making note of which color is in which pen

Pens and inks

Now I can play in my new garden log :).
Pens, paper, and ink

October 27th, 2020

I can’t believe that in more than 35 years of journaling with pen and ink, I never used a fountain pen. For 35 years, I wrote without experiencing the fluid feel of wet ink on quality paper. I did not know the joy of the tactile differences among nibs, barrels, inks, and paper.

My husband gave me two fountain pens for Christmas in 2019 — a LAMY Safari and a Pilot Metropolitan — two models that in his research he discovered were good ~~gateway~~ entry pens into the fountain pen world.

I fell in love with them both: the LAMY Safari for its inky flow and light weight, the Pilot Metropolitan for its precision and solid heft. I found every excuse to write just so I could feel words flow through these beautiful instruments.

I used ink cartridges in the beginning; I was intimidated by bottled ink. But as I browsed for ink cartridges on the Goulet Pens site where Brian had bought my original models, I was seduced by all the inks. Pumpkin orange! Cactus fruit pink! Caribbean blue, Amazonite green, Navajo turquoise, poppy red!

My writing world exploded. I can’t believe I went so much of my life using only blue or black ink!

Now instead of two pens that are limited to the colors that ink cartridges come in, I have six pens, each with a different barrel feel or ink flow, a different weight or texture in my hand. I love the TWSBI Ecos for the flowy nibs and because I can see the ink in the clear barrel (the white one was gorgeous when it was full of Navajo turquoise ink). I love the Lamy because it sits perfectly on my fingers and it’s fast; I can write almost as fast as I think with the LAMY. The Pilots help me write neatly, and I like their superfine points. They make sharp, clean lines, and I love the heavy metallic weight of of them. They feel classy.

From left: two TWSBI Ecos, LAMY Safari, three Pilot Metropolitans

It didn’t take long after I started writing with fountain pens, and especially with different kinds of ink, to realize that paper makes a huge difference in what a pen and ink feel like. I was disappointed to discover that my previous favorite notebooks, Moleskines, are not fountain pen friendly. Ink bleeds through the paper, making the pages messy and rendering every sheet one-sided, and it doesn’t feel good to watch the ink bleed through.

I’ve since tried a few different kinds of notebook, and have yet to find the perfect one. Clairefontaine paper is buttery smooth and is wonderful for the inkier TWSBI and LAMY pens — it flows so smoothly! — and I love the large A4 paper size (~8″x12″). However, the paper is also bright white, almost too white, and the Pilot Metropolitan nibs feel scratchy on it, like they’re too sharp for the paper. Still, I love the Clairefontaine A4 notebook for journaling and prompted free-writes; one page is the perfect size for a day’s journal entry or a single 10-minute write. Plus, given the amount of paper I go through, the Clairefontaine is the more economical choice at $14 for 192 pages (7¢ per page).

The lighting was super low, so this isn’t a great photo and the ink looks bleedier than it actually is, but this is the Clairfontaine lined paper

I alternate between the Clairfontaine A4 and the Leuchtturm1917 B5 composition notebook for journaling and prompted free writes. The pages of the Leuchtturm1917 are smaller (~7″ x 10″), but so is the line spacing — 7mm between lines instead of the 8mm of the Clairefontaine — so a single page of the Leuchtturm1917 can also hold one day’s journal entry or a single 10-minute free write.

The Leuchtturm1917 composition notebook is pricer at $24 for 121 pages (20¢ per page), but I like the Leuchtturm paper better because it’s got a tiny bit of tooth, meaning it’s not so buttery smooth. It gives me a smidge more traction when I’m writing, which means my handwriting feels more controlled. The paper is also ivory instead of bright white, which is much more soothing on my eyes, and the Pilot Metropolitans feel like they were made to go with this paper. I use a smaller journal sized A5 Leuchtturm1917 for my well-being journal that I write in every day.

Again, the lighting was terrible, and post-processing of the photo makes the ink look bleedier than it actually is. The edges are crisp in real life. This is the Leuchtturm1917 A5 dot grid notebook.

My favorite paper, though is Miliko. It feels wonderful with all of my pens, with just the right amount of smoothness and tooth, and the paper color is a soft ivory. The only problem is that the bound notebooks I like only come in the small A5 size (~5″ x 8″). I use a spiral, hard cover Miliko notebook for my book journal and a softcover notebook to savor small moments.

Miliko softcover notebook. Same disclaimer with the light; the sun was setting and the light was too low.

I currently keep four different journals — one to log books I read, one to savor small moments, one for my well-being journal, and one for my daily writes. I think the reason I keep so many is so I have multiple opportunities to play with my pens, inks, and paper. I make up excuses to write just so I can see the pretty ink flow.

Turquoise ink sampler

Warm colored inks

Teal sampler
Should a story called “Squall” include a squall?

October 17th, 2020

Last year, I stuffed my prompt box with words that would put me in the world I want to be in: on a boat in the Caribbean. I was (and still am) learning how to sail, and I filled my prompt box with sailing terms to help me inhabit that world. These are the prompts I’ve been writing from now that I started free-writing again.

The words — mooring, pelican, Force 3 wind — do pull me into the world I want to be in, and they help me envision myself there. They are daydream tools that help me manifest the future I want. And if daydreams can be called fiction, the prompts also result in me writing fiction.

When I pulled the “squall” prompt the other day, though, I thought, ugh. I don’t want to write about tension; I don’t want to write about a storm. I had just written about Tropical Storm Isaias, and I wanted calm.

I wrote “Squall” at the top of my page in turquoise ink and thought of Chekov’s gun. If you introduce a pistol in the beginning of a story, it has to go off by the end, right? If I title my story “Squall,” there should probably be a squall in it.

I’ve run into a disappointing trend when trying to learn about sailing. I learn by reading. If you want to be a sailor and you read a lot of sailing books — memoirs or novels — you will encounter a frighteningly high proportion of disasters and catastrophic weather and terrifying seas.

Because this is what is published, because this is what is available for me to read, because it is not balanced by books and stories where the sailing is smooth, I am left with the message that sailing is super scary and dangerous and risky.

Stories are built on tension and drama. The types of conflict are one of the first things you learn in a literature class: character vs. character, character vs. nature, character vs. self, character vs. society, etc. Violence and disaster are easy ways to find drama and suck readers in. Extremes rivet the audience. Nuance and subtlety are harder; finding traction in peace is not an easy thing to do, and especially not if you want to hook your audience instantly.

So we end up with the extremes, which lead us to believe the extremes are the norms. Instead of seeing peaceful protests as the norm — which, with 95% of protests being peaceful, is the reality — we see violence as the norm because that’s what the news reports. Instead of seeing calm, gorgeous days on the water as the norm, we see the rarer high seas drama.

We see the squalls.

I don’t want the squalls right now. I want the smooth sailing that I believe is and can be the norm.

When I wrote my daydream “Squall,” I decided not to put a squall in it. It’s just a peaceful happy day on the water. It’s not dramatic, there is no climax. It’s just the place I want to be.
Writing More Means Doomscrolling Less

October 14th, 2020

I decided last week to write more. I am in the habit of journaling for myself, and I also wanted to get back in the habit of doing prompted free writes, and blogging, and I also want to really, truly, for real this time transcribe all my old journals.

That’s a lot of different kinds of writing. But I thought about it, and I could easily do all of that in one hour per day: 10 minutes each for journaling, transcribing, and free-writing, and 30 minutes for blogging.

An hour is not that much, really, not for something I say I want to do. I’m awake for about 17 hours each day. I dedicate an hour to exercise and a shower; between three and four hours for meal prep, eating, and dishes; eight hours for work; and one to two hours for reading. That’s about 14 hours, leaving three hours for other stuff like time with my family, messaging with friends, writing, chores, errands, and miscellaneous time-passing, like Twitter and Instagram and news consumption.

Writing was already in my free-time activities, but not enough. I wanted more.

As a Making Space for Writing post on Tumblr pointed out, you can’t add more to your life just because you want to. The hours in a day don’t expand to fit more just because you have something more you want to do. If you want to add something, you also have to subtract something.

I thought about my days, and about what I can subtract. What’s in that three hours that I can let go of? I rarely watch TV. I do stand at the window a lot and look at my garden. But on days where I don’t have chores or errands, where does that time go?

Simultaneously, my mental health was suffering from news overload. And I thought, hmm. In the morning, instead of picking up my phone after I journal, instead of immersing myself in news of things I can’t control and that stress me out, why not direct my energy to writing instead?

I read the book Where’d You Go, Bernadette? last year (I loved it! Fun and funny, highly recommend), and there was a quote in it that has stuck with me:

If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.
Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette?

When Bernadette didn’t create, she destroyed. Not on purpose (I don’t think), but destruction was a consequence when she was not creating.

Ever since I read this and thought about the relationship between creation and destruction, I’ve found this to be accurate. Not that I become a menace to society, but maybe just a little bit to myself (and by extension, my family). When I focus on writing — on creating sentences and paragraphs from whatever’s going on in my head — my mind feels productive, happy, and satisfied, and is in a healthy place where I want it to be. When I create through writing, I feel like my mind is alive and my spirit is fed. When I do nothing but consume, on the other hand, when I don’t create on my own, a darkness seeps in. My mind feels insufficient, confined, and discontent, and my spirit withers.

For the past six days, I’ve put creating first. I listen to news to get the big stories while I unload the dishwasher and make breakfast and coffee, then I turn it off, pick an ink color that feels good, and start writing. I journal, then do a prompted write, then schedule a blog post before I go to work. If I’ve timed everything right, I can also squeeze in 10 minutes of transcribing old journals so I can get them off of my bookshelf.

It’s only been a few days since I committed to add writing and subtract doomscrolling, but so far, so good. I haven’t cut social media out all together, but I feel like I have a better balance now; by the time I consume, I’ve already created. I feel more nourished than when I wasn’t writing, and I’m getting more comfortable with letting words flow and not overthinking. The more I write, the easier it is to write, and the more I want to write. I feel filled up instead of emptied out.
Thoughts on blogging

October 9th, 2020

It used to be that I was able to put aside self-consciousness about publishing on my blog. I published unpolished random writing exercises, outtakes of nothings on my mind, vignettes of a woman sweeping her walk at the beach.

Sometime in the recent past, maybe in the last year or so, that has changed. I have theories. One is that I feel repetitive. Another is that I got self-conscious about other people reading what I wrote. A third is that I questioned my motives — why do I need these words to be public instead of private? A final one, and probably the biggest one of 2020 — since the pandemic began, and since I began waking up to the misogyny, white supremacy, and racism that are still very much alive in the US, and since my mind is almost exclusively occupied by work and the disgraceful and horrifying state of our country and leadership — is that everything else feels insignificant in comparison.

Because of this recent self-consciousness, I haven’t been blogging much. What I’ve discovered from this is that when I don’t blog, I feel like my psychic arteries are clogged. There’s something about getting words out — not just out of my body but out into the world — that unblocks me. I guess this is what is meant by self-expression, though I don’t really know what I’m expressing when I blog. I don’t have a big message to share with the world (a fifth reason for my self-consciousness). This isn’t art, I’m not inspiring big thoughts, there’s no layered meaning to my posts, I’m not changing anyone’s life. Blogging just somehow serves as a release, like opening the windows when you’ve been shut up inside for too long.

I want my windows open. I have been shut up inside for too long.

To unclog my psychic arteries and open the windows for my pacing soul, I want to blog more, and I want to blog comfortably again, in my own skin, despite self-consciousness. To help get me out of my rut, I looked into fresh options to inspire me. I found the Brainsparker app. I used a couple of the free prompts with success, and I wanted more. They have a variety of “card packs”, including a blogger’s pack, and I was curious — what kinds of creative prompts would a blogger’s pack include? They already have a journaling pack and a writer’s pack. I wondered how Brainsparker creators perceive blogging and what kinds of prompts they thought fitting for bloggers.

When I found samples of cards from the blogger’s pack, I understood. The prompts are titles like “The best 10 ways to improve XYZ” or “The single best way to get good at XYZ.” These make me think of Buzzfeed headlines or blog posts written by companies who use blogging as part of their content strategy. I forgot that blogs can be monetized, and these are the types of titles that drive traffic, and that this is what many people think about when they think about blogging.

Needless to say, that’s not the type of blogging I do, and I suspect many of you reading also see blogging as something bigger than clickbaity headlines: blogging is writing, journaling, thinking, philosophizing, opining, sharing, teaching, expressing. The existence of this blogger’s pack and the type of prompts it provides got me to thinking about blogging in general, and what it means, and what people do it for, and what I do it for.

And here we are at a blog post wherein I realize I blog to express and release and breathe fresh air and unclog my psychic arteries. So I guess Brainsparker worked :). I definitely don’t need that blogger’s pack of prompts, but they have other packs to spark creativity that I am curious about, including colors, quotes, and a what if? pack that looks fun. There’s also a pack for photographers, and the prompts look like they might be good for writers, too.

I want to preserve this space for hope and beauty, and this post is my first step in unblocking myself to do that. For now I’ll continue to seek external inspiration and prompts until stuff starts flowing on its own. I cracked open own my prompt box again. I haven’t published anything I’ve written from the prompts, but maybe I should start, just to get me over the hump of, It’s okay to not write about the big stuff; it’s okay to write about the mundane, and maybe even beauty in the mundane, to for the very purpose of bringing a little light despite the big stuff.
Write this moment

August 22nd, 2020

I’m not typically an anxious person. In normal times, I worry about what-ifs, but not to a paralyzing extent.

Lately, though, I struggle. I’m already prone to living inside my head. This is mostly fine when the world isn’t on fire (though, I’ve realized lately, the world is always on fire, but as Haruki Murakami wrote in 1Q84, “If you belong to the majority, you can avoid lots of troubling things.”) Right now, though? I don’t have to tell you what things are like right now. And spending time inside my head doesn’t always take me to great places.

I find myself in a low state more often than I’m comfortable with. In 2020, everywhere we turn, something terrible is happening. If I manage to redirect my attention from Covid, racism, ecological and financial devastation, and threats to our democracy, I find myself wishing for things I can’t have — dinner in a restaurant, travel, a cup of coffee in a cafe with my husband. These unfulfillable wishes only pile on the sadness.

It takes more work to corral my mind these days. I’ve maintained a writing practice for months, but even there I’m in my head, focused on thoughts, feelings, and abstracts rather than color, texture, scent, presence.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to change that. We were on vacation at a sparsely populated beach. A tropical storm had just passed. Despite being safely through the storm and in one of my favorite places on earth — where land and sea meet — I found myself squandering the limited time I had in this place I had so desperately wanted to get to. I caught myself staring out the window at the Atlantic Ocean and not even seeing it. My mind was on fears and worries and wishes.

I started coffee to brew, dug around in my bag for a notebook and a pen, tucked my hair into a hat, and went out to the beach. It was morning. The light was peach, the breeze fresh. Nobody was around except beachcombers walking the swash zone looking for seashells, and I sat in the sand and wrote. I wrote the birds, the waves, the wind, the brightly colored houses. I wrote the taste of my coffee, the feel of the sand, the smell of the ocean, and the sounds of water washing up on land.

When I finished, I closed my notebook and sipped my coffee. I felt good. Grounded. Filled with the beauty and energy of the world.

Since we returned home, I’ve continued this practice. Every day, either in the morning with my coffee or in the evening after I close my laptop, I pull myself out of my head and into my body: I scribble a page dedicated to the moment I’m in. Even if every time I sit down to write it is 6:30 am, and I’m in the chaise lounge by the front window with my coffee in the windowsill and the cat plopping down on my notebook as soon as I get situated, I do this. I write the present moment through my senses — what I see, smell, taste, hear, and feel.

This has helped me. My mind still wanders even while I write, and I have to bring it back. But through this practice, I am able to tap into the realness and beauty in each moment for those few minutes each day. I observe my surroundings more deeply (because I get bored writing the same thing every dang day): I notice changes in light, quiet sounds in the house, animal patterns.

This practice also helps me change my perspective (because I get bored writing the same thing every dang day) so that I pay attention from different places. This morning, I sat in the chair my son usually sits in at the kitchen table, and I saw our house from a completely different point of view. I saw what he sees every time he eats a bowl of Reeses Puffs or toast with tahini and molasses. I saw the art on the wall I gave my husband on our anniversary last year; I rarely see it because I don’t usually sit somewhere that I can. Or if I do, I don’t pay attention.

My anxiety and worries haven’t gone away, nor have the problems of the world. Writing the moment has helped me cope, though, and that’s something good, right?

Gentle Rain is an example from a here and now/write this moment session.