what comes after the draft?

On December 20, I finished the first draft of the novel I've been working on since June. The euphoria of it lasted for about as long as it took to print a copy, stack the pages evenly, and bind it with yarn because it was too large to fit in any manuscript box that I had. I put it in the mail to Laura, e-mailed it to a few more readerfriends, and that was it.

We should bind more piles of paper with string. It's a theory.

The draft was done, and it was time to start the mellowing process before revision. Most writers will say they need a cooling off period before doing a thorough revision, some emotional and intellectual distance, and I generally agree with that. It's probably wise (to try) to fall a little out of love so I can look dispassionately at the narrative and characters before I make the hard decisions.

It was good to get the draft done. I got on a plane to visit family for the holidays less than thirty-six hours after I finished. The trip was part of the imperative to complete the book: if it wasn't out of my hands, it would have been in my hands through that whole trip, to the exclusion of the people I flew two thousand miles to see. I tried to leave it all behind, actually, but couldn't. I put a complete printed copy in my carry-on. I read my own draft on the plane, in airports, and even in the rare stray moments between visiting mania. I called it line-editing, and that wasn't a complete lie. At my parents' house, I was an insufferable prat who dropped the whole brick of it in front of my brother, onto the floor, so he could hear it. The physical shape and heft are things that everyone gets, even if talking about the weight of a novel means something quite different on the inside of this writer.

I have (mostly) stopped carrying it around. I have feedback from each of my readers, and as of the end of January, I've begun the actual process of revising. I even rearranged my desk to accommodate that.

Drafts to the left of G, drafts to the right, but he's stuck in the middle with Blues (versus Kings, which totally didn't fit into the lyric I was going for).

But between late December and late January, without the anchor of working on the novel, I nearly flew to pieces. I don't know what actual mania feels like, but maybe it was like this. I picked up knitting again for the first time in nearly a year. I didn't just pick it up--I tore back fifteen hours of knitting and started over, eclipsing my previous ending point in half the time. I spun several hundred yards of laceweight yarn. I completely disassembled my spinning wheel, re-treated all of the wooden pieces, and put it back together again. I've had it for almost six years and have never done that. I spun some more afterward. I made a lot of bread. I tried new recipes. I went to the gym. I reorganized my spice cupboard, cleaned the oven, listened to minor league hockey games, and tried to teach myself Russian. I agonized over whether to join a fantasy hockey league and decided I was too emotionally compromised by hockey to add an additional dimension to that. I applied to more residencies, I wrote some pieces of essays, I started working on the next novel in the queue. I cleaned all of my fountain pens and turned to writing everything long-hand for a while. I bought a brush pen and tried to learn to use it. I found an opportunity to teach in Romania for two weeks this summer. I prepped a brand new class I'd never taught before. I planned a road-trip and a vacation.

And I went back to the manuscript, over and over. I couldn't help myself. No matter what else I tried to put in those hours, there was no staying away. I looked at the first set of comments I'd gotten and made notes, questions to ask my other readers. I cheated and started fixing details and continuity blips; I rewrote the first chapter entirely because I'd decided to do that anyway. I spent the week after New Year's with a friend (who was in the process of reading the draft) and explaining to her what the characters thought of the music we listened to, the food we ate, the scenery.

There was, in sum, no clean break, and I couldn't figure out how to actually take time off. The only way I can conceive of getting that real distance, the editorial coolness and indifference that other people talk about, is infidelity. I will need to fall faster and harder in love with the next thing, and it isn't happening now. I don't want it to, either: the revising is getting done. In the past, I've gotten that distance because familiarity bred enough contempt that I didn't want to look at the piece anymore. Then I came back to it, weeks or months or even years later, when it had ceased being mine in any significant way. The contempt for this project hasn't come, and the revision is getting done because the trail is still fresh, still compels me to follow. The metaphor has gone from romance to the hunt. They are, of course, the same thing: both about blood, which is the vehicle for desire.

Annie Dillard writes, in the first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. (13)

I'm following the blood on this book because the trail is still fresh, and it feels like an open wound in that I'm always conscious of it, like something's carved open and dripping red if I'm not working on it. That's new for me.

Gregory Orr, a lyric poet, and John Gardner, of Grendel and The Art of Fiction fame, talk about writing as coming from a wound, as trying to stitch together what will never heal. Both of these writers have some concrete experience with an extreme version of this--Orr shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident, and Gardner's brother was killed in a farming accident while Gardner was driving the tractor. I understand that every word may pull toward those kinds of moments because how can they not? But I don't think the wound is always tragic. I don't think the wound is always even real, insofar as to mean an event or a happening, but I cannot help but think of writing--any writing--as something in the blood or of it, even the raw flesh sting of a hangnail. Maybe that's the crux of it, really: it doesn't have to bare anything to the bone in order to exist.

I have a triangle of broken skin at the edge of my left thumbnail. It's not even a proper hangnail. It scabs flat and thin and my idle worrying at it makes it bleed without even hurting. The blood follows the line of the nail, pools under the short white rim of keratin before I can get a Band-aid. It's been this way for long enough that I can't picture this hand without it. Certainly there was a time, and not so long ago, but I don't remember it. The feeling, the vague itch, presents itself as forever. So it is with this book and revision. I can show you on a calendar when it became a part of my life--June 4, 2012--but it feels like always because imagining before, where there must have been some empty space that has become so filled, is too dire to contemplate. And for the three or so weeks that I tried, really tried, to make it not be present, there was a small, raw place on my thumb, my brain, my heart, my left ankle, just above the hard jointed knobs.

I'm still working on that knitting, but I haven't cooked much of anything since the Superbowl.

The pattern is Catkin by Carina Spencer. It's a cracking brilliant design.

My phone has two Romanian flashcard apps on it, but I haven't looked at them in a while. My Russian dictionary is beside my desk, but it's only there for the book. It's even been a little over a week that I've been to the gym, but I'll tip the halfway point on revising tonight. There's still a red seam on my left thumb, but both hands have been too busy to worry it.
 

Èccolo World Traveler Journal

I've been thinking about this journal for a long time because I originally thought that it would be my travel journal for my UK trip at the end of May. I ended up choosing a blank Exacompta journal for that because of the blank pages, but now I've got the Èccolo World Traveler Journal beside my bed for those middle-of-the-night ideas and so on. So let's talk about the wee thing, shall we?

Lovely shade of green, and the tree-in-relief is a great textural detail.

It's 5x7 inches (12x17 cm for the metric-using folks), and it contains 256 lined pages. I am a big, big fan of notebooks that are generous with their included pages. The little specifications sleeve there on the right (which is removable, of course--just a bit of cardboard) says it's got an "Italian Faux Leather Cover." I don't have any idea what that actually means, and the other side of the sleeve says it was made in China. Whether that means the cover material was made in Italy and it was all assembled in China or it's actually faux Italian leather which was made in China because it's only faux-Italian or the sleeve was the thing actually made in China (I'm guessing that is not the right answer), I don't know. I blame this on the vagaries of English and the deliberate vagaries of product labeling. And that's all of only secondary importance because the key thing here is that I love how this cover feels. It definitely feels almost like leather, but with a certain near-rubberyness that makes it feel like this journal would bounce if the cover were just a little thicker. It's supple and smooth and the center image of the tree is in relief on the darker green background. It's a nice textural detail that adds interest without being obtrusive.

Now the paper.

That'll do, Notebook. That'll do.

This is, of course, not Clairefontaine, not Rhodia, but it definitely does better than okay. The paper is a nice ivory color that's a bit more cream-colored than it appears in the photo, and it holds up pretty well to most of the inks I tried with it. There's very, very little feathering. If you click to embiggen, you'll see a bit of capillary action with the Levenger Cocoa and the Tsuki-yo, but it's remarkably crisp with the Raven Black, the 1670, and the Diamine Syrah. Also, I'll forgive this paper for feathering a smidge with the Tsuki-yo because that was put down with a Noodler's Flex pen, where there's a lot of ink to deal with. I was surprised by the Cocoa feathering--where I think it's the most pronounced--because that's one of my most well-behaved inks. Of course, it could be that the True Writer/Cocoa combo have declared themselves as being in a fully committed relationship with my Ecosystem notebooks only. They do see each other most often, and far be it from me to homewreck a happy trio like that.

Perhaps even more exciting is how well it works with the Lamy Studio F and the Raven Black. That's a pen and ink combo I hadn't tried before, and I wish I had. The Studio is sort of my last resort pen. I don't love it, though it writes well enough. It's a weight issue, mostly--it's a little heavier than I prefer. (If anyone wants to propose a trade for the Lamy Studio F, I'm more than willing to entertain suggestions.) But the ink, the pen, and the paper right here are lovely together--the line is fine and neat and smooth. 

I couldn't get a clear image on the reverse side of the paper, but there's a bit of show-through. The worst line, predictably, is the Tsuki-yo because there was a lot of ink involved there (a few little dots of bleed-through, too), and the two True Writer combos follow. The rest of them, however, are quite tidy. Again, the Lamy/Raven duo is the best of the lot--barely so much as a shadow and definitely not enough to interfere with writing on both sides of the paper. The Lamy Joys (both sizes, both inks) also behaved quite well.

When I decided to move this journal to my bedside, I put the Pilot Prera with it because I liked the greens together. After this test, the Studio is definitely going to take up residence there.

The Èccolo is available many places (office supply stores, online, and so on). I think I got mine at Staples, and it cost $7. I definitely consider that a worthwhile purchase. I just wish that it were a little more clear on what the cover is made from. (I'm sure it's some sort of petroleum-based synthetic cover, and I'd rather it weren't. It's very cute, and it performs well, but I still would rather have something like the Ecosystem journal because I know what that whole thing is made from.)

Unpacking

Okay, so this title is a bit misleading, since I've been unpacked (and back from my travels) for quite a while. But let's go with the metaphorical version of this, since this is the week when I feel like I have an actual chance to mentally unpack. The week after returning from the UK adventure, I spent trying to figure out what timezone I was in and getting the garden and such in place so that we could enjoy a few days of my sister-in-law visiting. Which we did, and that was awesome, and it involved a trip to Denver for delicious food and the Real Pirates Exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Before I say anything else, let me say that if you're anywhere remotely near Denver, you need to get yourself to that exhibit before it closes in August. It presents the story of Captain Sam Bellamy and the Whydah (as well as the recovery of the wreck of the Whydah), and it is a damn fine story. (Peter Jackson, would you please make the film adaptation of this?)

But. I have no photos of that. I do have a few photos from my UK extravaganza, though. (Operative word being "few"--I took almost 300 photos, but you don't really need--or want--the minute-by-minute play-by-play. This post is by no means a catalog of everything I saw. It's just a few representative of the things I liked.)

Death's head marker at Greyfriar's Kirk. Lots of Memento Mori goodness there.

Greyfriar's Kirk is in Edinburgh, which was--and still is--my favorite place anywhere. I've been trying to figure out why that is, and the best guess that I can come up with is that Edinburgh was the place where I first was on my own in any substantial way. In 2003, between finishing my BA and starting my MA, I did a 3-week summer program at the University of Edinburgh, and it was the first time I'd flown by myself, my first time out of the country, my first time negotiating a real city on my own. It was also a place where I met many, many wonderful people, two of whom I had a chance to meet up with again on this trip. (And somehow I managed to neglect getting photos of either of them. I am significantly useless with a camera.) But one thing that I did do, after seeing one of those friends in Edinburgh and chatting rather late into the night, was walk across the city at midnight, under a light rain and strangely warm skies. And that was the greatest peace that I've felt in a very, very long time. Edinburgh feels like home. I've been there three times. Every time I love it more.

Meconopsis flowers at the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens. I adore these flowers. 

 It's a fairly difficult to find truly blue anything in nature, and that's perhaps why I am so fascinated by blue flowers. The Edinburgh Botanic Gardens were lovely in all ways, but most particularly for this blue flower. I fear Wyoming is rather dry for such a plant, but I can think happy blue thoughts about them, anyway.

The Brazen Head, Dublin. The oldest pub in Ireland (dating to 1198) where we saw storyteller Johnny Daly and had the best Irish stew ever. Apologies, Mr. Man, for taking your picture while you were trying to take a picture yourself.

One of the major highlights of the trip for me was this trip to The Brazen Head. It was a night of stories, music, and excellent food. If you're in Dublin, check out Johnny Daly and Irish Folk Tours. You shan't be disappointed.

For the fountain pen folks: in London, I found Penfriend, in the Burlington Arcade, which was a perfectly lovely little shop. The clerk was very friendly and kind to me, even though I clearly was not going to be the object of a large sale (or any sale at all, actually). Definitely worth a visit, particularly if one is interested in vintage pens. (They do have things for sale through the website, too.)

I had only one real disappointment on the trip, but it was a big one: Beowulf wasn't on display. Despite what the British Library website said. It was off for conservation. I didn't weep openly, but that was a very near thing. It was crushing enough to completely put me off my game, direction-wise, too, which also hurt my pride. I suppose that simply means I'll have to go back. (Gawain and the Green Knight was also off. That's two reasons.)

I did, however, see the Sutton Hoo hoard and the Franks Casket. Yeah, for medieval nerds, that's like seeing Becks and Posh. You don't even know how much hand-flapping there was in the British Museum (which, by the way, is completely overwhelming and brilliant and lovely).

I'm going to leave you with a Rodin sculpture that I couldn't stop looking at. It's housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum (which is a thousand times more awesome than any of the descriptive blurbs in travel guides make it sound). The sculpture is titled La France, and it is a likeness of his pupil/assistant/lover, Camille Claudette.

It doesn't matter where you stand. She isn't looking at you.

In future posts, perhaps, I'll toss in another photo or two from this trip, as they seem relevant. Really, I'm no photographer. I take pictures to remind myself of the narrative of the trip, to remember structural details for research purposes, to please my inner Boswell. The best course of action, claro, is to see all of these things with one's own eyes.

Spring Cleaning

I flushed, cleaned, and readied all of my pens (save two) for new ink on Saturday morning.

I will likely do this again later this week because it was rather therapeutic (and because I didn't take any ruddy pictures and because my four favorite pens are currently not at home). The failure of it was, though, that I managed to leave my two favorites (my True Writers) in my office and my next two favorites (the new Prera and my Parker Vector) at a friend's house last night. I also left my day planner, my blank Clairefontaine, and apparently my willpower at said friend's house. (There have been Cadbury Egg casualties in large numbers this weekend.)

But: I did have the experience of cleaning out two cartridges for refilling. What a nifty and painless experience when one has a syringe for such a task. The converter for my Prera is so incredibly petite that I will likely use the empty cartridge for swapping ink colors, thought. And though I have no photos just now, the Prera is refilled with Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses (I'm kind of in love with that ink. Don't judge me) and the Vector has its empty cartridge refilled with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis. I filled my Lamy Studio with some of the Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng sample I got last week. Lovely ink. The pen continues to underwhelm me, but I'll give it some more time.

All of this is in preparation for the Great Grading Odyssey that will be the next two weeks for me. I graded a huge whack of papers today, too, alternating between the Lamy Studio, a blue Signo, and the .3 mm Zebra Sarasa. Okay, so I "alternated" for about eight papers, and then I clutched the Sarasa tight and wouldn't let anyone else play (since my go-to pens are partying elsewhere without me and I'm a bad pen-custodian). I wasn't sure I'd like the superfine tip on the Sarasa, but I do. It writes in a lovely chocolatey brown, and there were no smudging problems.

Another experiment in this arena soon. It's hard to decide what will go into my True Writers next. It's likely that Black Swan will go in the stub (again. still) and my trusty Levenger Cocoa will end up in the Waterlilies pen, as that is absolutely my favorite grading combination, but I'll go through so much ink in the next two weeks, I can likely let everyone play.

A very lovely weekend

The fact that this was a three-day weekend two weeks before the end of the semester certainly didn't hurt its quality. There was a great deal of grading, of course, but there was also a lot of cooking, two excellent meals out with friends, and baseball. Roy Halladay pitched another masterpiece today for the Phillies. Glorious.

One of the other things, though, that made this weekend so lovely was the amount of time I was able to spend engaged in making things. I finished knitting a baby sweater for a friend in the most perfectly delicious Malabrigo (Silky Merino) in a brilliantly cheerful creamsicle color. Just have to find some buttons for it and sew up the seams. That was mostly what I did between grading sessions over the past week, and it was comforting to have a knitting project that I really enjoyed again. (The last two times I knit something, it was with yarn that I really, really disliked. My next project is the same way, alas, but I'm hoping that large needles and such will speed it along.) More significantly, it was lovely to have something to do as a break between necessary professional tasks that felt both purposeful and relaxing.

That brings me to the other exciting part of this weekend.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I ordered some new journals and some pens. And some ink. I was particularly excited to finally get my paws on some Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses, and for good reason. I adore it in my Levenger True Writer stub nib. The ink behaves quite beautifully on all manner of paper (as I discovered while using it for grading--bright enough to see, not red-red enough to give things the Ink of the Damned feeling), and the slight shading qualities are enhanced by the stub. Inkwise, I also picked up some samples of Noodler's Kung Te-Cheng, Diamine Green-Black (currently in my True Writer Fine and currently lovely), and Diamine Syrah from the lovely Goulet Sample Shop. In the same Goulet order, I also picked up an Exacompta Basic Sketchbook. With which I am in love. In which I am trying not to write until it's time because that journal is going to have a specific purpose. I'm staving off my desire to use it by using a blank Clairefontaine journal, and that's been a pretty good fixer. (I got a blue cover. I am so pleased that my randomly-chosen cover was blue. It is, so much, my favorite.)

And then, because I was having a crisis over writing implements on my upcoming trans-Atlantic jaunt, I skittered over to JetPens for some non-fountainy options. I did get a few Uni-Ball Signo 207s (black, blue, green) and a Zebra Sarasa (0.3 mm brown) for my travel workhorses because both have gotten such positive reviews on PenAddict & OfficeSupplyGeek. I also had an artsy whim and got a Uni-Ball Pocket Brush Pen. I am, of course, quite pleased with all of them--they'll serve their purpose and give me some color options with very little fuss.

I also might have blacked out and ordered a lime green Pilot Prera with a fine nib.

The lime green Pilot Prera is not a pen I expected to be interested in. For one, it's lime green. You can tell by the color scheme on the blog and by the inks I mentioned above that I'm not really a lime person. (They're quite delicious fruits, and I may occasionally be limey, but I don't do much in the "bright color" spectrum.) It's also a glossy, single-color barrel. But I love it so much I actually woke up at 5:15 on Friday morning (the day that I had designated as my "sleep as long as you want" day) because I was excited about using it again. (I stayed up past midnight on Thursday--well, into Friday--doodling with it.)

And I think that's why I was so excited. I was actually drawing things with it. Before I graduated high school, I made certain to take an art class every year. I was, by no means, any kind of natural talent, and I don't have one of those spatial memories that can envision--with great clarity--the far sides of objects or what something might look like lying on its side and so on, but I did okay. Most importantly, I loved it. And because I had my life-goals set out in front of me (and they didn't involve visual arts), I could love it simply, easily, without pressure or expectation. I hadn't realized how much I missed that in the past few years.

In the past three days, I've doodled a lot of my favorite, recurring subjects: fruit, trees, branches with cherry blossoms, bamboo. I also tried drawing a few faces, based on some useful tutorials (proportions, and so on) that I stumbled across. I've never much liked drawing people, but I managed a few who actually look like people, and I really enjoyed it.

And I drew this bamboo. I really like drawing plants. They don't give me any lip.

I did this with the Prera, fine tip, with a Pilot/Namiki cartridge in blue/black. The color is really lovely, and I'm sad that it isn't waterproof because I'd love to do a watercolor-tinted sketch with this pen. (I don't get many options for FP-safe waterproof inks, do I?) I think what I love best about this pen is its ability to make soft, sketchy lines. I'm a big fan of my True Writer for writing because, despite its fine tip, as a Western fine, it makes a pretty assertive line, especially given my usual inks (Levenger Cocoa, Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo). When I write, I generally do feel assertive. Writing isn't always easy, but I feel like I know what I'm doing. I know my strengths, my weaknesses, how to play to one, how to challenge the other. When I'm drawing, I am much more tentative. I certainly feel rusty at this point, but even when I was drawing something in class, two or three times a week, I still made the same line, lightly, a dozen times over, before I would commit to a bold line. (And even then, I kind of resented it.) I should get into the habit of sketching in pencil and then doing cleaner lines in ink for that reason, but I also like instant gratification and can never find a pencil or a decent eraser when I want one.

The only problem is that now, I will want to have this pen and a blank journal (in addition to my lined "everything" notebook and all of my other pens) with me at all times. That runs counter to my (often futile) attempts at traveling light. Ah, well. Small price to pay for a rekindled love.

No Pelikans, So How About Pelicans?

So, as I am wont to do every time I go to some sort of major urban center, I checked out St. Petersburg for fountain pen stores. I didn't find any. (Granted, my search wasn't super-thorough, as I knew I'd be confined to the area near my conference, but I didn't get a sense of there being much choice in the matter.) Thus, instead of Pelikans, you get pelicans, and the pelicans are doing their thing at the St. Petersburg pier.

This pelican is a rock. He is an island.

Hail, hail, the gang's all here.

I spent a full day squeaking every time I saw an anole. Which was a lot of times. They are so cool. Almost as cool as stegosauruses.

And, because we went to a Tampa Bay Rays game, have some baseball players. None of them appeared to be using fountain pens at any point in the game. That's probably wise.

Vladimir Guerrero & Brian Roberts, warming up at the Rays vs. Orioles game.

Also, this seems like a fine time to show off some new pen gear I got for my birthday: an Aston pen case and a small, blank Rhodia Webbie. My delightful husband picked them up at GouletPens. Oh, I have a new appreciation for a blank journal. I don't use blank journals much, since I'm far more a writer than an artist (and I have an inability to write in a straight line), but getting this little blank journal made me want to sketch a few things. On the page spread that you can see below, I sketched one of the conference presenters' water glass. It's not by any means masterful, but I can tell it is, in fact, a little cup. The Rhodia paper is, of course, dreamy. It's a very pleasant cream color, which I didn't expect that I would like, but I do. Particularly for my sketchy little embarkations.

Closed journal & open pen case. True Writers, both of them. 

All of these things in action.

Because some of you may wish to know: the writing is done with a True Writer stub filled with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, which is the black pen in this photo. The Waterlilies pen is filled with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo. These are easily my two favorite inks thus far in my inky experimentations. Interesting thing about the Bleu Myosotis: it seems to mellow and lighten with age. By age, I mean a few hours. When it's newly dry on the page, it's a much more saturated and dark tone, nearly purple. After a few hours, it gentles to its highly shaded periwinkle. Mostly, I point this out because it's neat.

It's going to be a hard choice when I have to pick a journal to take with me to the UK this May. I purchased a slightly larger one (lined, not a Rhodia) for that purpose, but I really do like the blank paper in this Rhodia because of the urge to sketch things. And, well, the paper behaves gorgeously. It is a bit small, though, to do a whole lot of real writing in--I feel like I should write much smaller than I usually do in the small pad, and that slows me down a bit. 

Decisions, decisions.

Discovering My First Fountain Pen (Not Where I Expected It)

I had been under the impression that my first fountain pen was a black plastic Manuscript pen that I bought at Hobby Lobby around the holidays last year. (I purchased it in the hopes that it would somehow stave off my coveting of the Levenger Waterlilies True Writer. It didn’t work.) Then, a few weeks ago, I was rummaging in my little drawer-unit of office supplies (a wretched mess of old ballpoints, metallic gel pens that don’t not-work enough to allow myself to toss them, 3.5” disks, and shop bags from special stores). And I found a pen I’d forgotten I’d had: a blue-plastic-barreled fountain pen with silver accents. I remembered: one of my uncles (the same one who loaned me The Lord of the Rings trilogy for my first read through the series) had gotten me a fountain pen—one that used cartridges—for a birthday. It might have been my sixteenth, even, or it was a gift for high school graduation—I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember what the real occasion was.

Pen photographed on a bit of Japanese cloth given to me by a coworker

And I don’t really remember using the pen. Even without having the accurate memory, though, I can tell you  why I don’t remember using the pen: the cartridge. It likely only came with one or two cartridges, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania (an honest hour to anything  like a Staples). This was before I could have ordered anything on the internet, too. And so I would have saved those cartridges, hoarded them until the perfect moment. Then, when I used the first one, I would have thought that the line was too bold, too dark, too certain or too arrogant or too permanent. Too wide. Too something. At sixteen, or eighteen, or whatever, I remember using pencil nearly exclusively, and if I forayed into pen-usage, it was with black Bic stick pens, the kind that left gossamer strands of that viscous ink between letters that smudged, faintly iridescent and sticky. (Those metallic gel pens? I really only used them for drawing on myself and for the occasional whimsical note—on black paper—to friends or my boyfriend, now husband.)

Ink was too permanent. I wrote—poetry, fiction, papers—in pencil. (Still, I didn’t erase much. I’d strike through something in graphite instead of erasing it, oddly enough.) My preference was for the disposable mechanical pencils, though if I could have gotten my hands on a gross of the fat, dark blue Ticonderoga pencils we used in kindergarten, I’d have used only those forever. (In a drawer, in my parents’ house, there’s a two-inch pencil stub with my name—on a tiny slip of paper—still taped to its barrel.) I don’t know if they still make those pencils, but the leads were so smooth, so yielding. I don’t think I’d call them soft, not exactly, because I don’t have much memory of that lead smudging, but they wrote so easily.

And so I wrote in pencil. Either out of ease (little pressure required), out of uncertainty (so much less assertive-looking on the page), or out of habit (very little work was done in pen during my pre-college days—just the final copies of papers). In college, I lost track of my blue fountain pen. It was probably always with me, in that messy drawer of writing utensils, but it certainly wasn’t on my radar.

Fast-forward through three degrees. I still wrote a lot of things in pencil (particularly while grading), though I’d switched to writing my fiction exclusively with the black Bic stick pens. (I learned that pencil-on-looseleaf, carried around on a clipboard shoved in a backpack, leaves one with smudged and often difficult-to-read results.) I wish I’d noticed during my Ph.D. years that the Bics were probably contributing to my massive wrist/hand pain because they require a good bit of pressure to work well, but I didn’t. It wasn’t until my move to Wyoming that fountain pens really hit my radar, completely due to the aesthetics of the pen itself. (I’ve never much cared for a bold line while writing. Growing up, I envied those wispy sketch-lines that come out of taking certain art classes.)

I thought I could stave off the (expensive) urge for a Levenger pen by getting any pen with the “fountain” quality. It didn’t work. My black plastic Manuscript served its purpose, though it also was prone to covering my hands in black ink at any given moment, of getting me used to a bold line. I discovered I liked that. I don’t know if it had to do with having my first “real” job—a full-time position as an instructor; if it had to do with accepting my writing as a legitimate, worthy thing; or if it was simply time. (Having that “real” job also made it possible to even consider a pen that cost more than all of my office supply budget for a four-year graduate degree. And now I know that the Levenger brand pens are on the gentler end of the fountain pen expense scale, for the most part—but that’s another thought for another day.)

The rest, of course, is the current history: fountain pens have become one of my enthusiasms, though the symptoms are relatively minor by comparison to others’. But let me bring this all back to that blue-plastic-barreled pen.

It is, as I have discovered, the most basic model of the Parker Vector, probably from about 1997. The nib is petite, and the point is quite rounded.

Nib very shiny. It says Parker across the base of the nib.

I’m sure there are terms for these features, but I don’t know them. It is extraordinarily light in the hand because the blue plastic is quite thin. It uses cartridges (which I can now get at the local OfficeMax, though they only have black in stock). My current evil plan is to use up at least one cartridge and then refill it with more interesting ink until I have a good reason to order a converter for it. (I much prefer converters to cartridges. I can’t even tell you how much more.) I may even consider making it an eye-dropper pen, though I’ve not done that before.

Have an ink-haiku!

The line it makes is fairly smooth, somewhere around the Western fine that my Levenger True Writer produces. It is a little bit dry-writing, though it cooperates more easily the longer I write with it. It also seems to like the Levenger annotation pad (with a slight bit more tooth to it than the Rhodia) more than other paper options.

Paper is Bloc Rhodia, no. 16

At current, I will likely not use it very often—just to have something inked in black when I need it, as my other three everyday writers are always done up with something a bit more colorful—but I am glad to have it. This pen came to me because my uncle recognized, more than a decade ago, that I was someone who took writing seriously. My uncle Dennis has always done this; from him and his wife, I received writing and reading tools (bookmarks, particularly, and the refillable planner I used from freshman year of college until I graduated with my Ph.D., the year that finally killed it) that were both beautiful and functional. Things that were serious business. More importantly, these gifts said that he took what I did seriously, and that interest goes a long way in bolstering the confidence of a young writer and academically-minded person.

Oddments

I'm heading into one of those wacky-busy weeks (it involves papers coming in in five out of five classes and two trans-continental flights in February), so this post is going to be an assortment of oddments.

1) I'm doing some knitting for charity, which is awesome (how much do I love organizations who appreciate support demonstrated in yarn?). What is slightly less awesome is that the knitting has to be done with yarn that was given to me for the project, and the yarn is not pleasant to knit with. If the same event happens next year, I'm going to try to find a way to suggest that knitters may also wish to make a donation of yarn, too (which may save on the basic cost of the endeavor as well as entice more knitters to take part). I know that many knitters' love of natural fibers and such can pose issues with regard to allergies, but perhaps some careful labeling could help.

2) The object of the trans-continental flights is the Associated Writing Programs conference. Four days of writerly and readerly chaos. I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends and some new ones, as well as possibly finding plenty of good reads.

3) I'll be within a long walk of Fahrney's Pens. I don't have much hope of having enough free time to make the trip there, but it is terribly tempting. Of course, I'm planning that my next fountain pen purchase will be an Edison Mina, so I should probably resist that temptation.

4) I write my fiction long-hand for several reasons. The most immediate of those reasons is that I occasionally have problems paying attention when I'm at the computer. The less immediate, but likely more substantial of these reasons is that I find that I feel much closer to a scene, to a character when my hand is forming the words, the curves of letters. I think my access to my vocabulary improves, too (which is key when I do most of my writing between 5:45 and 6:45 a.m.). And so while I really loathe the act of typing up my hand-written process, the system works for me, and that typing gives me a chance to do a very rough first edit.

5) Writing my fiction by hand is also a pleasant sensory experience with the advent of my fountain pen interest.

6) Have a photo. This is from the end of June, above Alcova Dam, somewhere in the vicinity of eight-thirty in the evening. I miss summer. I miss it terribly.

The alluring scent of new stationary

For those of us who have never grown out of the excitement of getting new school supplies, the start of a new semester is a heady thing. (Getting high off those fumes is may be what makes the impending mountain of grading bearable, perhaps. And no, I'm not talking about the fumes from those giant, black, industrial-strength markers with the metal bodies that really did make you loopy after five minutes. ...or those Trix-scented markers that came in the cereal boxes somewhere around 1992. Anyone else remember those? They were freaky.)

Right now, though, I'm talking about the much-more-intangible scent of fresh notebooks that are destined for particular classes. The odeur of possibility, of promise.

This semester, a passel of Maruman Token notebooks from JetPens.com is what's perfuming the air. I was looking for an affordable option for course-planning notebooks, something spiral-bound and ruled fairly narrowly that would still stand up to fountain pens, and the Maruman Token fits the bill perfectly. They're not very large--only 40 sheets in each--but that's pretty much perfect for class planning (45-ish class meetings and many days when I can double up notes for two classes on one page). Also, I think they're pretty good-looking critters: quiet, unassuming, smooth covers; very attractive blue-coated wire binding; nifty accented "a" as the cover decoration. (I also like that the design color is reminiscent of Iro Tsuki-yo--more on that in a minute.)

 But how does it stand up to what I actually wanted it for? Well, pretty awesomely, even if I cheated and tried out another new toy (a pair of Lamy Joys in 1.1 & 1.5 nibs) on it.

That's Levenger Regal ink in a Lamy Joy 1.5 calligraphy nib. I am already so extraordinarily pleased I picked up this pen: it makes this saturated purple display the best of its qualities. In a fine nib, it's a very dark, very assertive ink, and that's nice, but it doesn't advertise its purpleness as much as I'd like a purple ink to do. This pen really makes it look, well, regal. Also, this ink can feather a smidge, but it behaves well on the Maruman paper. Huzzah!

Quote is taken from the Anglo-Saxon poem "Deor": "Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg" or "That passed; so shall this." It's a favorite of mine.


Then there's a bit with Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo using a Lamy Joy with a 1.1 nib. I can't get over how much I like the shading/outlining quality of this ink. I will continue to work at my photography skills so I can someday get a picture that captures that. This time, the quote comes from Beowulf (2890b-2891): "Deað bið sella 
eorla gehwylcum þonne edwitlif!" or "Death is better to any earl than honorless life." Those Anglo-Saxons are all about saying it like it is.

Three other pens/nibs to look at, though the Regal makes a repeat appearance: Levenger True Writer F with Levenger Regal, True Writer M Stub with J. Herbin Bleu Myosotis, Lamy Studio F with Levenger Cobalt.

And this is the reverse side of the page. There's a little show-through, which doesn't bother me one bit (it's a working notebook, not a journal, and I usually only use one side of the page for planning so I can take any necessary in-class notes on the reverse), and no bleed-through.

Okay. There. Review. Sorry to get all infomercially on you, folks, if you're really not here for that sort of thing.

Let's talk about what's going into those notebooks in the morning.

There's going to be Annie Dillard. I'm teaching Composition II using Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as a touchstone text (because if there's anyone who can pull together a thousand different kinds of research effortlessly and fascinatingly, it's Annie Dillard), and I love that book to the ends of the earth. ...I quoted Annie Dillard on New Year's Eve, too. That makes me happy. (She shows up in my Composition I course, too. And I will pull The Writing Life into one of the independent studies I'm directing. That's three out of five classes she's guaranteed to come up in. ...Beowulf will come up in five out of five, though, because I don't know how to not-talk about it.)

The other two courses are all about the other side of the pond: British Literature after 1800 & a Jane Austen independent study. That means I get to talk about Robert Burns and Pride and Prejudice and Oscar Wilde and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and A. L. Kennedy.

I get paid for this.

Life is good.

I'm not sure it counts as fine craftsmanship, but--

After a bit of inspiration yesterday from this article, I decided to break out some of the crafty things I've been saving up. Over the summer, I got turned on to book arts by the inimitable Deborah Poe, and since then I've been gathering up interesting odds and ends with the intention of making some hand-made books.

I have, of course, done very little with them.

Today, though, I settled in with twelve open tabs in Chrome pertaining to Coptic Binding, a stack of art paper, and a very beautiful greeting card sent to me by my friend Laura.

This was the result:

This experiment confirmed several things: 1) greeting cards are an interesting and green source of potential cover materials 2) but they really need to be reinforced with something before being used 3) a proper cover-punch or something along those lines would make much nicer holes than my awl 4) Coptic binding is super easy when doing the signatures and it's a right bitch where the covers come in. 

I am generally pleased with this experiment, though, as this will make a useful jotter for lists and things and it should be fountain-pen friendly because of the paper weight. It's multi-media paper, and it's certainly not as smooth and precise as Clairefontaine or Rhodia, but it doesn't feather like mad and it is thick enough to not suffer bleed-through. 

Yesterday, too, I broke out the new inks and some Tolkien quotes. Please forgive my inability to make certain letters in consistent fashion (I seem to swap between t-forms a lot). Paper is a Rhodia No. 16 graph pad, and all of this was done with a Brause dip italic nib.

Iroshizuku Tsuki-Yo:

I'm as bad or worse photographer as calligrapher, and so I don't think the fantastic outlining really shows here. But the "Tolkien" at the end exhibits some really lovely dark, almost burnt-looking edges. The color is generally that saturated deep teal, but there's a warm quality to the ink that comes out where the lines are quite wet.

Iroshizuku Kiri-Same:

What really geeked me about this one is the range of color. It starts out as a very dense pewter and shades to a fairly ephemeral cloud-like grey. The lighter end is really washed out and so wouldn't be good for things like grading or professional use, but as a shade, it makes me ridiculously happy.

J. Herbin 1670 Rouge Hematite:

The fabled 1670. My photograph doesn't capture the range of color at all. The lighter areas are a very vibrant red-orange (there was a hibiscus flower at the Binghamton Zoo at Ross Park that was exactly that color), and the darkest areas are evocative of rust (in a really good way). There's also a gold fringe that appears where the line was quite wet (not feathering outside of the line, but inside of it), and I wish I'd had this for Christmas cards. It's magical.

I like magical.

Reading and also writing

I'm currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Williams (yes, I know: me and everyone else on the planet). The link goes to the book's LibraryThing page. What a cracking novel. I'm only about a third of the way through it, and I am dazzled by the number of significant and interesting narrative threads Mitchell's braiding here. The one that I am most interested in (the most human of them, perhaps) is, of course, the one the reader gets least of, but rather than feeling slighted by the choice, it's easy to recognize a) the narrative necessity of that construction b) the practicality of how that thread may weave itself through the rest of the plot with consideration to the novel's reality. And, well, it's lovely enough to want to keep that one set of interactions rare and striking and not dull itself with too much familiarity.

All that said, though, if the last 200 pages of the book want to be nothing but Jacob and Aibagawa, I would surely not complain one bit.

Segue.

I am needing, in a very significant way, to get past a wall of inaction this weekend if I don't want to call my writing goals for the month a sham and a mockery. (And, lest anyone be confused, I surely do not wish to do this.) The most prudent way to approach this, of course, would be to open up the Word document the novel is in and start typing, But I have the attention span, of late, of a sparrow. Or of my cat, The Scoo. See photo.

And so I think that I'll turn to pen and paper this morning. And, for those of you who like that sort of thing, the choice will be my True Writer Water Lilies pen filled with Levenger Cocoa ink, and the paper is the Ecosystem notebook that has been dedicated to this single project. (Seriously--Ecosystem notebooks, available at your local B&N or on the interwebs, are brilliant things. No crankiness at all with fountain pen ink, and mine, which is roughly 8" by 5", has held up to much, much rough treatment. I first discovered this gem through the Letters and Journals stationary giveaway, which I was fortunate enough to win in July.)

Anyroad, it's time to get on with it.

Lazy Sunday

Well, it's not exactly lazy-lazy--I still have a to-do list, but the weekend has felt incredibly decadent in that I didn't/don't have anything to grade. To that end, I've been rather productive in the sense that I've gotten a nice-sized batch of stories out into the world.

I've also decided that perhaps the more effective option for my November challenge might be to ensure that I do one writerly act each day. I say this because, while I've been accomplishing things, I haven't exactly been following my own plan. Mostly, I've been striking while the proverbial iron is hot--instead of revising one story, I did two. Instead of sending one story out to three places, I sent two out to a total of nine journals. So, I'm resolving not to be particularly fussed over what gets accomplished in what order, so long as something gets done.

One thing that has actually helped me to be productive is the acquisition of some new writing tools. I try to avoid relying on "stuff" whenever possible, but when there's a basic pleasure in using the instrument, I find myself far more interested in completing tasks. Most significantly, I'm talking about fountain pens. In March, I acquired my first fountain pen: a Levenger True Writer in a pattern called Water Lilies. It has since been discontinued, which is heartbreaking because it's really, really lovely (and inspired by the Monet painting, of course). In the past month, too, I added a black Levenger True Writer with a stub nib and a Lamy Studio to my new collection.

There are countless blogs devoted to the art of the fountain pen--to fine-tuning and appreciating the nuances of these instruments. At this point, I'm not qualified to comment on any of these issues, but what I can say is that there is a brilliant and beautiful simple pleasure in writing with a quality pen. The ink flows without any kind of pressure--not only is it much, much easier on my hands (which makes it easier to write for a long time), but there is a lovely metaphorical reassurance in that, too. The writing instrument isn't fighting the writer, so that leaves one with only the idea and the words themselves to wrestle.