Category: fountain pens.

art. fountain pens. writing.

A magic wand for tattooing dead trees

The piston knob on my favorite fountain pen broke recently, so I sent the pen (a Lamy 2000) off to the mothership in Germany for warranty repair. It came back a little while ago, with a delivery note listing the repairs which were performed at no charge. That’s some awesome customer service for a pen I bought eleven years ago.

I started a new notebook for the current manuscript in January, but I had to use one of my other pens for the first few chapters because the Lamy 2000 was out of commission. I can tell by the quality of the handwriting changing mid-page when I got the 2000 back because it looks cleaner and neater. I put a lot of miles on that pen over the years–I wrote the first drafts of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE with it–so I’m glad to have it back for the next decade of novel-writing.

I don’t usually do product recommendations (except for my own novels, of course), but I’ll make an exception for the fantastic notebooks I found on Amazon last year. Before I came across those, I wrote in Moleskines until their paper quality started going downhill, at which point I switched to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, but these new ones are head and shoulders above even the Leuchtturms, and they cost about one third as much. If you’re a fellow ink-and-pen writer, you need to give them a try. The pages are sewn, so they lie flat no matter where you open the notebook, the notebooks are sturdy, and the paper is seriously thick–probably twice as thick as the ones on the Moleskines. There is no ink I’ve tried that will bleed or show through on the other side of the page, and it’s smooth paper with just a little bit of tooth, perfect for fountain pen nibs. The best part is the price: they’re twelve bucks for a pair. I throw another pack into my shopping cart pretty much every time I order other stuff, and I have enough now to keep me in first draft notebooks for the next six or seven novels.

Here’s the link if you’re interested. Stock up while they have inventory because you won’t find a better notebook, especially not for a mere six bucks a pop.

fountain pens. writing.

Cellulose backups

These are the original handwritten drafts for “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” (which ended up in Love Death + Robots on Netflix as ‘Shapeshifters”), and “Ink and Blood”, which was my first published short story ever. It seems that the stories of mine I like best all started out on paper and came out of a fountain pen.

Funny thing: I went through one of my old notebooks today to search for notes and story ideas I had written down years ago, and came across an unfinished short story I can’t remember writing. It’s in my handwriting, so I obviously did, but I don’t have any memory of it at all. It’s called “Pirates of Shiraz”, and it starts with a group of friends doing a VR bombing run in a WWII multiplayer online game in their guild’s B-17 called Springfield Sally. The pilot has to bail on the group for a few minutes because the baby’s crying in real life in her crib. He puts the plane on autopilot right as German fighters come in, and the guild members tell him that they’ll make him pay the repair bill if the plane goes down. I don’t know where I was going with the story, but it started out pretty well.

If I finished that one now and put it out into the world, people would probably say that it’s a Ready Player One pastiche. (That old notebook is from 2010, so the story fragment was written long before RP1 came out.) This was definitely the weirdest moment I’ve had while going through old notes. That’s why I keep all the notebooks I fill…you never know what you’re going to forget in the future.

fountain pens. writing.

At work again (and some pen & paper neepery)

Break’s over, and while I am waiting for the edit notes for the first PALLADIUM WARS novel, I am busy working on several different projects, one of which is a new Frontlines novella that I hope to have finished by the end of the month. Then there’s more Wild Cards stuff, and it looks like I’ll finally have some time to get started in earnest on the novel in the Ink & Blood world I’ve been threatening to write for years now. That one has had the benefit of stewing in its own juices for all this time, which means I’ve had a lot of time for world-building. I’ve said to Robin that my elevator pitch for this one is “Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones by way of the Brothers Grimm”, and I think that’s not even a joke.

For the new work, I’ve taken to fully drafting in longhand again instead of just dashing off a chapter here and there, and it’s lovely and relaxing. I do think the slower pace of handwriting makes for tighter writing, or maybe that just comes from the word-by-word revision you have to do when you type everything into the computer. What ends up in Scrivener or Word is already a second draft, and I can definitely tell the difference.

I used to be a Moleskine fan, but for someone who writes a lot and drags his notebooks everywhere, the binding on Moleskines does not age well. I have some battered notebooks on the shelf containing the handwritten draft of LINES OF DEPARTURE, and you can definitely tell they’ve been opened and closed dozens of times every day for the better part of a year.

My new notebook love is Black ‘n Red. They’re spiral-bound, with extremely robust polymer covers, and the paper is the best fountain pen-friendly notebook paper I’ve found. It’s smooth and thick, and it absolutely will not show bleed-through, not even with a broad-leaning medium nib and a wet ink. I used to dislike spiral bindings because you can’t write well on the left-hand page (the verso) without your hand running up against the spiral spine. The simple solution for me is to write only on the recto (the right-hand page), and flip the notebook upside down when I’ve reached the last page, which turns the old verso into the recto. (It also looks cool when you change colors for the upside-down recto.)

fountain pens. writing.

Analog manuscript

Found these again while straightening out the office bookshelf:

That’s the handwritten manuscript for LINES OF DEPARTURE. The finished version filled two 192-page large (A4) sized Piccadilly notebooks. And because I am a pen nerd, I remember which pens I used (Pelikan 205 and Lamy 2000, both with EF nibs), and the ink (Noodler’s Bulletproof Black).

The first drafts of TERMS OF ENLISTMENT and LINES OF DEPARTURE were written by hand and then typed into Scrivener. I like doing that because what ends up on the computer is a word-for-word revision that has been edited on the fly. And because I am a pen nerd, I like the tactile feeling of nib on paper. It’s also immensely satisfying to have an original handwritten manuscript on the shelf when you’re done.

These days, I still use longhand for world-building, notes, and shorter fiction, but the novels are going straight into the computer (still via Scrivener) because it saves time and doesn’t hold up the schedule. I’ll go back to longhand-first for the military fantasy novel I am planning to write later this year because it seems appropriate (it’s the Ink and Blood world from my short story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, only rolled out onto a much larger canvas).

If you want to keep your handwritten stuff around, don’t skimp on the notebook. The Piccadillys I used were Moleskine knock-offs (bought at Borders on the cheap at the time because I was poor), and their binding and cover lamination didn’t hold up well over the years. Then again, those went with me everywhere for over a year, so maybe the Moleskine wouldn’t have fared any better.

 

fountain pens. writing.

One for the fountain pen fans

I have a little tradition for book release days. Every time a new novel comes out, I get myself a nice new fountain pen to commemorate the event. 

For FIELDS OF FIRE, I didn’t have to shell out my own money, because this one was paid for by 47North, my publisher. It’s a gold-trimmed Parker Sonnet in black lacquer. I immediately inked it up to use for notes on Frontlines #6.

I wrote the first two novels in the Frontlines series by hand, with a fountain pen. These days, I write directly into Scrivener because of the delivery schedule for the Frontlines books, but I’ll occasionally break out the pens to write a chapter or two to mix things up. For the next series, I may just go back to longhand first. The process feels less like work when i get to put down ink on actual paper first and then transcribe later. (It also has the advantage of on-the-fly revision when you type up your longhand, and what ends up on the PC is already a word-by-word first revision.)

IMG 0014

castle frostbite. fountain pens. shameless self-promotion. writing.

novel the third.

Last Friday, I finished the manuscript for ANGLES OF ATTACK, the third novel in the Frontlines series. 

<insert tired “Hooray”>

Now it’s going to go through the editorial ministrations, and after all the bumps and potholes are fixed, there’ll be the usual publisher magic done to it. I’ll share the release date as soon as my publisher sets one.

I have a modest little splurge tradition going that I may have borrowed from Elizabeth Bear and tweaked for my own purposes. Every time I finish a novel, I buy myself a nice fountain pen. (Bear buys hers when she sells a novel, i think.) Then I use the new pen to start on the next novel. For TERMS OF ENLISTMENT, I got a Lamy 2000. For LINES OF DEPARTURE, it was a Pilot Vanishing Point. And for ANGLES OF ATTACK, it’s this one, which just arrived in the mail:

IMG 0265

That’s a Pelikan M600 “Souverän” in green, with a medium 14k nib. These are to fountain pens what a Benz is to automobiles—solid, traditional, high-quality, and a bit of a luxury. (It’s a modest luxury compared to a new Benz, to be sure.)

I didn’t write ANGLES in longhand like I usually do. Because of the close deadline (which I still managed to overshoot by, uh, LET’S NOT SPEAK OF IT EVER), I had no time for transcribing all the longhand, so I had to write everything straight into the computer, using my MacBook Pro, a Das Keyboard, and trusty Scrivener. 

These last three months have been a bit challenging. Writing is not really hard on the body, but every time I finish a book, I feel like I’ve lifted a dump truck using just my frontal lobe. In addition to the regular mental strain of cranking out 100,000 words of fictional fiction, it has been noisy around the house for the last few months because of the various projects we need to get dome before icy death sets in for another six months. I’ve spent a lot of time out of the house to avoid the hammering, clanging, banging, and dog barking, and I’ve stayed up late a lot. When I turned the novel in, I felt even more drained than I usually do. The next day, I slept until noon and was still tired, and it took me about three days to get back to a regular sleep pattern. So yeah, writing can be hard work—just not the kind where you get blisters on your hands and come home covered in coal dust. But making up stuff all day for months on end can wear the body out in surprising ways.

Anyway, now I am going to reset my brain with video games and other leisurely pursuits for a week or three, and then I’ll ink up the fancy new pen and get started on the next novel. 

fountain pens.

pen-modding.

A fountain pen works via capillary action. It has a roughly leaf-shaped nib that sits on a feed which is connected via channels to the ink supply. Ink will flow out of the supply, through the channels, and then to the tip of the nib, all without the user having to put any pressure on the pen to write.

On most fountain pens, the tip of the nib is a little ball that’s welded onto the nib itself and then split along with the nib. The finer the little ball, the finer the line the pen will leave on the paper. Super-fine nibs will make your ink supply last a lot longer and allow for writing in small spaces such as graph paper and book margins, but the finer the nib, the less smooth it feels because of the smaller amount of ink for the nib to glide on.

There’s a type of nib called an italic or “stub” nib that isn’t a ball, but rather just a chisel shape with rounded edges. It’s mostly used for calligraphy and expressive writing because the chisel tip produces different line widths on horizontal and vertical strokes.

Here’s an example of the difference between a ball-shaped “regular” fountain pen nib and one with an italic nib:

IMG_0586

As you can see, the lower pen with the chisel-shaped nib makes thinner lines on the horizontal strokes, while the ball-shaped nib tip of the upper pen produces a line that does not vary in width.

Italic nibs are a little harder to master because they favor a certain stroke direction and sort of force your writing that way, but the output sure looks nice.

The bottom pen is a Pilot Knight fountain pen. I bought it with a medium nib of the regular variety, and it was just a ho-hum nib that didn’t write remarkably in any way. I also had two cheaper Pilots around with different nibs, one of which was a Pilot Plumix with an italic nib. The nibs and feeds on the Pilot pens looked identical, and I had read that the feeds are just friction-fit inside the sections, so I emptied both pens and tried my hand at some modding. I pulled the feeds and nibs out of both pens and swapped them to find that they were, in fact, completely interchangeable. Now I have a nice metal-bodied Pilot Knight with an italic nib, and two spare nibs to use if I want to switch to a medium or extra-fine line.

Once you get used to the peculiarities of the italic nib, it’s a lot of fun to write with. It gives the line a sort of character you can’t get from any other pen. The Knight is no longer in production, although you can usually find some new-in-box examples on fleaBay. The Plumix with the italic nib is widely available, for example here, and it’s very inexpensive as quality fountain pens go.

fountain pens. writing.

those old-timey writing tools.

There’s an interesting article up on the BBC’s website on the rise of fountain pen sales, an unlikely trend in a time where handwriting is on the decline.

The article includes an explanation by that Neil Gaiman fellow why he writes with those old-fashioned things these days, and some of it echoes my own reasons for having gone back to longhand:

I found myself enjoying writing more slowly and liked the way I had to think through sentences differently. I discovered I loved the fact that handwriting forces you to do a second draft, rather than just tidying up and deleting bits on a computer. I also discovered I enjoy the tactile buzz of the ritual involved in filling the pens with ink.

Of course, I don’t have the rather nice problem of being famous and receiving gifts of fountain pens from adoring fans all the time, so I only have about half a dozen of them. But it’s nice to see that other, rather more successful individuals in the field have come to the same conclusions regarding the merits of the fountain pen for first drafts.