Pro Amor Patriae

Oh, I’ll bet I’ve spelled that wrong; I’ll be writing ROMANI ITE DOMUM all over the forum for the rest of the day, now.

In any event, tomorrow is the sesquicentennial of Canada as an independent country (as recognized by European nations).  We do this on the first of the July not to sneak in before the US’s national celebration, but because having a summer celebration is much better than one in winter, and because it one is free to choose, why not the first of the month?  It makes for a tidy calendar.

Today’s films, therefore, are little bits of national history programming which we occasionally get to enjoy rather than adverts on TV.  There’s plenty of them, and I’ve chosen ones that I think give a pretty good sense of the sort of interior mixture of pride and regret that a lot of Canadians are steeping in currently.

Today’s pen: Pelikan M600
Today’s ink: Chelpark Black
(Not Canadian?  Oh, dear, me– we’re a mosaic of many cultures here.  They’re in Canada, so they’re as Canadian as I am)

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
22 June 23 June 24 June 25 June	First draft of “The Parade”. First draft of Choose Your Own Doom. Second draft of “The Parade”. Second draft of “Inconvenient Weekend of the Dead”.	5 manuscript pages and done. Ditto.  Any more messing around gets called second draft. 495 words, and also done. 770 words, also done.	45 min. 55 min. 40 min. 45 min.	Parker 50 Sheaffer Imperial Triumph Parker 75 Pelikan 120	Chelpark black Herbin Vert Empire Jentle blue-black Pelikan Brilliant Brown

The timorous cowering away from the big project of last week became a (probably regrettable) examination of the least possible effort to bring the thing to a conclusion.  I don’t think that’s quite what the chap running the workshop at the end of last month meant by his advice to always be finishing something, but it does get that phase of it off my neck.  In an attempt to hew somewhat closer to the spirit of the advice, I think I’m going to turn to some more second, third and 10,000-grit-polish drafts of some other stuff.  If nothing else, I’ll renew the illusion of momentum I’ve been dazzling myself with.

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
15 June 16 June 17 June 11 June	First draft of “Inconvenient Weekend of the Dead” First draft of “Decorations” More “Decorations” …and all but the end of that story.	4 manuscript pages and done. 4 pages. 5 pages. 6 pages.	35 min. 40 min. 45 min. 45 min.	Sheaffer Imperial Triumph Pelikan P1 Parker 75 Parker 50	Herbin Vert Empire Herbin Bleu Myosotis Jentle blue-black Chelpark black

If you accuse me of laziness in not getting back at the big choose-your-own project, I will defend vigourously with a claim of cowardice; the necessary extra work, even though less than what has already been done, intimidates me.  There’s also something not dissimilar to luxurious greed or even lust, because the two little things I’ve knocked out this week have really been offering themselves to me and producing the sort of endorphin effects I think writers and work-out fanatics both pursue in their separate ways.

But I’m about to run out of excuses.  {quivers}

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
8 June 9 June 10 June 11 June	First draft of Choose Your Own… The same. Almost done… oh, damn.  That thing I forgot. First draft of “Inconvenient Weekend of the Dead”	6 manuscript pages. 6 pages. 7 pages. 4 pages.	45 min. 40 min. 45 min. 30 min.	Parker 75 Sheaffer Sovereign II Pelikan P1 Parker 50	Jentle blue-black Herbin Éclat de Saphir Herbin Bleu Myosotis Chelpark black

A couple of reasons for the change of project today.  First, there was yesterday’s triumph of completion followed by the needle-across-record sound of realizing I’d forgotten a bunch of stuff that I’d meant to do after I finished a bit about a month ago.  I need a break from that damn thing, and a short and hopefully humorous story is just the ticket.

There’s not much of it because the expected letter of rejection appeared in my inbox this morning.  It was very polite, and Stoic philosophy is really a good way of keeping life’s blows from smarting, but… well, the wind isn’t out of my sails, but they are out of trim.

Or, to shift metaphor, I’ll see about getting Mickey to cut me, and then it’ll be back into the ring, no problem.

Frederic Wertham was Right!

No film today.  Today’s fun assignment is reading…

{Awwww!}

…comics!

{Yay!}

Someone just showed me a excerpt from a monumentally creepy comic, and I want to share it with all of you.  You’ll have to skip over the the site where it’s been scanned in, and be careful to not look ahead at the thumbnails, but it’s really worth it.

If, that is, you haven’t been having enough nightmares lately.

Today’s pen: Parker 50
Today’s ink: Chelpark black

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
25 May 26 May 20 May 21 May	First draft of Choose Your Own… The same “ “	3 manuscript pages. 3 pages. 9 pages! very nearly 3 pages.	45 min. 50 min. 55 min. 45 min.	Pelikan P1 Parker 50 Sheaffer Sovereign II Parker 75	Herbin Bleu Myosotis Chelpark black Herbin Éclat de Saphir Jentle blue-black

The production numbers seem down, and they are (apart from the glorious anomaly of yesterday).  Part of why I’d set this project aside was that the neatening up of threads was getting a little daunting, and while I’ve managed to work up a head of courage sufficient to tackle the work again, willingness isn’t reducing the complexity of the thing.  Those who have tried tablet-weaving may recognize the difficulty of resuming a multi-thread effort after setting it aside for a while.

Today’s pen choice is driven by a writing workshop that I’m going to on the weekend (alluded to in this entry); in that setting, a favourite pen and preferred ink seem the wise thing, and today confirms that they like each other.

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
18 May 19 May 20 May 21 May	Honouring Victoria, D.G. Regina, Def. Fid., Imp. Ind, &ct. First draft of “Then Tell, Oh Tell…” More first draft. Fiddling with trivia marginally connected to writing.	five gin & tonics. 5 manuscript pages. 4 pages. More than I wanted.	All day. 35 min. 30 min. 50 min. 35 min.	Parker 50 Sheaffer Sovereign II Waterman Préface Pelikan P1	Chelpark black Herbin Éclat de Saphir Pelikan violet Herbin Bleu Myosotis

Pens, Man.

Today’s film interlude is someone else reviewing a pen I sort of want but haven’t quite gotten around to yet.  See?  I still care about the pens!

A small comment, though; I think Mr. Brown is putting a lot of stress on his fingers, if not the pen.  Relax!  It won’t run away!

Today’s gently-gripped pen: Parker 50
Today’s ink: Chelpark black

A Bed of My Own Making

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
11 May 12 May 14 May 15 May	Not-quite-first draft of “Then Tell, Oh Tell…”	see below	45 min. 35 min. 50 min. 50 min.	Parker 50 Waterman Préface Lamy 2000 Sheaffer Sovereign II	Chelpark black Pelikan violet Jentle blue-black Herbin Éclat de Saphir

…and it’s a fine bed of jagged springs and low thread-count sheets; don’t even look at the pillow.  There’s a belated realization that as mere background for the story I want to tell, I have to at least figure out the plot-line for two murder mysteries.  As of the close of that particular business today, I’ve got the more mundane one worked out but the intricate and more honestly fictional one needs more gingerbread and gilding.  This because real murders are, in general, not much more than a momentary rage followed by a panicked, hasty effort at concealment; you don’t get that many H.H. Holmeses, happily.

What I could have done was take of the threads of that previous project, but there’s a couple of recursions in it that are daunting me and I frankly want more of a break than last week afforded.  There are advantages to doing writing uopn which no one has imposed a deadline.

The Stubbening

I’m sure we all remember back in ye aulden tymes of this screed of mine when I made a noise about the modern urge to mess with point geometry.  You’ll also note that the noise was referent to vintage pens, so when I explain what I got up to this weekend you mustn’t shout “Hypocrite!” too loudly.

There is, indeed, the dust of a lot of tipping littering the cavern floor in my Grotto of Hunched Squinting.  An aside– I’m thinking of hiring an Igor to take over some of the hunching for me, although the squinting is built into the task.  A client recently left a couple of pens with me.  One, a Jinhao 159 (that company’s Montblanc 149 look-alike) had nothing wrong with it. but he thought he’d like it made over into a stub, or perhaps even an italic.

Click upon for closer examination

Since removal is relatively easy and replacement is ridiculously difficult, the stop awaiting client examination is a 0.7mm stub, which I’ve indulged in my trick of leaving as a fine round tip on the reverse.  By “my trick” I don’t mean to claim it as my own, as others have done it– it’s just something I like when a stubbing is in the offing.  There’s plenty of tipping left, but I’m at a point where it has pretty much parallel sides the rest of the way down; if this isn’t broad enough, then we’re bidding farewell to the tipping and heading for the land of italic pens.  Even this won’t get a much wider line– I figure at the place I’d have to stop for fear of the feed tapping on the paper, it would get up to 1.1mm at best.

The other pen he left with me definitely had something wrong with it.  Rather than describe it, I’ll get you to make your own visual aid.  First, press you hands together in front of you, as if in prayer or preparation for a dive.  Now, fold your fingers together, leaving only the index fingers pressing against one another.  Imagine these fingers to be the tines of a pen, with the uppermost joint the tipping.  Finally, slide the tip of the let index finger down to press right into the middle of the pad of the right.  This was the state of the Parker Urban I was handed, and the client’s description is understandable and understated: “It’s really scratchy.”  I don’t honestly know how ink was getting down that all the way to the tip.  I think another use of the word stubbed might well be applied to that poor point.  There was a limit to how much remediation I dared do to stressed tipping like that, too; it’s now writing again, thanks in large part to a removal of some tip material with the abrasives.

While I have all the articles of grinding laid out, I decided to cast a die as far as my Faber-Castell gift of recent delivery.  I mentioned that I had gotten a bold with an eye to amendment, but was hesitating in the face of how very smooth and delightful all that tipping was.  I won’t say that I don’t have some regrets.

Not visible; a vandal’s tears of remorse

You’ll note that there’s two “post-work” samples.  The problem of doing a lot of point-grinding, with the attached hunching and squinting, is that one begins to have I want to stop doing this replace I want to do a superior job of this as the guiding principle.  That initial sample came out to the satisfaction of a guy who wanted to stop peering through magnifiers and stand with the vertebrae in the stack natural selection intended.  If that sounds like it’s not going to be satisfactory to a less afflicted person, you’d be quite right.

I emerged from the Grotto, and over the loud crackling of my spine asked my wife to give the pen a try.  “That’s a lot more pressure than it should need,” she said, after a couple of false starts.  I married well.  Indeed, I’d arranged to produce a sort of baby-bottom effect, and the darkness of the first sample is a result of my unconscious spreading of the tines to overcome the problem.

I did not instantly fly down the stairs to address the matter.  I had lunch, went shopping, took my son to a birthday party, made supper, watched Miyazaki Hayao’s latest and possibly final work, slept for several hours, ate breakfast and then sauntered back to the Grotto.  I’ve left the point in more of an italic than stub configuration, and my current regrets at the loss of that smooth, smooth blob is underlined by the very narrow lateral strokes of an almost-sharp edge, because there was a lot of household stuff to see to yesterday and I wasn’t going to rush the job.

I don’t think I’m quite done with this one.  The owner isn’t entirely satisfied.

Today’s unamended pen: Parker 50
Today’s ink: Chelpark black