Meditation Time

Here’s a chap messing around with a pen.  I occasionally do stuff like this… in one corner of a page, for about two minutes.  I don’t devote quite the level of resources to it that he does, either; nice paper, boutique ink.  Very inexpensive pen, though, which is worth pondering.

The trick will be to not see any of that stuff when you close your eyes to go to sleep tonight.

Today’s pen: TWSBI Mini
Today’s ink: Herbin Lie de Thé

 

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Faber-Castell e-motion Pelikan P1 Sheaffer Stylist Parker 65	Herbin Pousièrre de Lune Diamine Marine Montblanc Royal Blue Herbin Bleu Myosotis	18 manuscript pages.

This week was a bit of a struggle, and not for want of inspiration or direction.  I knew exactly what the scene at hand was to be, but I was doing something terrible to the protagonist.  I’ve done plenty of terrible to other characters, mind you, and the protagonist has been dealing with the fall-out from it, and even witnessing some of it, but that’s all comfortably fictitious supernatural terribleness.  This week the terrible was of a true-to-life nature, the sort of thing that happens all the damn time in the news and which makes us all shake our heads and wonder at the base nature of humanity.

What made this hard is that it wasn’t something that was done to the protagonist; it was something he did.  Given who I modeled him on, and who the inspiration for his victim is, it was a steep bit of the path to the summit.  All the more so because I can imagine the sort of assumptions that will get made post-publication; if the author wrote this, then doesn’t it stand to reason he thought thus?

No.  No it doesn’t.  That’s why the slow progress.  I was axle-deep in cognitive dissonance.

Also, you’ll note there that I flatter myself with the notion that there’s going to be publication. Vanity still has a seat at my table.

OH!  I forgot, in all that– srtuggle or no, I’m out of the red at last:

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Parker 65 Sheaffer Stylist Faber-Castell e-motion Pelikan P1	Herbin Bleu Myosotis Montblanc Royal Blue Herbin Pousièrre de Lune Diamine Marine	21 manuscript pages.

No profound thoughts this week; I do find myself having to tamp down impatience to be bloody well done this first draft, and not just because I’d like to get onto the back-up-able phase and silence worries about fire, flood and nesting rodents.  The calendar pages are flying off the wall!  Other stories want writing!

Electro-Quick Car-o-matic!

A possible side-light to my (apparently) retrograde political notions is an interest in non-combustion vehicles.  Had I but the money for a PV roof, a Power Wall™, and an electric car, I’d be revelling in the quiet joy of driving about town on the back of harnessed lightning.

But I wouldn’t expect to go quite this fast:

Today’s pen: Faber-Castell e-motion
Today’s ink: Herbin Pousièrre de Lune

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Sheaffer Stylist The Striped Enigma Parker 65 Pelikan P1	Montblanc Royal Blue Waterman blue-black Herbin Bleu Myosotis Diamine Marine	26 manuscript pages.

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Pelikan P1 Parker 65 Faber-Castell e-motion Retro 51 Tornado	Diamine Marine Herbin Bleu Myosotis Herbin Pousièrre de Lune Jentle blue-black	20 manuscript pages.

Olden-Timey Entertainment

Today’s film isn’t, although it comes from the usual repository.  Rather, it’s an audio drama, which in ages past was called a radio play.

It’s also good fun, if rather steeped in pastiche.  If you want to follow it, they’ve got a web-abode of their own.

Today’s pen: Parker 65
Today’s ink: Herbin Bleu Myosotis

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Retro 51 Tornado Faber-Castell e-motion Pelikan P1 Sheaffer Craftsman TD	Jentle blue-black Herbin Pousièrre de Lune Diamine Marine Quink Black	12 manuscript pages.†

†Apart from having to spend most of Monday prostrated before an effigy of Victoria, d.g. Reg., Def. Fid., Imp. Ind, as required by Canadian federal law and thus getting no writing done‡, I find that the air up here as I approach 60,000 words is getting damn thin.  I’ve sent a team of Sherpas back to the last supply cache to drag up a few extra cylinders of inspiration, but until they get back I’m moving fairly slowly.

‡In all honesty, I was mowing the lawn and pushing my son on the swings.  While it’s not getting the book finished, both are valid (and in the latter, important) uses of my time, so I thank Her Late Majesty for imposing a day off in the best part of the year upon me.

This Week’s Pens	Inks	How Much Novel Written
Parker 65 Sheaffer Craftsman TD Waterman Carène Pelikan P1	Herbin Bleu Myosotis Quink Black Quink washable blue (vintage) Diamine Marine	21 manuscript pages.

I’m about, according to my own estimates, 70% finished the first draft.  This is not going as quickly as I might have hoped, although it’s not going quite as slowly as I’d feared.  I found another gap in my research today, which I should be able to comfortably fill in during the second-draft process, and this lead me off on another tangent of thought….

Part of me is beginning to yell at the other parts regarding the mechanical approach to the writing I’m following.  “Hand-written first draft?  Fine for a 4,000 word story, but on this scale… what is wrong with you?!”  I don’t think I’m going to listen to it, because as this late stage to shift to the the sort of writing production that most normal people seem to pursue these days, banging away on a keyboard rather like I’m doing right this minute, doesn’t seem possible without jumping right into the second-draft process.  Which would mean leaving the back 30% of the thing in a nebulous form while I re-write what already exists, only picking up the weaving when I travel back to this point… and I don’t know that the narrative would survive this sort of interruption of its gestation.

HOWEVER, for those who are (still, somehow) interested in this process, and for Future Me who will one day be writing another novel (I have vague outlines for at least eight, so I’d best pick up my pace), a couple of thoughts on this hand-written first draft stuff.  On the negative side, it is taking a long time, and it means second draft will also take a long time, since that won’t just be amending stupidities, but will be an entire re-write to transform marks on paper into an electronic format that editors and publishers will actually look at.  Also, as it stands now, my very-literal manuscript is a unique object; no redundancy, no off-site back-up.  This has been a source of some concern for about the past month and a half, as the imp of the perverse keeps painting pictures of fire, flood and brief-case theft.  I find that the difference of scale between a 4,000 word short story and an 80,000 word novel radically alters my ability to look at these potential disasters and greet them with an indifferent shrug.  I might well toss myself into a lake if the current heap of paper were to meet with a bad end.

The benefits of hand-written creation are still present.  I don’t go back and fiddle with specifics, so the flow of the work remains (generally) good.  I might be closer to done now if I had hit the keyboard ab initio, but I might also be only half as far along, having allowed myself to spend a full day getting one paragraph just so because the text is so malleable when it’s electronic.  Hand-writing harnesses the power of laziness in this regard, or perhaps lashes it to the power of cheapskate-ish-ness, because to do that sort of thing now would be a lot of fruitless scribbling and wasted paper.  At this point, though, I think I may have enough practice with rushing ahead on extruding the basic concept of the scenes without giving into the urge to fix things that aren’t quite the right shape that I may be able to conduct the practice in a keyboard-driven environment and thus be able to attack novel-length projects with better efficiency.

I guess we’ll see when I’m done this one.  Which… sigh… won’t be very soon.

Move It, Soldier!

I have, sadly, more or less stopped fighting in armour.  Time constraints, fears about (more) concussions, equipment failures… it all adds up.  Something that I don’t entirely miss about it is that “scalds with safety” thing Shakespeare mentioned.  However, I did enjoy, when we did public demonstrations, people being surprised at how well we could get about in our outfits.  Just check this chap out:

…and yes, I wish I had that gear.  Look in your heart– I’ll bet you do, too.

Today’s pen: Parker 51
Today’s ink: Herbin Vert Empire