Thinking of You on Your Birthday

Day	What	How Much	Duration	Pen	Ink
17 August 18 August 19 August	First draft of “Old Home Week”. “Old Home Week” continues, and I should tell you the story behind it when I’ve a moment. Yet more “Old Home Week”.	Seven manuscript pages Six pages. Six pages	55 min. 45 min. 40 min. 30 min.	Lamy Studio Sheaffer Balance Defender Parker “51”	Herbin Éclat de Saphir Jentle blue-black Diamine Sherwood

Since it’s the 125th birthday of a gentle professional author and amateur racist from Providence, I might as well do a little open thinking about writing, both his and my own.

I’ll let ego take the fore; what’s that story I hint at in the Progress Report?  Well, it promises to be almost entirely uninteresting, but here it comes:  A few months ago, I had an idea for a story and wrote it down.  During my extended vacation, there came to me a mental image of how a story that fits that idea would start, and I nurtured that image until I had leisure to get it written down (for those without one, a school-age child when there’s no school is a magnificent preventative against sitting quietly and writing, so my vacation had almost no writing in it).  “Decorations” followed thereafter.  When I got the story finished, or as finished as it’s going to be until I pass it through the improving mills of third-party, semi-anonymous readers, I found that there was some dissatisfaction in me.  I still quite liked the mental image that had come on me, and wondering if putting the whole thing into a format that would serve a visual medium would quiet my restless heart, I went through the screenplay effort mentioned on past Reports.

Success of a sort.  I certainly think the exercise was worthwhile.  At the workshop I attended at the end of May, our guide mentioned that it is useful to try handling the same story with different points of view.  Usually, this is meant to be more internal to the story, moving from “I walked along the street, carefree, until a squelching sensation underfoot and a rank smell brought me up short” to “Halfway along the block, old Mr. Crun is pausing in his morning constitutional to briskly scrape one shoe on the edge of the curb, while shouting imprecations at the whole genus Canis.”  What I did was a little more meta- than that, moving the point of view from reader to viewer, but the effect on writer I think was much the same.  I saw the story from a new place, and I realized what my problem was.  Success!

…of a sort, because the problem was this: I didn’t actually write the story that the idea described.  That was the source of the dissatisfaction.  Thank goodness it wasn’t a novel, eh?  If you look at the few paltry things I’ve got in the Art Department here, you’ll get a good sense of the sort of thing I habitually do.  I like the shiver of effect more than I do committing a satisfying arc.  This is probably a result of my frequent indulgence in Lovecraft’s writing, and while I don’t think it’s wrong, it’s not always right.  In the case of what I meant to write, I realized I shouldn’t be trying to hang out in Arkham or points along the Aylesbury Pike, but should rather be thinking more in terms of October Country.  I get to begin again, with dials in my head adjusted properly– “Shocking Revelation” is turned down, “Sweet Melancholy” turned up a little past half-way.  As much as I honour the Old Man, sometimes art lies in directions he tended to avoid.

All of which is a very long way of reiterating the importance of reading if one means to be a writer.

I cannot discover the true source of the image; if you click on it, you’ll end up whence I lifted it.

Today’s pen: Waterman 52
Today’s ink: Reeves blue-black

Lifetime Experience

As we enjoy another January 7th here on the wind-swept prairies, and await the sound of renewed glaciers as they thunder down from the north to wipe all sign of human achievement from the face of the continent, I though it might be fun to look back at a time when the general popular assumption was that the wiping away would be by fire rather than ice.

Gosh, he is in a mood today, isn’t he, folks?

Over the weekend, I got an e-mail directing my attention to an interesting item of Sheaffer ephemera on the Rhodia Drive site– for the purposes of my current noodling, I reproduce the image accompanying a little imagination-excursion to the 1964 New York World’s Fair:

This reminded me that I had another advert in the same line, which I picked up on a strange whim.  The page has little to identify the source, but the size of the page suggests a slightly smaller magazine, as Popular Science and/or Mechanics were in the days of yore.  Have a look:

There is at least one more ad in this series, showing a ring which acts as one’s portal to using a credit card. That can be seen over at Pen Hero on the page about early Imperials, and I decline to reproduce it here as he’s taken the trouble to apply a citation to the bottom of it.

What this puts me in mind of is not the durability of today’s pen, nor of the item I’ve got with the appropriate “Lifetime” clip (both of which, of course, will be ground a powder as they join the terminal morraine of the next glacier), but rather of the interesting degree of prescience that Sheaffer’s ad-men brought to the question of consumer goods in the early 21st century.

Imagine for a moment that you were, as the lead male in The Time Traveler’s Wife, launched backward to the early 1960s carrying nothing but perhaps the pigments of any tattoos you might have.  You find that your stranding lasts long enough to allow the finding of some trousers and perhaps a shirt, and you tell the donor of some of the wonders of your own time.  Huge flat-screen TVs would be pretty astonishing, although somewhat pedestrian by the time Star Trek and Fahrenheit 451 got into general release (both from 1966, apparently the year of the large monitor), but then you start to get into the smaller items.  Consider that you are just telling, not showing, and what you describe can only be visualized through the filter of your auditor’s current context.

The “visual phone” is pretty clearly an iPhone, clunky physical switches notwithstanding.  That watch is not quite the same shape as any of the three which are available on the Thinkgeek site, but that hardly signifies.  The credit-card ring is a little harder to find an exact modern homologue for… but is it somewhat suggestive of the RFID technology.

Interestingly forward-looking.  And yet, they still went ahead with the Stylist.  Go figure.

Today’s pen (even in the 21st century):  Sheaffer Imperial IV
Today’s ink:  Pelikan 4001 violet