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 pen user from way back. Received my Black n’ Red notebooks today. Very impressed. Thanks for the recommendation, sir.
The very written language and the tools to write it discriminate against the sinistral. 🙁
(…which is why I live vicariously through posts like this.)
You’ve used 54th Mass before, I know – what is this lovely green? Are you set on using waterproof/archival inks for this?
That’s Private Reserve Sherwood Green. I used to write more or less exclusively with Noodler’s Bulletproof, but these days I just fill the pens with whatever looks good at the moment.
Is that a Waterman pen?
That’s a Pelikan M600 “Souveran”.