I should know better

One of my problems in life is having a mind that can’t settle on a hobby. And another downfall is my propensity for starting websites devoted to the hobby of that month and then letting the site fail. I own one successful web forum and the only reason it’s still around is the passion I had when I started it. Passion makes things like this work, without it, your chances of failure are high.

We all know about Fountain Pen Network, it’s the king of pen sites, full of great people and as far as I can tell, the largest pen site on the net. But when you take away the fountain pen, there are a lot of other writing instruments that people love, pens, pencils, and the art stuff is endless. Where’s the site that brings all of the journaling, writing, drawing, paper collecting geeks together regardless of the writing utensil we use? If there is a place like that… well I didn’t find it.

So I did what I always do and bought a domain name and set up a forum. It’s simple and I did that on purpose, this is how I think it needs to start. If it fails, I didn’t waste a lot of time, if it turns into something, then the community can shape it as it sees fit. I think that’s the way it should be run.

So I present to you: Stylo Forum.  I hope it’s useful to someone. If you like the idea and you want to help spread the word, I appreciate it. If it fails, I guess this domain name will turn into spam fodder in about a year.

Who’s over your shoulder?

The Judge stands in my mind as a dark figure seated upon a huge black beast.

There are people who don’t fear this man, he has never shown his face to begin with. There are people who have faced this man and beat him, their lives now free from his interruptions. There are people who have faced this man, fought and beat him, only to have him remain. And there are those, like me, who have yet to face him but can feel his hot breath on our necks every day.

When I stand on the edge of a bright white empty landscape, writing utensil in hand, he is there. Somewhere behind me – I can feel his presence – he sits upon his black steed waiting to charge forward and gut what little belief I have in myself and what I’m attempting to do. He is a dark shadow in my mind, an ever present observer who will stop at nothing to make me feel inadequate and unqualified for whatever task I set out to perform.

Do you feel him behind you? The Judge stands behind me and I’ve yet to turn to face him. I am procrastinating, dreading the show down, putting off any necessary confrontation for tomorrow. Today I will say to myself “I need to pick up this pencil and draw something, anything!” and yet I’ll push it off with other excuses. I’ll watch TV, I’ll spend an hour on Twitter, I’ll read blogs,  I’ll suddenly remember that I need to pay some bills, anything to keep the standoff for another day.

I need to turn and face him, I need to lift my chin high and stare into his cold dark eyes and tell him where to go. This paper is mine, this pen is mine, what I create is for me and me alone. He need not interject his fear, doubt, loathing, and despair into my work, this isn’t for him, this is for me. I am the one in charge here, he lives in MY head. I am the master of this mind, he is simply an unwanted inhabitant who must be taught his place.

He doesn’t like these words, I can feel that. The Judge doesn’t want to be faced, he doesn’t want to be banished from my mind to leave me to my creative wishes. He wants to be in charge and the audacity that I would face him can be enough to send him on his way, back deep into the recesses of my mind to spend his days in a cave, waiting for weaker times. He’ll be back, he always comes back, but after you defeat him once, the power lies on your side and he knows it.

Don’t tell him, but I’m about to turn and shove a sword into his belly. For me, it will simply take the first stroke of this pencil to my sketchbook and the fight will begin. I do not intend to lose.

Life Time vs. Technology vs Creative Time

How’s that for a confusing title?

Here’s something I’d like to find an answer to: how to balance real life demands with our online demands and our creative demands. My life isn’t particularly filled with activities yet I spend 2 hours a day on the road travelling to/from work, 8.5 hours at work, then come home to a Fiance who wants to spend time with me, not to mention the preparation of dinner when I get home at 7pm. Toss in the draw of Twitter and checking out all the links that everyone shared throughout the day, and of course catching up on other computer activities like paying bills and stuff. Once you get all of that out of the way, when do you have time to do anything creative?

I’m writing this Sunday night. I like to write my blog posts as soon as the inspiration hits and then I schedule them. I spent all day Saturday out at a yearly gathering I throw for my car website and didn’t have a lot of time or energy to spend by the time I got home. I guess spending your day from 7:30am to 8pm on your feet running around and inhaling smoke from a bbq grill will do that to you. Needless to say, I had no interest in doing anything creative other than making a mental note to journal about the gathering so I’d have some solid notes for next year.

Now here it is, 11:30pm on Sunday night, I need to go to bed but I still haven’t journaled about Saturday. I came down to my office to do just that but instead this inspiration hit me and I sat down to type it out, then of course Twitter called and I was off checking links for the next 30 minutes. I still have to sit down to write and if I’m lucky, I’ll maybe get a page into it before I get tired and want to go to bed. I’m sure you’re thinking I could have started earlier and I agree, but I spent the day relaxing with the Fiance and then this NCIS marathon came on…

I wish I had an answer on how to cram all this into one day but I can’t. I’m starting to think the best thing to do is just ignore technology (very hard) and forge on with the “real” things in life. Granted, that’s not the real answer but there sure are a lot of devices in our lives that now compete for our time, be it creative or “real” life. I’m probably not the only one who falls victim to the technology bug.

I’m positive technology is doing us equal harm as good.

A new friend for my Space Pen

For the past few weeks I’ve been stuffing a 3.5×5.5″ Moleskine Cahier in my back pocket. The covers seem to just be cardboard and the size left me with no option but to sit on it. Needless to say, it didn’t take very long for it to start looking kind of ratty. I’m not very keen on pulling a bent notebook out of my pocket to write on either.

Enter the almost cute 2.5×4″ Moleskine Volant. I stumbled onto this little delight during a recent visit to Borders. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had found the perfect little notebook for easy front pocket carry and the fact that all the pages are perforated made it even better. I used it rather extensively this past weekend at an event I hosted, even using a couple pages as makeshift gift certificates for a give away.

My only previous experience with Moleskine has been the Cahier but it’s easy to tell that the Volant is following in bigger footsteps. It has an “In case of loss” page in the front, and the cover is of a completely different material that I understand is more “moleskinesque” if I must coin a word to describe it. And of course, if the small size doesn’t work for you, the Volant comes in larger sizes as well. I find this tiny notebook perfect to slip in my pocket behind my Blackberry and next to my Fisher Space Pen. It’s only been a couple days, but it’s not bent or looking worse for wear so I’m quite happy with the move from Cahier to Volant.

As far as I know, and my knowledge is admitedly limited, there isn’t a knock off rival for this sturdy little notepad. If you know of one, please share!

Art store field trip!

I’m not an artist and I never have been, but today I walked into Blick Art Materials in Dearborn, Michigan. I was there because they supposedly carry Rhodia pads and I’m desperately wanting something that isn’t a staple bound notebook. I imagined walking in and finding every Rhodia imaginable but alas, they only had a small supply of the staple bound books. To top it off, I accidentally bought a graph paper #16 which bums me out even further.

Besides my Rhodia hunt, I was there for another purpose. I decided that I was going to buy a sketchbook and some pencils or charcoal and then force myself to draw. If you’ve read my blog much, you know that I’m currently struggling to open the creative side of my brain which seems to have been walled off in recent years. I can’t seem to bring myself to doodle in my journals, so I purchased a 9×12 sketch pad with perforated pages so I have the freedom to sit down, sketch something, and always have the option to throw it away with nary a trace of it having existed. I also grabbed a 12 pack of Prismacolor pencils to draw with.

The Blick store in Dearborn is a tiny little place but the amount of artist materials on display is quite frankly overwhelming. I wandered down almost every aisle in awe at the sheer number of options an artist might have. Standing in the pencil aisle, I had to wonder how anyone could keep track of what pencil they need or want. I have a new found respect for anyone who has a good art supply collection as it seems like it might be a bit of work to amass.

I also picked up a 3 pack of Writersblok notebooks but upon arriving home, I see that Notebook Stories already reviewed them and found their paper to be very thin. Oh well, those can go in the drawer of unused notebooks for a later day.

Now, I must try to break in the new sketchbook.

Review: Field Notes Mackinaw Autumn

In the world of the pocket sized notebook, the Moleskine reigns supreme. You may not be a fan of them, but you know what they are. Naturally challengers will rise up to compete with the king and they will either fall by the wayside, or carve out a little niche for themselves under the umbrella that is Moleskine. Field Notes is one of those challengers and one I had high hopes for since the first time I heard of them.

If you’re not familiar with Field Notes, they’ve been cranking out pocket sized notebooks for a while now – I couldn’t find a definitive answer to when they began but I believe it was sometime in 2008 (feel free to correct me). Their main product offering is a 3.5″x5.5″ notebook with a brown cover and 48 pages of lined, graph, or plain paper. At some point in time, they began selling limited edition color combinations and I happened to be quick enough to snap up a 3 pack of their Mackinaw Autumn set. Apparently they sold out of these in 22 hours so I count myself lucky. They arrived today and I couldn’t help but dive right in for a review.

As always, Field Notes included a few freebies; in this case it was a “general purpose band of rubber” and an ink pen. I was kind of hoping for one of their pencils but I’m not complaining. They also included a sticker which is the logo of Coudal, the parent company of Field Notes.

The Mackinaw Autumn set comes in the colors of a Michigan fall, something I’m very familiar with. The covers were even made in Niles, Michigan by French Paper Company which made me even more excited to purchase them. Field Notes describes these colors as “burnt red”, “running-board brown”, and “harvest moon orange” but the notes in the back cover call them “Tangy Orange”, “Safety Orange”, and “Orange Fizz”. I’m not sure which are the official names but they look snazzy either way.

Now we get into the meat and potatoes of the review. When I first heard of Field Notes, it was on FPN and the general consensus was that they were fountain pen friendly. One of the more “famous” voices endorsing Field Notes is none other than fountain pen guru Richard Binder. That alone was enough to satisfy me but the day after I placed my order, I found a thread on FPN where people were complaining of problems with feathering and bleed through. The possibility of Field Notes changing their paper recently has been floated about but doesn’t seem to have any real proof behind it. I had already placed my order so I knew I’d be able to find out first hand. Sadly, it seems as if the detractors were right.

I tested the first page of a randomly selected notebook with 5 different fountain pens ranging from a Pelikan M200 to a Pilot Varsity. The feathering was immediately noticeable with the paper visibly sucking ink out of the nib. The minute I placed my Lamy Safari nib to the paper, my heart dropped. I had such high hopes for this paper but all was dashed in that split second. I continued testing pens, my Pelikan M200 dumped ink onto the page as if it were a sponge, even my lowly Platinum Preppy experienced a good amount of feathering. Of all the fountain pens tested, the best behaved was a cheap disposable Pilot Varsity. Oddly enough, while it managed to write without a lot of feathering, it was 2nd worst at bleed through.

I tested a Sharpie pen for kicks but I wasn’t surprised when it worked well, after all, it’s designed for use on regular paper. One other odd note, this paper exhibits a quality where the grid lines actually seem to repel ink. The darker inks from the Lamy and the Pelikan show this phenomenon quite well. Even the Sharpie wasn’t immune, the grid lines show through the lettering in several spots. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced this with any other grid paper before.

Naturally when paper has this much feathering, you can expect bleed through and the Field Notes paper followed through with plenty. Normally I expect to see the writing through the page but the Pelikan and Varsity actually bled through enough to put spots on the next page. You can see the decent amount of bleed through exhibited by the Pelikan which was by far the worst performer of the bunch.

I wanted to be as thorough as I could be so I tried the Pelikan on the next page, and the next, and the next. Five pages in and I was still having the same feathering and bleed through as the first page. I then begrudgingly picked up the other 2 notebooks and soiled their first page with the Pelikan only to find that they didn’t have any feathering issues. I numbered the bottom edges of 7 pages on both and the results were the same, the feathering wasn’t there. However, the bleed through occured on each page I tested. I understand that a notebook manufacturer will have differences between paper batches but I can say without a doubt that all 3 notebooks that I tested have some degree of fault when being used with a fountain pen. I will say this, the Pelikan and the Mont Blanc ink combination seems to be a very bad offender when it comes to bleed through. I tested the same pen on a page from a Moleskine Volant and while it didn’t feather, the bleed through was evident. However, since it happened with the Varsity as well, I can’t fully excuse this paper.

Frankly the paper variation between the 3 notebooks is frustrating. The first notepad is useless if I use a fountain pen, the other 2 still exhibit a level of bleed through that I find unacceptable. I numbered several other pages in the remaining 2 notebooks using my Lamy Safari and, while the bleed through wasn’t comparable to the Pelikan, any writing on those pages would render the back of the page useless. Comparing them to my recently purchased Moleskine Cahiers, I feel the Moleskine has the better paper. I have yet to experience feathering and bleed through with the same Pelikan is nothing like the Field Notes. If you use a gel pen or a Sharpie pen, you shouldn’t let this review turn you off but fountain pen users beware! I very much prefer the look of these notebooks to the Moleskine and I’m kind of bummed that I had to soil all 3 to get a fair review. Oh well.

So there you have it, my first very long (and hopefully thorough) notebook review.

QOTW: Do you still use cursive?

There’s been a lot of discussion on the death of cursive lately. In fact, here’s an article on that very subject from Yahoo News.

So of course the question of the week is; “Do you still use cursive and how often?”

Hit the comment section and tell us!

Learning how to use a journal

The subject is probably a bit confusing; how to use a journal? Easy, write in it! Allow me to take you on a journey through my mind.

To me, a journal has always been a continuous flow of text. Regardless of my age, that’s what my mind pictured when I heard the word “journal”. A 14 yr old girl sitting in her room writing in her journal/diary? In my mind I saw that to mean sentence after sentence of how she’s in love with (insert kid at school here) and nothing more. Someone of a bit more experience in the world who journals? I figured they must be writing about their day or taking notes on ideas they have floating in their head. A journal held a massive amount of words and nothing more.

About 2 years ago I discovered fountain pens and was suddenly plunged into a world of creative folk who used their pens for more than just scribbling notes on a 79 cent notebook. These are the people I always imagined would use a journal. I imagined them wielding a fountain pen and writing their innermost secrets on creamy ivory pages of their expensive leather bound journal. They spent their time chronicling their every move so they’d be able to look back on it in years to come and see the a portrait of their mind at the time, frozen in place on paper.

Then I started noticing people who weren’t using their journals as a boring line by line record of their life, they were writing poems, doodling, drawing, and painting.  Everything on their pages reflected something, whether it be a moment in their life or a picture in their head, they were journaling in a way completely foreign to me. I myself stayed locked in the line by line idea of the journal and, try as I might, could never get away from it.

I simply must experience this form of journaling. If you were to sit down and read my current notebook/journal, you would see a progression over 2 years (yes, one notebook in 2 years.. sad isn’t it?) where I fill the pages with sentences and paragraphs don’t deviate from that style. Then you’ll see a page from last week where I filled a page with nothing but random thoughts. It sounds simple yet it was oddly invigorating. I was breaking the “rules” of journaling in my mind and it was a whole lot of fun. I can’t seem to switch myself over to that method yet, but I’m trying.

I’d like my journals to be a collection of my current mood, feelings, pictures in my head,  etc..  I don’t want only sentences,  I want something visual that does more than bore you to death with poor grammar and spelling. I want my journal to be full of spontaneity and feeling, and one day I’d like to be able to sit down with my journal and doodle on it. I don’t know why that’s so hard to do, perhaps I fear the finality of ink on paper and not being able to correct the thing I’ve written or drawn. It’s as if my mind has set up a fence at the edge of boring journal entries and demanded I not cross it for fear of failure.

But what can I fail at? It’s my journal, it’s my paper, it’s by my hand. There should be no fear involved here, it should be organic and free, it should flow from my brain uninhibited by these crazy thoughts of failure. If you don’t want someone to see it, lock it up. If you’re afraid of what might come out, perhaps you shouldn’t worry until that happens and just let your brain go free!

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go try to climb this wall my mind has put in my way. See you on the other side!

Any suggestions on how to make this transition would be greatly appreciated!

Brain freeze!

I knew that eventually updating on a daily basis was going to catch up with me. Perhaps I should change that schedule. Anyway, let’s see what I can come up with here.

How about a few links to some interesting blog posts I’ve read recently.

BiffyBeans asks How’s your Grip? I liked this entry because it touches on a problem I’ve been having for a very long time. Death grip and the resulting cramping! I cannot seem to beat it but I’m trying.

Office Supply Geek is hosting the 3rd Carnival of Pen, Pencil, and Paper. Deadline to get your submission in is October 4th. I’m trying to see if I can’t come up with something to submit this time.

Rhodia Drive (also authored by BiffyBeans) asks What’s keeping you from writing? This hit home to me because I’m so easily distracted and I pretty much can never find time to write!

Unposted returns from a few month hiatus of writing to review the very interesting RevolveR notebook.

The Pen Collector talks about my favorite gel ink pen with a few thoughts after 6 years of use.

FieldNotes rolled out a new color combo which I’m sure is sold out by now.  I have a 3 pack on the way which will be my first time using a Fieldnotes book.

I think that’ll be sufficient to give you a few things to read while I try to gather my thoughts and put something original on this page.

Thank you mister postman!

The post man dropped off my Jet Pens order today. I tried to grab a bunch of pens that were < $10 each. I ended up with the following list:

1 Pilot Vpen (very similar to the Varsity)

1 Pilot Plumix (The medium nib is identical to the Pilot 78G Bold)

1 Pilot Petit1

4 Platinum Preppy pens in varying colors/nib sizes

1 Sailor Ink Bar

I’d like to write about these but I’m not sure how I’ll go about it. I could do a cheap pen shoot out and cover them all quickly in one article, or I could do a full review on each pen. I guess I’ll have to see what feels right when the time comes.

A little sneak peek: I’ve tried all of them and oddly enough, I’m a fan of the Fine Pilot nibs. I would not have guessed that as I’m normally a Medium nib guy.