My Used Pocket Notebooks — The Finer Point

My Used Pocket Notebooks — The Finer Point

I have seen a lot of photos of collections of unused notebooks but rarely a collection of used notebooks. Therefore I thought I would share my used collection here.

What we believe in.

Organize your notebooks for quick reference – Unclutterer

Organize your notebooks for quick reference – Unclutterer

Some good ideas here.

Apprentice – Baron Fig

Apprentice – Baron Fig

New product released for order today from the makers of The Confidant.

This one is a pocket sized notebook that, from the looks of it, seems to be on level playing field with Field Notes or Moleskine Voliant sized notebooks. They are taking pre-orders now with shipping beginning on 10/14. I remain pretty happy with The Confidant and the folks there are very nice. Worth checking out.

Real Pens Sweat

by Tony Sculimbrene

Kaweco Sport 1

I am not what you think. You see me, and you expect a certain level of refinement–a genteel experience. And you get that. But you also probably think I am dainty, that I am a light and fragile fountain pen, but Kaweco means it when they call me the Sport. This isn’t “sport” like you see on some fancy European car. This is “sport” from phrases like “Nice job cleaning out the gutters, sport” or “That was one heck of a roundhouse to the abdomen, sport.” I ain’t no sissy pen–I am the Kaweco Sport. I ain’t even an expensive pen, no aluminum here like my rich brother. I am basic black plastic, one hell of a smooth nib, and I am a tough bastard.

Kaweco Sport 2

You see, I am workhorse for a public defender. They take criminal cases when people can’t afford a lawyer, and as you can imagine, we have a lot of adventures and lots of work that we do. Its not often in a quiet office or a fancy boardroom. I write in court. I scrawl out notes in a hurry during a Probable Cause hearing. I take detailed notes in depositions. I write down facts in jails and prisons. I am used by a dozen different people a day. But I still write like the paper is glass.

Sure, I am little beat up. The gold “Kaweco” lettering is fading away. My plastic barrel is scratched to hell. My nib is a little sweaty, but that’s because I do real work. I ain’t no dainty signing pen. I ride in pockets with keys and when they get physical with me, I get physical right back.

My owner and I, we ain’t got time to waste, so in the 19 months I have been with him, he’s never cleaned me, not once. And its all cartridges for us–no time to mess with wimping converters or eyedroppers. We write, jump in a car, go to the next court, deal with the next crisis in someone’s life, and move on. That’s what we do.

Kaweco Sport 3

Now I am not just tougher than you think, I am really a good writer. 20 pages of notes in an hour is nothing for me and because I need less pressure to work, my owner’s hands don’t cramp up like they used to. I am also quite the looker, so even in rough places, people comment on me being a fountain pen. I get handed someone that has never used a fountain pen, that uses me upside down, and guess what, I still kinda work. My owner shows them the right way to hold me and everyone, every single person comments on how nice it is to write with a fountain pen, even in the rough places.

So I am here to tell you–use us. We can take it. Good fountain pens are tougher than you think. I may look like a belle from a ball, but I am really a tough, rough writin’ SOB. I am not what you think.

Tony Sculimbrene is a Dad and husband obsessed with everyday carry gear and pens. He writes with pens way too much during the day and writes digitally during the evening for his own site, everydaycommentary.com, alloutdoor.com, and a few other places. He also hosts a twice a month podcast on EDC gear, Gear Geeks Live.

History of The stylographic pen | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

History of The stylographic pen | The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Alonzo T. Cross patented his stylographic pen on this day in 1880… Unlike the quill or other form of pen that must be dipped into an inkpot, the stylographic pen is a version of a reservoir pen, which contains its own store of ink inside the barrel.

Very interesting history about the invention of the modern pen and the inventors who are household names in the pen world battled for the perfect solution. For instance, I had no idea about this:

Stylographic pens only enjoyed about 10 years in the limelight, however, before Lewis Edson Waterman had improved the reliability of the nib pen so significantly that nibs surged past stylos in popularity. And a nib was sturdier than the stylo’s thin wire, which was easily broken or bent. Waterman was a former insurance salesman who had once lost a sale because his pen leaked onto the paper. He made it his mission to improve the design of the fountain pen to prevent leaks and provide a more reliable performance, and then he figured out a way to mass-produce his pens. Waterman led the pen market until the 1920s.

Seriously, go read the whole thing.

Oliver Jeffers – Illustration

I made a bunch of maps for the United Airlines inflight magazine. They are all geographically accurate.

Beautiful work here. Click through for the whole collection.

Journal Day » patrickrhone.com

Journal Day » patrickrhone.com

lt will fall on December 9th each year. The idea is to celebrate the practice of journaling.

There are many ways to celebrate or traditions one could keep to mark the day. For instance, this might be the day to take out previous journals and reflect on where you were then versus where you are today. Another tradition may be to let someone you trust read one you have kept and get to know the “real” you. Perhaps gift one to another person in your life who practices or you feel could benefit from doing so. Or, maybe, be so bold as to spend a year keeping a journal for someone else in your life whom you love and spend your days with — write down their day as you saw it or the things you were thinking about them at that time. How wonderful a gift would it be to allow someone close to "see" themselves and their year through your eyes?

Mark your calendars. Now, I have a site to properly celebrate, honor, and promote the day. You’ll be hearing more about my plans as the day draws near.

I Wrote a Novel By Hand

by Harry Marks

I’m a writer. I’m also an aspiring author. I say “aspiring” because I haven’t been published yet, but that will come. I know it. I’ve written three novels in as many years and each one has been written differently from the last. The first was typed directly into Scrivener. The second was handwritten, typed on a typewriter, and entered into Scrivener simultaneously. To call that process “complicated” would be quite the understatement. This last book, however, took a simpler route, one that left me wholly satisfied when I reached the final page.

LUMINOUS began its life in an extra large Moleskine notebook, born page by page at the Barnes & Noble cafe near my office. For a few hours each morning, I sat in an uncomfortable chair–no doubt designed to turn one’s ass numb as motivation to eat his scone and get the hell out–and built my little world one pen stroke at a time. I thought I knew what I was getting into. I wrote about the joys of going analog and how computers made things too easy. Some of that still holds water. Other parts are a steaming pile of horsepuckey. Allow me to explain.

Why Pen and Paper?

Because a notebook is lighter than a laptop, or even an iPad. Because I don’t have to worry about battery life, or booting up, or waking from sleep. Because I’m not distracted by the mere idea of Twitter, Wikipedia rabbit holes, or cat videos. Because no backup solution is flawless, but paper is a whole lot more resilient than iCloud/Dropbox/a hard drive. And because I have a new baby and a typewriter makes too much noise.

When I wrote about writing more often on paper, I listed the following as reasons:

1. My brain does one round of self-editing as I carefully choose my words while physically writing them down.

2. Those same words go through another filter while my brain processes what I’ve already written as I type them into the computer.

To a degree, those concepts remained true throughout. I did find myself thinking more before I committed words to the page. It wasn’t like everything I scribbled was gold–much of it was replaced during the revision phase–but I noticed a significant difference between my prose for this novel and my second one, and a Grand Canyon-sized difference between this book and my first. I can’t chalk it all up to changing mediums, though. I’ve learned a lot in three years as a writer, as well as as a reader. I’ve picked up a few things in my travels and that education is popping up all over my work.

My biggest reason for using pen and paper? It was the ultimate distraction-free environment. While I knew my phone was in my pocket the whole time, I never felt the need to pull it out unless I had to consult Google or Terminology. I’m not ashamed to say I have no willpower when it comes to distractions. My wife calls me “Distracticus”, the god of–ooh, the TV is on. Had I written my first draft on my laptop, I would’ve found any excuse to check Twitter or Facebook, even if I’d disabled the Internet beforehand. Knowing a world of useless quizzes and fights about new iPhones are one minor finger movement away is dangerous in the wrong hands.

My hands.

What was the Process Like?

Like all great things in life, writing longhand takes time and stamina. It wasn’t glamorous and it felt a little weird to sit in a public place and write in a notebook when everyone else around me had a screen. I never worried about daily word count, though I did try for at least one page per day. With the help of a 0.3mm pen point, I was able to squeeze about 500 words on a page, so if I wrote two pages one morning, I felt like I’d conquered the hardest part of the day.

The biggest thrill came from watching the back of the notebook get thinner. I use Scrivener‘s word goal tool religiously, but a meter turning from red to green doesn’t have the same effect as holding a stack of pages in my hands and saying, “I did this.”

I did this.
I did this.

Completed sets of pages were scanned using Readdle’s Scanner Pro app on the iPhone. I waited until the draft was complete to scan the pages, but I realized later I should’ve been doing that as I wrote. This also describes my writing style–I’m a “pantser”, not a plotter. I like to make it up as I go and when I get to the end, I survey the mess I’ve made and do my best to clean it up.

Once I had several chapters down, I switched over to Scrivener and began transcribing them into the computer. Yes, I wrote two drafts simultaneously. Yes, I realize this might make other writers cringe, but you know what? Despite what some people might tell you, there’s no wrong way to write a novel. There were times when I looked at what I’d written in my notebook and said, “The Harry who wrote this should have his pen taken away from him,” and edited it as I typed. The greats will tell you to step away from a first draft before you start your edits. Take a week, maybe a month and do something else until what you wrote looks like it was written by someone else. I did that for the last two novels, but not this one. I kept this one fresh in my mind the whole time. I wrote entire chapters knowing I was going to turn around and massacre them when it came time to migrate them into the computer. My first draft is full of cross-outs and marginalia illustrating what I should’ve written instead of what I actually wrote. First drafts are supposed to suck and parts of mine were practically made by Dyson.

Writing by hand didn’t miraculously make every word perfect. It made me think more, but I still forgot pieces of scenes and sometimes I ended a paragraph early just to avoid further hand-cramping. Every method has trade-offs and for me, the trade-offs of enduring wicked hand pain over writing with distractions were worth every knuckle crack.

What’d You Use?

As I stated above, I wrote everything in an extra large Moleskine notebook. If you pay attention to stationery blogs and podcasts (which, if you read The Cramped, you probably do), Moleskine paper gets a lot of guff from enthusiasts. “It bleeds!” “It feathers!” “It tied me to a chair and stole my laptop!” Well, I’ve got 65,000-70,000 words that didn’t care where they were written and no larceny was committed.

My pen of choice is a Pilot Hi-Tec-C–not the cheapest pen, but definitely the smoothest and with a point small enough to allow me to cram a ton of words on each page.

The rest of the book was written with a complete disregard for healthy sleeping habits and enough caffeine to fuel 50 circus elephants. I got up at 5:00 every morning and was at the coffee shop by 7:15 am. I wrote for two hours, then went to work. If I had time on my lunch break, I kept at it. Otherwise, I’d have to wait until the next morning.

My train commutes were spent reading. If you want to be a great writer, you need to read. There’s no way around this one. This isn’t even a suggestion. I’m telling you. Others will tell you. You wanna write? You better make the time to read. I committed myself to 20 pages per day, usually reading at least 10 pages in the morning and 10 or more in the afternoon. You’d be surprised how quickly you can get through a book with that one little tip.

What Should I Take Away from This?

Hell if I know. I’ve been rambling for quite a while now. I’m not going to say writing in a notebook will work for everyone. I can’t say writing a novel period will work for everyone. What I did is for a very specific type of person who enjoys pain and what can come from that pain. I wrote a lot, but I scratched out and rewrote a lot more. Writing anything longer than a tweet is a process and I have fun screwing with that process all the time. It just so happens this process works well for me and as a result, I’ll be utilizing it more often.

But none of this matters. What matters is that you write. You put your butt in the chair every day and you open your notebook/laptop/package of napkins and you get the words down. Don’t worry about anything else.

Oh, and get yourself another cup of coffee.

Analog studio | Simogo


Analog studio | Simogo

“We don’t have a design document for The Sailor’s Dream. Our ideas and thoughts are spread out on paper, on post-its or in notebooks all over the office.”

Good old fashioned analog correspondence on this… | Minimal Desks – Simple workspaces, interior design


Good old fashioned analog correspondence on this… | Minimal Desks – Simple workspaces, interior design.