On Writing Implements...

[klsiegel320]

So, this friend of mine cjsherwood essentially wonders out loud if there's anyone else out there who could - let alone would - post three consecutive entries regarding writing implements...and mentions someone who might possibly be able to...who isn't me, by the way.

Which means she may have forgotten for the moment that I'm a pen freak.

I'm a pen freak of a very eclectic nature. I started out when I was five or six, and I discovered Flair felt-tip pens. They used to have a display of these at the drugstore where we stopped every Sunday to pick up my grandmother's Sunday New York Post, and I was enchanted primarily because there were other colors of ink besides blue, black, and red. There was olive. There was orange. There was brown, and purple, and pink, and turquoise.

Within a couple years, I'd discovered those fat old Bic four-color pens. I never had much luck getting them to work well, and they're really too fat to be comfortable in the hand, but I loved them anyway.

I also had several iterations of the old, mass-produced Sheaffer fountain pens (the ones that invariably leaked all over your hand). I didn't know anything at all about fountain pens, except that I thought they were cool, and that while I loved the idea none of the ones you could get at CVS or the corner drugstore quite lived up to my sense of what writing with one should be like. More on that later.

Oddly enough, this love of writing instruments never transferred to pencils, particularly. Pencils weren't "fun," the way pens were. Pencils were working implements, for doing math and marking music and practicing penmanship (how ironic).

Pens, on the other hand, were for making notes, and drafting stories; for playing and illustrating and doodling; pens were creative, in a way that pencils never were.

Comments

[mowglikat]

My boss collects pens. I've bought her a simulated snake skin pen, a pen with an etch-a-sketch attached, and a pen with a boxing frog.

I bought her one that looks like an Oscar (gold, with it's own stand so it stays upright) and she also has one that laughs when she writes with it, others that flash all kinds of different fiber optic colors.

I like pens. But my favorite pen for every day use is the Papermate Flexgrip Ultra. I'm not particular if it clicks or not, but I find it writes very smoothly, and doesn't spot up, like a Bic does.

Funny about that...

[klsiegel.livejournal.com]

That spotting up? I always found Papermates did that to me, more than Bics. Go figure. Neither's anything like the blotch you get if you forget halfway through a word what you're trying to say with a fountain pen.

A friend at work used to bring me pens, when she found something wild that she thought I'd like. There's one with its own stand that has a wild head of fake yellow hair. Somebody gave me a cat pen that I think came from one of the museum stores, once. This same work friend also gave me a very cool lighted pen on a string, which I find rather handy in the dim-lit interiors of planes.

It's funny, too - I was so enthralled with the fairly small and ordinary range of "cool" colors available in Flairs when I was little. I never even imagined the ranges and effects that gel inks would open up. I think if they'd had something like Gelly Rolls when I was six, I'd've thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Re: Funny about that...

[mowglikat]

Oh Oh Oh! My favorite is the metallic colored gel pens when you write on black paper. I have a great metallic sky blue and bright pink...they look like car colors.

I also have a couple of flat ink gel pens. They look more like you're writing with chalk. But I find they skip a bit if they get too cold.

Re: Funny about that...

[klsiegel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I totally forgot about that - I love those, too. They almost glow.

What I love about the Zebras and Gelly Rolls, both, is that they seem to me to skip the least, and blotch the least. I did discover, however, that one has to be patient when writing journal entries with them - they don't all dry instantly, and if you're too quick to turn the page, you get spotted pages.

And I have no idea what the staying power of the ink is. I used to keep my journals in 5 x 8 spiral notebooks, just the ordinary sort you find at Staples or wherever. And I kept them with whatever pen I felt like using. Discovered a couple years ago that the oldest ones written with the Bic purple ink are developing a "glow" around the letters...

So, now I keep my journal in Levenger mid-size journal refills that I believe are made with acid-free paper, although I'm no more selective than before about inks. Ah, well. Who's ever going to want to read my old journals, anyway, except me?

On Writing Implements

[readinginbed.livejournal.com]

Oh, man! I hadn't thought of those old fat Bic four-color pens in a hundred years. I loved those things. I've been a nut for pens and paper since forever. I was also a fan of Flair pens when I was younger. The only pencil I ever got attached to was a pale blue mechanical one with a very fine lead and an extremely good eraser (didn't leave marks) that I used in college to annotate and underline in my Norton anthologies.

Re: On Writing Implements

[klsiegel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. I haven't had one for ages, and I never could write well with it because it was shaped badly, from an ergonomic point of view. The one I really went nuts for, later on, was a similar affair - a four-color pen - but the four colors were magenta, aqua, bright green, and pink. It wasn't by Bic, though it was clearly in the style of one. It also never wrote nearly as smoothly as a Bic, which is why it went the way of all pens quite some time ago...that and I could never find refills for it.

I'm starting to get a bit attached to a rather nice mechanical pencil I picked up a couple years ago - very fine lead, and also a good eraser, which I carry for marking music in rehearsal. And lighter than the fancy Preludes, so it doesn't take dives out of my hair.