My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is an odd book which is kind of a stream of consciousness rant about the ways in which an artist struggles with what the author calls “Resistance.” That in itself is not odd, there are many books on ‘the writer’s journey’ but this one reads as though it has been written by someone who is on, then off his lithium (or cocaine, whatever the cause may be.) The whole thing is a rant, sometimes it’s an enthusiastic, insightful rant and sometimes it’s just a manic bitch rant (people who are sick, or who put attending the birth of their child above their art are simply giving in to resistance) and sometimes it’s just straight out spiritual/religious mish-mash-whackadoo (and I put ‘mystic agnosticism’ on the census as my religion, so I can handle a high level of spiritual mish-mash.)

The best way to approach this book is probably to think of it as an editorial – it’s just a guy with a bunch of opinions about why a true artist takes his art seriously. If you’re pining for someone to tell you that it’s okay to ignore the world, your loved ones etc… while you work, then this is the book for you (personally, though I don’t know what on earth you’re going to write about if you avoid the world as completely as he seems to suggest.) The other warning about the book is not to expect anything on how to actually achieve this resistance to Resistance. Yes, he mentions over and again, sitting down to it every day but that’s hardly new advice though the angels and God and muses just arriving is not something I’ve heard expressed in quite that way before.

As I said. Odd.

View all my reviews

Maybe I’m cheating a little because, as I watched it today, I remembered how much it tugged at my heart when I first discovered it and Levni Yilmaz’s other morsels of human insight, early last year, and I realised that I’m already a step away from that person. Of course, getting to the point where watching this with merely a nostalgic chuckle is a multi-year project, in itself, so maybe I’m not cheating that much.

I was a rebel for National Novel Writing Month, this year, albeit a tame one. Instead of starting a new novel, I used NaNo as an excuse/permission to put away a draft which was becoming a spaghetti bowl of potential plot threads and spend a month simply writing from the start again, knowing my characters and their situation but otherwise just seeing how the story played itself out, intuitively.   I thought it might be easier, knowing the characters and important story beats as I did, this time, but I found it much harder. Not only did I miss the wonderful support of my neighbour, Toni, in Sydney, but doing a re-write put a lot more pressure on me than the almost ‘free association” writing the NaNo concept encourages. I also found myself back pedalling and editing as I went, more, because I wanted to come out with as many usable words for my After Africa alpha draft* as possible, and I think I achieved that. Nevertheless I got the 50k done, have a new opening which is structurally more sound and gets us to the ‘bad guy’ faster, so I’m satisfied.

As with last year, I’m going to try to keep this momentum going beyond November because my aim is getting the alpha draft done, not winning NaNo, so posts should be fairly scarce through December, as well. For now, though, I’m going to go and have a rest because it seems my new medication’s “may cause drowsiness” warning should actually read “may cause drowsiness all through the next day, too!”  

I have just posted this on The StoryCraft Blog and, since hosting  #storycraft has been such a big part of my life these last 18 months (often my only regular appointment for the week,) I think it’s significant enough to post here on my personal blog, too. For those of you who have come here prompted by the invitation at the end of this post – sorry for the double-up!

As you all know, when I moved to Bangkok about 2 months ago, the old #storycraft time became around 4a.m. for me (depending on US DST) so I moved the chat to 10pm Bangkok time, which was about 11a.m. Sunday, New York Time.  After a good 6 weeks, those of you who have been managing to get to this new time won’t deny that it’s proving to be too early in North America to get enough people together for a fast flowing, idea-inspiring #storycraft.  I’ve tried to will the time zones to work in some better way but, alas, I don’t have such god-like power and I have had to admit that I have moved to the very worst time zone from which to host a tweetchat.

I am too fond & too proud of #storycraft and its community to let the chat die because of my time zone so I have faced the fact that, if the time can’t move then the host will have to change.

I have asked the lovely Kim Koning  (@AuthorKimKoning), an original #storycraft regular, who lives in New Zealand, if she would take over hosting #storycraft at the old time (3pm Sunday, US Pacific)and she has very kindly agreed to do so, starting next week.

Kim & I have similar sensibilities when it comes to the craft (we are both ‘hybrid’ pantster-planners) and agree on why a chat without ‘biz’ talk is valuable. She has a background in journalism, so her communication and editing skills are strong and she writes fiction so she understands what “my characters keep me awake at night” means and won’t be suggesting anyone needs to see a psychologist! Kim also shares my strong beliefs regarding no self-promotion during the chat and has a tougher skin than I (I feel horrible for hours after I’ve had to come down on even the worst troll) so will be able to keep those who are only interested in self-promo away from the chat at least as well as I have. I have every confidence that she will be a great host and I’m a little jealous of you all that you’ll get to participate!

When I announced this change on this week’s #Storycraft, I was asked if I will be participating at all. As Kim put it in a tweet last night, #storycraft will still be “@Danisidhe’s baby” – first and foremost because asking someone to take over the whole thing would be asking too much but also because, at this stage, Kim can only commit until February, so I’ll be looking for other solutions after that. Of course, I also don’t want to pull out entirely – I’m not doing this because I want to – but I will be leaving Kim sole control when it comes to hosting and chat topics because trying to host a topic imposed by someone else is just too difficult. Of course I’ll be supporting Kim in any way she needs and I’ll still be webmaster, so I’ll see the transcripts as I pull them each week & I might comment on the blog or Facebook between chats. Kim and I are both admins on the Facebook Page and Group, so we’ll both participate there, too. As to the chats themselves, if I am up at 4a.m. on Monday mornings, I’ll definitely pop in to participate because I’m going to miss everyone, but I hope that that will be rare because that would mean my insomnia is back!

There will be a period of rebuilding as the chat moves back to its old time and I hope that as many of you as possible will return to help Kim make that transition. Kim will be using her own account: @AuthorKimKoning, not @Story_Craft to host, so anything from @Story_Craft (or @Danisidhe), you’ll know is me Do follow @AuthorKimKoning and Kim’s Facebook page for updates, as well as The StoryCraft Blog for transcripts and other communications from both Kim and I.

Thank you to everyone for the wonderful chats I’ve been lucky enough to host over the last 18months, I hope to see you all around the #storycraft interwebs very soon. If you’d like to keep up with me outside of #storycraft, do come say ‘Hi’ over at my personal blog: Narrative Disorder and/or on Facebook.

As always,
Happy Writing!
Danielle
@Story_Craft/@Danisidhe

I was reminded of this, today, as I watched the movers pack up our air and sea shipments to go off to Thailand. Now, I’ve known for many years that I am more of a geek than I am a “girl”, I’ve worn the geek title proudly, but I have occasionally backed down when my geek-hood was questioned (online, of course.) Well, no more. Between my suitcase and the air shipment, the items that I have chosen not to live without include: 3 Computers of various size and power (but real ones, no iPad), an Android Tablet, a Kindle, all my camera gear, 46 fountain pens, 52 bottles of fountain pen ink … and 2 pairs of shoes. 

If you had to move overseas and you had the volume of 5 tea chests in which you had to put your most essential items, what would you put in your air shipment? What would it say about you?

An Interview with Ryan Roossinck, of The Pear Tree Pen Company

Q. Why is the business named “Pear Tree Pens” (I’ve always wondered)?

A: James’ last name is Partridge…i.e., “…and a Partridge in a Pear Tree…”  He’s a creative guy like that.  It’s one of the reasons that I was attracted to working with him.

Q. How many people work at (or with) Pear Tree Pens?

A: James is part-time (executive leadership, some customer service – mainly around watches and such, and he handles some of the vendor relationships too), I’m the General Manager (i.e., I’m in charge of nearly every aspect of the store, from web work to customer service, order fulfilment to ink sampling, shipping…the whole works).  My wife helps out once in a while, too.  Mainly though, this is a hobby business that James started about 5 years ago, and I climbed aboard about a year ago (almost exactly a year ago, actually).

Q: Is there a PTP office or is it less centralized? Where do you put together the samples?

A: There WAS a Pear Tree retail shop at one point, back when the store was located in Ann Arbor, MI.  As of about this time last year, though, that all went away when Kara and I went out there one weekend with a pickup truck and a rented U-Haul trailer and emptied the store.  We brought it back to West Des Moines, IA (roughly 8 hours away) and set up shop in our basement.  Samples are put together next to the refrigerator…the same place that we fill orders!

Q: How long has PTP been offering samples?  Was it in response to requests from customers or a PTP initiative?

A:The sampler idea was actually the genesis of the business.  James had been on a search for the perfect blue ink for quite a while, and had amassed a relatively large stash of blue inks that he really didn’t care for, and only a couple that he did.  After seeing the clutter in his office once, his wife mentioned that it’s too bad that there wasn’t a way to get samples of ink before plunking down the coin on the whole bottle…and it snowballed from there!

Q: How many samples do you put together per month?

A:As of today, we’ve filled 782 samplers this year, so that equates to somewhere between 75-80 samplers per month.  There’s some ebb and flow to it, but 75-80 is a safe estimate.

Q. Are you the only person that fills the samples?

A: For the most part, yes.  Once in a while, Kara will grab a syringe and some empty bottles and sample out a bottle or two, but for the most part, it’s all me.  It’s tedious work. but it’s somewhat of a labour of love.  We know that there are a lot of pen users who are searching for the perfect (fill in the blank) ink and that our samples are a big help to them.

Q. What are the most popularly requested ink samples (if it’s now Edelstein, what was it before lol)?

A: Most of them are Noodler’s, with a smattering of other ones thrown in, too.  Baystate Blue, Heart of Darkness, Zhivago, Squeteague, Dragon’s Napalm, Navajo Turquoise, and Bulletproof Black are all pretty heavily sampled.  We also get a lot of requests for both flavors of Aurora, Visconti Blue, Visconti Burgundy, J Herbin Eclat de Saphir, Perle Noire, Cafe des Iles, Lie de The, R&K Alt-Goldgrun, Caran d’Ache Saffron, Blue Skies, Private Reserve Avacado, and R&K’s Scabiosa…that probably rounds out our Top 20.  There’s a lot of ebb and flow there, too; if there’s a really positive review of something on one of the blogs or FPN or Twitter, we’ll see a corresponding spike in samples that go out the door.  Likewise, we’ll also see sales dry up if there’s ever a bad review.

Q: Have you noticed any particular ink which is often sampled but rarely gets a follow up full bottle purchase?

A: Flavors of orange inks get sampled fairly frequently, but we don’t blow orange inks out the door afterwards.  I think there’s a novelty involved with some shades of ink (Noodler’s Whiteness of the Whale, Blue Ghost, yellow and orange inks, and there are probably others) where people think, “Man, I wonder what white (or yellow, or orange, etc.) ink looks like?”  Those types of inks get sampled, but they don’t always end up getting purchased afterwards like the staple blacks, blues, greens, purples, etc.  We see a bit of an uptick with oranges, a few yellows, and reds in the autumn because it corresponds to the color of the changing leaves.  We see the same thing with greens in the spring.

Q. Is there an ink which almost always gets a follow up purchase?

A: Aurora Blue & Aurora Black usually have a good shot at follow-up purchases (and with good reason, too – they’re great inks).  Baystate Blue and Heart of Darkness also get a lot of follow-up purchases.  It’s a weird month if I don’t ship at least a bottle or two of Baystate Blue per week.

Q: Are there any colour shades that many people seem to hunt a while for – like my hunt for the perfect soft pink?

A: Everyone is looking for the elusive “perfect blue” and quite a few customers are looking for the right shades of brown, pink, burgundy/dark red, and green.  Lots of people are on the hunt for the perfect purple, too.

Q: How important do you think ink bottles are to people’s purchases? Have you noticed a drop in Private Reserve sales since they changed their bottles?

A:For some customers, the bottle really means a lot; from a practical perspective, I can understand exactly why, too.  Even if the bottle looks elegant and/or cool, it still has to be functional.  What good is a bottle if you can’t access the ink easily?  As far as the new Private Reserve bottles are concerned, I can’t really comment on that because we’re still fairly well-stocked on the old-style bottles (and we’ve got a TON of empties that we’re still selling).  We’ve got an order of the newer bottles on the way, though, so time will tell.

About Ryan:

Q: How long have you been at PTP and how did you come to work for them?

A: I was a customer first.  I bought my first Lamy 2000 from James back in 2007, and because I was asking for something particular about the 2000 I wanted (a dry-ish writer – as a lefty overwriter, wet nibs don’t generally work well for me), I called James prior to the purchase, and we became fast friends.  We traded business ideas back and forth, and I really liked what he was doing with his company.  The fresh stream of ideas that we traded back and forth was really exciting to me.  I finally got the chance to meet him face to face during the summer of 2009, and at that point, we got to discussing the possibilities.  A few months later, I ended up coming aboard as the general manager, and I think it’s been pretty successful since then.  The Pear Tree Pen Company is a brand that we’re both very passionate about, and we’re always looking forward to bringing new and interesting products to the market, and providing the best customer service in the industry.  I’m sure that there are improvements that we can make, but overall, I think we’re both pretty happy with the way that things have gone, and we’re looking forward to a big 2011!

Q: What is your history with ink and fountain pens? When and how did the passion start?

A: My exposure to fountain pens started when I was a freshman in high school.  I was at our public library, and stumbled upon a sterling silver Parker 75 (the Cisele pattern).  I turned it in to their lost and found, and they told me that if no one had come back to claim it within two weeks, I could keep it!  Nobody claimed it, so it became mine.  I used it off and on because I thought that it was unique, but shortly after the school year started, it vanished (I wish that I knew what happened to that pen…I’d give anything to have it back).  A couple of years later, I discovered Levenger and ordered a rOtring 600 and a Waterman Maestro.  They were great pens (I kind of wish that I could have that 600 back, to be honest).  During college, I didn’t really do much with pens, but in 2004, I stumbled upon a pen shop in Kansas City and fell in love with a bright orange Safari and bought it.  That was what hooked me on fountain pens.  A year or two later, I found the Fountain Pen Network, and it went steadily downhill from there!   Initially, the passion was because fountain pens were something unique, but after using them for a while, I realized that my penmanship was getting better as well as my thought patterns (I used to hand-write a lot of ideas when writing proposals for a consulting firm that I worked for).  After that realization (and discovering vintage pens and how well they wrote after restoration), I was hooked.

Q: Would you name your four favourite inks that are currently available for sample at PTP?

A: My favorites, in no particular order, are as follows.  Visconti Blue, J. Herbin Orange Indien, Pelikan Royal Blue, and J. Herbin’s Vert Empire.  Honestly, though, I’ve probably got a dozen favorites that we’ve got in stock right now.

Q: Would you name your favourite inks of all time (as many as you like!)

A: Being a lefty overwriter makes me a fan of the more traditional/European-style inks; if it’s too saturated, I’ll end up wearing it on my hand.  My favorites are Diamine Royal Blue, J. Herbin’s Orange Indien, Pelikan Brilliant Brown, Montblanc’s now-defunct British Racing Green (in my opinion, they made a big mistake in dropping this one from their lineup), R&K’s Alt-Goldgrun, R&K’s Scabiosa, Diamine Umber, J. Herbin Vert Empire, Waterman Florida Blue, Waterman Havana Brown, J. Herbin’s Lierre Sauvage, Noodler’s Heart of Darkness (which, in my opinion, is the best black on the market), Noodler’s Ottoman Azure, Visconti Bordeaux (the old-skool version), Visconti Burgundy (the current-production stuff), and Montblanc Toffee Brown (this is a relatively recent addition to their lineup, and it’s great stuff).  The list changes depending on the time of year (in the summers, I stick with more traditional stuff because it’s more resistant to the effects of humidity), as well as the mood I’m in…so don’t take this as the definitive list!

Q: Which are your favourite ink bottles?

A: This is a more succinct list .   For overall utility, my favorite bottle is the one that Lamy uses.  It allows you to get every last drop of ink out of the bottle without too much trouble, and the inclusion of the waxpaper-backed “toilet paper” to clean up the nib is a great bonus.  Other favorites include the bottles from Sailor, Caran d’Ache (who DOESN’T love these bottles?), Visconti’s glass V-bottles (again, who doesn’t love these bottles?), Montblanc’s boot-shaped bottle (both the old and the new are great designs), and the old-skool Sheaffer’s bottles with the built-in inkwell.  The new Pelikan Edelstein bottles are pretty stellar, too!

Thank you to Ryan for answering my questions so fully.  I hope you enjoyed finding out a little more about Ryan and the ebb and flow of people’s interests in ink. I personally LOVE that autumn leaf colours spike a little in Autumn and that people get frisky with spring greens in Spring!

You can find Ryan’s profile on the Fountain Pen Network as rroossinck and mine as Danisidhe. If you’re just finding out about the Fountain Pen Network from this post, FPN is a fountain pen enthusiast community with a blog and forums in which we share information – I’d suggest that if you’ve made it this far through this post then you’d probably enjoy it.

In my introductory post to my recent series on the Sailor Jentle, 2011 Limited Edition Collection, I mentioned that limited editions were difficult, if not impossible to “sample”.  Sampling fountain pen inks was something I discovered when I returned to Sydney and found that it was nigh on impossible to find inks that weren’t blue or black, here. Peter’s of Kensington ( a gorgeous, old fashioned department store that sends you to the Fifties when you walk in the door) has a good collection of pens and stock Noodler’s (though by no means the full collection,) Lamy and Waterman ink (again, not the full collection) but they won’t let you test it and the staff don’t seem to be particularly understanding of a fountain pen user who likes some colour in her nib.

I turned to the trick I had learned in Japan: ordering online. I accepted that, ordering sight unseen, I would get a few duds, not minding because it cost me less to order from overseas than to get any shop here to bring them in – even taking into account postage (just like ordering books from O.S.) That’s when I discovered a company called The Pear Tree Pen Company. While browsing their inks, I noticed a little item they called Fountain Pen Ink Samples.

For $4.99, the customer can choose any four inks they like from the extensive drop down list, and Ryan at Pear Tree Pens will put about 1cc/1ml of ink – enough to sample – into each small bottle, vacuum pack it, then box it up carefully, and whisk it off to you – it takes about a week to ten days to get to Sydney. As you can see in the picture above, the samples come in two basic types of bottles: with and without a dropper. I got the dropper first but found it just as easy to get it without and use my ink mixing syringes to get the ink out and into a pen.

There is another company that now also does samples but their international postage is just too expensive for me to consider (that may their intent) and I have a soft spot for Pear Tree Pens because of  Ryan Roossinck , who fills the samples and always leaves a little note (usually in a wickedly tempting ink that becomes part of my next sample order) and provides great customer service, despite PTP being an online shop. Ryan understands when you put in an order for eight different pinks, and will suggest pinks you haven’t thought of, because he’s ‘one of us’ – as you’ll see when I post an interview I did with him about the samples and how the company works, soon.

For anyone who loves to use a fountain pen and wants some coloured ink but lives far from a well stocked pen shop (or even just one that doesn’t allow you to test inks,) Fountain Pen Ink Samples are wonderful. Perhaps a little too wonderful – since arriving in Sydney, last year, my ink and fountain pen collection has gone from this:

to this:

And I use all of those colours at least once a month, honest I do

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read this book immediately after being disappointed by It was the Best of Sentences, It was the Worst of Sentences, so I may have been primed to have an overly enthusiastic reaction to a book which offered such a different take on the subject. To me, Fish’s book was more like a philosophical work on how to approach sentences than a “how-to” book and (apologies if Fish is riffing on a philosophy espoused by others, this being my first exposure to it) I think Fish is really on to something.

As in any book on ‘the sentence,’ Fish parses sentences but he eschews the traditional literary terms, the parts of speech etc., and, instead, approaches the sentence as “a structure of logical relationships.” What does this mean? Well, as I understood it, it means that, rather than analysing the sentence for the parts of speech and labelling those parts and checking them against a table of what is and isn’t allowed (the traditional method,) Fish divides the sentence into logical segments and analyses each part, how each part relates to, and changes, the other parts and what meaning, as a whole, the words in the sentence actually communicate. The ‘logical’ segments I spoke of require only that you are fluent in the language the sentence is written in, you don’t need to have studied literature, nor know how to label all the parts of speech, to learn how to analyse a sentence for quality.

In short, where traditional methods focus on labelling and rules, Fish’s method concentrates on the relationships between words and their effect upon each other and the reader (the content communicated.) Fish’s method consistently reminded me of learning a new language; We can learn the rules and exceptions by rote, but we are far more likely to become fluent using an immersion approach – this is what Fish does with sentences.

Fish analyses many different types of sentences for us, by way of showing us how to do it ourselves, and we may not all agree with the sentences he chooses, but this is beside the point, they are simply samples used to show a method. Still, if we want him to tackle a favourite sentence, Fish asks that we email him (thus, bad ratings of the book based upon which sentences he chose are not only missing the point but betraying that they didn’t read to Fish’s request for alternatives.) Fish gives the reader no sense of “there, now you know everything you will ever need to know about sentences” at the end of this book, rather, he sends us on our way having provided us the tools required to spend our lives learning and improving our writing, or reading.

View all my reviews

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was expecting something different from this book. The back of book blurbs used phrases like “wickedly funny” and “you’ll laugh all the way to writing better” (the former is a sentence, I know,) so I was expecting a light, new and easily absorbed, for even the uninitiated, take on the art of the sentence. “It was the best…” is lighter than Strunk and White, certainly, and the sentences that Casagrande corrects in order to instruct were, occasionally so bad they were amusing but it wasn’t laugh out loud funny (like, for example, “How Not to Write a Novel” by Mittelmark and Newman.)

I was excited by the first chapter, in which Casagrande declared, “Thy Reader, Thy God,” I looked forward to her showing us how good grammar helps us to serve the reader and she did do so but not in any particularly new way, nor in a way which would help those who didn’t already have a good deal of traditional grammar under their belts. Despite the ‘cheekiness’ of using “actual sentences” from actual pieces Casagrande has edited, albeit disguised, her adherence to an essentially traditional method of teaching grammar results in a heavy treatment of the subject.

If you have the traditional grammar background, there is no doubt that there is much to learn from this book, but it doesn’t meet the purpose I was hoping it would fulfil: a book I can recommend to those without the traditional grammar background, but with an almost religious belief that grammar is unnecessary.

View all my reviews

Maybe I just love a ‘ladder’ – I am a list maker – but I found the the graphs helpful because they were satisfying, they made me want to stay above that line!

After NaNo, I wished that I could keep using the site in the same way and for multiple projects but, of course, I couldn’t – fair enough, too, bandwidth for that kind of thing is expensive – even Storycraft crashes once a week, just after the chat, and that’s just to read posts! For months after NaNo, whenever I found myself thinking that the graph might help spur me on, I googled for word count apps. I found a few basic word count metres but nothing like the NaNo graphs and stats – until, finally, I hit on Write Track.

Write Track was designed by one  David S. Gale, himself a NaNo winner (2009) and married to one (2003.) David and his wife felt just as I did after NaNo but David had the skills to do something about it and put together a replacement, with some fantastic additions which take your non-writing life into account.

Here’s the Write Track basics:

1. you register (free;)
2. you create your own projects with your own target word counts and target dates;
3. the software creates a Calendar for you, giving you the average that you’d need to write each day to meet that goal and;
4. creates a graph ( a couple, actually) of your projected goal, which will gradually be overlaid in a different colour as you;
5. enter your actual word counts each day – or every few days because you can enter the actual word count for any day at any time (as long as it’s not in the future.)

Sounds pretty good, so far, but David has been both clever and  considerate and made Write Track a little different to NaNo, because it’s not actually NaNo all year round and life only puts up with that “I’m doing NaNo, how much blood is there?” crap in November, right? 

After you’ve created your project and Write Track has created your calendar, you can click on a day when, say, you have/or had meetings all day and have/had to take the kids to hockey practice and won’t/didn’t get anything done till late at night. You can ‘weight’ that day as ‘25’(percent) or even ‘0’ and Write Track will adjust the daily targets accordingly, spread over all the days you’ve allotted, and give the day in question a 25% or 0% load of the total. Similarly, if you have a day when you know you’ll have the house all to yourself and will write well all day, you can weight that day at 200% and, again Write Track will adjust the target over the whole project. Weighting and recalculating over the whole project allows you to catch up, without your feeling you have to do twice as much the next day – it’s gentle.  The daily target will also help you to work out if you are pushing yourself too hard, or not enough, with your overall targets.

I don’t have any screenshots for you because David seems to be ‘just this guy, you know?’, not a software company so it’s not presented with a slick ‘features’ and ‘screenshots’ page, but it works wonderfully and he does seem to be constantly tweaking it. Write Track is free to use, with a tasteful, unassuming donation button, which I clicked and sent him $19.95, because I’d be happy to pay that each year as a subscription for such a service.  The previous sentence should make it clear that this is not a paid recommendation post  – you’ll never find those on Narrative Disorder – or Storycraft, for that matter, I wish people would stop asking – and I don’t have any ties to the Write Track or David Gale, I simply like the software and highly recommend it.

Happy Writing!

“If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth – one a lot of writers would rather deny: The Reader is King. You are his servant. You serve the Reader information. You serve the Reader entertainment…Only by knowing your place can you do your job well….

Here’s another way to think of this: Your writing is not about you. It’s about the Reader. Even when it’s quite literally about you – in memoirs, personal essays, first-person accounts – it’s not about you…

When you forget the Reader, you get what I call writer-serving writing. It exists at every level of writing expertise. I’ve gagged on it when reading personal essays and caught whiffs of it in award-winning books and articles. I’ve been horrified to find it in my own writing. Writer-serving writing is perfectly appropriate in diaries and journals – but any writing that’s meant to be seen by a Reader must serve the Reader”

We discussed what we all thought of this theory, and whether it applied not just to the art of the sentence but to any other, or all of the elements of the art of crafting fiction.  Most were in agreement, as long as writers weren’t going to the extreme of trying to pander to the reader or ‘cash in’ on trends – though we also agreed that few readers actually want either of those things, even when it seems it may be the case. I had expected for a few of the “F… the readers, it’s not art if you do it for anyone but yourself”  gang (that’s an actual quote, though I won’t “credit” it,) but they must not have been around, this week, because they could not have resisted if they’d been lurking. Perhaps they were all off being avant garde having Mothers’ Day dinner at home.

It was an interesting discussion – if you’d like to see how it went, the transcript is at The #Storycraft Blog, here

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I’m giving this book 1 star because I simply could not push my way through it. A loved one asked me to read it, so I wanted to give it a decent chance but 33% was all the exposition I could handle. This is my first attempt at a Hobb novel, so I don’t know if she always writes in first person but I’m baffled as to why she chose that narrative perspective for this story set in a land with a grand, epic history. There is so much historical information that the author feels is necessary for us to know before we get into the story proper, that the result is a sense of one step forward, seven steps back. Each “I recall” begets another, whether it be the recollection of the POV character himself, or in blocks of dialogue as another character instructs the POV character. This, basically structural, issue is a great pity because there was a hint that the magic in this novel would be something more interesting than the magic of the “not-quite-humans-beyond-the-kingdom/s” usually is, but that possibility wasn’t enough to keep me reading.

View all my reviews

The first thing I thought, when I saw the Apricot ink in the bottle was “Edelstein Mandarin.” After I’d written with the Apricot I thought “This is what Edelstein Mandarin should have been.” Don’t get me wrong, I like the Mandarin but it’s just not Mandarin, which are delicate and sweet and a lighter orange than the ink  - in just the same way that this ink is more mandarin than it is the colour of apricots. Whatever it is called, I adore this colour, it’s sits perfectly between Edelstein Mandarin and Diamine’s Sunshine and is spookily close to the Rhodia orange, which is nice for days when I’m feeling a touch OCD and want to match my ink to my bloc pad or Webbie.

All the Sailor Limited Edition Jentle inks feel silky in my test pen (Lamy Joy with Medium nib), and show little, if any, feathering on the Clairefontaine, 80gsm, white vellum of the Rhodia Bloc pad I used for the tests.

Because my writing is not the best, the comparison inks listed are: Edelstein Mandarin; Diamine Sunshine Yellow and; J. Herbin Orange Indien.

Grenade is extremely close to the Oku Yama of the Autumn 2010 range and I wondered, for a few moments, if this was just re-named for the English market (if oddly.) When I opened the lid, though, it was clear that Grenade has more pink to it, where Oku Yama has a more of an oxblood hue, especially when put down wet. The scan doesn’t show the difference between the two very well, because they are both dark, purplish reds and I have the Oku Yama in a Japanese Fine nib pen (which is XXF in Western size) to minimize the brownish hue. You can see, though, that next to the De Atramentis Oleander, which is the truest red without any yellow in it that I’ve found, Grenade is a dark, purplish pink.

Because my writing is not the best, the comparison inks listed are: Sailor Oku Yama Autumn 2010 Limited Edition; De Atramentis Kermesin; De Atramentis Oleander (scented); Edelstein Ruby

All the Sailor Limited Edition Jentle inks feel silky in my test pen (Lamy Joy with Medium nib), and show little, if any, feathering on the Clairefontaine, 80gsm, white vellum of the Rhodia Bloc pad I used for the tests .

Because my writing is not the best, the comparison inks listed are: J. Herbin Vert Olive; Edelstein Aventurine; Visconti Green