Note: This is the fourth in a series of reviews on the five inks in J.Herbin’s“Les Subtiles” scented ink range. For an overview of the range and the review of the “Rouge” ink, see the first post in the series For a review of the “Ambre” ink, see the second post in the series. For a review of the Bleue ink, see the third post in the series.

I purchased the ink reviewed below from Pear Tree Pens as part of an official sample set from J. Herbin. The sample set contains 10ml glass bottles of each of the five inks in the range: Rouge, Bleue, Ambre, Vert, Violette.

The Vert ink of the “Les Subtiles” range is the green of the range and is advertised as having an apple scent.

Scent: The scent of this one is not as disappointing as the Ambre and Bleue, it is definitely apple, though it is, again, very sweet. It’s by no means a fresh apple scent but it is a candy-apple scent and it’s lovely, if you’re in that kind of mood, and the colour is pretty vibrant so you’ll want to be in, or creating, a happy mood when you use it.

Colour: This ink shouts GREEN! It is not too yellow, not too blue. In a drier or finer pen is a true “Granny Smith” apple skin colour, almost a highlighter colour, but it certainly does not fluoresce.  I quite like the dark green it gives from the dip pen when fully loaded and I’ll be seeing what it’s like in a broad, wet nib, soon – I’ll update this post then.

Conclusion: I do like this ink, I probably won’t use it that much, but it is a nice addition to my green selection and has an agreeable scent.

Note: This is the third in a series of reviews on the five inks in J.Herbin’s “Les Subtiles” scented ink range. For an overview of the range and the review of the “Rouge” ink, see the first post in the series For a review of the “Ambre” ink, see the second post in the series.

I purchased the ink reviewed below from Pear Tree Pens as part of an official sample set from J. Herbin. The sample set contains 10ml glass bottles of each of the five inks in the range: Rouge, Bleue, Ambre, Vert, Violette.

The Bleue ink of the “Les Subtiles” range is the blue of the range and is advertised as having a lavender scent.

Scent:  Let me first say that it may be that this ink is not consistent in its scent. A couple of people on Fountain Pen Network (if you’re a member, I’m Danisidhe ) have said that they felt the scent was like true lavender and that they quite liked it while others have said that this and the rose and violette had so little scent they could barely smell it. I wish the latter had been the case with this one.  The scent that I got was about as far from Lavender as it’s possible to get – in fact it was more like that fake lime cordial scent that some ‘lime’ milkshake syrups have. It was very odd and quite off-putting. I’m actually mildly allergic to Lavender and lavender oil (I get a slight rash) so I’m pretty good at picking it up and I didn’t sense any lavender at all.

Colour: This ink goes down as a sort of a dark, denim blue but dries (eventually, I’m talking at least 3 hours) to be a genuine, English lavender delicate greyish blue with a touch of purple. It’s quite lovely, it’s a terrible pity about the scent.

Conclusion: Great colour if you like a subtle purple but the scent, in my bottle at least, was not lavender and too strong to ignore. The scent was repellent, as with the Ambre ink, but it wasn’t lavender.

Note: This is the second in a series of reviews on the five inks in J.Herbin’s “Les Subtiles” scented ink range. For an overview of the range and the review of the “Rouge” ink, see the first post in the series.

I purchased the ink reviewed below from Pear Tree Pens as part of an official sample set from J. Herbin. The sample set contains 10ml glass bottles of each of the five inks in the range: Rouge, Bleue, Ambre, Vert, Violette.  

The Ambre ink of the “Les Subtiles” range is the ‘orange’ scent of the range.

Colour: 

As the name implies, the colour is not a true orange but an amber colour which is more of a brownish-yellow, almost exactly the same as their “Ambre De Birmanie”.  The third and fourth lines of the sample page, below, are Ambre de Birmanie written with a very fine, very dry Pilot Cavalier, it was taken only five minutes after I wrote it and shows a little more orange than the de Birmanie but it has since dried to show no difference. I really suspect they are the same ink with the scent added. I do wonder why they went for this more subtle colour over a true orange as vibrant as the violette is purple and the vert is green, I suspect it is because the scent they came up with would have been even more obviously wrong if the colour had been closer to a juicy, citrus fruit.

Scent:

There are two ways you can go with ‘orange’ as a scent or flavour: the fruit or the flower. If you go for the fruit, you need to get that fresh tang of citrus orange, if you go with orange blossom it also needs to be fresh but sweet and almost creamy. Just as they chose the non-vibrant route with the colour, J. Herbin chose to go with Orange Blossom scent instead of the fruit – but I’m afraid they haven’t got it right. 

To be fair, orange blossom is hard to do, even the company that makes my favourite rosewater, for cooking, fails miserably in their orange blossom water, like many attempts at the scent, it’s soapy rather than creamy. The Ambre “Les Subtiles” fails in a similar way, it’s extraordinarily soapy, but it also has an extra element which makes it unbearable – a soil-y note, very much like turmeric, which cuts through the soapiness and clashes in a quite nauseating way.

Conclusion: I found the scent of “Les Subtiles” Ambre repelled me but the colour is a nice subtle alternative to the usual yellows. Luckily, if you like the colour you can buy the Ambre de Birmanie (as I had already done) and save your nose.

Scented inks are one of my favourite discoveries. Not only does the scent add an extra mood-setting element for my writing space, but it is also a reminder to consider all my characters’ senses as I attempt to communicate their experience with my words.  Scent is also a powerful memory agent which, I find, transports me with full sense and emotional memory in a way that words, or even pictures do not – and mining those rich veins of emotion is an important tool for a writer.

Of course, the power of scent is dependant upon the scent being, Goldilocks style, “just right.” The wrong scent can distract and repel as powerfully as it can draw you in, and getting it right is not easy. I find in perfumes and food flavourings, as well as ink scents, florals are often powdery or soapy, and fruits and other flavours are often more like milkshake syrup versions rather than true scents.

When I saw that J Herbin had a range of fruits and floral scented inks, “Les Subtiles”, I was eager to find out if they were any good – particularly the rose, violet and apple, which are three of my favourite scents. You’ll see over the next few posts that my impressions are … mixed.

As they do for some of their calligraphy and dip-pen pen inks, J Herbin offers a sample set of  “Les Subtiles” (pictured above) with five 10ml bottles of all five colours in the range: Rouge; Bleue; Violette; Vert and; Ambre. The bottles are not the same shape as the full size, pictured left, but they are good quality glass  with silver-coloured tin lids, which are a little flimsy but do the job perfectly well. There is a dearth of pen shops in Sydney, and the few that exist don't regularly stock such specialty inks, so I ordered my sample set from Pear Tree Pens, in the States, and it arrived in Sydney in 5 days!

Over the next week or so, I will post a review of each of the inks. Please excuse the quality of the photos, as this was my first attempt at white page photography and I have far from perfected the art – but I will!  I’ve tested each of the inks on a Rhodia white pad with the same glass dipping pen which is a fine nib, as glass pens go. I haven’t noted things like drying time, flow, or done a swab because, as you can tell from my handwriting, I am no artist. I use my pens purely for writing copious amounts of text, so I’m not a good judge of such things (and if the ink isn’t dry before I turn the page on my notebook, I use blotting paper – no time to wait!)

If you are an artist looking for an artist’s review, I highly recommend my favourite ink review blog (which inspired me to start reviewing ink here) The Spiritual Evolution of the Bean where the inks Stephanie reviews and all their shading potential are shown off in magnificent mandalas. I couldn’t find a review of “Les Subtiles” on “The Bean” but the index of her reviews of Herbin inks makes me a little jealous that she has had the joy of sampling so many!

On with my first ink review!

J. Herbin “Les Subtiles” Rouge – rose scent

I’ve started with the best of the lot, the colour is a lovely, deep, red on the blue side of the red spectrum (where I like my reds to be), and the scent is that of true roses – nothing powdery, soapy or fake about it at all. In both scent and colour, it is very similar to Mont Blanc’s Love Letter ink. You can see the similarity of colour in the sample pictured below, the first two lines are the Herbin and the second two are the Mont Blanc (I know I’ve written it but I’m fully aware that my handwriting requires some translation!) The fourth and fifth lines are a sample of Private Reserve Dakota Red, written with a very wet Parker Sonnet, which is a Red on the yellow side of the red spectrum, if only just.

It’s personal taste but I think it wins out over the Mont Blanc on two points: First, the colour dries without any hint of brownish tones (the Mont Blanc on Ivory or Cream paper can look as though the message is written in blood – I suppose that’s romantic to some, but not to me.) Second, while I hadn’t considered the Mont Blanc to be a powdery scent (I use the term ‘powdery’ in the perfumery sense), when I smelled it to see if, perhaps, they were the same ink, it is definitely less subtle and slightly more powdery than the Herbin.

I will definitely be purchasing a full sized bottle of this one, I can see the 10ml going quickly!

I’ve been enjoying Betsy Learner’s blog for a long time so I feel a little silly that it has taken me so long to read her book: The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice for Writers. In fact, I can’t even take credit for having finally decided to do so, as it was the first book chosen for discussion in the new book club which is an offshoot of the #scribechat tweetchat, which I try to join on Fridays. However it happened, I am so glad that I finally got round to reading it!

The Forest for the Trees  is not a how-to-write manual like Donald Maass’ books, nor a right-to-write inspirational like Julia Cameron’s, rather it is a memoir-style book, along the lines of Stephen Kings’ On Writing. The book has everything that keeps me reading Betsy’s blog; it is written with grace and humour, generous with her insight, blunt when necessary but never cruel, and it is peppered with just enough industry gossip to make us feel clever but not dirty.

I highly recommend this book to anyone considering publication, living with or loving someone considering publication and anyone considering a career in the publishing industry. Betsy worked as an editor for 15years before becoming an agent, and is also an award winning author and poet, what she shares with us in The Forest for the Trees is hard-earned experience, which only a fool or a writer could ignore.

For as long as I can remember, I have been desperately concerned with my level of metacognitive skill. It was the reason I gave the first story I ever wrote for public consumption to my best friend to critique, I was seven and I remember vividly the relief that I had a chance to fix it before I read it to the prep class (the grade before grade 1, in Australia.) Metacognition is the ability to assess one’s own skill level and, of course, I didn’t know the word until my university philosophy of mind studies, but my greatest fear has always been not failure to achieve perfection but to have thought that what I had done was objectively good and then to discover that it wasn’t.

Whether a child, probably too young even to have metacognitive ability, should be worrying about such things is a valid question for another, more private, forum, but it has driven a life-long love of theory and research, if only to do as much as I can to make sure I don’t find myself in that situation. It’s what drives me to believe that editing and story analysis classes are more important for a writer than any “Express yourselves, dahlings!” creative writing classes. It’s also lead to a morbid curiosity about how on earth people have the confidence to, for example, audition for So You Think You Can Dance despite having no ability whatsoever. Aren’t they embarrassed? And how can they not know how bad they are?

The same questions come to mind when I read an terribly flawed piece of writing.* When I have been asked to give feedback (professionally or no) I have to try to work out why the writer hasn’t noticed these flaws so that I can work out the best way to approach giving my feedback in the hope that it will be taken as constructively as it is meant. I have found, again and again, that the level of confidence the writer has is an excellent gauge, invariably, those whose pieces need the most work are most shocked that any work is required and genuinely seem to have believed they had produced a masterpiece.

I have discussed this many times with Superman and he recently pointed me to a 1999 report which shed some interesting light on the subject and backs up the, now old-fashioned, belief that anyone who believes themselves to be the best at anything is unlikely to be even close to the best.

The Report: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”**

In their 1999 report, Kruger and Dunning outlined four studies they had undertaken which were inspired by previous studies which showed a correlation between level of confidence and lack of ability. Kruger and Dunning devised experiments in which they asked people to take tests in the areas of logical reasoning, humor and English grammar, then asked them to estimate both: what their specific test score had been and; which percentile their test results fell into (i.e., where their test result would fall in comparison to others’.) The aim was to find the subjects’ actual skill level in an area, and then see if they were aware of what their skill level actually was.

Their findings were unambiguous: the less skill you have, the more grossly you overestimate your ability and, perhaps more instructively, it seems only those with above average skill underestimate their skill. Thus, if you want to make an assumption about a person’s skill from their attitude, the best thing to do is to watch out for humility, not confidence!

“But, but, but!” I hear all the management-book-steeped would-be-Donald-Trumps of the world shriek, “That’s loser talk. Confidence is the most important thing! If you don’t think you’re the best, who will?”

This is an attitude that, as far as I can tell, began to seep into the world in the 80’s, as advertising men, salesmen and generic ‘business’ men began to make enormous amounts of money, and people started looking to them as icons of success. Suddenly, everyone was reading management and wealth-building books written by these ‘guru’s, and this requirement for uber-self-confidence was being applied in interview rooms across all sorts of industries. Quiet confidence and humility became associated with ‘losers’ – who just didn’t want it enough, or were cursed with low self-esteem - a condition which was to be treated like a highly contagious disease.

I’m not denying the existence of, or problems associated with low self-esteem. It may surprise some people who have met me, because I usually speak with confidence, but I’ve been close to crippled by low self-esteem for much of my life. When I speak up, it is with confidence, but that’s because I only speak up if I have done copious research, practice and, especially if it involved public speaking, throwing up, in private.  I understand completely that a certain level of confidence is required just to step into any arena of experience, some more than others, but beyond the minimum level of confidence required for the particular task at hand confidence is, as the studies demonstrate, more of an indication of lack of skill than of competence.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that projection of confidence is essential in marketing, or sales, or any profession which requires one to convince others to willingly do what you want them to do. I also understand the philosophy that any interview is a sales pitch of yourself. It is not true, however, that every job is a sales job and anyone who conducts interviews for non-sales positions and makes their decisions based on who sold themselves most confidently really can’t complain when that applicant turns out not to have the skill they’d hoped (or has even lied on their resume!) Such interviewers are as responsible for the bad hire as they would be if they’d ordered a disappointing piece of exercise equipment skillfully advertised in the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, a study like this isn’t going to instantly change the prevailing culture but I thought it worth sharing with my small audience of, mostly, writers hoping to be published who are wrestling with their own levels of confidence, or perhaps should be

*Note: Any discussion of ability brings with it the jinx that there will be numerous grammatical and spelling errors in the very piece discussing it. I’d like to point out that metacognition is the issue here and I’m fully aware that this blog post won’t be perfect, unwilling as I am to spend more time than it takes to jot down the thoughts and get my creative juices flowing for my fiction writing!

** “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, Justin Kruger and David Dunning Department of Psychology Cornell University, © 1999 by the American Psychological Association For personal use only--not for distribution December 1999 Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134

Rather than write another how-to book, Mittelmark and Newman have produced a book in a format which will be familiar to TV Tropes readers, naming, describing and creating their own hand-crafted, hysterical examples of many of the mistakes that unpublished authors make in spec manuscripts (though I have certainly seen many of these in published books, too!)

Ask yourself, are you guilty of:

“The Overture: Wherein the prologue is a brief guide to the meaning of life”

“The Puffer Fish: Wherein the author flaunts his vocabulary”

“The Joan Rivers Pre-Novel Special: In which clothing is given too much prominence?”

“The Vacation Slideshow: In which the author substitutes location for story?”

“Gibberish for Art’s Sake: Wherein indecipherable lyricism baffles the reader”

““But, Captain…!”: Where characters tell each other things they both already know”

“Hamlet at the Deli: Wherein the character’s thoughts are transcribed to no purpose”

“Goodbye cruel reader! In which an inconvenient character is conveniently disposed of?”

“The Underpants Gnomes Where crucial steps are omitted?”

and does your novel end with

“Now with 20% More Homily! Where the author tells us what he’s just spent 300 pages telling us”

If you find yourself haunted by some of the examples (and if you are even slightly honest with yourself, you will) and if you find yourself trying to justify your particular use of them, then they are probably the things you most need to fix!

Laugh out loud, shriek out loud, funny, this book will teach you more than many similar books which take you away from your writing for far longer. Definitely a book every would-be novelist should read.

It took me a year to get my 10-17mm fisheye lens and I finally managed to get down to the building in the dying light of our last day in the city. I was terribly sad that day, and much of it was spent doing obligatory things with other exiting ex-pats who couldn’t give a damn that they were leaving, were actually excited about it and even laughed when they noticed I was struggling with tears, so snatching those couple of hours to do a walk about the city I’d fallen in love with and spend some time with ‘my building’ was precious.

I really should have got around to it earlier as I learned a lot from looking at the images afterwards, and would have loved a second go, but here are some of the results.

Do full screen the slideshow if you can, it will heighten the fisheye effect. I hope you enjoy this beautiful building.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Social Media cannot or should not be used for promoting a product, of course it can. I have no issue with someone I have followed or befriended posting about their current project on their account so that I’m aware of it and can opt-in in some way, nor do I have an issue with someone I have directly corresponded with sending me a private message asking me to give them a little support in their project before they go wide with it – that’s the good, effective way to use Social Media for PR. What I do have a problem with is the number of messages I have been getting, supposedly ‘tailored’ to me, or not, from accounts clearly set up purely for PR, which show very little genuine interest in either me or the platform they want to exploit.

So, fwiw, here’s my advice to anyone wanting to use Social Media for promotional purposes:

Any time you send an unsolicited message about a product directly to someone on any of these social media, you are not being an uber cool company that is down with what the kids are doing these days – you are TELEMARKETING. Not only are you telemarketing, but you are calling during a dinner party. Imagine being at that dining table when the call comes through. Now imagine the talk about you and your product afterwards – it’s not going to be good is it?

If you want to use Social Media to promote something, you have to actually BE social – be ready to put in the time or it will all be for naught. Tweet or post about something other than just your own products, something which will be interesting to your target audience so that they will engage with you and wonder what you or your product is all about. Getting a good word of mouth campaign going used to be a real coup in the PR world, because it was subtle, if sometimes vulgar, work. Social Media is all about word of mouth, so you need to put as much creativity into encouraging those conversations as you did pre-social media – the size of these vast networks you wish to exploit make it a more delicate process, not a shortcut.

Illustration credit: Matt Hamm

The plan was to do our best to treat Sydney as though it were Japan and continue to travel, playing tourist in our own land, and continue to blog about life as an ex-pat wife, hopefully hitting on the odd issue that could be helpful to someone. It seemed a good plan; we lived here for 18months before we moved to Japan and it was, indeed, like moving to a foreign country (I genuinely found Japan easier), so clearly there were difficulties worth addressing. Now that we're here, however, the cost of living prevents us from being able to travel as we did in Japan, so travel and photography will be limited to the, not unattractive, metropolitan area. What is more, in the few months we've been here, I've found solutions to the main problems we had living here last time and, while I will eventually write those posts, there really aren't that many ways to say "Have lots of money" and "Don't live in The Shire".  

Nevertheless, life is not lacking excitement, even if it is the kind of excitement which only that percentage of the population which identifies as 'writers' (and possibly musicians and other creatives) would define as such. Perhaps it's the lack of beautiful architecture luring me from my desk, and/or the removal of the constant, low-grade stress of living in a land in which you do not speak the language, but my narrative disorder has returned with a force I have not experienced for many years, perhaps even since high school. Characters are tramping through my head all night, scenes are playing like movies in my mind's eye, often from the moment I wake. When sitting down to write each weekday, my only creative angst derives from trying to unravel the big ball of scenes which seems to have replaced my brain. It's bliss!

All that is not to say that it's easy. No matter how quickly or slowly scenes come to mind, rarely do they come in order, and, despite the phrasing sometimes used to describe the process, nothing actually writes itself. What is different at the moment is that the scenes come so fast that it's all I can do to get them down, and there is simply no time for self-doubt. For years, I've understood intellectually the theory that you have to take off your editor's hat while writing your first draft. I've repeated the advice as mantras: "You can't edit what you haven't written"; "If it's worth doing well, it's worth doing badly till you learn", trying to convince myself not to second-guess as I go, but I've never before managed to achieve it. I'd like to think that I've reached some kind of personal and professional turning point, that this new state is the result of my continual practice and study of the craft, and that it will be, if not permanent, at least something I can call upon at will, but I daren't tempt the Gods by assuming such a thing.

And so, the answer to my original question becomes clear: the blog will return to its original subject - my Adventures in Wordcraft (I wonder if I still have any readers from when the blog was called that?) Whether this blissful state is permanent or not, I'll be doing everything I can to nurture it and, while I probably won't share my actual writing with you here, I will do my best to share anything that helps me to keep this state going. Off the top of my head, I can imagine posts might include: reviews of books on writing; alerts to a writer/agent/publisher whose blog or tweets I find inspiring; recommendations of tech that make reading or research easier; reviews of fountain pens and inks I use to slow down and create less frantically; or even a recipe for some comfort food to soothe a ragged, creative soul. 

To those of you who came to this blog because it was about Japan, I want to say thank you for reading these past eighteen months, I hope I was able to help your own Japanese experiences in some small way. I have a few posts on Japan left in me, but only a few. Many of you are also writers and I hope you'll stick around to see where this goes, but I won't be surprised or upset if I see my subscriptions and views dropping substantially - it's quite a ride, the whole ex-pat jBlogger thing, even from the sidelines where I've been hanging out!

Of course, the most important way to nurture the muse is to answer its call to write, so chances are there will be awfully long gaps between posts, but I imagine only family, friends and writers will be watching for Narrative Disorder to go bold on their feed readers, so I'm sure I'll be forgiven. 

From my desk to yours, happy writing!!

"I have a thing for second hand bookshops which specialize mostly in non-fiction or old textbooks (there’s something brash and low self-esteem about second hand fiction, their titles somehow always seem to have turned into huge, slutty pink-foil letters!) The good ones have the musty-sweet scent of old paper and have no cafe, and no music, just floor to ceiling books with conveniently placed ladders.

My two favourite stores in Melbourne (Australia) were Dr. Syntax in Commercial Rd, South Yarra and what is now boringly called the Queenscliff branch of “Barwon Booksellers” in the old bluestone Wesleyan church in the main street of Queenscliff. I say “were’ because one lunchtime – god, a decade ago? – I headed down to Dr. Syntax to finally purchase the complete John Donne in pretty blue leather and the 1930s textbook on Australian Aboriginals and two other texts from the 50s, that I’d had my eye on for some time (I love old anthropology textbooks as a sometimes eye-opening, often hysterical history of the ignorance and arrogance of the ruling elite) to find it had gone out of business.  I was devastated, and felt fairly guilty for not having just bought the books in the previous weeks (my $120 surely would have kept them going!)

Some weeks later, on holiday in Queenscliff (a beach town around the bay from Melbourne) I wandered into the ex-church-bookshop and was browsing when I spotted a familiar little book with pretty blue leather binding. I snatched it up and, sure enough, it was my Donne – with the Dr. Syntax price still in pencil in the front flap!
I raced to the counter and breathlessly asked if they’d purchased the Syntax stock – they had! I found all four books that day and left with the odd feeling that I’d discovered that some lost friends had found themselves a good home."

The following picture was taken in on Sea Shipment Day, 2008, 6 weeks after we arrived in Japan - many of the books pictured were purchased at Doc's

Powered by Twitter Tools

But the mic had a standard tripod fitting... Why. not? http://tweetphoto.com/13766966 #

Ah, Autumn. Gotta love it. http://tweetphoto.com/13936088 #

Look at that green! lettuce, capsicum, tin of tuna in oil, verjuice - simple & fabulous! http://tweetphoto.com/13987125 #

Look Ma! No boxes! Phase 4 - Done! http://tweetphoto.com/14214795 #

Powered by Twitter Tools

Work space done but for temp white table while damage to desk is fixed http://tweetphoto.com/13571201 #

Powered by Twitter Tools