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Four Pens in PlayMarch 05, 2010 While working on my Rotary talk, I hauled out an almost-new college-ruled spiral-bound notebook and started writing in it. "Psychic maps" is already branching out, spiraling around, spinning off new seeds. Morgana V wants everything sorted into files and folders, but material in the sprawl stage resists the either/or classifications necessary -- Save As what? my brain short-circuits just trying to come up with a filename -- while notebooks are more laissez-faire. Just write goddammit, they say. You don't need to call it anything. A couple of stories were developing, one about going to Katharine Cornell Theatre for the first time, another about going to the Edgartown post office. I didn't want to force a connection between them, so the obvious solution was to start them on different pages. And in different colors, so I could flip to a page and know immediately which story I was in. My fountain pens haven't been getting enough exercise in recent months, so they all needed refilling. The dark green one with the emerald green ink, the one I had been using most often, seemed to have gone missing. After looking in all the obvious and not-so-obvious places -- but resisting, barely, the temptation to tear the apartment apart in search, since deep in my heart I recognized that for yet another procrastination technique -- I figured that it had probably fallen off my desk and into the wastebasket. Like my stamp pad, pocket calculator, and assorted pencils, it had done so before and I'd rescued it. Most likely it fell in one more time than I pulled it out. So I filled the Pelikan 200 (translucent yellow) with dark cherry ink, the Verona (purple) with brown, and the two True Writers (blue and black) with, respectively, green and fireball -- a brown-tinged orange that calls attention to itself -- and went to work. I love writing in longhand. I also write well in longhand -- my editor takes a break and pretty soon my writer stops looking over her shoulder. I keep forgetting this. As I wrote, shifting from one pen to another as necessary, I noted how fluent the Pelikan and the Verona were and how comparatively scratchy the True Writers. I have four True Writers, including the missing green one, all purchased when I became a born-again fountain pen user while working my way through Julia Cameron's Artist's Way workbook. They're beautiful, and relatively inexpensive, but when I bought the Pelikan (on sale), I realized that some pens write more smoothly than others, and their ink doesn't have to be coaxed to flow after a day or two off-duty. An upgrade, I decided, was in order. Maybe two. First I browsed the Fahrney's Pen website. Then I did a little online research. Then I started haunting eBay. I've bid on several, but so far they've all gone out of my reach. I'm looking for another Pelikan or a Sailor. I'm high bidder on one of each right now. Wish me luck. Update, 4:09 p.m.: I am now the proud owner of a Sailor Procolor 500 in wisteria violet. It'll be shipped in the next day or two from Japan. Yee-hah!
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