Writing archaically is fun

Writing has become very easy nowadays. Ballpoint pens and cheap paper make writing easy, convenient, and boring. I love antiquity, and when I saw a metal-nibbed quill pen at Barnes and Noble a few years ago, I bought it for fun. I had always assumed that using a pen that you dip in ink was very difficult, inconvenient, and messy. I was wrong on all three counts (although the last one is true if you are careless). I quickly learned that a good nib (id est*, the pointy end) could hold a lot of ink, enough for several lines at least. So dipping the pen is not really that much of a hassle. You end up stopping for other reasons, like thinking or listening to the professor in class, more often than the pen needs to be dipped. Don't use an inkwell with slanted desks though, unless you really like the color of your ink and want to wear it. In general, don't leave the inkwell somewhere it can fall or get knocked over, and don't touch the opening of the inkwell or the tip of your pen with your hand. If you are careful, you'll most likely not get any ink anywhere you don't want it to be. As for the difficulty of using a dip pen, once you get used to the feel of a nib, it's mostly just like writing with a regular pen. Italic nibs require you to slow down a bit, since the edges of the point are less rounded and thus do not glide as well. For my fountain pen, I got a cursive italic nib, which is an italic nib that is slightly rounded for quicker writing.

Writing with an italic pen, in italic lettering, makes your writing look like it's from the middle ages. It's pretty sweet. I taught myself italic letters after I got my fountain pen, and now I have two distinct handwritings. My regular handwriting is illegible, and has been compared to Egyptian by multiple independent sources, none of whom can read actual Egyptian. One of my high school teachers said he tried to read my homework for five minutes before realizing that he was holding it upside down. The funny thing is that when I write italic, my handwriting is beautiful. It's partly because I have to go slower, but it's also because it looks all medieval-like so I care more about making it look right.

I use my italic fountain pen when I am out and about, where inkwells are not welcome. You need a desk or three hands to use an inkwell. At home I have two quill pens, one with a pointed metal nib and another with a calligraphy nib. I don't have real quill pens (where the nib is cut from the feather itself) because I don't know how to cut the nibs yet. I also have a glass pen, which is fun to write with and more portable than a quill. It's easy to wash the ink off of in the drinking fountain so this is what I use at school.

After I found some pens I liked and learned how to write in italics, I decided it was time to become more authentic. So I tried to find parchment. At first all I could find was parchment paper, which is just a translucent paper that people use in wedding invitations and the like. But I managed to find some real parchment (made from animal skins) at an art and writing store near the Sorbonne in Paris. I bought a couple sheets (for 10€ each, yikes!) and am still saving them for a special (id est, worth 10€) occasion. The discovery prompted me to look harder, and I found a website, Pergamena, which sells sheets of it. It's still really expensive, but they also sell scraps. For $25 you can get a 1-pound bag of leftover pieces of parchment. Since animals are not square, after the nice pieces have been cut from the hide, there are strips that do not fit. Also, during the process of making parchment from skins, mistakes or imperfections can cause holes to appear as the parchment is stretched. So the bag has an assortment of small pieces and also some large ones with holes or thin parts that were not good enough for the nice sheets they sell for a lot of money. I just wanted to write on it for fun though so the scraps have been just fine.

Parchment is not like other paper. For one thing, being written on is not its main function. Animals use their skins first, not as a writing surface, but as a membrane between their gooey bits and their hair. So even after the skin has been made into parchment, it needs additional preparation before taking ink well. Untreated, it's greasy and the ink will just form droplets on top of it. And the other side is even worse since it's kind of fuzzy and can make the ink run. The parchment needs to be sanded and then degreased with a powder like ground gum sandarac. I was especially happy about that, since it gave me an excuse to get a small mortar and pestle to grind it myself.

Next, I plan to get better at preparing parchment without leaving scratch marks from the sand paper, and I also want to learn to cut feather nibs. You can get goose feathers from Michael's for $2 and then cut them into a pen if you know how. Buying a pre-cut nib is expensive ($10) and the point wears down anyway after a little while.


 
* I don't like abbreviating foreign phases because it makes people say dumb things. For example, invitations frequently say "Please RSVP". "Répondez s'il vous plaît" is French for "Respond please", so they are saying "Please respond please". If people wrote out the whole phrase, they might realize that RSVP is a phrase and probably includes the word "please" already. In this case, I have written out id est, which you might recognize from the abbreviation i.e. Many people, including me before I looked it up, are confused about the difference between i.e. and e.g. Writing them out fixes that. Id est does not look like "for example"; it looks like "that is". Similarly, one would be hard pressed to forget that "exempli gratia" means "for example". So, until everyone gets it right, I expand my abbreviations. I write out et cetera even though everyone knows what it means just because I like Latin and look for excuses to use the little of it I know.

The most recent, at time of writing, blog post

As the title may suggest, I don't have anything to say, but I am not letting a silly thing like that get in the way of a perfectly good blog post. The last couple posts have been stories, so I must insert a real post here before tackling this week's writing prompt from the folks at writingexcuses.com in the next post, if I get around to it.

I am going to force myself to not talk about books. I've written lots of posts about them already. Football is out as well, as I have already said pretty much all there is to say on the subject. I could talk about ducks, but most readers know what those are. Same goes for frogs.

I'll just talk about the news this week. Tuesday November 2 was a big day. It was the day Towers of Midnight, book 13 of the Wheel of Time, came out. It was written by my two favorite authors: Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Besides having a cool title, it is the penultimate book in the series. This is exciting and also sad. On one hand, we only have one more book to go to find out what happens. On the other hand, we only get one more book after this. Another good and bad thing is that Brandon Sanderson is awesome at finishing the series in the absence of Robert Jordan. It's great that the ending to this, the greatest literary achievement in the history of mankind (in my humble opinion, although wrong people might disagree), is in good hands. However, the downside is that Brandon can't write book 2 of the Stormlight Archive yet. Maybe I take that back. Writing A Memory of Light (WoT 14) will make Brandon a better writer, as writing The Gathering Storm (WoT 12) prepared him for The Way of Kings (SA 1).

That was news, which just happened to be about books, rather than me just talking about books again. So this blog post is still not about books, like I promised.

In other news, NaNoWriMo started. NaNoWriMo, like it sounds, is one billionth of a WriMo. Since NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, we can safely assume that a WriMo is one billion national novel writing months, or eighty-three thousand, three hundred thirty-three national novel writing years and four national novel writing months. That is why they are using such a small unit. NaNoWriMo is just during the month of November. Basically, the idea is that participants write a fifty-thousand-word novel in that month. There is no time for proofreading, agonizing over wording, et cetera. It's an exercise to get people to write.

Elections were this week. I thought it was funny last election that Obama's thing was "change". It was remarkably unspecific. Remember, prior to the election, US citizens were never attacked by winged monkeys and the dead did not rise up to terrorize the populace. Now, if Obama had made that happen, it certainly would have been change, and yet I don't think the people who voted for him had that in mind. Luckily for him, people assumed he meant good changes, and luckily for us, we haven't had any zombies or airborne simians show up. But I still think slogans should be a tad more specific.

That's enough news for today. Enough blog post too. The next post might be a Writing Excuses prompt or a discussion about Europe and/or its languages.

A story from yesteryear

George and the Dragon

By Brentus, circa 2009 at 2 AM

George was walking home from college one day. He saw a dragon. He looked to see if it had captured any princi (which, as everyone knows, is plural for princess). However, there were none to be seen.

“Now look here,” said George, “How the deuce can I rescue a princess if you haven’t captured any? Dragons these days don’t lift a claw to work. Do you expect the populace to terrorize itself? And how can I save a princess if there’s no dragon to save her from. I’ll never get married like this.”

“But I like princesses,” said the dragon, who had not been to school and was thus ignorant of proper pluralization, which is a word. “I wouldn’t want to bother them.”

“My dear boy,” said George, “I’m sure they don’t mind. Go ahead.”

“If they don’t mind, then why would you need to rescue them?”

“Well, they would mind, see, if I wasn’t going to rescue them. But I am. So they will understand that it is a necessary prerequisite to getting saved by a handsome prince, like me.”

The dragon looked pensive, because he was. “I must be missing something here, because that actually made sense, and I am pretty sure it shouldn’t have.”

Writing Excuses 5.6 prompt

Those of you who have been faithfully following this blog, if existent, would remember that I said I would post things I write, other than just blog entries. So I will use this place to do the weekly writing prompts given in the excellent podcast, Writing Excuses. These stories are just quick practices, and will not be particularly good as I will speed-write them. This week's prompt is: "Two critics who reviewed Dan Wells' book and who had completely opposite reactions actually read two different books…". Allons-y!

The Book Identity

By Brentus

Mr. Fiend checked his watch for the third time and cursed. It was not a real curse, since Mr. Fiend was just a codename, and in any case, real fiends are more creative with their last names. He was running out of patience. The truck should have been here twenty minutes ago. He casually leaned against a street sign which gave the names of two streets at this T-intersection of the quiet suburban neighborhood. He hoped it wouldn't rain, but the clouds looked threatening. It was harder to look casual standing around in the rain. The street was deserted at this time of day, with all the children at school and the adults working or staying inside. He was just beginning to realize that leaning against a street sign for no reason didn't really look all that casual anyway when he heard the rumble of the truck coming up the hill. He started to walk slowly to the house where he knew it would stop, assuming Mr. Demon hadn't messed up the address again. Mr. Fiend wished there was a less awkward way of secretly sending packages than slipping them into delivery trucks while the driver was not looking, but their secret evil organization, EVIL, had limited resources and could not risk sending packages registered in the computer system or deliver them with EVIL personnel. But they had found that long-range trucks would sometimes make stops on their way out of the city if there was a delivery close enough to the route, so they would order packages sent to people living there so they could secretly stash their parcels in the truck as it left town. A similar method was used to retrieve them at the other end.

The driver got out of the truck, found the package, and walked up towards the door. Mr. Fiend dashed over to the truck, placed the package in the usual place, and then sauntered away as the truck driver finished getting a signature. His work here was done. The rest was up to the receiver, Mr. Monster.


 
Mr. Monster checked his watch for the third time and cursed. He wasn't any better at it than Mr. Fiend, but he was just as impatient. It was raining hard and his shoes were soggy. Soggy shoes were not in the EVIL pamphlet. "See the world!" It said. "And then rule it!" Well, when he was in charge, soggy shoes would be a thing of the past. He just wished they weren't such a noticeable part of the present.

Headlights suddenly sprung up through the rain. The truck came to a stop, but one house down from where he had expected. Oh well, he could still walk quickly and make it in time. As the driver headed up the walkway, Mr. Monster dashed through the rain to the truck. He cursed again when he saw the package was not where it was supposed to be. But then he saw a package labeled "Mr. Monster ARC" in the middle of the truck. It must have shifted during the drive. Mr. Monster ducked around the truck just before the driver headed back up the walk.


 
Mr. Monster sloshed in through the double doors of the local branch of EVIL. He nodded to the secretary, and hurried past to his desk. Finally, they would have the documents necessary to gain access to the FBI databases. He tore open the box, wondering what Mr. Fiend had meant by "ARC". He was impressed by the disguise. Usually Mr. Fiend sent him a book with papers sloppily glued onto the pages. But this one looked like it had been printed just for him. He began to read. It appeared to be in code too, as it cleverly disguised itself as a young adult fiction novel. He began to worry that the code might not be easy to break. But he was enjoying the story.


 
John Smith's scathing review of Dan Wells' new novel appeared on his blog the following day. It was the worst review by far that it had received. While Bob Jones had given the book a glowing recommendation, praising the clear prose and quick-moving plot, Smith's review was very different. It read:

"I hate to say it, but the much-anticipated sequel to I Am Not a Serial Killer by Dan Wells is a total flop. I began to worry before I even opened the book, since the publisher didn't even care enough to give it a real cover. They only scrawled the title of the book, Mr. Monster, on the shipping box. In fact, they didn't even print the book, they pasted the pages over the text of an existing book! I receive many advance review copies of books and never before have I seen such shoddy publishing. Unfortunately, that was one of the best parts of the "novel" (my apologies to the word). I would say that the plot failed to provide a compelling story, but there just wasn't one. And not only is there a lack of character development in the protagonist, but there is a complete lack of the character himself! Instead, Wells ignores the plot, characters, setting, premise, and genre of the first book and just gives us a bunch of secret FBI codes! The only mention of a villain is an address on one page of something called EVIL. This book is a disgrace. Let us hope that the third and final book gets the series back on track, since the first book left me wanting more. More story, not FBI codes."


 
Shortly thereafter, the members of EVIL were arrested by the FBI on charges of conspiracy. The bureau rewarded the critic for his help in uncovering the plot by giving him an actual copy of Mr. Monster.