Latest Update: Added Sacha’s 5 Ways to Deal with Writer’s Block.
Want to write every day? Chris Brogan says “The secret to writing every day is to write every day” - so just Write Every Day. He offers some tips on how to find the time to do a bit of writing, and you’ll probably find that if you do it a bit more often, you’ll get better at it. ...click to continue »
The leaves are turning brown, the nights are drawing in and writers across the globe are limbering up for another National Novel Writing Month. Fancy a go? ...click to continue »
I’m ashamed to admit it, but these past few months my creative side has been ignored so much I considered putting my gear on eBay. My work area was littered with half-completed projects, faded scribbled ideas on coffee stained post it notes, and a journal so badly neglected I could barely describe myself as an embodiment participant anymore. ...click to continue »
For all the writers out there who love the madness of NaNoWriMo and can’t wait ‘til November to have another go, why not stretch your muscles another way with this new challenge?
Script Frenzy is an international writing event in which participants attempt the creatively daring feat of writing an original, full-length screenplay—or stage play—in a single month. Spurred by a wild deadline and buoyed by a community of countless other writers, Script Frenzy participants can’t be bothered with self-doubt—or editing. They’re too busy writing by the seat of their pants, typing out beautiful, flawed stories that no one else could have dreamt up. ...click to continue »
Latest Update: Added a link to a Moleskine Hard Drive.
Moleskine? Little black notebooks, with a bookmark, elastic closure, and a storage compartment in the back. Useful little things on their own, but some people feel the need to trick them out further.
Most people just use their Moleskines freeform, scribbling whatever and wherever they like. Some people prefer a little structure… ...click to continue »
Latest Update: Added some brief notes on the Faber-Castell e-Motion, and the Caran d’Ache Fixpencil, and a link to an article I’ve spent a lot of time working on recently - The Cult Pens Guide to Mechanical Pencils.
Some of these link to full reviews of our own, and some link to reviews elsewhere (especially Dave’s Mechanical Pencils.) Others just have a few notes. We get to try lots of pens and pencils now, but don’t get chance to fully review them all. Most of the ones we’ve tried are via Cult Pens, Michael’s employer. Opinions here are entirely our own, etc.
There’s two main types of mechanical pencils - Leadholders and Automatic pencils… ...click to continue »
I always preferred short stories when I was young. They suited my attention span better. I liked science fiction, and short stories were plentiful, mainly in old second hand books that could be found very cheaply - another bonus. Generally, the shorter the story, the more I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure how extreme I’d have gone.
The idea of microfiction (see the Wikipedia article) is to tell a story in a very short form - usually around 300 words.
Well, Allison at Slow Burn Productions has taken the idea to an even more extreme level. He’s mixed the idea of microfiction with Twitter, to come up with Twitter Fiction. Twitter is intended for very short updates to say what you’re doing at any time, and your Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters.
At the time of writing, the idea has only just launched, and there’s only one piece of fiction there, so you need to write something before there’s much to read. The question is, are you creative enough to cram a story into 140 characters? I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge, but you can do it, can’t you?
UPDATE - Added a photo from my journal, and a link to my new flickr set.
During one of my daily early-morning pokes around the interweb, I stumbled across these journals from fine art paper manufacturer Hahnemuhle:
Now, it might just be my bleary early morning brain here, but those books do look very familiar with the rounded corners, elastic closure and… well, it doesn’t say whether this particular book has a pocket in the back, but its friend certainly does.
I’m going to have to get my hands on one or two of these to see how they compare against the legendary notebook it so resembles.
If you fancy doing a comparative test yourself, here’s where I found them:
Latest Update: Updated the page, mainly to make it a bit simpler to keep up to date. That big table was a pain to work with, and giving one page to each brand is more likely to work for us than trying to write a whole separate post about every colour we try.
One of the best things about fountain pens is that by either using a pen that takes bottled inks directly, or (more commonly in modern pens) using a converter, you can use any of a huge variety of different inks, all in the same pen. A bit about fountain pen ink first, then we’ll look at some specific inks… ...click to continue »
PigPog is Michael Randall and Sam Randall's site. It's about whatever we find interesting, which tends to include photography, geeking, creative stuff, and the occasional bout of catblogging.
