writing
- Jacques Herbin Émeraude de Chivor
- LAMY Turquoise
- Herbin Perle Noire
- Noodler’s Baystate Blue
- Fisher Space Pen Turquoise
- Zebra F-Refill Black
- Pentel EnerGel Blue
- Jacques Herbin melted away.
- LAMY was as ruined.
- Herbin feathered badly but was readable.
- Noodler didn’t notice.
- Fisher blurred slightly.
- Zebra: what water?
- Pentel was also lost.
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This is enough of a trigger for me to remember that day when I look back at it later. It’d be useless for anyone else reading it, but I write for me, not for a hypothetical person who gives a care about what I was doing in 2021. ↩︎
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Rhodia Webnotebook A5. Lamy Safari fountain pen, Noodler’s Baystate Blue ink. If I were ever going to enjoy handwriting in a book, I’m sure this is the setup that would have won me over. ↩︎
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None of this applies while on camping trips. I take a paper notebook with me to write in because I don’t have to charge it. ↩︎
Testing my fountain pen inks' water resistance
I wondered how water-resistant the inks from the various pens on my desk would be. For my unscientific test, I wrote a small sample of text with each of these inks on a sheet of plain white copier paper:
Don’t judge my penmanship. I know. I know.
I let them dry overnight. Then I used a wet toothpick to put one drop of water on each sample, being careful not to move the paper or water at all. The results were mixed:
While I don’t make a habit of getting my notes wet, if were carrying a notebook out of the house, I’d pick one of the survivors. Baystate Blue and the Zebra F-701 weren’t affected. The space pen was fine, and Perle Noire was readable. I wouldn’t risk Émeraude de Chivor, LAMY, or EnerGel to rain, drops of water off an ice tea glass, or even damp hands.
My notebooks often spend their entire lives on my desk and I don’t exactly take them scuba diving. Yet, this is a good thing to know.
For my next experiment, I’m going to let the same inks dry for a week before testing.
Followup 2024-03-17: I tried again after letting the inks sit for 2 weeks. The results were similar to the original test:
The extra time didn’t let them “cure” or “harden” or “set in” or such.
iA Presenter Public Launch
I’ve used iA Writer on Mac and iPad for years as my main writing environment. I’m typing this in it now. It’s strongly opinionated in the right ways: iA made a lot of design decisions on my behalf so that I’m not distracted by the temptation to fiddle with a thousand configuration knobs instead of, well, writing.
I leaped at the chance to try an early beta of their new iA Presenter app last year. It promised to make writing presentations as easy and pleasant as Writer made it to write words. In fact, their approaches are nearly identical. Both apps encourage you to write down your thoughts, and then they make them look pretty. Oh, how Presenter delivers on that promise! Rather than nudge me toward tweaking fonts, layout, page transitions, and all the other styling options you can possibly apply to a PowerPoint slide, it gives me an editor window where I write Markdown text. Then it renders that text as a series of beautifully styled, elegant slides. And with a couple of clicks, it can publish that presentation as a PDF that mixes slide content with narrator notes in a format that an audience can appreciate.
iA officially launched Presenter today and I bought my (one-time purchase! non-subscription!) license immediately. I’m grateful that I’m not regularly expected to talk to crowds. I’m also grateful that when I do, Presenter exists and saves me from the additional stress of trying to make my content look nice on a screen. It’s everything I love and appreciate about Writer’s approach to public writing, applied to public speaking. Congratulations, iA, and thanks!
Digital notes are better than paper
Techie people regularly rediscover paper and write about how they’ve created a good note taking system with it. I’m envious of them, as I’ve tried this many times but can’t do it. I keep thinking I’ll like writing on paper, but I don’t and likely never will.
A few years ago I started keeping a digital daily journal, not so much a diary with entries like “today I feel…”, but a record like “changed the van’s oil. Drove the kid to camp. Called Mom.”1 I was using Drafts on my iPhone as a sort of bullet journal, augmented with an action group I wrote. After a year of this, articles rhapsodizing on the wonderfulness of handwritten notes convinced me to switch to a paper journal and to get a nice fountain pen.2 I’ve used the physical process for about a year and a half now, and when I fill up this current notebook next month, that’s it. I’m going back to digital.
As I keep having to be reminded, pen and paper note taking is vastly inferior to digital in every way I care about. Other people love writing notes and that’s awesome, but I can’t escape the fact that I hate handwriting, and I often cut my thoughts short because I want to quit scribbling. Worse, the analog notes aren’t actionable. My Drafts workflow turns my day’s worth of bullet-style notes into a set of digital diary entries, new calendar events, and tasks in my task manager. I already carry my iPhone with me almost everywhere3 so I don’t have to remember to drag something else along. If I’m jogging and think of something worth remembering, I can say “hey Siri, remind me to…” and it records a note without me having to pause and jot the thought down. Paper would be nice for impromptu drawings, but since keeping a paper journal, not once have I drawn something in it.
For me, for my workflow, digital is vastly superior. Paper has its strengths, but none of them apply to how I want to use it. I mention all this for the benefit of other people reading articles about the benefits of paper note taking, and who feel vaguely guilty for not toting a notebook with them all the time. I think the important part is writing a note, not the medium it’s taken with.