They're here! I can confirm my friend's enthusiastic recommendation of the shockingly affordable, deeply silly, startlingly pleasurable to use, Jinhao Mako fountain pens. I'm very quickly falling in love with writing with them.

I promised pic spam, so here you go:


They come with converters but will also take what I am given to understand are "standard"-size ink cartridges; I am using those for the moment, and might explore the converters when the ink cartridges start to run low and I want to seek bottled ink. I have dreams of journalling in deep dark teal.

In other writing news, I am on the final act of book 3 of Secrets of Sleipnir. I struggled mightily with which way to take the plot, and there are still some moments of truth that I think I'll have to write right up to the brink of before I know what feels right, but in the last span of days the bigger obstacles have been 1. finding time to write, and 2. not using that time to read instead.

I've alluded before to the fact that SoS began as fanfiction, although it very quickly broke containment. Fiyeli and Evret were more themselves than their fandom progenitors long before I ever wrote a word of dialogue. That fandom either did something to my writing, or was just where I happened to be when something happened to my writing, but I smashed every single one of my personal records for fanfic: number of works, time spent in the fandom, and so on. The idea-well was starting to run slightly dry, fewer concepts I was less excited about, waiting for the next big thunderbolt - when SoS turned out to be that thunderbolt and I decided to just go for it.

While writing SoS, I've had yet another unprecedented experience, and that's consciously stepping back from my own hyperfixation with a fandom, pruning my overinvestment to free up emotional energy for other things. Always before the death came naturally, and I grieved it because I love that feeling of my imagination being engaged. Choosing to disengage, to better engage with something of my own choosing - something entirely of my own making - is a new experience. I'm still involved with that fandom, following certain works and conversing with fellow fans, but it's not the same kind of involvement as when I'm in the thick of things.

Often when I'm deep in writing, I read less. I don't want other people's words taking up space in my head while my own words are trying to get out. But when I write for a long time, I start to feel the need to read asserting itself more strongly. At those times, I usually want to read things I've already read; often I think I'm subconsciously searching for some answer to an unmet need in my own writing. (I've been greatly enjoying the Librera e-reader app, especially for curating my collection of fanfics downloaded as epubs off AO3.) As SoS unrolls before me in my mind, books that want to exist multiplying to my gleeful horror, I'm still looking for that balance between putting in time to get my words out, and taking time to enjoy letting the words of others in.

With any luck, by June I'll be re-reading Low Dawn and High Dusk to centre my vision before attacking the completed first draft of book 3!