I have a bunch of them.

I know: it looks like a cheap plastic pen. It is. They’re like $10-$15 on Amazon.

You’re not buying it for the body. You’re buying it for the nib.

And you can put these nibs in other pens. Here’s one in an Opus 88 Demo.

We’ll come back to that.

The Parallel combines the sandwich-style nib of an automatic pen (a specific kind of dip pen) with a fountain pen feed.

Instead of the ink flowing down a slit to a point, it flows through those two plates. This means you can write with the whole nib making contact with the page, just like a regular fountain pen nib, but it’ll also write with only part of the nib or the edge making contact.

This lets you try calligraphy styles like Textura, Rotunda, Batarde, and Fraktur, all of which are stupid hard with a regular italic nib because they require twisting the pen or using the edge of the nib to make hairlines. A normal fountain pen will struggle with this because you’ll lose the contact point that makes the ink flow, but the Parallel’s nib design solves this problem.

The Parallel’s nib also has some flex, which is useful for single-width styles like Neuland where you have to twist the pen or pivot your wrist a lot. The Parallel’s nib having some give lets you accomplish this; unlike a fountain pen, though, it doesn’t change the width of the line.

The Parallel comes in a whole range of sizes from 1.5mm to 6.0 mm. The skinny side is always about 0.5mm, so it’s a 3x to 12x difference on skinny to fat strokes.

The Parallel uses Pilot cartridges. You can buy special Parallel ones optimized for the pen with more flow. These are fun and last two seconds.

If you want to use your own ink instead, you can pop the nib unit out—you just yank it out—and shove it into an Opus 88 pen that takes a number 6 nib.1 (Thanks to Josh from Nibbed In The Bud for telling me this.)

This is nice because you can use any ink you want and the Opus 88 pens actually fit in pen cases, so you can do blackletter calligraphy on the go.2 A heads-up that doing this can make the flow weird and randomly gush, especially if you fiddle with the shutoff valve. You can mitigate but not totally solve this problem by swapping the Parallel’s standard O-ring (which will be on the nib unit when you get it) with one of the O-rings that came with your Opus 88.

If you don’t care about using your own inks and simply want the pen to look cooler than the stock Parallel and fit in pen rolls, the sections can be swapped with BENU sections as the threading is the same. This looks very stupid once you take the cap off, but it also works (CAVEAT IN FOOTNOTE).3 You still have to use Pilot cartridges (or a Pilot converter, I guess) with this method as you’ll be using the Parallel’s entire section.

There are also Moonman pens that allegedly take the nib units, but I strongly recommend you watch a Youtube video of someone successfully doing this on the specific pen you’re interested in before you buy it. For example, I read it works in the M2, which I already owned, and it definitely does not.

Because the pens are so inexpensive (relative to fountain pens, not to art supplies generally), there’s also a ton of stuff you can do to customize them if you have a Dremel and a can-do spirit. Jake Rainis’ website has a bunch of stuff on this, and here’s a video where he demonstrates nib modification.

I’ve been using the Parallel for over a year now. Originally only for dedicated calligraphy sessions (due to the big long shape), and then once I got the Opus88 Demo that could take a Parallel nib it’s become a daily carry. If you have even a passing interest in blackletter calligraphy—and especially the more complicated types—this is a strong recommend, especially for $10-15.

OTHER STUFF

Owl In A Trench Coat: Is going strong. All of this week’s chapters are queued up at Royal Road, releasing every weekday around 12 ET. This week Hank and his new friend Timmo, the legless snotgoblin, try to escape the Great Fish Pile and deal with Big Snippy.

New here and concerned you’re having a stroke? Owl In A Trench Coat is a serialized novel based on the “three owls in a trench coat” joke. Read it for free here—the first major arc finishes this week.

A Good Box: Remember when I talked about Diplomat boxes being the best boxes but I didn’t have a picture? Here’s what they look like.

The top is a metal sleeve that wraps around the box part. The box part is cardboard and slides into the sleeve. This design lets you use the entire height of the box to store stuff, where a traditional pen box that opens like a clamshell only lets you use the bottom part. I use this one to store single-pen cases not currently in use.

This is the Mazzuoli Moka.

You may not be familiar with the name, so let me break it down: It looks like a moka pot and was designed by Giuliano Mazzuoli.

Congratulations, you already know if you want this. It’s a weird little coffee pen. That’s the whole gimmick.

Read on to hear how I got it for very cheap AND YOU CAN, TOO, depending on when you read this. (I’ll link to where I got it at the end.)

Some context for “cheap”: This pen was distributed in the United States around 2018 with a street price of about $125 per old reviews (like this one from TGS). With the current exchange rate and shipping to the US, buying one from the official Mazzuoli site today will run you $270.

When I went to Venice earlier this year, I was on the hunt for one but only found it in rollerball. Tried to game out if I could get a fountain version sent to my hotel, but the logistics and fees got complicated and I gave up.

And then last week I searched ebay on a whim and found someone selling a whole bunch of them, cheap, new in box. With free US shipping.

How cheap? I paid $75 after tax.

The seller shipped it immediately and it came in the official packaging, still covered in cellophane. As far as I can tell, it’s legit.

Like I said, “pen that looks like a moka pot” is basically the selling point here. It’s really small, but not pocket-sized, similar to a Sailor Pro Gear Slim.

The nib is comically tiny—maybe half the size of the Sailor PGS. It’s even smaller than the Liliput.

Like many weird design pens, the nib comes in one size: nib. Mine writes like an extremely wet medium/broad. Look at that little guy go!

The section is really, really small, too. The Gentleman Stationer’s old review claimed that it was slimmer than a cartridge.

He’s not wrong.

You can post the cap on the back; it screws securely on with a half turn. It looks pretty cool when you do this, and doing so lets you grip the pen by the body/step-down if you prefer.

The pen comes with a little rubber grippy thing—usually for pulling a nib, but I believe in case the metal-on-metal section/body joint gets stuck. I’ve used the rubber bands we get on bunches of asparagus for this purpose in the past. This is probably better.

It also comes with a lanyard you can snap onto the top of the cap, in case you want to wear your weird little coffee pen as a necklace.

Again, though. It’s a weird coffee pen. You decided if you wanted it or not as soon as you saw that first picture.

Here’s a link to the eBay seller I got it from. No clue who this is or why they have these, but I am happy with the one I got. Buy at your own risk, it’s eBay.

Read: Owl In A Trench Coat

On Thursday I saw that Royal Road was running a writing contest. The prompt was “the person you pretend to be.”

My immediate, gut response to that prompt was “three owls in a trench coat.” Then, over Friday and Saturday, I wrote like 9,500 words of an adventure comedy about that.

I have now entered “Owl In A Trench Coat” into the contest.

The first two chapters are now posted, and I’m going to try and release a chapter a day during the week for as long as I can (my usual writing pace is 1-2 chapters a day). You can read it at this link—and please do comment, rate, etc. over on Royal Road. You know how algorithms work.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

Twizzy’s plan sounded insane. Take his coat. His wallet. Swap identities.

“Come on. He’s one guy and we’re three owls,” I’d said. “No one’s gonna believe that.”

“You got a better plan, Hank?”

I didn’t. So we did it. Pushed him down, took his coat and hat and keys and wallet. Hopped on each other’s shoulders, took the mag-lev to Charming Gardens, to the little neo-craftsman he shared with Tish and the twins. The girls were just infants then.

When we realized he had a wife and kids, I figured we were done for. And you should have seen Tish when the cops brought her into the station, when she came up to the cell where they were holding us. “I can’t believe you were three owls in a trenchcoat” and “where’s my real husband” and yap yap yap. Even testified at trial about how we’d shared intimate moments, made the whole jury gasp.

That was a dirty lie, by the way. I think she was just embarrassed and trying to twist the knife. We never even took the trench coat off. And you’d think after 12 years she would have questioned that, too, but no. We told her Doctor Doctorson said we had a skin condition that required us to now wear a trench coat and fedora at all times and she went with it.

I’m pretty sure she knew, is the point.

I hope you can tell I’m having fun writing it, and I would love to see you guys comment over there. Here’s the link again. Thanks!

This is the Diplomat XO. I got it and an Aero Rhomb in exchange for that Stipula I returned. And this is a good pen.

The XO comes in a special edition Diplomat box, by which I mean it’s the same as the regular ones, but black. And normally, who cares—but these are my favorite boxes from mid-range pens. The metal sleeve makes them sturdy and stackable, and the actual box part can be emptied out so they’re useful for storing parts and cartridges and stuff. They tend to be the only boxes I keep.

[A thunderstorm rolled in and messed up my lighting while I was taking pictures, so pretend I put a picture of the box here. As an apology, here’s a dramatic picture I took of a dinosaur.]

The XO comes with a hardened leather case to make it look even more like a cigar.

This case is great. The issue with a leather pen is wear/scratches on the leather, and this thing is flocked on the inside and very well-built on the outside. I wish they sold these generally.

(I cannot say enough good things about the stupid box and case and I feel like an idiot being like WOW WHAT PACKAGING, but also earlier this week I bought a new water bottle and it came in a weird long Amazon box that was a hot topic of conversation in our household. So whatever, good boxes are neat.)

The pen itself is basically a gimmick—a cigar-shaped pen that looks exactly like a cigar—which I love because yay gimmicks. And it’s a well-executed gimmick. It does look like that. Like, almost. The gap between the cap and the actual pen gives it away.

You can get it in a couple finishes. This is the camel leather one, which is put on there pretty nicely. There’s a small seam, as would be necessary, but it’s applied really cleanly. They also have a hard lacquer one, which is probably a little more hardy.

The actual pen itself feels very similar to the Narwhal Nautilus. Oddly, the XO (made of resin, I think) feels a little warmer to me than the Nautilus (ebonite), which is kinda the opposite of what I’d expect.

It’s a steel nib, cartridge-converter pen. Diplomat stock nibs are tuned very well and have a small amount of very satisfying feedback. The XO is a limited edition of whatever; the lacquer one tends to go on sale, these leather ones not so much.

I really liked this when it came out, but balked because it was beyond the price point I feel comfortable spending outside of a gift. And if you wanted to think of this pen as an exercise in “how expensive can we make a steel-nibbed cartridge pen,” I’d understand, as I think my initial reaction was “that should have a piston or a 14k nib.”But after the Stipula (which was a gift)1 was a dud and Yafa/Dromgoole’s said I could exchange it for any other Yafa brand, however, I jumped on it and love it.

2. Big Glow wins again

Did any of you guys do the DIY Kaweco Sport this year? Was the glow-in-the-dark worth it?

(I’m talking about the thing where Kaweco brings their assembly machine to a pen shop and then you can assemble a special edition one yourself. This year’s was a glow-in-the-dark Sport.)

I’d hoped to get one and convert it to a rollerball for my wife, but no luck. That thing hasn’t come to any retailers in my city, and spending $250 in gas and hotel to drive four hours to the closest event for a $20 pen feels stupid, so I’m missing out.

I did buy a pot of glow in the dark paint, though, because I was painting a model of the Fresno Nightcrawler wearing sneakers, as one does.

In theory, this means all of my pens now glow in the dark and I have broken the Big Glow cartel of BENU and Kaweco with $12 in model paint. I would be lying if I told you I hadn’t considered doing my own version of the Kaweco DIY.

In practice, though, not so much. The paint takes a million coats to get an even glow and then the built-up paint is pretty gritty to the touch. I primed that little Nightcrawler guy and it still took like two evenings of slathering it on to get enough paint on there to glow like that, and then the paint that I got on his sneakers made the laces glow (cool) but also have a weird gritty texture with wonky lines (bad).

3. A bad repair update

We’re now on month five of my Pineider Back To The Future being in the shop. I pinged the retailer to see if they could pressure for an update, as we’d heard nothing from Pineider since sending it off to Italy.

The problem was that it looked like the finish on the magnetic cap failed and then started to rust. Like so:

And I got an update! The retailer said that they recently got the pen back, realized no one had fixed it, and had to resend it to Italy through another contact in hopes they’ll actually fix it.

I laughed when I read that. There’s stuff that’s bad and stuff that’s so bad that it’s funny. We’re in the latter camp now, and bless whoever at the retailer had to send me that update email as that couldn’t have been easy to write.

I remain hopeful I will get this pen, which I bought for publishing my first novel, back in my possession before I publish my second. Not looking good though.

4. What do you listen to when you write or work?

We’ve had a good run of concerts here since my last post, with Carpenter Brut, Magic Sword, and Dance With The Dead all coming to town. Or, put otherwise, all the music I listen to when I write—dark, fantasy-driven synth and synth metal.

Spotify also finally came out with all-time listening stats, a very technically advanced feature WinAmp had in the year 2000. Dance With The Dead’s Driven To Madness is my all-time most-played record. I think it’s just about perfect for writing.

Meanwhile, the title track from Magic Sword’s new record, Side Quest, is so good that the song is already in my all-time top ten because I’ve been playing it on repeat for hours.

What do you guys listen to when you write or work? Put recommendations in the comments.

Also, does anyone else watch Eurovision? We got it in the USA in 2021 and we’ve watched it every year since. My wife and I ended up seeing Dadi Freyr and Lord of the Lost after first seeing them there (both of whom are absurdly fun live). Was rooting for Romania and Italy this year, what about you?

My wife got it for me as a Christmas gift many years ago as a “I hope he likes this” gift. I did, and she discovered an entire niche of gifts she can buy me for any holiday or event.

“Congratuations on the thing,” she will say. “Here is a weird pen I didn’t think you would buy for yourself, because it is Dracula-themed.” This will always go over well.

Now, note that this post is about the pen that got you into the hobby, not your first pen. That could be the same for many folks, but not for me. It took three tries for me.

My first-ever fountain pen was a LAMY Safari I bought when I was a kid based entirely on it looking cool.1 I had no idea how to fill it or use it. I have a memory of figuring out how to put the cartridge in after a lot of trial and error (“oh no what was that noise did I break it what if the goo spurts everywhere aiieeee”), but I don’t have a memory of actually using the pen that much. This was before the internet so I kinda gave up and probably pretended it was a sword.

My second-ever fountain pen was an extremely nice cigar-shaped pen that my father-in-law made me. He’s the sort of Renaissance man who, after retiring from being an engineering wizard, has decided to learn an astounding number of artisan skills. In addition to a fountain pen, he has made me a pocketknife, several bound books (including a hardcover version of my first novel where the lining paper is a bunch of cats), a jewelry/storage box, and an electric guitar. He also built himself a car. A full-size car.

All of these things are tremendous, but I didn’t appreciate the fountain pen at first because he put a stub nib it in it and I didn’t know how to use it. Plus I put Speedball India Ink in it at first because that’s what Amazon recommended when I searched for pen ink. (I cleaned it out quickly and it’s fine and gets plenty of use now.)

The M205, however, took. It was a combination of “oh wow look at the ink that’s neat,” a nib that had a very simple learning curve, and the internet providing me resources on how to use it. The steel nib is extremely smooth and writes with a crazy amount of flex on descenders. I can always tell when I’ve been writing with it because my handwriting is so distinctive.

I have no bad things to say about this pen. I think Pelikans are kind of expensive as a brand and so the ones I find most interesting tend to be these entry-level 200/205s and the goofball Twists that I apparently collect (review), but I understand why people get into them. It’s a great, uncomplicated, well-made pen.2

I’m curious. Which pen did it for you guys? Sound off in the comments.

OTHER STUFF

MORE TROGPOSTING: I’ve lived in the same neighborhood, on and off, for like twenty years. A couple weeks ago my wife noticed this in the sidewalk. I don’t know how long it’s been there, as this was kind of old even twenty years ago, but I love that this is the young-X/old-millennial version of a cave drawing.

SOME GOOD WRITING YOUTUBE: Prolific Fantasy/GameLit author Seth Ring makes the most criminally under-watched videos about the craft and business of writing on Youtube. I doubled my writing output within a couple days by applying his organizational tips. Watch his videos here.

I GOT THE DIPLOMATS: The XO and Aero Rhom I exchanged for the jacked-up Stipula have arrived! They are terrific writers and the XO is the most hilariously literal take on a “cigar-shaped pen” you can imagine. Full reviews forthcoming, but three cheers for Dromgooles and Yafa for how smooth this interaction was.

It’s pretty easy to buy a new pen at a trade show: some vendor is going to be standing behind a nicely-arranged table with a few of each model laid out. “Haldo, weary traveler,” they will say.1

“Here, have some grog. Let me sing you a song of our latest model, made of the most precious of plastics. It works like exactly every other pen you’ve ever used. If it doesn’t work and you can’t fix it yourself, you can return it easily. Feel free to check pricing on the internet.” You have to decide if you like the thing and that is basically it. Also, they will take credit cards.

The vintage tables, on the other hand, can have the feel of being at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. There will be 1,000 pens crammed into folders and trays that take up every square inch of the table. These can range from late-model pens that are basically still brand-new to pens so old they look like they’ll disintegrate if you pick them up.

Unless you already have a solid knowledge of a specific pen you’re looking for, you’ll need to figure out what kind of seller this is and how much you trust them, whether the price they’re quoting sounds generally reasonable, if the item is genuine or not, if you can fix it if it doesn’t work, if the ATM in the lobby still has cash left in it because the vendor may or may not take other forms of payment, and so on.

It’s a lot.

I don’t know if this problem is unique to me, but it shows up in the two vintage pens I actually own: a very old Moore lever-filler I bought from Redeem Pens—a vendor whose setup at the Dallas Pen Show doesn’t fall into this trap, as Will does a pretty nice job curating and presenting a limited line that he works on himself2—and this Sheaffer Imperial I’m about to talk about, which was in a case with a dozen or so other pens in a design store in Cork.

I like both of them. And if you are looking to try out what an old gold nib and vintage feed feels like, I’d specifically recommend this Shaeffer.

Let me give you a brief overview of the pen, then I’ll explain why it’s a good place to start.

There are a lot of variations of the Imperial; this is an Imperial 797. From the shape of the inlaid nib, it’s probably made on the later side of the 1970’s, which means it’s probably right around fifty years old (per this writeup of the same model here, at Peyton Street Pens).

The nib is 14k gold; the body is electroplated gold. Older versions of this would be gold-filled instead, but don’t worry about the difference—both electroplating and gold filling are to actual gold what La Croix is to flavor. It’s shiny yellow metal either way.

This pen puts down a truly bananas amount of ink. There isn’t much line variation, but it’s an incredibly smooth and wet writer. I can blow through a converter’s worth of ink in less than a week. It really feels very good to use.

There are a few cons: it’s a more slender pen than I like. It doesn’t have much of a grip section, though the taper is gradual enough that I don’t have the same problems I have with the Lamy 2000. It uses proprietary Sheaffer cartridges and converters, so you need to buy one of those and that’s mildly annoying. All kinda minor stuff.

Now, if you’re wanting to try out a vintage gold nib, I’d recommend something like this as a nice way to limit the number of variables you’re playing with. That is:

• This Imperial is widely available. If something breaks, you can find a part for it.

• It uses a cartridge/converter filling system that you already know how to use and clean.

• If you’re not sure how much it should cost, there are ton of listings online so you know what to expect ($100-$130 depending on condition).

• If that’s too much, there are lower end versions available without the gold plating. And if you want something more substantial, you can get one of these Frankenpens from Peytron Street where they put old Imperial sections in new ebonite pens from Lotus. (I’m genuinely interested in these as it feels like it’d solve the pen-is-too-slender problem, so please let me know if you’ve tried one.)

In short—and in stark contrast to the Moore I have and its floppy rubber sock filling mechanism—there’s not much of a learning curve beyond “do I like how this feels,” which will probably determine if you go further down the rabbit hole or not.

If I were doing it all over again, I probably would have bought this one before the Moore, and I’d probably own more vintage pens already.

Other Stuff

HOORAY FOR DROMGOOLE’S and also YAFA: Thanks for the feedback, guys! I sent an email and pictures of the Stipula I covered last time to Dromgoole’s (retailer), who forwarded it on to Yafa (distributor). This problem—the chrome wiping off—was new to both of them, and they said I could either wait for Stipula to fix it (3+ months) or exchange it for something else that Yafa distributes. The Stipula is now on its way to Houston and I should be getting a Diplomat XO and another Diplomat Aero (dumb review here)3 once everything checks out. Neither will have a gold nib or a bunch of hilarious pirate theming, unfortunately, but they will probably actually work.

HOORAY FOR FRANKLIN-CHRISTOPH: I do have one good pen repair story: Franklin-Christoph. I bought a hand-painted pen from them at a pen show last fall; it looked great, but the hand-painted finish rubbed off with some minor use. They re-applied it, re-varnished it with a better varnish, and had it back to me so quickly that when I wrote the post asking about pen repair time I’d totally forgotten it’d even happened. It has a cool matte finish now, too. I’ll talk about the pen when I review it later, but another good vendor to recommend.

HOORAY FOR TARDUK THE ANNIHILATOR: I am now actively working on my system apocalypse body-swap comedy, in which a woman must survive a sadistic game show while teamed up with her boss, a failed Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast member who has swapped minds with a tyrannosaur named Tarduk the Annihilator. The working title is T-Rex Tradwife Apocalypse.

To make a long story short, I got bogged down on the literary horror thing I’ve been working on after about 60,000 words and needed a palate cleanser. So I’m returning to this, a project I thought of when I was coming out of anesthesia after surgery last year. I plan to serialize this one online over at Royal Road, so look forward to that in the upcoming months.

It felt like an opportune time to review mine.

And this review is an EXCITING BLOG FIRST, as it marks the first time I’ve decided to return a pen in the process of reviewing it because the finish started to fail.

Yeah. Another picture of that at the end of the post.

An updated version of my original review—written before I tried to take pictures and noticed the finish wiped off (with a microfiber cloth!)—is below, with updates in brackets.

—

Key Takeaway: if you are looking for a practical, convenient daily writer that works without any fuss, you are reading the wrong blog.

And also this pen is not for you. It dries out quickly, the parts are a little wobbly, the front end of it is made of a material that is impossible to keep clean, and the nib can’t be pulled (as far as I can tell) so you can’t deep-clean the pen or do any real nib work yourself.

But it looks cool and is very weird, which are major selling points for me!

Let’s go through it in detail.

The Da Vinci is basically the Italian version of the LAMY Dialog 3, which is the closest comparable pen. They were both originally designed at around the same time and, I’m guessing, were parallel approaches to the “capless fountain pen” problem. Both work by twisting the pen to deploy the nib.

The Da Vinci Carribbean, which is the pirate one I have, further adds design cues from the BENU Parrot. PRECIOUS GEMS!

Both the Da Vinci and the Dialog have problems with dry out. The Dialog’s ball valve and gaskets don’t work perfectly, so every once in a while you’ll need to clean dried ink out of the nib with a wet paper towel—maybe after a month or two of use, though mine had no problems at all for probably the first one or two years I had it.

By contrast, the Da Vinci’s rotating half-moon mechanism also doesn’t work perfectly, but you have to wipe it down like once a day, starting immediately.

I’m not kidding about that. Here’s a writing sample of me trying to use it in the morning without wiping it down.

This would probably be less of an issue if the nib wasn’t so dry. We’ll get to that.

Size-wise, the Da Vinci is a gigantic, heavy pen. I normally like using these if the nib is well-tuned, as you barely have to grip the pen at all and can let gravity do the work. (You should be feeling an increasing sense of foreboding about the nib.)

The Da Vinci does have a nice, defined grip, and the pen is so huge that the clip won’t get in the way as your hand won’t reach that far. I really like this.

Speaking of the clip, mine has a skull with sparkly eyes. And crossbones. And feet?

I think those are feet. I don’t know for sure.

I do know that my clip came with a fun bonus: a very sharp burr.

I took care of it with some fine sanding sticks.

Much better!

The nib comes out of this stainless steel end here, which is EXTREMELY HARD TO KEEP CLEAN. Mine, which I got at a pen show, was pretty gnarly when I bought it.

A spot of rubbing alcohol and patience fixed it, but it’s basically a fingerprint magnet. I really wish this part had been chromed [UPDATE: maybe not]. It usually looks a little more like the above picture than the below.

The little half-moon thing retracts when you twist the pen and then the nib comes out. It takes like six or so turns to do this; fewer if you use both hands to turn the parts independently, more if you’re trying to avoid knocking your phone over in order to make a GIF.

I actually couldn’t capture the entire process in a single GIF—probably safe to say this is not a pen you’ll use for jotting down a quick note.

It’s really easy to get ink on the half-moon thing from regular use and really hard to clean it. Stipula says not to get ink on the mechanism, which kind of makes me wonder what they thought this would be used for.

To fill the pen, you have to take it totally apart, similar to the Dialog. While the Dialog is pretty intuitive and idiot-proof, the distributor who sold me the Da Vinci at the pen show had to stress that if you do not put it back together the correct way you will ruin the pen (NO PRESSURE!).

Let’s go through the procedure! First, the body of the pen is friction-fit. It pulls off.

The nib unit clicks into place. You squeeze this part here to release it.

Pretty easy. You can then fill it regularly or by yanking the converter out and using a syringe. Again, you are not supposed to fill it with the section still attached because that would involve getting ink on the mechanism.

To reassemble, you slide the nib unit back in and then have to turn it until this little tab pops into place. That makes sure the nib is aligned with the half-moon hole. If you don’t do this, it’ll still move the nib forward, but you’ll grind the nib into the pen and ruin it, said the guy at the pen show. (NO PRESSURE!)

The body then snaps back on. There are some slots for it to slide into, which are easy to find.

The body has a little bit of play. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s something I noticed right away when compared to the Dialog. [UPDATE: I was going to include a GIF of this, but then after the whole finish thing this felt like a comically minor issue, so I didn’t bother.]

Finally, the nib!

It doesn’t work. Womp womp.

So here’s the thing: out of the box, the tip of the tines on this thing were touching so hard that it barely wrote without pressure. And while the nib flexes beautifully, using a giant, heavy pen that requires pressure for fine motor work is not ideal. The experience is like taping a ballpoint pen to a hammer and trying to use that to write. It looks amazing and everyone wants to be your friend, but your hand gets tired fast.

The nib can’t be pulled from what I can find online, and I am not keen to be the test case for this as gold Stipula nibs almost cost as much as what I paid for the entire pen. This means I couldn’t do much with a brass shim to fix the problem.

I tried using two brass shims to separate the tines, as commenter Toga suggested, and then I used some micro-mesh and mylar paper to polish it a bit. I did a little of each and then ran a cup of water with a little dish soap through it and now the pen works, like, okay.

This pen, unfortunately, has a MSRP of $1,200. I paid less than $500 for mine as “pirate pen with sparkly eyes” was probably not as much of a seller as they’d hoped, but that’s still not an “it works okay, I guess” price. Once I run it dry I’ll probably put it back into storage until a nibmeister comes to town who can make it work. [UPDATE: I’m going to send it back and see if it can be repaired or exchanged for something else.]

Verdict: I love the IDEA of this pen. The fact that you have to wet the nib every day is dumb but manageable, and the idea of a complicated pirate pen is obviously exactly up my alley. I think I’ll use it a lot if I can get the nib working as it is an extremely extra, goofy pen.

But this is a review. And the fact that the nib was so absurdly dry and that the clip had a sharp burr on it is bananas to me. This orange one was an edition of ten. Ten!!!

The certificate of authenticity had an actual ink signature for someone inspecting it. I don’t know how it passed inspection with the burr and the nib.

It’s frustrating that the pen will now sit in a drawer until I can get to a nibmeister to fix it. [UPDATE: My original plan was to have it fixed by Matthew Chen the next time he came to town and then happily use it. Because the finish is now failing—and here’s a picture of another area where this is happening—I’m instead glad that I saved the certificate of authenticity as it’s well within the two-year warranty period.]

In conclusion, between this and my Pineider Back To The Future, my faith in fancy Italian pens is pretty low at this point. I know it’s not a new observation to say that they have quality control issues, but I think I naively assumed that’d only be at the lower end and the nicer ones would have, you know, been given the ol’ once-over to see if they worked. Lesson learned.

Other Stuff

SURVEY: thanks to everyone who voted last time and the helpful comments. The somewhat depressing result was that a 4-9 month wait for a penmaker to fix a manufacturing issue seems to be the norm. (And I will note I wrote the prior two sentences before realizing the finish was failing on the Da Vinci, adding another pen going to the shop.)

A CAVEAT FOR ITALIAN PENS: I know making fun of Montegrappa pens is kind of a thing we all do, but I should note I have a handful of Fortunas (entry), an Aviator (mid), and an Extra (fancy) and all of them have been rock-solid. I also really like the Gioia I have, which had quirks but nothing related to quality and has consistently performed well.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO? Assume you were me. I got this at a pen show late last year; the guy who sold it to me was from Yafa (I think), but working the Dromgoole’s table and so the actual transaction was with Dromgoole’s. Stipula pens have a two-year warranty, so I can definitely get it serviced. Who would you approach—Dromgoole’s (retailer), Yafa (distributor), or Stipula (OEM)? [UPDATE: Dromgoole’s has offered to help figure out a good solution here. Thanks for the recommendations!] Does anyone have any ideas how to fix the finish without sending it back (beyond “learn electroplating”)?

In better news, I got some new pens as gifts thanks to UNSPECIFIED LIFE EVENT. L-R: Pininfarina Modula, Opus88 Demo 2022, Laban Flora.

Anyway, all of my somewhat-limited energy has gone to novel drafting, so I’ve been slacking here. To make up for it, we’re going to do a poll and two mini-reviews. Poll first!

How long does it take to get a pen fixed?

SCENE: you bought a nice pen. It has a clear manufacturing issue. And it’s a problem with the pen itself, not some nib thing a nibmeister could fix for $30. You decide to send it back to the dealer for repair. How long will it take?

I don’t know. I’m asking. Please vote or comment.

The reason I’m asking: I’m now entering month four of waiting for the Pineider that appeared to have rust on it (original, pre-rust review). I have no ETA, nor does the retailer that is doing their best to run point on this with the distributor and Pineider.

Is that a long time? I have no idea.

I would really like to have reasonable expectations for this and would love to know what y’all’s experiences have been. Can you please sound off in the comments?

Review: Duffy Bookbinders Blanks

I mentioned these guys in my post on Ireland. If you buy a blank notebook in Dublin from a bookshop, good odds it’ll be made by these guys.

I picked up this one from the Winding Stair and have been using it as the story bible for the horror novel I’m working on—I’ve just hit the 50k mark (~200 pages) on the draft and with a nonlinear narrative it’s become very necessary to have timelines and relationship maps handy.

And I really like it!

Slightly textured, very absorbent, very heavy, matte paper. Works with all nibs from a Japanese EF to a Pilot Parallel. The texture means you’re not going to have the world’s crispest lines, but if you’re doing a calligraphy project you’re probably not using a bound notebook anyway. I really like it for how I’m using it.

Some ghosting here and there depending on ink. Some minor bleed/feathering if the Parallel’s nib is oversaturated, which seems to be a universal problem with using a Parallel [nib that you jammed into an Opus88]. Nothing that was a problem for me, overall—a really enjoyable notebook and worth picking up if you’re in Dublin.

Review: Fine Writing International Fenestro

Finally: this is the Fine Writing International Fenestro.

“Fenestro” is Esperanto for “pointy carrot,” which I think refers to the shape of the pen. It’s a really long, somewhat vintage-shaped pen, and by “vintage-shaped” I mean the clip feels tiny.

This is made by Taiwanese brand Fine Writing International and it’s a pretty fun one. It comes with a converter but is also outfitted with o-rings so you can turn it into an eyedropper.

It’s a steel nib, and the EF I have definitely feels like a Japanese EF grind—some feedback and a very fine line. That said, it writes in that textured notebook I mentioned above and doesn’t feel scratchy.

These came in a bunch of colors; the striated one I have was a limited run of 100.

If you want to try one out, Gourmet Pens still has the demonstrator in stock here.

We’ll get back to our regular schedule soon!

Good news! Meet the Parafernalia Falter 2-D, the world’s most minimal clicky pen:

The Falter 2-D is basically the same pen as Parafernalia’s Patent 1, a design study on making the most minimal click mechanism imaginable.

The difference is that the Falter is a little cheaper, has fewer parts, and you have to put it together yourself so it’s not going to work as well.

This is what it looks like when you get it.

I bought mine at Santi in Venice, which we covered last time. I played with the Patent 1 in the shop and thought it was really cool but then the guy had the Falter version in black so I went for that.

And to be clear, that entire thing is not the pen. That’d be ridiculous. It is FIVE THINGS.

1. The actual pen

2. A little tool for assembling the pen that did not work for me at all

3. A ruler with no numbers on it WHICH IS INCLUDED FOR NO EXTRA COST

4. The refill and spring

5. A stand for the pen WHICH IS ALSO FREE YOU’RE WELCOME

Does that sound complicated? Don’t worry, it comes with instructions.

In theory you can assemble this thing with the included wrench and these dark mode Ikea instructions. In reality you’re going to need a set of pliers1 and watch a bunch of videos of people trying to put it together. Here’s the official one from Parafernalia.

The trickiest part of assembly is bending the pen into the right shape. Good luck!

Look, it’s a bad sign when Parafernalia’s official video shows them switching out the one they’re demonstrating with for another one that looks better (watch the video starting at 1:00). To their credit they don’t try to hide this, but just to be clear yours is probably going to look more like this sad trombone:

And less like this sexy saxophone, which they bring in from offscreen.

Here’s what mine looks like.

Kind of a frustrated oboe.2

Don’t worry about how yours looks so much as whether it works, though. The tolerance on the slot you feed the refill through is pretty tight, and if the pen isn’t bent in the right way the refill will catch on the sides and be basically useless. Just keep fiddling with it until it deploys correctly.

To that note, the super-minimal deployment is the main reason you’ll buy this or the Patent 1. It works by moving the refill between these two holes at the back of the pen.

If you’ve done this perfectly, you can rapidly deploy the pen with some very slight movements. That’s how the Patent 1 works and it is very cool. When mine is actually working, it requires two hands to deploy, but can be retracted with a nudge.

You can use the little stand to display the pen with the refill engaged. My wife thinks this looks like those wine bottle holders that make the bottle look like it’s floating.

I know I made fun of the ruler for having no numbers on it, but it’s actually a nice little straightedge. I keep it in my journal.

Verdict: if you want an unusual display object that you assemble yourself, get this.

If you want to use the pen, get the Patent 1 instead—the fact that you can bend this into shape yourself means you can also bend it out of shape yourself and getting mine to work so the refill doesn’t get stuck in position is a constant battle. The Patent 1 won’t be as ultra-minimal (there’s an additional grip part) but it’ll actually work, and in retrospect I wish I’d gotten that one.

Other Stuff

SPEAKING OF MINIMAL: mnmlscholar JP is now on Substack. One of the very first blogs to read and link to EFW, JP’s blog has a focus on ink palettes and a systematic, thoughtful approach to the hobby. Vibe is like a meditative walk through the forest. Go subscribe here.

WRITING UPDATE: So the religious horror thing has turned into a bigger project. Originally a bunch of short stories, it’s evolved into a novel-in-stories, like Lovecraft Country or A Visit from the Goon Squad (right now, more like the latter). The individual stories are still each all retellings of Bible stories, but the through-lines and recurring characters are not. I’m hoping to have a draft for beta reading around May.

CALLIGRAPHY UPDATE: I’m ahead of schedule, with all the Rotunda miniscules and half of the capitals in the can. I’ll probably post a sampler once I get them all done.

Venice is great and I love it.

Especially in the winter—it’s cold and rainy but you can move freely about the city without having to dodge cruise ships and tour groups. Sometimes you’ll be the only person on the street.

Now, I search for “pen shop in [city]” enough to be annoyed when someone buries the lede, so I’ll have a bunch more pictures and recommendations at the bottom. But first, the two best pen shops to visit if you’re in town.

Two Very Good Pen Shops in Venice

1. Succ. A. Santi Venezia (website link): Calle delle Bande 5276, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy (map link).

Santi is located a couple streets off of St. Mark’s square, so you can easily pop in here from the main tourist sites. It’s a five-minute walk.

Ignore the fact that it is bizarrely listed as a craft shop on Google. It’s not. And IT’S WORTH IT. This was my favorite shop.

The owner is very nice and specifically curates stuff from smaller, design-focused brands.

Tons of Pininfarina, Parafernalia, and literally only the second shop I’ve ever seen to carry the EGO.M CENTO-3, one of the first pens I ever reviewed (and still one of the weirdest).

You’ll also find weird niche stuff from Ducati, Mazzouli, and more. This shop is small but in the same league as Vecchietti in Bologna (discussed here) or La Stilografica in Milan (tiny egg pen!!) in terms of “wow I’ve never seen that in person before.” I went here twice, got overwhelmed with how much this guy had all the stuff I love, and ended up impulse-buying a Parafernalia Falter 2-D (a pen you make yourself from a single piece of metal). Recommend!

2. A.D Arte & Design (website link): Campiello Mosca, 53/A, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy—just across the bridge from Campo Santa Margherita in Dorsoduro (map link).

You probably won’t come across this one if you’re just in town for the day, but if you make it to the southern part of the city it’s easy to find—we spent a bunch of time in Santa Margherita and stumbled across it. They have a really wide selection of pens from a big variety of brands, and are probably the best pen shop if you’re not a design weirdo.

Like a lot of shops in Venice, this place is basically invisible when closed—they have shutters that cover up the windows and it blends in with the environment.

I went here looking for a Mazzouli Moka; they didn’t have any, but the guy showed me a bunch of other Italian pens. A nice experience overall and a good shop if you’re looking for a Delta or Montegrappa or something. They also carry AG Spalding, an Italian brand that positions themselves as American vintage in a fun Uno Reverse riff on how things usually work.

OTHER STUFF, VENICE EDITION:

Okay, now that we’ve covered that: some more niche recommendations that I think you will like.

FANCY VENETIAN PENS: If you want a more classic souvenir pen, you’ll find glass pens, dip pens, and fountain pens everywhere. All of the tourist areas will have the cheap versions; here’s an example from near the Rialto, but basically every shop and street vendor in Venice has stuff like this.

There are also mid-market versions from nicer stationery shops. There are a whole bunch of these with very similar-looking products—a big step up from the street vendors, but they kinda had a kit-pen feel to me (especially after seeing similar designs so frequently).

The fanciest ones are, by far, at Karisma.

Karisma has insanely beautiful stuff with appropriately bananas price tags, though they have some more affordable options if you’re just looking for a souvenir.

I didn’t even go in here as none of this is really my thing, and also because when I tried the guy was doing calligraphy and so the door was locked and I took that as a sign. If this is the kind of thing you’re into, though, that’s where I’d go. Website and map link.

SI, SIGNOR MONK: Trying to improve your Italian listening skills but struggling to find stuff to listen to that isn’t either way too fast or boring stuff for kids? TRY CRIME SHOWS. We left our hotel TV on the Top Crime network and realized that crime procedurals are basically perfect for comprehensible input if you’re at an intermediate level. The episode of Monk where Tony Shaloub has a cold and has to speak slowly was especially good.

SI, SIGNOR BLUM: Signor Blum sells handcrafted toy puzzles in Dorsoduro. They make them in the shop and the owner is very friendly; it is maybe the happiest little store in the city.

We walked by here a million times and I bought my wife a smiling brontosaurus when she had a cold and couldn’t leave the room. It cured the cold, but be cool and don’t say anything since it was technically an off-label use.

OH, THAT’S WHERE RICK OWENS LIVES: Check out this Medusa ring, you guys.

So much detail! BUT WAIT:

The inside is Perseus on Pegasus! I think there’s stuff on the inside of the shoulders, too, but I couldn’t get it in the shot.

That’s by Paolo Grillo, who works under the brand name DECEM. He’s a former traditional jeweler who went out on his own to do his own designs. He has a bunch of sculptural stuff like this, all way more detailed than I’ve ever seen before. We saw his stuff in a window in the city center, but since I didn’t think to take a picture or jot down where we were I had no way of finding it again.

Instead, I googled something like “Medusa ring venice,” found his website, and then saw he had a studio on Lido—the outer island that’s like twenty minutes away by ferry and then either a bus or another half hour by foot.

You can probably tell from the earlier pictures that we made this trek.

And it was totally worth it! I think we spent an hour with him. You have to order rings in advance so they can be sized—most of his business is online—so instead I ended up buying a cross necklace from him that he finished right then, after he showed us the Roman nail he used to make the design.

He also told us how an American designer lived on the island too and then it turned out to be Rick Owens, so that’s fun.

Oh, and then right before we went home we found the shop on the main islands again. It’s called Zvara and is right by St. Mark’s, we just didn’t go down that specific alley again until the very end of the trip. Here’s the window.

A NECKLACE MADE OF HUMAN TEETH: Do you want to visit Murano but wish the glassmakers made stuff like human teeth and pills and eyeballs?

You read this blog, so probably! Visit Sunset Yogurt!

Cosima Montavoci is a contemporary glass artist with a shop a few alleys off of the main drag in Murano. The likelihood of you stumbling across it is basically zero, so here’s a map.

Best way to visit is by booking her AirBnb experience, where she’ll walk you through her work. It also guarantees you can visit—a woman tried to enter the shop during our demonstration and got turned away as she arrived right when Cosima had her torch on. We spent most of the afternoon with her and my wife ended up getting a necklace with a few teeth on it; Cosima let her pick the specific teeth and then put it together right then. And we got to look at this big teeth ball too.

Plus, if you have teenagers whom you like to embarrass, a heads-up that Cosima also does glass beads that look like boobs and genitals. All very PG-13, but you can pick them up and pretend you don’t know what they are and make a real meal out of how mortified your kids will be. (I don’t have kids, so someone please do this for me.)

SPEED ROUND: Some final quick recommendations!

• Church, but make it English: St. George’s Anglican church is the only English-speaking church in the main islands. It’s right by the Accademia. You get free Prosecco after services. The lay reader is mystery author Philip Gywnne Jones. Everyone is very nice.

• Pub, but make it Irish: There are a bunch of Irish pubs in Venice. The best one is literally called “Irish Pub Venice” in Cannaregio. Inside space is at a premium in the winter in Venice, but you could hang out here for a long time with one Guinness and no one cares. Also both times we went there was a dog.

• Pizza, but make it kebab: Like ten years ago we were in Munich for work or something and went to a pizza/kebab shop, where we bought pizza and kebab and then put all the kebab meat (technically shawarma) on the pizza and were like “why doesn’t anyone do this it’s amazing.” Well, Pizzeria SanSovino, just across the Accademia, does this. We went twice. Here’s a map link.

• Good gelato: “It’s never too cold for gelato” is a foundational saying in the Extra Fine Writing household. The best shop we found was Salotto San Marco, Fondamenta Narisi. Map link.

• Whoops too much gelato: Most gyms in Venice sell day passes, though most also do not mention this online. Club Delfino in Dorsoduro is pretty good.

• If you want to buy a LAMY: Just find a cartoleria. 20% of the shops in Venice are these and they all seem to carry the lower-end LAMYs. Higher-end LAMY and Faber-Castell can be purchased at Fabriano, too. Here’s a picture of a cartoleria near Signor Blum where you can see the LAMY display on the right.

  

  I have more things to recommend but Substack started screaming at me that this was too long for email a long while ago, so we’ll end it here. Ciao!

There were many reasons for this:

• Aesthetic preference

• Saw an opportunity in the rising need for handwritten, hard-to-read diplomas

• Found cursive too hard to read even if I was the one who wrote it

• Wanted to use all my italic pens more often

• I am a MAN and needed my handwriting to be MANLY according to a podcast I didn’t listen to and cursive is for GIRLS

I was surprised how hard it was to find written instructional materials on this. You can find lots of exemplars of this stuff, and I already had a book full of gothic typefaces, but you kind of need to already be a calligraphy wizard to use that. So I’d hoped that I’d find something as comprehensive as the Getty-Dubay stuff on basic Italic (review) or Michael Sull’s Spencerian workbook (review), both of which I highly recommend.

And…I didn’t. I did find Richard Wideman’s Calligrascape site, however, and that led me to his master Blackletter Calligraphy practice sheets. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Just to cut to the chase: this is probably the best starter option for most people. It’s $32 and covers eight scripts. It breaks down the letters by stroke, so you don’t have to try and analyze each letter from an exemplar. It’s not as comprehensive as the other materials I’ve reviewed, but it’s not trying to be—and it’s a good value for the money in its current form. Let’s go through it.

Supplies

In addition to the practice sheets, you’re going to need an edged pen and paper.

EDGED PEN: These materials are designed for the Pilot Parallel. Specifically, the 6.0, 3.8, and the 2.4mm nibs—the materials are sized to be printed out for those sizes.

You don’t need a Parallel, and you can do almost all of this stuff with a normal italic nib—it’s just going to be a lot harder and more frustrating if you want to learn scripts that use some of the more complicated techniques.

That’s because the Parallel’s sandwich nib design, where you can create capillary action with any part of the nib, means you can do hairlines (using the edge of the nib) and tapers/twists (twisting/lifting the nib) really easily. You can also do this with a regular italic nib, but it’s a lot trickier.

For actually learning this stuff, my recommendation is to get a 2.4 or 3.8mm Pilot Parallel and go from there. The bigger Parallels are cool once you get the strokes down but will just eat ink and paper at the “still learning” phase. I personally start with a 3.8mm Parallel and then switch to a Kaweco 2.3 or Lamy 1.9 once I know the letterforms, both of which I’m more likely to use day-to-day.

PAPER: Two options here. You can print out the materials and if you’re totally new to this you might find it useful. If so, you’ll need to invest in some quality paper as the Parallel is the world’s wettest pen.

I’ve since just taken to doing this in my journal, a dotted Leuchtturm. It holds up fine against the Parallel and the dotted grid makes it easy to do everyday, good-enough lettering without having to draw a bunch of lines.

How It Works

This workbook covers Uncial, Rotunda, Italic, Neuland, Textura, Batarde, Roman, and Fraktur. He also sells these as one-offs for $10 each, so the $32 will be a better deal if you like at least four of those.

Each script has an intro page that has all the letters, a “quick brown fox” exemplar, the letter height ratios, and then the techniques you’ll use in the script (pen angle, if you need to tilt/rotate the nib, etc.). The ex-designer in me really likes how efficiently he uses the space on each of these pages. Here’s the intro page for Rotunda from his product page, available here.

After that, you get pages and pages of letters. Each letter is broken down by stroke, and then there’s a line below where you can practice, including a few grayed-out ones you can trace if you like. Here’s one of the Fraktur pages, also from his product page.

Thoughts

I’ve used this to learn Uncial and Batarde and am now working on Rotunda. Here’s how I’m doing with a 1.9mm stub nib (the one from the LAMY Joy):

This is representative of how I normally write—in a journal, with a pretty rounded stub nib, kind of eyeballing the height, reversing the nib at times. A crisper nib, loose paper, and taking the time to line out the baseline and x-height and so on will give cleaner results, but my most common use case is making headings in my journal and that’s what this looks like.

And I’m happy with these results! I think these materials are definitely worth $32 and would recommend them.

That said, here are some things I wish were different:

• I wish the letters were grouped by similar shapes/strokes, instead of just appearing alphabetically, and that they would appear in order of difficulty. For example, the “a” in Rotunda is a fairly standalone letterform and also the most difficult, and starting there is VERY DISCOURAGING. Adding a second intro page for each script that gives a recommended learning path, with similar letters grouped together, would help a lot.

• I wish there were vertical grid lines. Getting a letter’s proportions right involves both height AND width. Seeing a grid that tells me the general proportion of the letter would be incredibly helpful.

• I wish there were more exemplars of the script being used. This would help with spacing between words in particular. You can find this elsewhere easily, but still.

Those aren’t really criticisms, though. They’re me wishing these were something different—comprehensive how-to books instead of practice sheets. Those are just areas I felt were challenging as a result of this format when compared to something more comprehensive.

In sum, if you’re looking to get into any of these scripts, this is probably the best way to get started and see if it’s for you. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Other Stuff

CIAO DA VENEZIA: I’m in Venice again. It’s cold and wet but I saw EIGHTEEN DOGS the first night so it’s an overall win. Winter in Venice is delightfully spooky; even with Carnevale starting shortly, you can walk around at night and be the only person on a street where every building is a thousand years old. It’s incredible and feels like being in a novel and I highly recommend it. Look forward to a future post on some good stationery and pen shops here.

IN MY PROFESSIONAL POTATO OPINION: To follow up on last time’s post about weird YouTube stuff, here is a channel where a lady recaps TLC shows using the potato filter. In the best videos, her editor inserts her into the scenes as she describes them. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

To that end: this is the Nahvalur Dracula.

In theory, this is a titanium version of the Nahvalur Nautilus with some minimal vampire flair, which is why I passed on it when it came out. In practice, it’s a vastly superior pen to the standard Nautilus, and we all have Mrs. Extra Fine Writing to thank for getting it for me for Christmas so I can talk about it today.

The Presentation

The Dracula comes in a coffin-shaped box. It kind of reminds me of that old Misfits boxed set everyone had in the 90’s. The one Caroline Records did. Remember that?

Anyway, it’s a cool shape. But that’s the back. Here’s the front:

So I feel like the pen design team and box design team didn’t talk. It’s like the vampire reference for the pen was The Breed but the reference for the box was Vampire Academy.

The box art was honestly one of the reasons I didn’t jump on it when it came out, as it just gave me the wrong vibe for what the pen actually was and I didn’t look too closely at it after that. (And I imagine others had the opposite problem, getting interested based on the box but finding the pen pretty minimal by comparison.)

Anyway, the inside of the box is lined with flocked red stuff and has a pull tab so you can make the pen rise from the grave. That’s kind of neat.

The Pen

Moving on to the pen: it’s based on the Nautilus, and it’s a piston-filler with the same silhouette as that pen. It’s made of titanium instead of ebonite, however, because vampires are famously made of titanium. This adds weight to the pen, but I find it more comfortable to use a pen this large with a little more heft, so that was an upgrade for me.

It uses a steel #6, which wrote okay out of the box and terrific with a tiny amount of tuning to loosen up the tines a bit.

It has a much sturdier clip than the base model. It reminds me of a Pineider Avatar or Metropolis clip, some of my favorites for both shape and utility.

The cap is flush with the barrel, which makes it a little smaller than the base model when capped. Overall, the machining tolerances on this pen are outstanding—the cap threading in particular is unbelievably smooth.

Now, all of those upgraded features are also on the Nautilus Ti, the non-vampire titanium Nautilus. The Dracula further adds the vampire theming with fangs and blood, and I’d initially thought this was just printed on the barrel.

It’s not. The fangs are functional ink windows, recessed into the body of the pen.

This is actually another functional upgrade—these longer, narrower ink windows are more useful than the circular portholes on the standard Nautilus and Nautilus Ti.

The blood and grin (I guess?) are engraved into the body. The blood is hand-lacquered.

It’s overall a much more substantial, fancy feel than I can really capture in pictures.

The Verdict

So look: I’ve had a regular Nautilus for a couple years—in the pictures above you can see mine still says “Narwhal” on it—and I very rarely use it. I think it’s a fine pen, just not one I really find reasons to use. My wife said that was a reason she bought the Dracula for me, that she knew I had a good opinion of the base model but wasn’t likely to buy another one for myself.

And man, I really like the Dracula. I kept commenting to my wife for the first several days how pleasantly surprised I was by it, how good it felt to write with and how comically weird it was.

That is: why is it silver? Is it supposed to be both a vampire and a vampire repellent?1 Why is the fang-to-mouth ratio so fang-forward? Could this Dracula even close his mouth? Is it supposed to be a saber-toothed Dracula? I have so many questions.

I personally like to think of this less as a “Dracula” pen than a pen with two bloody fangs for no reason, which is somehow funnier and better. I’ve been using it since it came out of the box and it’s made the cut as a pen I’ll take with me for a long trip. It’s a limited edition of 500 but there are some still out there, and I recommend it.

OTHER STUFF

DOOPIIDOO: keeping with our spooky theme, I finally saw an AI video I like. I feel like this is maybe the only good use of AI. I have watched this so many times.

Do you remember Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle? This guy is taking up that torch. The clip above is the least weird thing he’s done and definitely the least dark, so heads-up.

BLACKLETTER: I decided to go with Rotunda (ye olde italiano) as the first new hand I learn this year. If you want to learn along with me, my goal is to learn the first half of the miniscules (lowercase letters) in January. (And if you want a head start, do the “a” last, it’s by far the hardest.)

This year we are doing something a little different because I actually reviewed everything in my queue for once, so I don’t have to cram a bunch of little reviews in here to catch up. So we’ll do some 2025 stuff first, then the 2026 review queue, and then end with a CLIPMAS MIRACLE!

Stuff that stayed inked all year, mostly

Starting at the foreground: for regular writing, the Pineider Avatar (original review) is my go-to pen for the second year in a row. The Diplomat Nexus (review, this year) made the cut too; both pens have huge ink reservoirs, shutoff valves, and sturdy, durable designs that mean I can take them on the go pretty easily. And of course, for desk dominance, the Visconti Iopenna has remained out all year, held aloft by the crab of justice.

The next-most-used pens would have included the Montegrappa Extra, Sailor 1911L, Schaeffer Imperial, Pineider Back To The Future—basically, all the ones with gold nibs that put down a ton of ink, but which I was less likely to take on a trip in a year that saw a bunch of longer travel.

My most popular review of 2025

My most popular review of 2025 was the one where I try to pitch the Visconti Iopenna as the ideal starter pen.

That one has the most views of anything I published this year, as it currently is sitting on the first page of Google results for “best fountain pen for beginners” and HAHAHAHAA I LOVE THAT.

NO WAIT, IT’S EVEN BETTER: IT’S BEING USED AS ONE OF GOOGLE’S AI OVERVIEW SOURCES.

I ran this in a clean, cookie-free Firefox window to make sure it wasn’t pulling anything specific to me, and no, it’s in the default Google. My wife then looked it up on her phone and same. WOW.

Now, the AI is not recommending the Iopenna “as a tastefully floppy alternative to the Safari and Metropolitan” yet, but I think we’ll get there with time. This is a big win, thank you to everyone who promoted this.

My favorite reviews of 2025

I really love writing the high-concept reviews. This year we had three, patterned after a Hallmark Christmas movie, a horror comedy, and a scene from my book. If you missed the Hallmark one, that’s probably my favorite. Links:

• Review: small town pen (Hallmark movie)

• Review: pen-shaped abomination (horror comedy)

• A gift for Great Leader (Great Leader Detective Agency)

(I probably should have released that last one after I’d started talking about the book, as that probably came a little out of left field. It should make a lot more sense now!)

Writing stuff in 2025

I published a book! Everyone who read it has been very nice! Many of you left nice reviews! Thank you so much! You can still buy it here on Amazon because that’s how books work!

I also wrote Book 2 in that series, started working on a LitRPG based on an idea I had when on painkillers after hand surgery, and knocked out and edited two short stories for a religious horror collection that started as a side project on a trip (“wow, the story of Jonah and the fish is pretty scary if you think about it from the perspective of one of the sailors”) but has gained a lot more momentum.

In 2026 I expect to get the horror thing done first, then revisit Book 2 in Great Leader Detective Agency. I’ll probably also keep working on T-Rex Tradwife Apocalypse, which has evolved to be a body-swap comedy where a sentient tyrannosaur trades bodies with a woman who got kicked off of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, set in the context of a LitRPG apocalypse.

Handwriting stuff in 2025

I made an effort at writing left-handed after hand surgery. It went okay.

I also decided to build on previous efforts at learning Spencerian (described here) and Italic (described here) with Uncial (ye olde Roman, illuminated-text stuff) and Batarde (ooh la la ye olde French) blackletter hands this year.

Next year, I’m hoping to learn Textura (ye olde English), Rotunda (ye antico italiano), and Fraktur (ye olde German). Fraktur may be beyond my grasp right now, but I feel good about the others based on figuring out Batarde.

2026 Review Queue

Here’s what we’ve got in store for next year! It’s a good mix of stuff I bought in 2025 and stuff I just haven’t gotten around to talking about yet that I’ve had for a while.

We’ll be covering:

• A handful of Pilot Parallels

• Caran D’Ache Whatever Number This Pen Is

• Moonman M2

• Sailor Pro Gourd Slim

• NARWHAL DRACULA

• Ye Olde Propeller Pencil

• Some Glass Pen I Tried Once And Decided It Was Not For Me

• Schaeffer Imperial

• Monteverde Something Or Other But It’s Pretty Good

• Another single-pen case

• Conklin Duragraph

• Pelikan M200

PLUS, NOT SHOWN ABOVE:

• The Sailor 1911S Ninja and the Stipula Da Vinci Caribbean (still in the box)

• Calligrascape blackletter calligraphy course (not a thing you can photograph)

• A hand-painted Franklin-Christof that they are re-hand-painting for me so let’s hope it looks cool when I get it back

A CLIPMAS MIRACLE

Finally: last year my wife bought me the tastefully floppy Visconti Iopenna for Christmas.

This year she got me this tastefully floppy bowl.

It’s very floppy. I cannot stress this enough.

Anyway, when I opened it she was like “they call the guy who designed it ‘the Fish’ because his last name is Pesce.”

I started laughing. “That’s the same guy who designed the pen you got me last year.”

FRIENDS, SHE HAD NO IDEA. SHE JUST SAW THAT BOWL AND WAS LIKE “HE WILL LIKE THAT.” A GENUINE CLIPMAS MIRACLE.

Here’s hoping you have or find someone who understands you this well in 2026. I’ll see you then!

We have another installment today.

As a reminder: a single-pen case is a great way to tell the world you’ve graduated from being “regular weird” to “super weird” about writing. You don’t just use a fountain pen; you use one made of antler or shark or adorned with a carving of a ninja made with sparkly gold dust, and you want to protect it.

We started this journey with a review of a whole bunch of different one-pen cases, all of which I think I got for free.

Then I bought myself an extremely weird-shaped Pineider (here) for finishing my first book and wanted something specifically to protect that. So we covered the Esterbrook Pen Nook, a heavy-duty, hard-sided case.

And then that case didn’t work for that Pineider either.

WELL, THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM, because I finally got a case that works for that pen, and that’s what we’re covering today. And then a bonus review of another one that I believe will work, but can’t test yet because I found what looked like rust on the Pineider and had to send it back.

We’ll get to that. Let’s dive in!

Review: Visconti Dreamtouch single-pen case

The Visconti Dreamtouch is probably the best single-pen case you can buy if you’re trying to protect a pen with a particularly weird shape or delicate finish—the kind where you don’t want the case putting pressure on the pen in some form.

(I know, I know, big surprise: the Italians made a pen case that works perfectly for all your Italian pens made of volcanic rock and bog oak. Shut up, it took me a minute to get there.)

Here it is with my unnecessarily pointy Pineider.

It’s made of leather, lined with very soft material. I don’t know what the material is. If you asked them they’d probably tell you it’s Nanovelvetica or something. It’s nice.

The top half zips all the way around to let you take the pen in and out without having to scrape it against the case. This is useful if you have a pen made of a natural material like antler or sharkskin that you don’t want to jam against the side of a case. The zipper is very nice quality and is smooth to the touch.

When the case is closed it’s sturdy. It’s not a hard-shell case like the Esterbrook, so if you actually sat on the thing you’d probably be in trouble…so try not to do that. Otherwise I think you’ll be fine.

Honestly, that’s about it. It’s a really good, well-designed case. It’s expensive, but not exorbitantly so—I think the street price is around $90 compared to $60 for the Esterbrook, and that one was made of leatherette instead of real leather. That’s the only real drawback.

Strong recommend if you have something made of natural materials, hand-painted, or otherwise decorated in a way where it’s especially sensitive to the kind of case you use.

Bonus Review: Lapis Bard Two-Pen Case

I know, this is technically a two-pen case. I’m just excited it exists.

When I was initially trying to find a case for that Pineider, I told my wife that I wish someone made a case that was basically one of those pocket humidors for cigars, but lined with soft stuff instead of cedar. I figured that’d be perfect for what I needed and also the idea of people thinking I was taking out cigars but nope it’s just two fancy little pens was funny to me.

I spent a lot of time looking for this on Etsy and came up dry. And then, when looking through the bowels of Appelboom’s site on Black Friday, I found that I had willed it into existence, because that’s exactly what this thing is.

It’s a molded leather case, made of two parts that slide together pretty snugly. Not sure if that’ll stay as tight over time, but let’s hope so. Right now it’s solid.

It holds two pens.

You will notice neither of those are the Pineider. Hold on, that’s coming.

First, we have to talk about the major drawback to this case, which is that the slots are kinda small. The pen on the left is a LAMY Dialog, which is about as big as you can get. You can also cram a Diplomat Nexus in there if you believe in yourself, but that’s the biggest it can get.

Those are big pens overall, but most pens are actually wider at a fairly critical point—the cap band (or just generally, the cap). Like, you can put a Sailor Pro Gear Slim in this case, but a 1911L won’t fit:

Basically no Montegrappa will fit, since they all kinda have this shape.

And so on and so on. I’d guess at least half of my pens won’t fit. The Pineider Back to the Future should—I measured it before I bought the case—but I don’t know for sure, because I don’t have that pen right now.

About that: Between getting the Visconti case and the Lapis Bard, I noticed some brown stuff in the Pineider’s cap. I thought maybe it was leftover from production, like dried oil or whatever. But when I wiped it out it was, as far as I could tell, rust.

I took some pictures and sent them to Truphae, whom I bought the pen from a little over a year ago. My cover letter was something like “hi, please help I’ve never seen a pen with rust I don’t know what to do.”

Major shout-out to their customer service team for offering to run point with Pineider on getting it repaired. I *think* some of the finish on the magnetic cap seal failed and started to rust, but it was a first for the Truphae team too. Kind of a freak occurrence and I’m really curious what it turns out to be. I’ll post pictures and talk about that experience when it’s over, but I have a feeling that’s going to be a while.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to use this case for its original purpose at some point in the future, as I really do love that weird little pen. And if you have smaller pens, especially those without a big cap or cap band (a LAMY 2000 and Pelikan M200, for example, are both fine, and vintage pens probably will be too) this Lapis Bard is a pretty cool case.

OTHER STUFF

TARIFFS ARE HERE: well, we all knew this was coming. That pen case from Appelboom came with a $20 tariff that I had to pay DHL. Womp womp. It did make me feel like a very sophisticated Art Vandelay-type, though.

ALSO THIS: The good news is that Sailor made NEW NINJA PENS. The bad news is that they cost exactly the same despite being built on the cheaper 1911S model.

Top row: last year’s model, 21k nib. Bottom row; this year’s model, 14k nib.

Those are the street prices from Goulet, who helpfully had them all in one easy screenshot, and that’s consistent with what I’ve found elsewhere. This might have just been Sailor getting ahead of an overall price adjustment that they announced for 2026, but womp womp. (I still got one anyway, but from Endless Pens as part of their bonkers month-long winter sale for much less than those prices. Hopefully you did too.)

ONE MORE TO GO: We’ll do one more post this year—I’ll do a year-in-review and include some other stuff too. It’ll be after Christmas. (And Merry Christmas, unless you are British in which case Happy Christmas!)

This pen has been a hit for Diplomat—as evidenced by the increasing number of colors they have made available—and you’ve really been looking forward to checking it out. Yet, as you prepare to consider it, you feel uneasy. Will it live up to the hype?

It is not unlike the unease you feel about that weird lump on your right testicle. Was that there before? It’s probably fine, right? There are reasons to have a lump on your ball that are not cancer, right? Like a snake bite?

You resolve to push your fear aside and review the pen, and then separately research if it’s possible for a snake to bite you in the crotch while you are sleeping.

Review first: The Viper is a slender, smallish cartridge/converter pen. It’s a modern, fun take on a classic pen shape, like if Jonathan Adler made a Parker 51.

The Viper is notable for the snakeskin pattern on its monochrome barrel. It’s pretty easy to have a pattern like this go wrong, a fact anyone who has ever used a barbell can attest to. Too subtle and it will feel like nothing; too prominent and it will be pokey and hurt.

The Viper achieves the right balance here. The barrel’s shape is prominent enough to be distinctive, but not so much that it is uncomfortable in the hand. It’s pretty satisfying to the touch.

…and that’s a sharp contrast to whatever is going on with your right testicle. You find yourself going out of your way to not touch it when going to the bathroom. It’s not that it hurts; it doesn’t. It’s just that you kind of don’t want to be reminded that it now feels like someone shoved a steel ball bearing into a hard-boiled egg. You figure if you ignore it then you don’t have to discuss it with your doctor or have cancer or both. Maybe you can stay in this moment of Schrödinger’s ball cancer forever.

Back to the pen: It has a very powerful magnetic cap. It closes with a nice little ZOOP noise, which comes from the force the magnet exerts when it seals itself.

It is pretty fun to play with. And the semi-violent way it seals makes you comfortable that the cap is securely in place.

…and you need some comfort in your life, too, as you’ve now ruled out the whole nighttime snake bite/crotch thing. That only happens in Australia. And when you asked ChatGPT if dreaming about Australia could cause a psychosomatic snake bite on your crotch while you slept, it told you that you were a kind-hearted genius for asking such an insightful question but also no.

Worse, you ran some internet searches. Why did you do that? All the options are bad! You can’t unsee those pictures! Maybe ball cancer is not that bad, you think.

Again, the pen: The Viper’s grip is relatively bullet-shaped, which gives it a vintage feel. Here it is compared to my old Shaeffer again.

It’s a slender pen, but the section is long with only a very slight taper. You can hold it in a bunch of different places and it works.

As for the nib: it’s a hooded nib, another nod to the “Viper” name. Probably. I’m not a snake guy. Anyway, it looks like this:

Diplomat pens generally have solid nibs; this one is solid as well. It performs like a well-tuned, stock steel nib. There’s a nice amount of feedback, which I think is consistent with the other Diplomats I have. (For a discussion of what exactly “feedback” means, see the blog linked at the bottom of this post.)

Is the Viper worth it? That depends. On the one hand, the design is cool and sturdy, it writes well, and it’s reasonably priced. It looks like a stylish, modern take on an old fountain pen. On the other hand, it’s pretty slender and uses a hooded nib, and if those things aren’t your bag then the design and construction won’t matter.

You have similar thoughts about calling your doctor about your whole testicle situation. On the one hand, you don’t love the idea of asking your doctor to look at something on your ball, and maybe it’ll go away on its own. On the other hand, you also don’t like the idea of asking your doctor to look at something on your ball and finding out that you now have stage 2 cancer because you waited a couple months to avoid some mild embarrassment.

You pick up the pen and examine it again, concluding it was worth it as you wait for your doctor’s office to pick up the phone.

OTHER STUFF

CANCER CONTEXT: I always wonder what it’d be like to be a new subscriber and get this in your inbox. Like the guy who subscribed this morning: hi!

I survived this cancer. I write about it once a year in November, because I caught mine very early due to someone in my life telling me I should be checking for it.

So, here is actual testicular cancer advice for the men in your life: check your stuff once a week in the shower. Do it on Sunday night or Monday morning, whenever you shower, so if you find something you have basically a full week to get to the doctor. You are checking for anything that feels different than how it normally feels. If you feel something new, go see the doctor, immediately—unless you are really angling to give chemotherapy a try, in which case give it a little time so the cancer has a chance to spread to your abdomen and lungs first.

OH, GRANDMA! This post let me indulge one of my favorite kinds of writing: pharma ad non sequiturs. If you are not subjected to these in your country, the format goes like this.

FADE IN: EXT. BACKYARD. AN OLD WOMAN IS PLAYING WITH A YOUNG BOY.

OLD LADY
(LAUGHS, WAVES AT YOUNG BOY.)
Great catch, Timmy!
(TO CAMERA)
But do you know what isn’t great? Uncontrollable butt blood. That’s why I take Dributika.

YOUNG BOY
Oh, Grandma!

SOME GOOD THANKSGIVING READING: Finally, here’s a link to a great blog that seriously looks at the artistry and technique involved in crafting fountain pen nibs.

If you want to learn more about how nibs work and see a lot of cool ultra close-up pictures, check it out. The post on “what is feedback, anyway” is really good.

nibbedinthebud

modern race. analog pace.

By Josh

I decided to take a break from my regular projects and work on a collection of short stories of religious horror. Working title is With Fear and Trembling, and it retells Bible stories from the perspective of other characters, by which they become horror stories.

For example, Jonah 1 from the perspective of the other mariners is “we got caught in a huge storm, this guy told us the storm would go away if we killed him because he was trying to run away from God, we eventually gave in and threw him overboard, IT ACTUALLY WORKED, and then a giant sea monster ate him.”

There are a lot of stories like this. Like, I’ve always wondered what the pigherders were thinking when their pigs became demon-possessed and ran into the sea to drown themselves. Now I’m writing about that!

Anyway, I’ve previously talked about how I don’t get drafting fiction by hand because I find it too slow. But since I planned to work in pubs on this trip, I decided I’d give it a go. And it was pretty great! I wrote four stories! You guys were on to something! Recommend!

And on that note, let’s go over a bunch of other recommendations from the trip, starting with other stuff in that picture.

Cheap journals from Venice

My notebook for With Fear and Trembling, the one pictured above, is a cheap, 5-euro thing I bought at the Libreria Acqua Alta in Venice early this year. It’s a bookshop in Castello named after Venice’s routine flooding, for which reason the books are kept in bathtubs and gondolas so they survive the high waters. It bills itself as “the most beautiful bookshop in the world” and has a fair claim to that.

I got them as souvenirs, but like, wow—the paper quality is extremely good. I’m headed back there in January and will be stocking up as they’re pretty ideal for a first draft of an idea while also being cheap and plain enough that I actually use them. That bookshop is not really on the main tourist route, but if you have the chance to visit the journals they sell are terrific.

Clockwork Stout, Dublin

The beer in that picture is Clockwork Velvet Stout. It’s local beer sold at a lot of the heritage pubs in Dublin; that picture is from the Swan.

As I understand it, the heritage pub owners got annoyed at the wholesale cost for Guinness, banded together to start their own captive brewery, and then came up with this as a Guinness substitute, which they released earlier this year. It tastes generally the same but has less of a black olive note and is, I think, a bit creamier.

If you enjoy Guinness you’ll like this, but if not then this isn’t going to magically make you like a dark stout. (I know from making my wife try it.)

It costs basically the same as a Guinness—the savings is going to the bar owner, not you—but I really liked it and got it as much as I could.

Stationery in Dublin: almost every store

Dublin has a stupid number of bookshops. Like, maybe all of ours in America didn’t actually shut down, they just teleported here. It’s wild; it feels like it’s the Y2K era in a good way.

Many of these shops sell blank journals, which seem to be bound by the same local bookbinder. Here are two I bought from a big chain store and then a little indie bookshop by our hotel.

You will not have to look hard to find this kind of stuff there.

Pens in Dublin: almost no store

ON THE OTHER HAND, there’s a real dearth of pen shops in Dublin. It looks like there used to be one right by the river, but there’s now a vintage clothing store in its place. (The “pen shop” sign is still there, WHICH IS VERY MISLEADING.) The only dedicated pen shop I could find was too far from the city center to merit a trip for us.

Arnott’s, a big department store in the Jervis area of Northside, has a nice LAMY display and (I think) Shaeffer. The antique shop Needful Things also carries new Shaeffers, only some of which have ironic curses. And that’s pretty much it.

You’ll have better luck shopping for vintage pens in Dublin’s antique shops. You’ll be even better-off if you want to try out some “historical writing” and get an antique propeller pencil, WHICH I OBVIOUSLY DID.

I got this at an antique shop in the Powerscourt Townhouse center, which is a strong recommend too—it’s an old townhome converted into a whole bunch of design and jewelry and antique shops. I saw these little propeller pencils everywhere in antique shops and decided to get one. If you do the same, shop around; the one I bought ended up being a fraction of the price of the first one I saw.

Pens and Stationery in Cork: Unbound

Unbound is a design shop on the bridge between the Victorian district and the main part of Cork. It’s on the Victorian side of things.

They have A LOT of pens and stationery stuff, including one of the biggest Kaweco displays I’ve ever seen. They even had a cabinet with a few vintage ones they’d restored, and I ended up buying an old Shaeffer Imperial.

If you’re full up on stationery needs, they also sell these goofy animal rugs from the Netherlands, which we debated about heavily but held off on until we are absolutely sure our dog is out of her piranha phase.

The Academy music venue, Dublin

The Academy is a club venue in Northside Dublin, close to the Jervis station on the tram. We were staying a couple blocks away from it, but if you’re in Temple Bar on the other side of the river it’ll be an easy walk.

We saw two shows there on our trip and IT WAS A NICE VENUE, YOU GUYS. So many staffers! They had like ten of them behind the bar pulling pints and handing out water, and then others just walking around constantly minding trash and safety. It was terrific.

On our first night in Dublin we saw Hanabie, an all-girl metal group from Japan. They brand themselves as Harajukucore, which is metalhead for “the most Harajuku.” I’d had them on my workout mix for a while and was psyched it’d be so easy to see them. Totally bonkers live.

I made a GIF of the singer jumping around that I was going to put here, but I showed it to my wife and we agreed it might give someone a seizure. So instead here’s a video clip. BRACE YOURSELF.

The next night we saw Lord of the Lost, which Eurovision fans will recognize as Germany’s entry in 2023. My wife didn’t remember them from Eurovision and dark synth rock is not really her usual thing, but she was like “THIS IS AWESOME” the entire show. The singer, who is also known for his large collection of mugs (see below), was a true delight.

That’s the kind of stuff you’ll see there—I’d guess it’s like a 500-person capacity venue, so you’re going to see smaller local acts and larger international ones.

Irish Gym Culture

We went to a local commercial gym to work out on this trip (a FlyeFit, which is probably somewhere between a 24 Hour Fitness and a Gold’s in the USA). It was hugely effective at getting over jet lag quickly, which normally hits me hard.

Some good/bad here.

• Good: out of a half-dozen visits I only saw one person filming, and he set up in a corner where he wasn’t bothering anyone or getting other people in the shot.

• Bad: no one reracks stuff. Finding dumbbells was like a treasure hunt.

That said, I’ll take reracking stuff over having to awkwardly try to navigate around someone filming a thirst trap video for Instagram, so this gets a recommend too.

Doom Slice for breadtangle pizza, Dublin

There are a lot of Neapolitan pizza options in Dublin, which is great because that’s the best kind. But sometimes you want a breadtangle of pizza, and for that there is Doom Slice.

I’m not a breadtangle fan, but this one was really good and I’d get it again.

Vintage Cocktail Club for cocktails, Dublin

VCC is a speakeasy-type bar in the dead middle of Temple Bar, which you will never find unless you are specifically looking for it. Every big European city has a place like this; it’s easy to find if you know what to look for, but you won’t stumble upon it. (Exception: Rasputin in Florence, which is so inconspicuous that it’s hard to find even when they tell you exactly where it is.)

It’s a small bar with Prohibition-style theming and a super deep menu arranged by era of bartending, including pages of absinthe and Fernet drinks. Our waitress very honestly answered my request for the best Fernet drink with “none of them” and steered me towards a Manhattan riff instead. You’ll have to ring the bell to get in; use their very good online booking for a reservation so you don’t run into capacity issues.

Franciscan Well Brewery for craft beer and pizza, Cork

Maybe twenty minutes from the city center on foot, right along the water. Very friendly staff, nice old pub with snugs and an outdoor area where they have a pizza place set up that serves solid Neapolitan.

Gogglebox, television

Watching Gogglebox is one of my favorite things to do at night in the UK/Ireland. The basic concept is the same as 90 Day Fiance: Pillow Talk, except it covers an entire week of TV shows (versus one episode of one show) and is generally way more fun. In addition to the original, there’s also an Irish edition and a hilariously understated celebrity edition—where they’ll introduce one of the commenters as “so-and-so’s friend Joanna” and it’s Joanna Lumley, for example.

My favorites from the original series are Giles and Mary. Please let me know if you watch this too!

Fart Yoga, from a huge toy store in Dublin

Finally, fart yoga.

The box for Fart Yoga is the best and possibly only way to learn how to say “fart game for the whole family” in Italian. My tutor is going to be really impressed. Recommend!

1. Denial (it’s fine, i’m sure all the water it keeps spitting out is normal)

2. Bargaining (okay even if it’s dead the internet says they’re not that expensive)

3. Super Denial (no that can’t be what it costs, the internet said so)

4. Sorrow (oh it really does cost that much huh wow that’s awful)

5. Acceptance (at least it’s over)

All that say: I’m bringing back Just Nice Things. Here we go, Halloween edition!

Nice Thing 1: This spooooky pen case

This is the new Esterbrook Pen Nook.

I got it for my Pineider Back To The Future because the top of that pen is pointy carbon fiber and thus not load-bearing, so a normal pen case—most of which allow for some pressure to be applied to the top of the pen—doesn’t really work. I always thought these Nooks looked cool, so when the new edition came out I bought one.

Well, joke’s on me: the Pineider doesn’t work with this case either. The Nook is way too big for that pen without using the Nook’s elastic loop to secure it, and getting a delicate pen with a magnetic cap in and out of that loop is too much work.

That specific pen aside, the Pen Nook is a pretty good case if you want something that’s going to have hard sides all around. I like it, though I’m now using it for a metal one with a screw-on cap.

That said, downsides:

• It is huge. You will most likely have to use the elastic loop to secure your pen or it will rattle around in there; whether this is a problem or not depends on how you plan on using the case.

• Kinda expensive for being made of fake leather.

• Haunted by a soldier from a forgotten sixteenth-century religious war who will not stop screaming in French every time you open the case.

Nice Thing 2: This fun horror movie

It’s October, which means it’s time to subscribe to Shudder for one month and then recommend a movie to you guys that is on Netflix instead.

Dead Talents Society is a Taiwanese film that has no plot similarities to Beetlejuice but reminded me of that movie the entire time, in both the tone and how much it fleshes out the mundane mechanics of the afterlife it presents (a significant amount of plot hinges on permitting requirements). It’s a horror-flavored comedy.

Give the first few minutes a try. The cold open sets out one of the core conflicts in the film and represents the overall tone/style quite well, so in five minutes you’ll know if the movie is for you or not. And if you make it all the way to the end of the credits there are like four fake endings, which are fun.

Nice Thing 3: Enthusiastic Guy With Eyepatch

I heard about Dead Talents Society from Ghost Pirate Entertainment, one of the many horror movie recommendation channels I watch on YouTube so I don’t have to waste ten hours scrolling through Tubi.

This one is run by Enthusiastic Guy With Eyepatch, also known as the visual artist Kainan Becker. He picks kind of gross thumbnail images for his videos (BE WARNED, the above is a very tame one) but the actual content is fairly wholesome and fun, and he’s good at making videos by streaming service so you can just get recommendations for whatever you actually subscribe to. Link here.

Other recommendation channels I like include the Enthusiastic Guy With Dad Hat And Mug (Cobwebs Channel),

Redheaded Lady, American (Possessed By Horror),

and Redheaded Lady, Australian (spookyastronauts).

Nice Thing 4: This tea that doesn’t stain your teeth

This is CatSpring Texas Native Yaupon Tea. Let’s all agree I don’t know how to pronounce “Yaupon.”

I know someone who was kinda involved with this company and they gave me some to try. I successfully put aside my concerns (wouldn’t this technically be a tisane? don’t we already have Texas tea, and it’s oil? IS THIS JUST OIL?) and tried it.

One of the ways this is marketed is more or less “you can brew it for too long.” This was a selling point to me because my kitchen is upstairs from my office and thus leaving a tea bag in the mug the entire time is kind of the dream for me. (SORRY, TOGA AND OTHER READERS FROM THE UK. MAYBE STOP READING TWO SENTENCES AGO?) It also doesn’t have tannins, so it’s not supposed to stain your teeth. So I put in one of the green tea bags in a giant mug, drank most of it, and then forgot about it for a couple hours.

When I remembered and checked back in, the marketing actually delivered. The tea doesn’t get bitter when you leave the bag in, and both my teeth and—more surprisingly—the white mug were totally stain-free. A Halloween miracle for the lazy!

So I think we can all agree I know everything there is to know about pen shows.

And, by logical extension, that means you do not. (Only one person can know everything about pen shows. It is a Highlander situation.)

But don’t worry: If you’ve ever gone to a pen show and struggled to stay in budget, here are some HOT TIPS that will help from me, the owner of Crab With Top Hat.1

Make it hard to buy things

There will be more things at the pen show that you want to buy than things you should buy. This becomes even more true once you make your first purchase and get a little dopamine rush. Things can snowball quickly and if you’re not careful you can end up over budget and owning a pen shaped like a parrot.

Avoid this by making it harder to buy stuff. Some people do this by only bringing cash, but that has the drawback of you 100% spending of that cash, possibly on parrot pens and hat-wearing crabs. It keeps you in budget but does not necessarily make any of your purchases smarter.

A better approach is to only bring cryptocurrency, commodity options, or foreign currency—basically, anything that has real value but requires a few steps before someone will take it in exchange for goods or services. Make sure you REALLY want that parrot pen (and stay in budget) by making every transaction take an hour.

Handle stuff you want fixed before buying new stuff

Trick your dumb lizard brain into thinking you bought new pens by having some old ones fixed. This time I had Matthew Chen tune the nib on my Montegrappa Extra (many skulls, review here) and Will from Reedem Pens re-seat the nib on the Moore I bought from him last year (most popular review on this site, here).2

$35 later I was like WOW IT’S LIKE I GOT TWO NEW PENS because then they worked better.

Also, doing this first will make you slow down. Not buying stuff right away helps you make better decisions. Another way you can do this is…

Take a lap

See all of the things before buying any of the things. Anything big, at least.

Don’t buy a bunch of mid-range pens and then find out the very expensive one you want is available for a ridiculous discount but whoops you bought a bunch of special edition Safaris so you’re out of money. Survey what’s there before spending money. And while you’re doing that…

Ask the price of everything

To help you plan what to actually buy, ask the price of anything you are remotely interested in. Especially stuff that’s expensive.

Most of the time it’s what you’d expect, but don’t assume this. If I’d done that, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you our final tip…

Get really lucky when the ridiculous pen you want is on sale for $5 less than your budget

Okay, so this was at the pen show:

That’s the Stipula Da Vinci Caribbean. It’s a retractable pen—it’s like the LAMY Dialog, except five times more complicated, ten times more fragile, and 100% more pirate-themed. Here’s a glamour shot from Atlas Stationers, which is one of my favorite vendors lately.

Obviously I wanted it. But then:

Oof.

I saw it when it came out and was like “that’s awesome, good luck with that pricing.” I know the exuberant idiot pen market well (PARROT PEN) and the only way you’re getting that price for a pen that ridiculous is if it was designed by Sylvester Stallone.

Stipula only made like 10 of each color so I’d never actually seen one, but the Dromgoole’s distributor guy had TWO. I asked him how much he was selling them for, expecting to get a “special pen show price” of 5% off and walk away.

Instead he told me a price that was well more than 50% off, taking it from a silly MSRP to a pretty normal price for an Italian pen with a gold nib. I said something like “okay, thanks—wait, really?”

Anyway, now I own one.

Kinda. It’s my wife’s Christmas present to me, which means she hid it. And yes, having learned my lesson from the last time I bought a weird Italian pen at a suspiciously deep discount, she hid it AFTER I thoroughly cleaned and tested it. It needed a little TLC—this is the kind of pen where everyone who sees it is like “haha what LET ME DIP IT IN INK AND PUT MY FINGERPRINTS ON IT”—and I’ll cover all that when I’m allowed to see it again.3

In conclusion, best pen show since I bought that parrot pen in 2019. Share your own tips in the comments!

Other stuff

DOING WELL, THANKS: thanks to everyone who checked in on my hand. It is healing well, though I’m still going to be doing PT for a while to get my range of motion right.

Also, as a preview of our annual men’s health awareness post, I found out on Sunday that I’m two years cancer-free! One more year of MRIs based on what my doctor told me last time and I’m done.

COOKIE CHAOS: this post is a day late because I went to the state fair yesterday, so I had to prepare for that and then do it and then take a nap. Here is a thing I ate.

And here’s a margarita filled with Pop Rocks.4 Bye!

I guess it wasn’t visible on the MRI that one of my carpal bones had grown on top of another one, so the surgery was worse than expected. When I went in for the follow-up my doctor told me “yeah, when I started chipping away I said ‘ooh he’s going to hate me after this.’” My wrist is now wrist-shaped, though, which is nice.

I’d been hoping I’d walk out with a light brace or cast. Instead I got Mega Man’s arm cannon:

All that to say, recovery has been unpleasant and is still ongoing. I got downgraded to a brace last week and had two glorious days where I was cleared for most normal activity, then called my doctor on Friday because my hand was swollen and she was like “jk keep resting it’s still recovering.”

So I’m still leaning on my left hand a bunch for both writing and typing. Here are five things I’ve learned:

1. It’s faster to type with my left hand on a physical keyboard than use my left hand on my phone. Both are terrible but the virtual keyboard requires more precision and is thus massively more frustrating. For example, it took five tries for predictive text to get I wanted to say “requires” in the previous sentence.

2. If you’re going to have to use your left hand for writing, practice before you need it. I had to keep my right hand elevated for the first two weeks, which meant I couldn’t hold the page in place, and the movements were so unfamiliar that this was an issue.

3. Writing with your non-dominant hand is not like learning a new script. That’s kinda obvious, but I’ve been working on learning Uncial and Batarde this year and think I unconsciously anchored there for difficulty. It’s of course way harder. You have to relearn what your arm vs wrist vs fingers do and when.

4. It’s not the mirror image of what your dominant hand does. I think that would be easier. Instead you’re still writing left to right, which means you’re now pushing the pen when you’re used to pulling it and that is tricky. You may also end up using a totally different grip; I kinda like the over-writing hook grip for my left hand.

5. Don’t start with a fountain pen. You need way more drag on the page. Pencil or a felt-tip; I used the latter.

6. BONUS SIXTH THING: I learned that painkillers, specifically Tramadol, can have zero effect on certain people. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.

For practicing, if you’ve misplaced your handwriting books like I did, Jet Pens has some nice lettering pages with traceable letters that you can print out. The script is kinda like D’Nealian handwriting.

I’ll be at my local pen show this Friday—I will be the Italian with a mohawk and a wrist brace—and should have more to report next time.

OTHER STUFF

EH CLOSE ENOUGH: Check it out, I now have one of those automatically generated “What’s it about?” tiles for Great Leader Detective Agency over on Amazon:

Mostly accurate! Shark guy and dictator guy are the same guy but still not bad.

UPSHOT OF ANESTHESIA AND ALSO PAIN: While still under the fog of war I came up with the idea for my next book series, T-REX TRADWIFE APOCALYPSE. It’s about a T-Rex that gets trapped in the body of a tradwife influencer from Utah like five minutes before the alien apocalypse. The tagline is “She’s a tyrannosaurus. Stuck in the body of a tradwife influencer. And this apocalypse, she’s out for revenge.” It’s either the best or worst idea I’ve ever had.

Fortunately, Ballard was great. It’s like Portland ten years ago, when it was at peak Portlandia, minus the sugar trash donuts. I’ll put a list of cool stuff the end of the post if you find yourself there, but we’re gonna focus on Push/Pull on Market Street.

This is an art supply store. And also a shop for local art. And also a shop for underground comix, which are like regular comic books but instead of being about a superhero they’re about evangelical masculinity in two specific horror films from the 1980’s. (If that one calls to you the same way it did to me, it was still in stock last week.)

They also do classes. Honestly, you walk into this place and will either be totally bewildered or be like “oh yeah, this kind of place; I bet they put on shows for Food Not Bombs in the back, by the vegan snacks,” depending on your life experiences.

For our purposes, they make and sell their own fountain pen and drawing ink.

A lot of it.

The vast majority of inks come in these 20 ml vials, which they sell for $8 each.

Some are water resistant, some are waterproof, some are vegan. The vegan thing surprised me because I guess I thought all inks were made of plant or mineral stuff. Now I’m curious which of my other inks are made of horse meat.

Anyway, I bought five of them to try out: Shadow, Magpie, Witching Hour, Rook, and Ennui.

Technically I bought two of them to try out and then came back and bought another three because I thought the packaging was cool and I just kind of assumed they’d perform well.

Here’s how that turned out:

Whoops. That one is Magpie and it’s the worst. Witching Hour and Ennui are not much better.

Shadow spreads but doesn’t feather too badly. Rook works more often than not, but takes a very long time to dry without smudging. Those are the two I am most likely to try to use again.

Look, as someone who feels a nearly compulsive need to be different, I wanted these to work SO BAD. I loved the packaging and colors and the idea of having a reasonably-priced niche brand that I could use as my go-to ink was a big plus for me. I literally went back to buy more before I even tried the first two!

Initially I thought maybe they were just really wet inks and I was using the Pineider we talked about last time, which is the wettest-writing pen I’ve ever owned. So I used my Krusac Dragonslayer (very over-the-top review here if you’re new), an incredibly reliable pen, to test out Magpie and Witching Hour and Ennui. Same problem. I then put Diplomat/Sailor inks in the two pens I used as a control, just to make sure there wasn’t anything weird with the pens; no issues.

Still thinking maybe I was doing something wrong, I went to go look if anyone else had reviewed these. Yes: Mike from Inkdependence did, LAST MONTH, and had the same problem with two different inks than the five I tried.

On the site it’s literally his most recent post, which was frustrating but at least confirmed it wasn’t me.

Verdict: WOMP WOOOOOOOOOMP

My wife did buy a cool sticker from that store though, so not a total loss. The comics and art they have are weird in a polarizing way that you’ll either hate or will make you want to spend hours in the store. So I think it’s still worth checking out if you’re in Ballard, or online if you want to see if Mike and I both got bad batches.

OTHER STUFF

THANKS: Thanks to everyone who already checked out Great Leader Detective Agency! Reminder that it is on Kindle Unlimited! Special thanks to the person from the UK who borrowed it from Kindle Unlimited and then read the entire thing in one day! That made my day, whoever you are.

NEXT POST TBD: By the time you’re reading this I’ll likely be in the OR for hand surgery. I’ve got a gnarly carpal boss (bonus bone growth) and ganglion (squishy lump from tendon injury) that have decided to team up and form one big ol’ mass on the back of my hand that, though benign, is causing me some functional issues and also looks very very gross. My next post will probably be about trying to write with my non-dominant hand while I heal.

INK FOR THE INK GOD: Are any of you guys into Warhammer? There was a Warhammer speakeasy in Ballard, basically a place to play Warhammer 40000 that has a bar. I walked by it like twenty times and then went in and asked the guys at the bar “hey so can you explain Warhammer to me.” An hour later I walked out with my first Warhammer model and a reading list.

I’m pretty excited about it. Anyone else?

AS PROMISED, A Truncated List of Other Cool Places in Ballard

• Lucca: Gift shop with a bunch of unusual stuff, including some stationery/writing utensils. I got a pocketknife that looks like a fish. My wife got an embroidered patch of a shark with a bloody hand that dangles from its mouth.

• Waystone Wargaming Speakeasy: Aforementioned Warhammer place. Cool concept and really welcoming people.

• Barnacle: An amaro bar that is largely used as a staging area for a connected restaurant, which is criminal. It has the largest selection of amaro I have ever seen, anywhere, period. They had more fernets than most bars in Italy have amari.

• Ballard Health Club: Extremely reasonable short-term passes, very well-equipped with many racks and platforms, diverse range of ages all lifting weights without anyone filming themselves and making it weird. Feels like a throwback to lifting culture in the early 2000’s.

buy the book here

Pen-wise, this means it’s time to finally open this pen I bought from Truphae at Black Friday back in November.

I told myself I wasn’t allowed to open it until I actually published my book, as I knew I’d be tempted to bail out during editing and proofing and all the admin stuff you do to actually get it out there. This was some external motivation to keep going.

I’m pretty sure it was a final sale. But even if not, it’s been nearly nine months so I’m very positive we’re out of any return window.

So was it worth the wait? Let’s find out in this super-sized post!

First, let’s open it up.

Inside that hilariously large box was a Pineider Back To The Future pen and also a book. (That’s it. No additional parts or ink with this one. It’s a maximal/minimal approach to packaging.) So I don’t have to keep typing “Back To The Future,” for the rest of this post I’m going to call it the Marty McFly.

The Marty McFly is a limited-edition, piston-filling fountain pen with a MSRP of just under $1,000. I definitely did not pay that and you won’t have to either, as Truphae now has it for $500, but keep that original price in mind. I got the all-black version, of which they made 88 in total (the minimum number for time travel). Remember that, too.

Here’s a glamour shot and current pricing from Truphae.

The accompanying book is entirely in Italian and is about Pineider’s history and postwar something something. I don’t know. I speak enough Italian that I could figure it out, but I’ve instead been spending all my time trying to get this pen to work. (THIS IS CALLED FORESHADOWING, BUY MY BOOK FOR MORE LITERARY INSIGHTS.)

It’s a very nice coffee table book, anyway.

Let’s move on to the pen.

First impression: it looks like a cyberpunk bamboo rod. It looks like string cheese for a xenomorph. It looks like a magic wand designed for a Harry Potter/Robocop crossover fan fiction.

It’s a weird pen. Weird enough that I found a Pen Chalet unboxing video from January 2022 and you can still buy it new in August 2025 because in three years they haven’t found 88 people who want one.

The pen’s silhouette is my favorite kind of shape: confusing. The likelihood that it will be comfortable for you to hold is pretty low. It’s pointy and angular and covered in some kind of carbon fiber armor.

Sorry, it’s not carbon fiber; it’s carboiridium. What is that? Let’s ask:

Got it. Basically it’s like Makrolon but for Pineider, which is to say, no one knows because they made it up. It’s like how this blog is made of Worderinium, which is an innovative approach to writing that combines the strength of carbon fiber and the elegance of yelling.

The takeaway is that the pen is really lightweight and has a cool shimmer effect when you move it back and forth in the light. This is rad.

The clip is spring-loaded and relatively strong. It also has a biomechanical, Giger feel.

Functionally, I don’t like it as much as the clip on my (dramatically less expensive) Pineider Avatar (reviewed here, I love it). It doesn’t feel as sturdy, and using it can make the cap rock back and forth due to how the cap/body joint is angled.

To summarize: the pen looks insane and I love that.

Now, let’s talk about how the pen works. (THIS IS WHERE THE FORESHADOWING PAYS OFF. WRITING!)

Pineider is known for its embrace of an experimental approach to pen design, and the Marty McFly is no exception. This pen boldly challenges one of the most fundamental assumptions of fountain pen engineering: that the ink should stay in the barrel until it is needed, in line with the common belief that fountain pens basically function as a controlled leak.

The Marty McFly hears that and responds: yeah, but what if it wasn’t?

What if every time you tried to write, the feed filled up with ink? And then, when you put the pen right-side up, the ink went back in the barrel? Wouldn’t that be cool?

And, I mean: kinda!

As of this writing, I’m not really sure if the pen is supposed to work this way or if there’s an air leak. I do know that I own about 100 fountain pens and this is the only one that has ever done this, with internet consensus being “it has a leak.”

It doesn’t actually drip on the page—the pressure seems to equalize when the feed is full—and the end result is the most ridiculously wet pen I’ve ever used. Like, writing with a dip pen. It’s nuts. It can spatter if you write with enough passion, which, sono italiano quindi si. But if you like a super saturated line, the kind where you can see the ink sit on the page and then absorb, this is it.

If there’s a leak, it’s coming from the piston; I went through basically every iteration of silicone grease and swapping out compatible parts/nibs to confirm that it’s not the nib unit. Which is super great since I have no idea how you could take this thing apart to grease/fix the piston. My local pen show is next month and I’ll probably bring it in for one of the repair guys to take a look if it’s still doing it and causing problems—right now I’m on the fence.

Of course, if it’s a leak then it’s pretty understandable. Pineider made 88 of these things! That’s so many! You can’t check them all, you know? Especially if the MSRP was only like $1,000. Obviously you’re going to have to compromise somewhere.

For example, how the parts fit together. You could compromise there.

See this?

The cap doesn’t line up with the body. It’s slight but noticeable when the pen is closed. ENHANCE.

It’s more noticeable when you post the cap.

As far as I can tell this isn’t a problem with how the pen was cut; if you line it up manually, the cut seems to be pretty solid. The problem is that it’s also a magnetic cap, and the magnet is so strong (good! secure!) that it yanks the cap a little further than flush (bad!). I can believe that the other issues could have come from the pen just sitting unsold for so long, but this is a design thing.

It’s also a small thing. Who cares? No big deal, as long as you don’t do something silly like try to market the pen based on how precisely the parts fit together—

—oh okay nevermind.

Speaking of that marketing blurb: let’s talk about the piston.

The piston is half-obscured by the carboiridium sheath, which makes it really important that it functions smoothly as you have to spin it with your thumb—you can’t easily grab it with your thumb and fingers like basically every other piston-filling pen.

You know where this is going. The one I have is jerky. It was totally stuck out of the box and when it first started moving I thought I broke it, which is always a fun experience. This could have been caused by it sitting unsold/unused for nearly four years and is honestly a super easy fix that I could do myself if Pineider included any instructions or tools on how to take the pen apart, which, you know, they don’t. If anyone comes across any videos where someone disassembles one, please post it in the comments—I haven’t been able to find any for this pen.

Also: Since this is a piston filler, you submerge the nib in ink to fill the pen. The Marty McFly adds a fun extra step to this process: using the edge of a paper towel to clean out the ink that gets in this gap between the section and the pointy sheath thing.

Moving on to the nib: The nib is a 14k gold “Quill” nib. It’s ridiculous. Good ridiculous. It’s like a Sailor 21k nib (reviewed here) in terms of feedback, but with a bit more flex than that nib. I got a “soft extra fine,” which due to the ink flow writes like a wet fine, but still. It’s a terrific and beautiful nib.

So: was it worth the wait?

The easy answer is no. I should have opened it right away to inspect it and test it, or used a pen from a different brand as my wait-until-it’s-published pen. This is not the first Pineider I’ve had with issues (like when they coated nibs with some matte black stuff which looked cool but also made the nibs not work).

But also: I really like this pen, man. It’s just so weird and (by sheer luck) it’s a solid size and shape for my hand to use comfortably. I just took it on a plane and somehow it didn’t leak. It looks like nothing else and the nib is so expressive and satisfying to use. The issues are frustrating, but I bought it for the bizarre design and that, plus the exceptional nib, means I’m happy with it (he said, hoping no other issues would arise). I keep buying Pineiders for a reason.

OTHER STUFF

THE MOST THANKS: You guys, I am so grateful for how many of you read and reviewed the book through the advance reader thing. (The reviews are now migrating to Amazon (here’s the link), so you all can read them—thank you 2x to those of you who’ve already reposted yours there! If you haven’t yet, please do!)

The estimated reading time for my book is something like six or seven hours. Unlike with videos and podcasts, reading requires all of your attention. Writing a review—which I’ve been told only 1% of readers do—requires even more time. And a lot of reviews on Amazon are kind of insane.

Your reviews, by contrast, were extremely thoughtful and thorough. They were fair and honest and constructive. I am so excited for them to be out there in the world so everyone can see them. I am so grateful so many of you did that. Thank you again.

PEN MAINTENANCE TIP: Do you have a pen that you struggle to keep clean? Maybe the nib is in there so tight you’ve never been able to remove it for a deep clean?

Have you tried dropping it in the toilet?

For example, when running to the bathroom to grab a tissue to clean the cap, thinking to yourself “I don’t need to put the pen down on the counter, I’m just leaning over to grab a Kleenex, there’s no way I’m going to just randomly drop the pen in the AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Nibmeisters agree: there’s no better way to make sure your pen is fully clean than dropping it in the toilet, panicking, and then dismantling it in a fugue state so you can wash every part individually. Try it out: It will be the cleanest pen you own!

SEATTLE RECOMMENDATIONS: I’m writing from Seattle, where they have nice weather in August! What a great idea! If you have recommendations, I’m all ears. Did the Ballard Farmer’s Market yesterday and was thrilled with it.