Setting the stage for reading and writing

Tuesday was a rain day. My first ever rain day. School was cancelled due to expectations of flooding and our governor’s request for non-emergency personnel to stay off the roads. I took the opportunity to build myself a reading day.

I lit a candle. Put on music. Laid my pens and notebooks out. The right setting made my writing and reading mellow, recuperative, and fun. It’s gotta be fun.

Writing surface. I prefer a soft writing area. I have an alcantara desk pad on my desktop and cushioned placemats on the dining table.

Suede doppelgänger

Setting pens and books down on a soft surface eliminates my fear that they will roll. Further, paper and notebooks stay in place on those softer surfaces. Nothing like a notebook slowly sliding away from you on a hard desk surface.

Plus, these surfaces make for pretty backdrops in pictures. Stylin’.

And they feel fancy. We all deserve a little fancy, time and again.

Beverage of choice. Preparing a drink of some kind has become ritual for my writing and reading. It’s part of how I prepare myself for thinking. Similar to how evening routines help your mind to “come down” from the day’s activities.

I far prefer tea to coffee. It’s a subjective preference. I have no ill will toward coffee drinkers.

I can smell writing time

Dark, spicy teas pep me up. They’re great  for drafting sessions and lesson planning. I also prefer caffeinated teas while reading nonfiction.

If I’m creating, then a dark tea is to hand. Spiced chai and bitter Earl Grey are favorites.

If I’m editing or grading, or just mucking about with inks, then green and white teas are on the table. Or water. Plain, flat tap water works well enough, too.

My drink offers an outlet for my mind to take a momentary break.

Soundtrack. Music plays a large role in my thinking. It shapes the kind of thinking I slip into.

Slow, plodding music leads me to longer, thoughtful journal entries: piano solos and lo-fi. Energetic music, like Explosions in the Sky, are great for focused, targeted writing and reading — and editing. Or grading.

I even play music quietly underneath my teaching. Anecdotally, my students seem to treat one another more civilly when supported with calming music. That and I like it.

My writing surface, tea, and music are the cornerstones of my writing experiences. How do you set the scene for your writing and reading times?

This week’s Inked Tines update includes my most recent currently inked writing tools.

Toolset

Pens. This week’s standout combo is absolutely the Sailor Pro Gear (H-F), inked with Sailor Yozakura. Yozakura made this pairing shine. Combined, a moderately wet, disciplined F line. Excellent for accent notes as Yozakura’s dusty pink stands out clearly against both Matter and Oyster Grey. Reading notes, lesson plans, lecture notes, journaling. 1/2 full.

• Lamy Safari (M) — Feed. Smooth writing, but prone to hard starts. Suspect the converter isn’t seated properly as I’ve lost most of the ink already. Meeting headings, journaling, some teaching diagrams, and a thank you card.

• Platinum 3776 (F) — 1/4. Toothy and moderately wet. Dries quickly, preventing smears and smudges. Excellent for quick detailed notes and managing tasks. Daily driver, task management, meeting notes, scratch notes.

• Franklin-Christoph 46 (EF SIG) — 1/2. Late addition to this week’s currently inked. Sharp EF SIG nib works best during slow writing at a level desk. Writing quickly often finds the nib’s sharp edges digging into the paper. Excellent accent color. Meeting notes, manuscript editing, margin notes.

• Franklin-Christoph 31 (M SIG) — 1/2. Generous feed and a wet ink bring out Dimension’s sheen. Girthy section is comfortable during longer writing sessions. Minimal threading make the 31 well-suited to meeting notes. Fun option for headings, journal entries and lesson plans.

• Kaweco Sport Blueberry (EF) — 1/2. My go-to pocket carry throughout the week. Warped Passages dried quickly. Was able to scrawl pocket notes and immediately close my Stalogy pocket notebook without smearing. The pair is also just bright enough to work well as an accent color. Meeting notes, scratch notes, lesson plans, lecture notes.

• Nakaya Neostandard (B) — 1/2. Excellent pairing at the outset. Feed began drying out during longer writing sessions by week’s end. Love Leaves of Grass  alongside the Heki-tamenuri finish. B nib proved well-suited to meeting headings and journaling.

• Kaweco Sport Fox (EF) — 4/5. Just wet enough to elicit Fireopal’s fun shading. The pop of orange works well as an accent notetaker. Scratch notes, reading notes, marking, meeting notes, some journaling.

Notebooks. Work bujo. Musubi Cosmo Air Light 83 (A5). 16 new pages this week. The work bullet journal now sits at page 136.

Six pages house notes from my students’ roundtable discussions of the Epic of Gilgamesh. They’re applying Gerda Lerner’s definition of patriarchy to the events within Gilgamesh. And then tying those connections back to real-life events from ancient Mesopotamian city-states. As one does.

A Lamy (M) and Franklin-Christoph (EF SIG) tag team effort

I chose two pens for each class. One (the broader nib) served as the headings recorder. The second took more detailed notes on students’ ideas. I also make note of which students seem to struggle.

More immediate, I take meaningful-to-me notes in front of my students to model note-taking. They often follow my lead. And if I use two pens at a time, my young folk are more likely to take their notes more seriously. That’s the good kind of contagious.

The other ten pages contain typical spreads. A two-page weekly for managing tasks and tracking my teaching progress. Three pages of meeting notes are interspersed throughout.

With bold headings and all

Four lesson plans sit towards the end. The week’s notes conclude with a one-page list tracking which of my progress report comments are written, and which are uploaded to our online gradebook platform.

Pretty in pink

Busy week.

Journal. Taroko Breeze (A5). Eight new pages, all long-form reflections. My new pages are spread across four different entries. Two clock in at three pages each; the other two at one page each.

I still find joy in ending journaling sessions with a poem that’s resonating with me that day. Monday’s session concludes with a short piece by Rupi Kaur, called “Balance.”

Yozakura seemed fitting

The Nakaya struggled to keep up with my writing pace a half-page into Thursday night’s journal entry. A first for me with the Nakaya. I’m thinking that the feed dried out due to some combination of the humidity, Walt Whitman, and my quick writing speed. 

Pre and post tinkering

A quick turn of the converter’s piston brought Whitman’s fun shading back to the forefront.

Written dry. All eight pens survived the week with ink remaining. Then again, I spread my writing out across eight pens.

The Lamy Safari is down to its feed. Surprising. Even given that I only got a half-fill last weekend, it seems unlikely that I wrote half a converter’s worth on scribbling this week. The pair was mostly an annotating and meeting notes tool this week.

I suspect the converter isn’t sealed fully against the pen’s feed. Even while the converter is snapped into the pen’s body. Odd. And still the subject of investigation. So, dehydration seems the likeliest explanation.

The air wants its Matter back

Newly inked. One pen saw new ink on Tuesday — just before upload this week’s currently inked. My partner offered up a “birthday” present given last week’s celebrations with the blog: a full bottle of Ferris Wheel Press’ Candy Marsala.

I’ve shared before that I was surprised to find I found a red ink that sparks joy. My sample vial of Candy Marsala is half-filled. It’s an earthy red with strong shading — for an ink from Ferris Wheel Press.

I grabbed the Franklin-Christoph 46 and swapped in a black EF SIG nib. Fun pairing.

The collection

Incoming / new orders. A new pen arrived on Friday. Jinhao makes a mid-sized wood pen which they call the 9035. The wood body is smooth. The clip grips snugly. And the nib looks proper under a loupe.

Love a pen clip that doesn’t split the cap

I have yet to ink and test the 9035. That is an adventure for another week.

Outgoing / trades or sales. No movement this week. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say: no outgoing movement.

Currently reading and listening

Fiction. Do you see confetti gently falling? Can you hear the crowd roar their approval? This parade is because I finished Wells’ latest book in the Murderbot series: Fugitive Telemetry.

I deeply enjoyed Wells’ series. Thanks to everyone who commented and emailed. Reading along with you all made the experience seriously fun!

Inspired by the newest attempt to tell Dune visually, I picked up Dune Messiah. It’s my first time reading beyond the first of Herbert’s books. I struggle with his writing style generally. But I love the world-building enough to make up for Herbert’s frequent jumps from one character’s perspective into another. A seesaw of nerdery.

I’m only 33 pages into the novel, as yet. Far too early to make a decision. Herbert is still introducing us to a new collection of characters.

Nonfiction. Wednesday and Thursday mornings were spent reviewing Erica Benner’s analysis of The Prince. Her take is that Machiavelli intended his little instruction manual ironically. In short, The Prince is a test. A test meant to steer the younger Medici away from the suggestions he makes in the essay.

Thirty five pages of revised annotations. I leaned heavily on my Sailor Pro Gear. The F nib is round, and so lenient with often-odd writing angles while I jot notes quickly in the margins. And Yozakura adds a fun, dusty color that is easy to skim for against black printed text.

I pull from Benner’s introduction to set my students up to decide for themselves: is The Prince a literal instruction manual or a work of irony? History is fun when it’s active.

Music. I listened to a variety of music this week. From the Silversun Pickups’ distorted guitars, to miscellaneous piano covers of Studio Ghibli soundtracking, to an old college-era playlist of acoustic covers.

But Federico Albanese is the artist I came back to, over and again, throughout the week. Depressed piano. Perhaps sad. Certainly calming. Fitting for a rainy week.

** Edit –– I’ve corrected the spelling of Earl Grey based on a friendly comment.