Should I feel guilty for emptying a converter of an ink I’ve grown tired of?

One of the strongest draws to fountain pens, for me, is that they bring fun to the mundane notetaking that pervades my work life. If I’m going to write for a living, I want the act of writing to be joyful. Life is too short to dread process in a push for an end product.

The cyclone of new inks and pens offers constellations of pen and ink and paper combinations. Exploring these pairings helps me to get started — even on tasks I’d rather avoid or delay. A beautiful Sailor Pro Gear and some fun, grey-green ink add some whimsy to organizing a lesson on the ancient Athenian democratic structure. 

Once I get 15-20 minutes of lesson planning under my belt, I can keep productive through the rest of the day. My pens draw me into that 15-20 minute window.

But combinations don’t always work well together. This week, Blizzard Twinkle disagreed with my TWSBI Vac’s feed. The pair clogged repeatedly. Clearing out the pen become a distracting task in itself — which runs counter to what makes fountain pens so appealing to me.

So I emptied the pen into a sample vial.

And I felt guilty. Like I was cheating. As if it’s only appropriate to change inks in a pen after the pen has been dutifully emptied by writing or drawing.

Should I feel guilty for emptying a converter of an ink I’ve grown tired of?

Perhaps my collection of pens and inks serves me best when I allow my fleeting interests to play. In this case, emptying a pen before it is fully empty encourages me to write with another, more interesting pairing. 15-20 minutes ahoy.

Perhaps it is more sensible to get my money’s worth from each bottle of boutique ink. After all, why waste the money I work so hard for?

Then again, one reason I use analog tools in an increasingly digital workplace is because writing by hand with a fun nib encourages me to start writing. But I only reach for a pen when writing with it, and writing with the ink in that pen, is still exciting. A joyful writing experience is worth a couple tenths of a milliliter of extra-fancy colored liquid. Isn’t it?

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

Toolset

Pens. The Nakaya Neostandard, inked with Diamine Salamander, was this week’s standout combo. Journaling. The B nib and Nakaya feed brought out both the wet greens and dry browns of Salamander. I kept reaching for this combo during journaling time. My most frequent writer while at home this week. Enough said. 1/5 left.

Sweat-inducingly pretty

• Platinum 3776 (F) — Empty. Daily driver. Excellent as always with task management. Clear, narrow line. Dries quickly. Easily read, even in poor light. Became an accent notetaker while reading. 

• Montblanc 146 (EF) — Feed. As the ink chamber grew more empty and airy, the feed grew wetter. Aonibi continued to shade like a beast. Subtle, rare instances of sheen came out towards the end of the week. Journaling, reading notes, and end-of-week task management. 

• TWSBI 580 (M Predator) — Feed. Combo felt like two different pens during meetings. The M also lent well-behaved sheen to a journal entry. And to my notes during Friday night’s dungeons and dragons session. You’ll never see my thief coming – unless she’s carrying this bright orange pen. 

• KACO Edge (F) — 1/4. Wet, reliable lines. Eel is without visual personality. The frankenpen continues to impress. Became a meeting pen, paired with the TWSBI 580, by week’s end. 

• Narwhal Poseidon (M) — 1/2. Primarily an accent pen for reading notes. Fun feedback. Outstanding shading with subtle, infrequent sheen. Excellent for keeping interested during extended writing sessions.

• TWSBI Vac700 (F CSI) — Emptied. This pair clogged repeatedly starting on Tuesday. Neither cleaning the tines nor flooding the feed helped. After a few days in my penvelope, I emptied Blizzard into a sample vial. Perhaps a B nib will fare better?

Notebooks. Work bujo. A5 Hobonichi Plain Notebook. Handwriting for work was way down this week. A combination of two days off and two days spent away from my desk manifested in five new pages.

My usual two-page weekly spread took up only one page this week. The Platinum drove my task management. Progress was painted in Gris de Payne.

The remainder are meeting notes and scratch notes from calculating grades for my students’ final projects. Meeting notes were almost all taken with Vaikhari. It’s versatile with the TWSBI’s multitasker nib and so felt like two pens. Scratch notes were all with the the dark grey of American Eel in the KACO.

Journal. Unbranded A5 Cosmo Air Light. A handful of evening events at work made journaling time scarce. Eight new pages of writing, across three entries.

I settled on the Nakaya for my first entry. I typically spread entries out, reaching for two pens so the colors separate our topics — one color for reflective writing and another for analytical. My mind works linearly like that. Sunday’s entry was all Nakaya. It’s lovely when a pen is a beautiful writer and sentimentally meaningful.

The TWSBI Vac clogged up throughout my second entry. I subbed the Montblanc in after three paragraphs.

Commonplace. A5 Elemental Paper Iodine. I keep a commonplace book of reading notes. Writing about my commonplace notetaking is new for this blog.

My commonplace notebook houses interesting and important margin-notes from the texts I read. I periodically transfer these notes into an easily-searchable notebook.

Grey is for quotes. Accent colors for my reflections

This week, I added eight new pages of quotes and notes – all from an old read-through of Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works. Stanley is an endowed professor at Yale. He literally wrote the book on modern fascism. It’s a terrifying read, and important.

Written dry. This was an odd week. I did a lot of work away from my desk. As a result, I emptied a single pen from use: my daily driver, the Platinum 3776. The Platinum was a carry-over from last week. A blue-grey weekly task list was a lovely change of pace from my usual procession of grey inks. The pen ran empty Friday morning.

I also drained 2 ml of ink from the TWSBI Vac. Blizzard is a lovely, bright blue with silver glitter. But consistent clogging means the TWSBI’s slot in my penvelope would be better served by a different pen.

Two more pens are down to their feeds: the TWSBI 580 and Montblanc. This coming week’s currently inked looks to be exciting with four pens to replace. 

Newly inked. The new Kaweco (see below) called out for a grey ink. And with my daily driver empty, I reached for my bottle of Monteverde Coal Noir. A solid pairing. Lays down a super smooth and disciplined EF line. Dries quickly. But little-to-no shading.

2 of 3 ain’t bad

Seriously. This is one of the smoothest steel EF nibs I’ve written with.

The collection

Incoming / new orders. My great friend and family member, Brian, at The Pen Thing has been sitting on a beautiful Kaweco Skyline Sport in the new Fox color. It’s an earthy burnt orange with silver trim. I’m a sucker for silver trim.

The Kaweco became mine on Friday.

Burnt never looked so tasty

The first thing I did with this pen was to swap the silver M nib for a black EF nib. The orange coloring looks fetching with the black trim.

Seeing the nib, my partner encouraged me to order a matching black clip from Yoseka Stationery.

This will be the prettiest pen at prom next week

With money left on a birthday gift card, we also had funds to restock my partner’s library of Stalogy stickers.

There’s a whole organized sticker system in here

And a new pen purchase. Eager-beaver.

Outgoing / trades or sales. No sales or trades this week. The collection remains intact. Even if the packed Parker Vacumatic quietly whispers that it’s ready to leave for repair.

Currently reading and listening 

Fiction. No new reading in either Rothfuss or Sanderson this week.

Nonfiction. The last, and arguably most important, component of reading — and understanding what I read — is reflecting on the notes I take while reading. 

This week, I transferred notes from Stanley’s How Fascism Works into my commonplace notebook. My reflecting covered the first 97 pages of the text. I now have the first six of ten chapters accounted for.

I call these “title notes”

Music. Arlo Parks. Lyrical imagery amidst a collection of mellow, driving beats. This is what tea time sounds like for me right now.