Author Archives: obsidianpalms

Every writer has a process, and one of the fascinating things about the process is that every one does it differently. Octavia Butler, prior to making it big, would get up at 2 a.m. and write for 2 hours before she went off to work. Patrick Rothfuss of In the name of the wind fameContinue reading “The process”

For this Friday’s Fountain Pen Friday we’re going to talk about one of the most accessible fountain pens: The Lamy Safari (retails for $29.60 without the converter) is one of my go-to pens. I have a lot of those, but I do have a soft spot in my heart for my Lamy Safaris. They’re someContinue reading “Fountain Pen Friday #4: Lamy”

I’ve decided to stop using the Tomoe River paper for ink comparisons. It’s been discontinued, as previously mentioned, Instead I’m going to start using the Exceed notebook. It’s Wal-Mart’s answer to the Leuchturm and it’s actually surprisingly decent. I’ve used a few of them for meeting notebooks at school. The only downside is there’s aContinue reading “wInksday 8: Robert Oster River of Fire”

I will have this poll up from today till next Tuesday and it will determine the inks for the next several weeks. Be sure to vote for your favorite.

If you type in traditional vs indie publishing, you’re going to get a whole lot of sites and given how prevalent indie publishing is online a whole lot of those sites will have a curious pro-indie publishing angle. Once I got the rights to my traditionally-published book back I went ahead and began selling itContinue reading “Meandering thoughts on the craft and salesmanship”

Monteverde has been one of the inks that have been sneaking into my regular usage because 1) it’s one of the most affordable ink bottles I have and 2) it flows really well on most of the pens I’ve inked it with (the other one I have is the Monteverde Sapphire) I was on theContinue reading “wInksday #6 Monteverde Ruby”

Back at it with the Iroshizuku’s Kon-Peki, a fascinating blue ink. Bright, vivid, bold. If you’re looking at a light blue ink you’re not going to regret this one. Again, decent showing all around and it actually did better on the Clairefontaine than the Scribble did. For this test, I used a Lamy Safari MContinue reading “wInksday #5 – Pilot Iroshizuku Kon-Peki”

On Mondays, I’ll do a routine blog update with stuff that I’m working on, things relating to the writing world at large, and just my own meandering thoughts. I always like to start off my blogs talking about fanfiction because it’s how I got started writing-writing. Before the book deal, before the longlists, before theContinue reading “An (un?)needed defense of fanfiction”