Tag: IWSG

IWSG: The Ultimate Writing Machine

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 72 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and cohosted this month by Rebecca Douglass, Pat Garcia, Louise-Fundy Blue, Natalie Aguirre, and J.S. Pailly (hey wait a minute, that’s me!!!).  If you’re a writer and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group, or click here to check out the IWSG Facebook page.

Each month, IWSG asks us an optional question.  It is totally optional!  IWSG members do not have to answer the question if they don’t want to, or if there’s something else they need to talk about instead.  This month’s optional question is:

What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivner, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools?  Why do you recommend them?  And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

As you know, I love space, and I love science.  Based on those two statements, you might expect that I’d also love technology, or that I’d at least feel somewhat comfortable using technology.  But no.  There’s something about sitting in front of a computer screen that makes the creative side of my brain switch off.  Ergo, I don’t use writing software or writing apps much.  I do almost all of my writing the old fashioned way, with pen and paper.

Now I’m not trying to be a hipster about this.  I don’t want to wax poetic about the magical sound of a pen scratching on crisp, white paper.  Writing by hand is not—absolutely not—a better, more sophisticated, more intellectually proper way to write.  It is simply that I cannot “good words do” (as Patrick Rothfuss once described writing) when I’m staring at a computer screen, so writing by hand is my only option.

I do use a computer (obviously!), but only at the very end of my writing process.  Once I have a fully finished draft written out by hand, I take it to my computer, go into a fugue state, and mindlessly transcribe whatever I wrote into a word processor.  Which word processor?  It doesn’t matter.  I don’t have strong feelings about these things.  But I do have strong feelings about pens.  So let me tell you about the Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball Pen.

Pilot Precise Rolling Ball pens are marketed as “the ultimate writing machine.”  They’re ballpoint pens with super fine, almost needle-like tips.  According to the marketing copy, these pens use a “unique ink formula” and an “advanced ink feed system for smooth, skip free writing.”  That sounds like marketing B.S., but this is one of the rare cases where the marketing B.S. is actually true.

When I’m in the zone, deep in the flow state of writing, totally lost in my own imaginary world, I don’t want to worry about having any sort of trouble with my pen.  And with Pilot Precise pens, I never do.  Just as words flow from my mind, ink flows smoothly and consistently from my pen onto the page.  It’s such a satisfying writing experience.  And given how incredible these pens are, they’re surprisingly affordable.  Depending on where you shop for office supplies, you can usually get a pack of twelve pens for under $20.

The pens come in two sizes: the V7 and the V5.  I prefer the V5.  The V7 makes a slightly thicker, slightly heavier line.  Nothing wrong with that, but the V5’s slightly thinner, slightly finer line feels more elegant and graceful.  The pens also come in a wide variety of colors, which helps me color code different projects, or keep track of different drafts of the same project.  The first draft of this blog post was written in green.  The second draft was pink, and the third draft was purple.  This made it easy for me to see, at a glance, which pages needed to be transcribed into the computer and which ones didn’t.

So I can’t offer any recommendations for writing apps or writing software.  I barely use a computer at all in my writing process.  But for those of you who write using pen and paper, I can recommend the Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball Pen.  And try out the multicolor variety packs, if you see them in stores!  These are the only pens I use for writing.  They really are the ultimate writing machines (and nobody’s paying me to say that).

P.S.: This is my first time cohosting IWSG.  I’m super excited to be doing this today, and (fingers crossed) I hope I do a good job.

IWSG: Time

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 20 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Liza at Middle Passages, Shannon Lawrence, Melissa Maygrove, and Olga Godim.  If you’re a writer and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group!

Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group asks a question.  The question is totally optional.  Members of the group can choose to answer it in their blog posts, or not.  This month’s question is:

In this constantly evolving industry, what kind of offering/service do you think the IWSG should consider offering to members?

As you know, I love space, but I also love writing (almost as much as I love space).  Unfortunately, love isn’t always enough.  Enthusiasm isn’t always enough.  I have plenty of love and enthusiasm.  What I really need right now is time.  Maybe I’m asking for too much here, but is there any way the IWSG could make the day a little longer?  That’s something I think every writer would appreciate.

I can think of several ways we could do this.  As demonstrated in this comic from xkcd, if we all started spinning counterclockwise, we’d alter Earth’s angular momentum, slowing the planet’s rotation and making Earth’s day just a fraction of a second longer.

Or we could start relocating writers to Mars.  Mars’s rotation rate is already slower than Earth’s, making a Mars day about 36 minutes longer than a day on Earth.  That’s 36 extra minutes for writing!  True, we’d have to deal with the ultra-thin  atmosphere, the scarcity of oxygen, the toxic soil, the radiation, the extreme cold… but think of how much more writing we’d get done!

Another option: a while back, there were rumors that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (a nuclear physics laboratory in Europe) might cause the accidental creation of a black hole.  That sounds scary, but hear me out: black holes create major distortions in both space AND time.  Could those space-time distortions allow us to make more time for writing?  Maybe!  Or maybe not.  I’m not great at math, so I’m not sure.  Alex, check with a physicist before you try this idea.

In the meantime, I recently negotiated a new work schedule for myself at my day job.  My new schedule is a little weird.  My boss and several of my coworkers were initially confused about why I’d want to work such strange hours.  But my new schedule frees up several hours worth of time, which I can now use for writing.  And I did it without altering Earth’s rotation, moving to Mars, or generating an artificial black hole.  So that’s a win for me!

IWSG: Real Reasons vs. Acceptable Reasons

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 22 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and cohosted this month by Victoria Marie Lees, Kim Lajevardi, Nancy Gideon, and Cathrina Constantine.  I’ve been an IWSG member for many years now, over on my previous blog, but this is my first IWSG post here on my new blog, I Love Space.  If you’re a writer, and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group and to see a list of participating blogs.

I just got back from an event in Washington D.C., an event where ordinary citizens (as opposed to professional lobbyists) got a chance to advocate for space exploration to U.S. lawmakers.  I’ll have more to say about that in upcoming blog posts.  Stay tuned!  But there was one aspect of this experience that felt super relevant to the challenges of being a writer.

This is a picture of me with Bill Nye.  You probably know him as “the Science Guy,” but he’s also the current C.E.O. of the Planetary Society, the non-profit group that organized the space advocacy event in D.C. which I attended.

I’ve often felt like there’s an easy and obvious metaphor to be made between pursuing a writing career and running the U.S. space program.  Both involve big dreams and lofty aspirations.  Both involve shooting for the stars, so to speak.  Both also involve some harsh economic realities.  And in both cases, balancing those big dreams against those economic realities can be a real challenge.

As former NASA administrator Mike Griffin put it, there are the “real reasons” we explore space (our curiosity, our sense of awe and wonder), but there are also the “acceptable reasons” we must use to justify space exploration to Congress (job creation, spin-off technologies, planetary defense, and so forth).  In a similar way, for us writers, there are the “real reasons” we write, but then there are the “acceptable reasons” we must use to justify ourselves if/when we chose to pursue writing as a career.

For me, the real reasons I write are, in fact, the same as the real reasons NASA exists: a sense of awe and wonder about the cosmos, plus a deep sense of curiosity about what else might be out there.  That’s why I write this blog about space.  And that’s also why I want to pursue a career writing science fiction.  As for my “acceptable reasons,” well… I’m still working on those.  Plenty of cynical people in my life have told me that my writing is good, but that I should stick to a more sensible, more economically viable career path.  I’m never sure what to say to these people.  But I’m working on it.

So, my fellow writers, what are the “real reasons” you write, and what are the “acceptable reasons” you use to justify yourself if you’re pursuing writing as a career?

P.S.: Former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin was recently interviewed on the Planetary Society’s podcast, as part of the lead-up to their big event in D.C.  Click here to hear what Griffin himself has to say about the real reasons vs. the acceptable reasons for space exploration.