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.