Monday Moanings - January 25, 2016

Going with the Flow

I was having trouble settling on what to write today. As is my usual practice when a number of candidates are trying to push themselves to the front of the line, I stepped away from the laptop to take up my fountain pen for wisdom.

image courtesy of Laywine's

I must tell you that there's a new kid in my handwriting collection, a Christmas present from my love. Actually he gave me a gift card and together we headed into Toronto, to Laywine's.



OMG if you love writing by hand, if you long for the feel and flow of a good pen, then this is the store for you, (but perhaps not for your credit card). Not only is there a magnificent array of fine writing instruments, there are also journals and stationery, many specifically crafted for the fountain pen of your dreams. Add to this, an eye-popping selection of inks from around the world and you know that you have arrived in handwriting heaven.



I brought along my trusty Parker Sonnet (in the first picture at the top of page), the workhorse of so many of my hand-inked words. I told the staff that I was looking to upgrade. The young man behind the counter happily obliged, but not before asking me a host of questions about my writing habits. He presented several pens for me to test drive. Weight, balance, ink flow, nib size were all tested before I settled on Lamy 2000, a piece of  impeccable engineering.

Enough already with the drooling over a pen! Time to get writing, BUT where is my journal book, the one with paper made especially to receive ink from a medium nib without scratching or bleeding? I can't possibly just use any old blank piece of paper! It took a full twenty minutes of turning my spaces upside down and more than a few expletives before the trim blue volume revealed itself. Ahhhh ... now to the writing.



Balanced perfectly in my write hand, my fingers cradling the smooth slim body, I gently pressed the tip to the page. Words were delivered to paper with just the right amount of ink and the page received them with grace, spelling mistakes and all!

Happy Monday - it's the last one this month and it's also Robbie Burns Day! 

Lang may yer lum reek!

©2016 April Hoeller  

Monday Moanings - November 3, 2014

NaNoWriMo Writes Again!



Yes folks, it's that time of year again when writers of all stripes and flavours set pens to paper and/or fingers to keyboards to crank out some 50,000 words by month's end. This annual writer's marathon which began on Saturday, November 1, is billed as a

"fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel."

Check out the NaNoWriMo website for all the details.





As was the case last year, I'm not a registered participant because firstly I'm not writing a novel and secondly, I'm not that driven, and so I'm doing a 'Lite' version. My approach is a little more relaxed because I've learned, finally, that it's okay to give myself permission to have fun, to accept the better offer when it comes along without obligingly picking up a side order of guilt, and it's okay to attend to my own well being.

My efforts last year got hijacked by the sudden appearance of a visual aberration that caused words to appear smeared down the centre field of view. The problem (epiretinal membrane in both eyes) persists and is even a little worse this time round, though apparently still not bad enough for corrective surgery.

I am undeterred! Over the past months I have learned to tinker with lighting, font size and type (yes - serifs make a big difference!), and line spacing so as to limit the impact of the aberration. I've learned to manage my time at the keyboard, limiting it to 30 minutes at a time so as to ward off eye strain, fatigue and headaches. I find it rather intriguing that I have less difficulty with my handwritten work. I do my best writing, my most creative and evocative writing, with my favourite fountain pen flowing across smooth white paper. When transcribing my longhand writing to the laptop, I don't have much difficulty deciphering the blue ink script. I suspect because my brain has already had a hand in the writing; it knows then what the words are on the page.

So what does NaNoWriMo Lite look like this year? Ah well I have a plan, a very organized plan to get my manuscript back on track, in just 3 hours a day x 30 days.

Week 1: Days 1 &2 - reacquaint myself with Scrivener®
               Days 3 - 7 - outline, outline, outline; get all those pieces already written and yet to be written, organized! 

Weeks 2 - 4: WRITE!

And how's it going so far?

Saturday: 4 hours (impressive eh?) updating the software, tinkering with the fonts - thank goodness for technology and good software architects who allow for format modifications, however tedious it may be to find the right menu and tab to do so - and working through some of the tutorial. My muse, reawakened from a long snooze at a writer's retreat two weeks ago, spent the entire time twitching in my write hand.

Sunday: 3 hours struggling to get through a few more tutorial lessons before giving up and moving on to reviewing what was already on my Scrivener® outline. My muse fought me every step of the way, her protests getting louder every minute, "I want to write. Forget the bloody outline. I want to write! Please let me write."

Today: All right, already! I hear ya. Come on babe, let's go write.

©2014 April Hoeller

Monday Moanings - August 19, 2013

The Book and The Crumb Cake

My write hand has been busy!! I've had to refill my fountain pen three times since last Monday. Yes folks, the mouse trap worked and I've been working on my book (see last Monday's post for details) True to form, I have under-committed and over-delivered on the promise of performance, logging a full 17.5 hours of work on the book (M-F & Saturday and Sunday!). Most of it was actual pen on paper time, but about 6 hours was spent keyboarding, otherwise known as the first edit and revision. I'm impressed! I feel great too! The only problem, if one can call it that, is that I don't want to stop. My mind is writing way ahead of my hand and I'm feeling pressured to keep up. I'm thinking that's a good thing.

The Clan, circa 1900
top row left is my grandfather;
middle row left his father & mother

Today I am taking a break, despite the protestations of my inner critic. Clearly this gal does not approve of days off. Well suck it up buttercup! There's a gathering of the clan out at my sister's today, something billed as "THE Party of the season". Cousins from across the pond have arrived and we're celebrating as only the Cudbird-Vassar clan can. True to my late mother's form, there will be a table, or three?, laden with comestibles, including Mom's recipes for potato salad, New York Cheesecake and Ebinger's Crumb Cake.

Back in my childhood summers at Breezy Point, seeing a cake box from Ebinger's Baking Company in the hands of my Great Aunt Lilian as she got off the ferry from a day in the city, was always a a thrill. The distinctive box held the promise of a scrumptious dessert, and if by chance it was a crumb cake, well then, heaven came to mind. It wasn't so much the cake as it was the crumbs; those icing sugar dusted morsels of butter, sugar and flour with just a hint of cinnamon. AND I have the recipe!

In 1957 Mom wrote to Ebinger's in Brooklyn, NY to ask if she might have the recipe as her family lived in Canada and for eleven months of the year had to do without THE crumb cake (some years later Entenmann's made a crumb cake that was available here, but it just wasn't the same...). The Vice-President of the bakery replied to Mom, "I can sympathize with you since I have a summer home in the province of Quebec and face the same problem you do." He went on to outline the ingredients and instructions.

I note that he left out the dusting of icing sugar, but based on the many times I have made this gem, that's all he left out. It does indeed taste just like way back when, only better because now in addition to being a treat for taste buds and tummies, it excites happy memories of the crumb fights my two sisters and I had over the last morsels in the box. The recipe says, "...sprinkle on desired amount of crumb mixture". I asked my younger sister how much 'a desired amount' might be. She answered, "6 to 8 inches."  Good thing I made a double batch of crumbs this time, and don't worry girls, today I've got extra crumbs for both of you - but I've got the most!

Time to push off.
Wherever you are, have a great ride this week.

The Crumb Cake

Monday Moanings - August 12, 2013

On the Wagon...

Sitting on my wagon rocking back and forth at the top of a new week. My fountain pen is fully loaded with fresh ink. It's time to get down to some serious writing.

I must say I'm really quite pleased with myself for keeping up with two blog posts a week. I wish I could say the same about the book; work on it has all but ground to a halt. I'm not stuck, it's not writer's cramp. There is a host of scene skeletons neatly suspended in the file folder just waiting for some flesh and connective tissue. So what's the hold up?

Well here's the truth: I spend way too much time with this question in the percolator while my write hand guides and clicks a mouse through the intricacies of Sudoku puzzles and Mahjong Titans. Such activity while apparently good for my ageing brain and the consumption of time, does little else of benefit to either me or the world.

What I need is a mouse trap, but where oh where does one find a trap for such a mouse. And how then does one set it? I know that the sheer joy of completing a scene or three is the best bait in town. The rest, I'm guessing is a matter of timing, and with that in mind I have blocked off 1:30 to 4:00 pm every day through Friday this week to step away from the mouse and put my write hand to the book. Because I am a firm believer in under-committing and over-delivering, I have left the weekend open even though I am often very productive on a Saturday and/or Sunday afternoon. For the same reason I am not going to commit to a total word count. Let's just see what I can do this week and then perhaps next week, I'll up the ante. And yes, I will give an account of myself in a week's time. The pressure is on!

But now it's time to tighten up the chin strap on the helmet, lower the goggles into position and push off...

Wherever you are, have a great ride this week.

Northumberland, England

©April Hoeller

Monday Moanings - June 10, 2013

Oh woe is me, woe I say!
I have managed to fritter away some seven hours today. Perhaps "fritter" is a little harsh - enjoying a good healthy breakfast and then heading off to a Curves workout in town were surely commendable pursuits. So let's award two hours for good behaviour. Now what about those other five? Well okay then, "fritter" is actually a fair word...

Fuelling this wasteful behaviour was, and is, my complete inability to make a decision, to simply choose a topic for this blogpost and then apply my backside firmly to a chair and write it. I was clobbered by some kind of tsunami as a sea of hands rose up in my classroom of topics each one demanding my attention. I'll have you know though, that I've been doing the 'backside in chair' part very well! The World Wide Web is such a great outlet for displacement activity.

Finally my inner critic goaded me with enough guilt that I just picked up my pen, grabbed my journal and started to write...

Almost all of my writing begins with pen on paper, as opposed to fingers on keyboard. There is a highly favoured writing instrument for this activity; a Parker 'Sonnet' fountain pen made in France, that my beloved bought for me some fifteen years ago. The perfect weight of the pen in my hand, the fine balance; the perfect tapered thickness of barrel between my fingers, the lush coolness; the satin smooth flow of specially blended ink accompanied by ever so soft scratching sounds as letters become words at the tip of a golden nib; all work together to make writing the most natural, most soothing, most pleasurable thing in the world.

The fountain pen comes with a history and character that only some papers can bear. The paper must be smooth enough to allow the pen to move unimpeded across the page, thick enough to resist bleed through and plentiful enough to encourage whole truths.

Maybe next time I'll be able to call on one of those urgent, waving hands in my writing ideas class, but for now I'll just let a fountain pen caress paper and enjoy what happens.