My Bear blog feels like a fountain pen.
I bought an entry level fountain pen recently, which is something I'd been thinking about for a long time, but I hadn't gotten around to it until a few weeks ago. Even though I had years to research the purchase I just impulsively grabbed one labeled "for beginners". (It is a Pilot Kakuno, for pen-knowers.)
It is so nice to write with! I don't know if it's just this pen or if any fountain pen would have worked, but it's much more enjoyable than a normal pen, though you do have to be more careful. I've gotten ink on a few things, and just a week or two in I made the mistake of trying to rinse some dried ink off the nib in the sink without realizing I could wash the entire cartridge of ink down the drain. That was my only ink cartridge so I had to wait for more to arrive in the mail. And going back to a normal pen (a Sharpie S-gel, which I'd previously liked!) I found myself writing a lot less. When the ink arrived I was writing more again.
It's kind of an unfortunate lesson because it's easy to get caught up in a consumerist cycle where you just need to have the perfect tool to write, or knit, or whatever, so I'd like to think I'm better than that but it does seem like I'm not.
It's true for this website, too. I had had a vague desire to blog again for years, so eventually I set up a WordPress at this same URL. I didn't really think about why I chose WordPress, I didn't want to use somebody else's platform and then WordPress is the default option you think of when you think of blogs, and my domain registrar offered it for free.
So I had a WordPress for almost an entire year and in the end I only posted one time there, right before I abandoned the project. I found it really overwhelming and just couldn't think of anything to write there. That one post I made did look fantastic so WordPress does have that going for it.
Since I switched to Bear Blog at the start of this year I have written 27 posts! After these months of just writing about whatever comes to mind — on this blog, and with my fountain pen — I'm even thinking about starting to write fiction again. This is all because this tool is more enjoyable for me to work with. It's such a big difference.
Of course the tool isn't everything. I could transfer all these posts back to a WordPress site and it would have 29 posts on it (the 27, plus that one I wrote before, and this one), which isn't bad, and I do appreciate that this platform lets me do that if I want to. But it makes a lot of sense to stick with what's working so that's what I'm going to do.
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This post was last edited 1 hour, 9 minutes ago.
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