silver

Leaving aside the whole issue that's slowly developing on me regarding internet privacy and me hosting my journal (privately) on LJ...physical journals!

I don't longhand journal because I am too wordy and it gives me hand cramps, but I do like having a physical and I use it as a mix of to-do list, reading tracker (since 2019, maybe I'll buy Excel at some point), to-read list tracker, small offhand journal/today lines, and place to stick all kinds of flat memorabilia, ranging from ticket stubs and admissions to newspaper clippings found in old books and stickers.

I bought a small Moleskine early on and immediately hated it. It is fairly expensive but mostly the paper is horrendous. Top peeves in writing in notebooks:

1. Paper quality - ghosting/bleedthrough/feathering of ink - ghosting is seeing the shadows of the ink from the other side of the paper, bleeding is the actual ink showing on the other side, feathering is the ink spreading and making all your strokes fuzzy
2. Journals that don't lay flat so you have to forcibly prop them open with the other hand
3. Did I mention my feelings about paper quality?!

Anyway the ghosting and bleedthrough on the Moleskin were really bad. It made only one side of the paper useful, which is such a waste. I also miscalculated and got a tiny notebook, around A6 size, which made me feel like I was writing in a tiny cramped space. However, I did discover I really like dot grid. It's much less intrusive than graph paper or plain ruled paper.

I can't write in a straight line for the life of me, so some kind of ruling is necessary.

At the end of 2017 I looked briefly online and basically looked for a dot-grid with the least amount of ghosting, and ordered a Rhodia Webnotebook. And I love it! Honestly, it's really good in terms of paper - I actually switched midway though to using fountain pens, and it takes fountain pen ink really well; almost no ghosting, no feathering at all, nice smooth surface to accept ink, but not so un-porous as to make the ink sit on top of the paper too long (and lead to smearing). The pages are cream/ivory not white, and the cover is this sort of soft pleathery stuff that I'm afraid of scratching, but otherwise I really like it. Oh and I've put bookmark post-its in since there is only one ribbon, and no pen-loop, but otherwise meets my requirements perfectly.

I just spent awhile searching online through reviews for a replacement one once I run out of this one - though this one is taking a couple years so it's not like I need one urgently. And if I hate the next one I'm going to probably go right back to Rhodia...I was originally planning to try Archer + Olive's really thick paper ones, but I've learned that they are really bad with fountain pens according to reviews, unlike their site page which of course simply claims they are great with fountain pens. Grr. But the reviews have test pages showing front and back - I love that this is convention - and it's awful. So far I haven't found one particular journal that I really want to try yet. There are some like Tomoe River paper, a Japanese brand, with apparently crazy good reviews of the paper but which are pretty much one-side papers again; and I like the covers of Western-style journals better than the Japanese ones. Though then again I suppose I could black out the cover with some paint. I may try Leuchtturm1917 or maybe Franklin-Christoph. I don't want anything fancy with indices and table of contents and calendars. I just want plain dot grid.

I've also thought about using the refillable paper journals, to appease the super picky paper part of me - is good paper so much to ask for?! But I really like the aesthetics and durability and permanence of a good, stitched journal. And because they have a limited number of pages, they are a discrete unit of time.

I bought myself Pilot's Metropolitan fountain pen, and I really like it. It's a starter fountain pen at a very affordable price (I got it on jetpens, where it was $18) and very unfussy. It's got a rounded nib, not an italic nib, unlike my other fountain pen, so you can write like you would normally. And it can take a cartridge and comes with a converter, which basically sucks up ink from a bottle of ink, instead of a disposable cartridge. I have a lot of dip pens, which are great because they're super flexible in effects and inks, but tends to be really fussy to work with - I have to clear off my table to accommodate everything, need water to wash nibs with, etc. And whenever I have to work with ink like that, I always get it all over my fingers. I like that with this pen it writes like a nice gel pen might, with a thin tip too, and is as easy to use as a ball point.

(I also bought like four 0.38 mm gel pens at the same time. I REALLY like the fine points. 0.5 is terrible and 0.7 is unspeakable.)