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Gear

I’ve got two things really cooking right now.

One I write exclusively on hard-copy, as in physical notebooks with nice paper, a mechanical pencil, and eraser. That’s fun, because top quality equipment (good notebook, pencil, eraser) collectively run about $20. Most of that is long term too. The pencil isn’t done when the story is, nor the eraser. The story will probably take a few notebooks, so maybe a few bucks more there.

Writing is interesting because the hard part, writing the damn story, is also the cheapest. Editing, more editing, layout, etc. are all reasonably expensive, but the really fun part isn’t.

In case you’re curious, Kuru Toga pencil, Pentel Hi-Polymer eraser, and Maruman notebook.

Those are all Japanese companies. Is notebook-writing big in Japan?

I like the Kuru Toga metal pencil bodies. Plastic ones are fine, but the metal ones have just the right amount of knurling so I can get a comfortable grip without it ripping up my fingers. The erasers on the pencils are terrible, so I use the Pentel ones. Those are about perfect.

The notebook is a N236ES with 70g/m^2 paper, which is perfect for pencil writing. I rarely use pens, so I don’t know how it is for that. They use a nice spiral binding. The other notebook I really like, Mnemosyne (also by Maruman, now that I look), uses a wire comb binding which keeps losing pages. Their wires are bent so each hole has two wires, but the wires stop to bend back. That leaves a little hole where pages can fall out. These ones have a normalish spiral binding.

The big problem with pencil writing, dragging your hand through a written line, is an issue, and the slick paper doesn’t help. I sometimes cock the notebook at an angle to avoid it. A rougher paper like newsprint might fix that, but I don’t like writing on newsprint.

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Context in Complaining

I said the difference between emotional and logical arguments is consistency. Let me change that to ‘a difference…’ Also different are the validities of the Appeal to Authority and Ad-Hominem Attacks. In logical arguments, they’re not. In emotional arguments, they are.

An example is whether or not I care about whining. A relative of mine has had a problem. I care about this relative and their complaints were sound, so I cared about their complaints and problem. But I just read a news story of someone complaining about equally valid points, but the person in question struck me as an inveterate whiner. No matter what, they’d be whining about something, so I didn’t really care about what they were whining about now.

Logically, that distinction is meaningless. A logical issue has nothing to do with how many other issues an arguer brings up.

Emotionally, I’ve only got a certain amount of mental energy to care, and once that’s used up, I don’t.

The key distinction here is whether the argument is devoted to the points being sound vs whether I do/should care. Both points were sound (logical) but I cared about the one, not the other (emotional). The logical arguments were effectively won, but I think the news-story arguer was making an implicit argument that something should be done about the issue in the story. Nah. Maybe someone else will.

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Context

Male character who just did something stupid for a pretty girl: “I bet girls never make that mistake. Women never do anything stupid for handsome men.”

The joke here is that of course they do. Nigh everyone has. The male character is thinking something wrong.

But I wrote the joke! I know it’s wrong, because I wrote it!

Book discussions often treat authors as, by definition, the sum of their character’s perceptions and opinions. But it’s probably more often the author is the counter-party to their character’s opinions. Especially if the opinion is about to induce some plot.