Dancing into December: My Favorite Writing Tools—Guest Post by Tami Kamin Meyer
Write Now Columbus editor and freelance author Tami Kamin Meyer pays homage to her favourite writing instruments.
I’m proud to be a contract author. For me, the time period evokes a romantic imaginative and prescient of hours tapping away on a dusty typewriter with cussed, spherical, porcelain, inexperienced keys as cigarette after cigarette sluggish burn in an ash-stuffed Diet Coke can on my desk. Coffee mugs with numerous ranges and temperatures of java, one hawking a neighborhood sports activities crew, one other boasting how The Queen takes her espresso (instantly!) litter my work space, and I’m blissfully blissful.
Reality, nonetheless, couldn’t be farther from the reality. For one, I don’t smoke, and once I tried to create a mysterious, smoky office, I gagged from the depth of the incense I had lit.
Note to self: The scent of musk is so 1970’s.
While it’s true that java fuels my creativity, and I can drink it anytime of day or night time with out incident, I want it recent and sizzling. And, my espresso tastes finest in my favourite mug…one that includes a 3D rendering of midtown Manhattan. Sure, my beverage of selection ‘usually’ tastes simply pretty much as good in a distinct mug, however it’s that vessel that triggers my mind into work mode.
I typically consider not utilizing my favourite mug, lest it will get cracked, or worse, the ‘B’ phrase. But the Old Faithful in me yearns for that mug daily. If I had considered shopping for a second one which sunny day in Manhattan a number of years in the past once I first laid eyes on the subsequent Starbucks rendition of its NYC mug, I might have. Maybe even three. Two to interrupt and one to maintain in storage, by no means to be stained by standing espresso, without end.
We writers will need to have our favourite writing instruments.
Another apply of mine once I’m writing is to maintain sharpened pencils close by. While I don’t recall when my love affair with a recent, razor-sharp, yellow No. 2 lead pencil started, I do know it was many moons in the past.
Writing with pencil permits me to make errors, as all of us do in life, however with the additional benefit of being empowered to completely erase my errors as in the event that they by no means occurred. Meanwhile, there have been instances I erased my phrases, solely to later understand the verbiage I had wiped away had expressed my thought completely.
Dammit.
Writing notes in pencil additionally jogs my memory of easier, bygone days. I recall the pencils we utilized in elementary college. Their thick shafts of wooden barely match the silver hand-cranked pencil sharpener that hung loosely by a nail on the classroom wall.
They didn’t have erasers, both.
So, I all the time had a effectively-used, oddly disfigured pink eraser laying close by. “If I could just remember where I put that thing….,” I recall pondering many instances, “I would be in business.”
Despite proudly owning a laptop computer and a PC, I proceed to write down interview questions and responses in pencil. Meanwhile, my private planner options scribbled notes, random story concepts I wrote down once they got here to me lest they be misplaced without end, telephone numbers, some accompanied by the proprietor’s identify and a few not (if I by no means known as, now why), e mail addresses, scribbles and extra, all created in pencil. Yes, the calendar’s pages can get messy and tough to learn. But, simply as with life, nothing’s excellent. Sometimes I really benefit from the problem of making an attempt to decipher simply what on the planet I had written in my planner.
It’s these little issues in life, ya know?
Ultimately, I relish the simplicity of a pencil. I don’t have to fret about it exploding its colourful ink in my purse like a Fourth of July firework. I don’t need to shake my pencil to make sure its lead is ‘flowing,” one thing ink pens beg for at instances. My pencil is all the time prepared to write down when I’m able to, too.
Except once I hear the teeny albeit woeful sound created when my stunning, sharp pencil tip breaks.
Anybody acquired a pen?
(c)Tami Kamin Meyer, 2021, all rights reserved
