As longtime readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on my handwriting for a couple of years. I know – boring. I’ve been writing about this a lot. Just hang in here with me.

Also, my thousands of fans know that I’ve developed an interest in fountain pens, nice paper, and other marks of civilized, creative, scholarly, intellectual elitism.

So here is the 2013 Writing Project, in steps.

1. I have ordered a new nib for my Lamy Safari fountain pen. The Extra Fine nib I have been using is scratchy, and the ink flow isn’t great. It has a lot of “start skips”, which is fancy fountain pen talk for when the ink doesn’t flow during the first part of the first letter of a word. These two issues – start skipping and scratchiness — are annoying as hell. So I ordered a Medium nib. It will, of course, use twice as much ink per line of writing, but that’s OK.
2. I have ordered a Rhodia WebNotebook. According to Goulet Pen Company, fountain pens work best on a paper that is not only heavier, but nicer as well.
3. I have ordered this awesome ink too. I will be using this ink, and other awesome inks, in the soon to be described (next number) project.
4. And now – the project. I will attempt to write something in this notebook every day, but not the usual “I had scrambled eggs and coffee” this morning type of stuff. I’ll try to write some artistic stuff, maybe very short essays, snippets of short story ideas, etc. I may draw a picture or two. Hell, I might just do an entire page of some nice letter “L”s — try a nice script. The idea is to do a “Year of Creativity” using nice paper and a nice pen.