The Writing Office

Here is some trivia for all you writer’s out there.  Did you know that today, October 29th, is the anniversary of the first ballpoint pen sale in America?

October 29, 1945 the first ballpoint pens went on sale at Gimbels department store in New York City.  Their cost? An easily affordable $12.50 each, well… maybe not so easy when you consider that would be roughly $130 today.

And, my mom says that although they were *the* thing to get, the things leaked horribly.

I have found a pen I want to get. You have probably seen it on television, or if you have a young child (9 to 14) you have probably had it showing up on Christmas lists. I want to get my hands on one not for the nieces and nephews, but for me. I want to see how the pen works for writing my outlines and novels out longhand.

The paper is a little expensive looking, but I am wondering if I could go back over the same lettering with the pen and use a page over? Or how small can you write on a page with the pen? Can you use both sides of a page? Ah, the questions never end.

I have been reading the reviews for the Fly Pentop Computer and so far the only negatives have been from

a) People who purchased the pen for a child that was younger than the reccomended age range for the product and were disappointed that the child lost interest in using the thing

b) Kids that were unhappy with the price of the thing and gave it a 1 rating because they could not afford to get one

Anyone that bought the pen for children over age 8 were happy with it, the only one that was not in the above two categories had bought the pen and got frustrated that it was not reading their handwriting - their review at Amazon.com was:

“I bought this simply to be able to transfer my notes to text without re-typing. It turns out that the pen is pretty picky about what it reads and about %20 of my notes were all that turned out. There are games and practices that you can do so that you can learn to write so that it can pick up more, but that takes more paper, and time. I had no desire to waste time doing that so I sent it back.”

I don’t know about you, but I am not going to be turned off on a product by someone that had no desire or time to learn how to use it.

Over 90% of the reviews that I have seen so far were complimentary of the pen, and of the ones that had actually bought and had experience with the thing it was more like 99.9% of the reviews were positive (3 or more stars in a 1-5 star rating system). Only one person gave the pen a 1 and that was a kid that was mad they could not afford to buy one.

Based on what I have seen so far, I can not wait to get my hands on a Fly Fusion Pentop Computer. I want to play with it on writing and sketching maps of my world and floor plans for buildings in my world and… This just looks like an all around great tool for a writer to be able to play with.

I’ve been working on my websites all day, trying to get caught up before NaNoWriMo starts and then I have to go to Las Vegas for a week - if I don’t get things caught up now it will be out into December before I can work on them, and then I will be too busy for catching them all up.  So I better get to it now.

I have the guide to writing progress meters up now. It is by no means a comprehensive guide, and I am sure there will be a lot of things that need to be added to it, but it is all set up now and shows a good display range of meters that writer’s can use to track their novels along with links to where you can find the different kinds of meters.

There are also a couple of entries that do not quite fit, but that I felt should be pointed out. One is a meter plugin for FireFox to be used with NaNoWriMo to show word counts in the bottom right of your browser window. The other one is a word press plugin that lets you create word counts in WordPress. I am going to be testing that out now and seeing how it works for me.

Only a few more days to NaNoWriMo.  Can you feel the excitement in the air?  I have decided that I want to collect a bunch of word counters that can be used not only for NaNoWriMo, but for any writing challenges and even for writer’s to share their writing progress at any time.

So, I am making a page here titled “Writing Progress Meters” and on that page I will have links to websites that offer free progress meters for writer’s to use in their novel efforts.

If you have a meter that you would like to have shared, please, drop me a comment and let me know where to find it.  Do I have one you own and you would prefer I add information on use restrictions (ie: not for NaNoWriMo use), or perhaps want it removed from here entirely?  Let me know.