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Practicalities of writing
I'm not all that impressed with my new fountain pen filler - the emergency cartridge I was using lasted for the length of several one-shot stories, but I've been using the filler for a few weeks now, and basically it doesn't fill properly. My old screw converter fills with ink all the way up to the top; this one always ends up with a sizeable airspace above the ink (just as the cheap piston fillers do) which means that it only holds about half as much ink as a full-length Parker cartridge.
A converter is always going to hold less ink than a cartridge because of the space taken up by the filling mechanism, but it just doesn't seem possible to get this one to draw up the ink without losing some. I hoped it might improve after it had been filled a few times - maybe the gasket had got dried out and shrunk a little - but it seems to be an inherent issue with this filler. Comes of having to buy a non-original Parker product, I suspect.
Since this is my 'outdoor' pen it shouldn't see that much use, but I'm afraid that lately about the only time I seem to get any writing done is when I'm walking somewhere else, so I've been using that pen almost to the exclusion of the Sonnet and hence becoming aware of the refill frequency!
The other thing that has become apparent is that the foolscap ledger I've been writing in isn't going to hold nearly so many words as I thought it would, due to the heavy-duty paper; that great fat book only has ninety pages in it (sewn in five sections of eighteen), and I've used 24½ pages already and am only on chapter four. At that rate I only have room for sixteen chapters, which almost certainly won't be enough - I've already split my third plot summary sequence over two chapters, and I've got seventeen of them :-p
So I shall almost certainly end up putting the end of this story into one of the other two notebooks I already discarded as not having enough space in them to hold the whole thing - only starting halfway through, which will be even more confusing than the situation I was trying to avoid. Oh well. It's an entirely artificial limit anyhow. (Blue Remembered Hills ended up with two folded sheets of loose paper wedged into the end of the last notebook to hold the overflow text!)
Out of a vague idea that Raoul gets himself into trouble by mistaking one of the sailors on board for the Phantom at the point where he reveals himself, I've managed to end up creating an uncongenial 'room-mate' for him to share a cabin with on board. (Who will presumably end up dying in the wreck and thus giving poor Raoul more angst!) I wanted him to wear spectacles, since it seemed to fit the fussy characterisation and provided a perfect explanation for how Raoul can mistake him for a glimpse of the Phantom's 'burning eyes'. Unfortunately I suspect that nobody whose eyesight was bad enough to need eye-glasses would have been accepted into the French navy of the era; my own grandfather was excused military service for being short-sighted. But it occurred to me that I could probably contrive something with a reflection off the lenses of a pair of binoculars, though it doesn't work quite so well...
A converter is always going to hold less ink than a cartridge because of the space taken up by the filling mechanism, but it just doesn't seem possible to get this one to draw up the ink without losing some. I hoped it might improve after it had been filled a few times - maybe the gasket had got dried out and shrunk a little - but it seems to be an inherent issue with this filler. Comes of having to buy a non-original Parker product, I suspect.
Since this is my 'outdoor' pen it shouldn't see that much use, but I'm afraid that lately about the only time I seem to get any writing done is when I'm walking somewhere else, so I've been using that pen almost to the exclusion of the Sonnet and hence becoming aware of the refill frequency!
The other thing that has become apparent is that the foolscap ledger I've been writing in isn't going to hold nearly so many words as I thought it would, due to the heavy-duty paper; that great fat book only has ninety pages in it (sewn in five sections of eighteen), and I've used 24½ pages already and am only on chapter four. At that rate I only have room for sixteen chapters, which almost certainly won't be enough - I've already split my third plot summary sequence over two chapters, and I've got seventeen of them :-p
So I shall almost certainly end up putting the end of this story into one of the other two notebooks I already discarded as not having enough space in them to hold the whole thing - only starting halfway through, which will be even more confusing than the situation I was trying to avoid. Oh well. It's an entirely artificial limit anyhow. (Blue Remembered Hills ended up with two folded sheets of loose paper wedged into the end of the last notebook to hold the overflow text!)
Out of a vague idea that Raoul gets himself into trouble by mistaking one of the sailors on board for the Phantom at the point where he reveals himself, I've managed to end up creating an uncongenial 'room-mate' for him to share a cabin with on board. (Who will presumably end up dying in the wreck and thus giving poor Raoul more angst!) I wanted him to wear spectacles, since it seemed to fit the fussy characterisation and provided a perfect explanation for how Raoul can mistake him for a glimpse of the Phantom's 'burning eyes'. Unfortunately I suspect that nobody whose eyesight was bad enough to need eye-glasses would have been accepted into the French navy of the era; my own grandfather was excused military service for being short-sighted. But it occurred to me that I could probably contrive something with a reflection off the lenses of a pair of binoculars, though it doesn't work quite so well...