Editing The Pen Addict 126/transcript (section)

== Pen Blog ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' I told you, man. Coffee day. All right. We have a new pen blog of the week. And I say new because it's literally a new blog, like within the first few weeks. Wow. But it's a well-known gentleman in the pen community, Father Kyle Sanders, who has been following me and talking to me on Twitter and emailing me for as long as I can remember, now has a blog called Reverence Writing. It's at reverencedwriting.com. He's a great guy.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' He's got some really cool posts up right now about the Dallas Pen Show, which he made a trip to. It's got all the details in it. It's funny. I look at his Dallas Pen Show day one post and Sean Newton and Lisa Van Ness are right smack in the front of the picture on his post. I get a good laugh every time I see that. I wonder if Sean knows his face is splashed on Father Kyle's blog. But he does a great job, has a great amount of pens, has excellent handwriting. And I just wanted to point that out because he has just kicked this off after years and years of following myself and all kinds of pen bloggers and being a real supporter of all of us in the pen community. I wanted to point that out now that he's got a blog of his own. So congratulations, Father Kyle. And congratulations. Congratulations. So coffee again. So that was not a Britishism.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And y'all definitely check that out. He's knocking it out of the park so far.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right, mate.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Top five pens update.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So we get a lot of people after, I don't know, whenever I release the top five pens, it takes about three months for the emails and comments to start coming in. When's the next top five pens update going to be? When's the next top five pens update going to be? And I always thought like about once a quarter was good. It was kind of good timing for the top five pens. But it's ended up to be about once every six months. And that's actually better because there's not a huge amount of change in some of these categories. which I talk a little bit about in the post. But the point I wanted to make was when you have kind of more static categories like gel ink pens and ballpoint pens and rollerball pens, it's really hard to kind of break into those areas.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Like the micro tip gel ink pens, that's a pretty solid category. There's no no one's making a pen that's any different or better than things like the Uniball Sino DX .38 millimeter or the Pilot Hitec C or you know, the Uniball Sino RT 1 or the Zebra Sorosic clip or the Pilot Juice. There's the Pilot Juice is the most recent addition to that list. I mean, it's a fairly static list. Those are good pens and no one's making anything that's better. So updating it every three months to just kind of say the same thing over and over again, I kind of need to give it a little bit of a window of opportunity in case there is something that happens in that time frame. I think every three months and I'm not I'm not dead set on a schedule on this by the way. It's just when it kind of happens. If it's every three months if it's three months and I feel like there's a big update I'll publish a new top five pens. If it's six months it's going to be six months just because there hasn't been a lot of updates. in the end when I started putting together this list I actually thought there weren't going to be that many updates.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But there kind of were. So the overall top five list had a little bit of change and I added a new category for rollerball which I can't believe I didn't have before but I think I talked about it before I didn't have a good feel for despite using rollerballs for years and years and years I didn't have a real good feel for how that category would shape up but I do now so that's in there and we're going to talk about that later.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But as always at least in the past two or three lists the fountain pens and the fountain pen inks there's like a huge shake up in there.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Part of it is I'm getting more experienced in those areas and part of it is I'm refining that too.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well you can't you can't do a top five list if you have three pens or five pens or maybe even six pens in a certain category I guess you've got to you've got to kind of dip your toe in the water a bit and understand the differences between different types and different styles before you can can go on.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Are we going to talk about the pen that's in the image of the post?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We are. We are. We'll save that to where we go into the we're going to go through some of these lists but I just kind of wanted to do like the introductory thing because I did notice like a big change in the way I've used pens over the past few months. So it's been six months since the last update and all throughout the summer you know probably on into August almost everything I carried was a fountain pen it seemed. I'd have 10 or 12 fountain pens inked up at a time all kinds of different inks all kinds of different nibs and then something kind of changed around August or so I don't know if I got it wasn't conscious you know I wouldn't say oh I'm just overwhelmed with fountain pens I need to switch it's just I started going back to like all these gel ink pens that you know the blog was founded on all these years ago you know pens that I've missed using and pens that I love like the Uniball Sino DX and I realized it didn't hit me at first that I wasn't using as many fountain pens you know I was kind of ratcheting my carry down for fountain pens to like now I carry like three fountain pens at a time and I'm pretty happy with that where before I couldn't carry less than 10 because I wanted to use all these different things but now I'm carrying this TI2 Tech Liner which is the pen you mentioned in the image and we're going to talk about that more in a minute which it it carries the Uniball it uses the Sino 207 refill which is a really good gel ink refill and I think using that made me miss like some of the other pens that I haven't been using all the gel ink pens I've used the super fine Jetstream refills that I like the .38 Jetstream and the .5 millimeter Jetstream tips which are ridiculously fine and not recommended for everybody but I like them and the drawing pens that I love you know the plastic tip or felt tip pens you know that I'll use one here and there but now I'll find myself carrying you know two or three gel ink pens two or three drawing pens a Jetstream and a rollerball like the Retro 51 and then two or three fountain pens where before like just earlier this summer like June July I would carry like ten fountain pens and almost nothing else so I'm kind of having this I think it's good I'm kind of having this I don't know resurgence and wanting to use some of these pens that I've kind of pushed to the side even though you know nothing's really changed with those pens for the most part you know I think the new barrel like I got from Kickstarter the Techliner that helped you know that was a little bit of an impetus but I don't know I don't know that none of this necessarily means anything but I try to keep the top five list as what I'm using currently you know I make a point to have you know I have a kind of like a fixed statement at the top of the top five pens page where you know this is kind of a snapshot of the pens that I'm currently using not this isn't meant to say these are the best pens of all time these are the pens you should purchase you know these are the pens you should just run out and fill up your cart and they're going to work perfectly for you none of that's the case you know you need to understand what your writing requirements are what's going to best suit your needs and recently my needs have been being met by the simple two and three dollar gel ink refills and kind of a fancy pen barrel in the tech liner and I've used that pen more than any fountain pen I've used recently which is I didn't realize it at first but it's kind of crazy so you know it's always interesting putting together this list and sometimes I end up putting it off you know until I get such a rolling theme of people asking me to update the list update the list and I'm like well there's not a lot of updates and then I start to dig into it on what I'm really using like even just for fountain pen inks like I got a bunch of questions on that on okay this is the stuff that's really sticking with me the stuff that I'm using a lot the stuff you know that's holding up over time you know that's a lot of it too a lot of these things get solidified over time right from the very first top five list I did to now you know there's you'll see some pens that are consistent from that very first list and you'll see some that have gone off the list that you'll that'll probably never see the light of day again just because I've had more experience with a wider range of pens so I think let's let's talk about the list some but first we want to talk about another one of our good friends