Editing The Pen Addict 653/transcript (section)

== Stationery Shopping at the Pen Show ==

* Rest of the afternoon, Saturday, I did stationery shopping, right? So there were several stationery vendors. California is a great area for a lot of these types of vendors, you know, sticker stamps, washi, you know, fun designs, unique items to come and have a table at. And at a pen shows like San Francisco, you know, it was the same way in California, a little bit on a smaller scale.
* But, you know, like that was it. That was the kind of stuff that, that I did. And then, you know, I was pretty wiped out by Saturday afternoon, just from travel, getting in Thursday night, like to Saturday afternoon. Like I went at it like pretty solid and I was just kind of done and, you know, went up to the room, chilled for about an hour, went out to dinner. And then it was back at the bar, you know, probably about like seven o'clock, 730. And there was just the coolest bar scene. Like we were all just had like ink and paper and, you know, pens strewn everywhere and people just, you know, showing off what they got at the show. And, you know, people getting to try other things. That's a huge aspect of these shows. I've talked about it a hundred times every time I do a show, a recap, talking about like the bar scene or the people scene or the sitting around scene. It's such a valuable experience, right? You can do a lot during the show as far as like, you know, testing products and figuring things out. But getting to talk to other people who, you know, have pros and cons about a lot of different products or just like, you know, learning about people. It was really cool. Like it's a huge benefit if you have the opportunity to stay a night at the show just to sit around, meet new people.
* It's just really fun. So I met a lot of new people at this show, which was great. And that was it. Like Sunday, you know, West Coast back to East is a full day of travel just with the time zone and the flight lengths and stuff like that. But it was easy, easy travel in and out, thankfully.
* Things are kind of a mess over here. As I'm sure many of you have heard, if you're not living in the U.S. right now, the travel travel is a little bit more sketchy than normal. But I had an easy, easy travel time. And that was that was it. I, you know, no pen show is perfect. I don't think I've ever been to a perfect pen show. But, man, this is up there, like in just like a unique event. I, you know, since I've never been to this one, it's always a goal of mine to go to these different shows. And it had so many vendors and so much quality of people. It was great. Like I cannot recommend this show highly enough. So I thought it was really, really well done. And just it checked all the boxes for me. So, yeah, I would not hesitate to recommend this if you have the availability to get to the California Pen Show next year. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just getting started or managing a growing brand, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell your products, services, content you create, anything. Squarespace has everything you need all in one place, all on your terms. It's so easy to get started with Squarespace. They have these beautiful website templates that you can choose from. But they've made it even better with design intelligence. By combining their two decades of industry-leading design expertise of cutting-edge AI technology, you can unlock your strongest creative potential easier than ever before. Design intelligence empowers anyone to build a more personalized, beautiful website tailored to their unique needs, crafting a bespoke digital identity to use across the entire web. I mean, they really do make it so easy. It's so easy to get started from one of the templates that they have. And they have these wonderful tools that can help put things together the way that you want and customize it the way that you want. You can also use their fantastic drag and drop tools so you can do everything visually. They make it so easy to design. You don't need to have any existing knowledge or skills. You just need to know how to use a mouse, which is, like, not very hard. But what I love about Squarespace is that exact idea that you just do the part that you want and it's nice and easy. And they take care of all of the difficult stuff in the background, like SEO. Every website is optimized to be indexed of meta descriptions and auto-generated sitemap and more. You don't really need to know what that means because the result is you will show up more often to more people in global search engine results, which is exactly what you want.
* Both Brad and I have been using Squarespace for, like, 15 years or something, both of us. Yeah, pretty close. For so many different projects, they make it so easy to get started and really, like, just to get what you want online with no fuss. But don't just take my word for it. Go to squarespace.com. You can sign up for a free trial. You can build your entire website and see how it's going to work for you. And then when you're ready to launch it to the world, just go to squarespace.com slash penaddict to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com slash penaddict when you decide to sign up and you'll get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of this show and all of Relay. All right. We got a shout out of the week, Myke.
* Shout out of the week.
* Rob's pen works. So shout out, Rob, for taking the time to talk with Caroline for this month's Meet Your Maker post. Rob, I got to meet Rob at San Francisco last year for the first time. I would obviously have seen his work online for years. Fascinating, wonderful, colorful, amazing work. And I don't always do this, but the timing worked that I have a giveaway up of one of Rob's pen works dip nib handles that he sent me. So we'll have a link in the show notes. Go over to the pen addict blog to enter to win some of Rob's beautiful glitterati handiwork, which I thought that was a great name for some of the more sparkly pens that a lot of makers are making these days, which are beautiful. So go check out that article. They did a great job on that. And go check out the giveaway, which is a beautiful, beautiful dip nib pen. So check that out. So you want to talk about what I picked up at the California Pen Show? I really do. Okay, interesting. So I've had one specific pen on my list for years.