What you write with. Literally.

 Funny, I just wrote about office supplies, and now I read Flavorwire's Writing Tools of 20 Famous Authors, which inspired me to write further about my own writing tools. Other than a computer, obviously. 

I do not like pencils. I never have. I probably never will. They're a "necessary evil" for gaming (character sheets require a lot of erasures, for your health if nothing else), and they were required in math class in school, but other than that, I don't use them. And I no longer have school, and thus little math.

I do like fountain pens, as many of the 20 writers the quoted article favor. I have a couple of cheap ones that tend to run out of ink through evaporation before I've written it all down. I've also used Varsity disposable ones, discovered in my college store. I just got a new one (brand forgotten already) from Walgreens. It's "steel" and the cardboard package is green; that's all I remember so far.

If I'm hand writing something, though, I like pens that are felt tipped. Flairs are great (pictured in my previous post with the rad wolf journal). Bic has some that aren't too bad. Sharpie pens are surprisingly disappointing; they're too rigid at first, the lines too draggy and skinny, and then they die soon after they're "just write". I do like a regular Sharpie, and occasionally I've written in a sketchpad using a Sharpie. This works well for the legibility of my handwriting as well. Like a kindergartener, a larger writing implement helps with my manual dexterity.

The (horrible) epic fantasy novel I wrote in high school was written using Pilot vball pens, and also sometimes Pilot precise, which had a way of leaking onto the first knuckle of my middle finger, leaving me with a smudgy blue smear. I flip flop between using blue ink versus black. More than 1000 pages handwritten on loose leaf, in one of those Pilots or the other. I'd like to think that I got it out of my system.

I've been on a black ink kick for several years now, so that might be the one that stays.