Forever Haven Day 1: Writing Instruments to Try

The habit of writing a public blog post every day was ingrained during Inkhaven, where 40 people wrote a public blog post every day for 30 days. There is a continuing challenge around writing blogposts after the program, with the same requirement of a minimum of 500 words.

I like the idea of staying accountable to what I am thinking about that day, enough so to articulate it in a basic way to a friendly other, and so I will try to continue with the challenge, Foreverhaven, as named by Claire in our Slack and written about by Lydia Nottingham here on her blog. It might end up as mostly notes to myself, but who knows how it will end up developing.

Today I will be writing about writing instruments that I may like to try soon.

Writing compression gloves

It’s getting cold. There are ones with cool patterns, and ones for arthritis. Which will I choose?

I got these from Amazon and will see if they help tomorrow with writing in the cold and hand cramping. I got this recommendation after sharing this article with someone where I talk about the pain of writing in the hands.

Mechanical keyboard

There are a lot of cool mechanical keyboards out there, and I’ll have to pick one out. These are super cool because then I can have a setup where I use it like a typewriter while I full screen a word processor, and then print out the pages, and it’s kind of like a typewriter. I haven’t tried one yet where the right and left hand are separated and you write more ergonomically. I was impressed by how fast and streamlined the typing was on the Keychron mechanical keyboard I was trying out. It felt like there was no friction between my thinking and the typing. This is definitely worth the investment for the amount of writing I plan to do.

Papyrus

These are pretty cheap and fun. I can imagine them being great for something like formalizing the table of contents for a book I’d be writing, or keeping track of ideas. They make things seem just a bit more formal. When I am feeling it in myself again to have a place to store these without them getting messed up, I’ll get them.

Keyboard for phone

There are a lot of keyboards for your phone. One of them I’ll probably fall in love with and it’ll be awesome. That way when I’m hanging out random places of coffee shops I can easily pull out my phone and type without needing my computer.

Weekly virtue reminder wheel

I wanted to make one of these. Pick friends I respect and admire, write out the characteristics of them I want more of. Then, for the next year, assign each week to one of the character traits, and practice it mindfully for the week. This week I have a weekly cadence that I can use, as well as a daily cadence. I am not sure what the effects of this would be but I can imagine something nice happening.