A blog about writing, sketching, running and other things
I’m still working my way through the Inkvent inks (9 pens left to write dry), and I’m trying to sketch more even on busy weeks. So I dusted off an old Traveler’s Notebook that I set up years ago and didn’t fill, and I started playing with fountain pens.
It’s 2024 and this time I’m doing neither yearly goals nor themes. I find themes to be too vague to be useful: they don’t provide enough structure or motivation for my needs. My old yearly goals worked perfectly before I got cancer, but now I can’t commit to a full year of goals (my brain just won’t let me). So I’m trying something new this time: the twelve week year. The idea is to treat each quarter as a new year, with all that entails.
I mapped out the first 13 weeks (from the 31st of December to the 30th of March) in my Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal, each week on two pages. On the left are the days of the week and on the right is my set of tasks for the week. The list of tasks is divided into two columns, and each column is divided into categories. The left column is for categories and tasks that vary widely from week to week: blogging, general tasks, various courses and challenges I’m taking. The right column is for my permanent categories that happen every week in the quarter: health, reading, connections, meditation and journaling.
The health category tracks fitness and health related tasks (on a given week it will have checkboxes for running, swimming and gym sessions for example, as well as reminders to go to the dentist or get my blood pressure checked). The reading category is for where I want to be with my reading in a given week (halfway through book x, 30 pages into book y). Connections is something I added after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and it’s been well worth doing: I call or meet up with 2-4 friends every week. Messaging doesn’t count, only phone calls, zoom calls, or physical meetups. If there’s one habit I’d recommend picking up in 2024 it’s this one. Meditate and Journal are just tracking locations for my meditation and journaling sessions.
I then set out goals in various categories for the entire “12 week year”, as if it was a full year. Each of these will be evaluated at the end of the 13 weeks, and a complete new set of goals will be set for next quarter. The goals are all SMART goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. Unlike themes there’s a possibility of not achieving all my goals, but that’s also something worth learning and carrying on to the next “year”.
So for instance under my health category for the next “year” is to get back to a 5k running base and an 8k long run (I’ve had a break in running for a few weeks due to illness and travel). If at the end of March I’m only at a 7k long run that’s not the end of the world, it just means that I need to take that into account when planning my next 12 weeks.
I then break down the goals into tasks that go into the weekly page. Each week I look at my goals, calculate where I am and where I want to be by the end of the week and fill out the weekly planning page accordingly. I use the calendar side of the page to block out time sensitive things or things that provide useful context (days of the week where I work from home and those where I work from the office, rainy days, holidays, etc).
To be clear: I don’t block the tasks for all the “year” in advance, but rather on a week by week basis. Only the goals for the entire 12 week period are planned in advance. The goals themselves are realistic, and many of them are broken into “base goals” and “stretch goals” much like in Kickstarter. At the last week of the quarter I set aside time to review and “shutdown” the quarter and plan and set up the new one coming up. If I end up not liking the weekly page setup, if there’s a goal that just didn’t work for me, if there’s something new in my life I can easily take it into account without feeling like I’ve “wasted” precious planning time or I’m bailing out on my plans.
So, if you’re unsure on how to plan your year, I suggest just planning the next 12 or 13 weeks. It may just work for you.
A quick cafe sketch in my Stalogy B5 with a Lamy Safari Diamine Merry and Bright.
This is the Diamine Inkvent 2023 day 23 door:
Day 23’s ink is Diamine Fireside Snug. It’s a standard ink.
Diamine Fireside Snug is a dark orange standard ink with a lot of great shading. It’s one of the few inks in the Inkvent calendar that would make for a great everyday ink. The dark dot on my swab is due to an ink drop on the Col-O-Ring card that I didn’t notice before swabbing the ink.
The base ink colour is a reddish orange that is dark enough to be readable even with a fine nibbed pen, and the shading it provides is pretty spectacular. I have very few orange inks in my ink collection, and this one is definitely one that I would add to it.
You can see the ink shading in this sketch of Mud Pie the teddy bear. He always appears a bit “squashed” and that’s part of his charm.
The original bear (purchased at Stonegate Teddy Bears in York):
There’s only a handful of standard inks in this year’s Inkvent and they’ve all been solid inks, but Jacaranda and Fireside Snug have been a cut above (I’ve decided that it’s completely unfair to call Diamine Weeping Willow a standard ink, and so I’m putting in into a separate category). If you’re looking for an alternative to Noodler’s Habanero, this is it.
This is the Diamine Inkvent 2023 day 22 door:
Day 22’s ink is Diamine Tinsel. It’s a shimmer ink.
Diamine Tinsel is bright red ink with red shimmer and a lot of shading and it’s gloriously Christmas appropriate.
It took 22 days for Diamine to pull out the red Christmas ink but they knocked it out of the park with this one. It dries darker than it writes on the page, with the base ink being a bright red ink with orange shading. The shimmer renders it darker and richer and really makes it something special. In previous Inkvents Diamine leaned too heavily for my taste on the red inks, but this time they picked them carefully and sparingly. While Bah Humbug goes for the dark red theme, Diamine Tinsel is the full on festive bright red with shimmers on top.
I probably should have sketched today’s bear with blue ink, but Diamine Tinsel it is. The reason I bought him is because of those eyes. I just couldn’t say no to them.
Here’s the original bear (what do you think of his eyes?):
Diamine Tinsel was the festive red ink that this Inkvent calendar needed. Whether you use it to write Christmas cards or letters to Santa, this ink definitely has “Christmas” written all over it.
Happy fountain pen day to all who celebrate. I purchased a Leonardo Momento Zero Nuvola rose gold fine flex nib from Fontoplumo with the hopes that it will arrive at some point in the future (deliveries are still severely delayed).
Unlike past years I’ve started working on my Inkvent reviews now instead of in real time, as a way to make them less stressful. I decided to theme my sketches this year around my teddy bear collection.
My PTSD has been kicking my ass since Tuesday, when I got caught in a crowded shelter (small room, no windows, closed door, large rocket barrage. Couldn’t have been more triggering if I’d designed it). I’m taking some time off daily posting to take care of myself.
Three rocket attacks today and I’m getting ready for an uneasy night. They’re sending them in large waves so Iron Dome missed a few and there direct hits and more wounded people today.
In better news the stray black kitten that my mom and brother saved is back from her stay at the vet’s (she had to have her tail removed after she was run over by a car). She’s so friendly and fearless the vet thinks that she belonged to someone who threw her out (a common fate with black cats in particular). But now she has a great forever home and she’s having the time of her life:
Adopt, don’t shop.
No rockets last night and so far no rockets today. Could this be the first quiet day we’ve had in three weeks? The north and south weren’t so lucky, of course.
Went on a short run within running distance of a shelter, and saw some monk parrots and a crow scrounging for treats in the grass. Small moments of normalcy in the madness we are living in now.
A young woman I work with was drafted on the terrible Saturday of the 7th of October and has been on active duty ever since. I sketched her today, to cheer her up. I hope she gets to come back to the office safe and sound and hang the sketch on her office cork-board.
I wasn’t in the mood to sketch these, but I decided to sketch them anyway. Pelikan Souverän M600 vintage Tortoise Shell brown fine nib with Pilot Iroshizuku Yama Budo.
I enjoy sketching with grey inks, so I oftentimes have a pen filled with a grey ink of some kind or another. Today’s selection is the Pelikan Souverän M605 Stresemann with a medium nib (which as it’s a gold nibbed Pelikan, verges on the broad) filled with Diamine Silver Fox. Silver Fox is from Diamine’s 150th anniversary collection (one of the original ones they issued), and is a slightly warmish medium grey with fantastic shading.
African elephants are pretty fun to sketch, so I may be tempted to sketch another one of them later this month.
If you’re looking for a grey ink that’s well behaved, offers a lot of shading, is readable even in fine nibs and is slightly on the warmer side of the grey spectrum, then I recommend giving Diamine Silver Fox a try.
Writing at Large 