Though I generally enjoy working from home, one downside has been easy access to my pen collection. When I was leaving the house more, much less commuting several days per week, I typically would pick out 3-6 pens on Sunday night or Monday morning, ink up those that were fountain pens, and use them through the week before cleaning and replacing those I wrote dry and repeating the cycle. Now, I’ve developed this tendency to pick out pens throughout the week to ink up whenever I need a distraction. As I sit here today at my desk typing this, I count 11 inked fountain pens, two more than I’ve written dry and need to clean, five fountain pens that are “next up” waiting to be inked, and six non-fountain pens. It’s starting to make my head spin.
Having a lot of pens inked is one of the “perils” of the review business. As much as I’d like to carry personal favorites exclusively, I have to keep three or so pens inked for review to make sure that I have enough blog content in the pipeline. Even then, it’s a challenge to make sure I’m organized enough to use these pens for an appropriate enough amount of time that I feel comfortable writing a review or adding them to The Curated Shop.
Of course, the pictures above don’t even touch the pencils I have in rotation (and in multiple pencil/pen cups around my office).
To the point of today’s post: This is a long-winded way of saying that I’m looking to hear from you all on how people manage and/or track their pen (and ink) usage in this hobby. The topic came up on last week’s TGS Patreon Meetup, where several of us dialed in to Zoom to chat for an hour or so, and ended up talking about how many pens we kept inked (answer: anywhere from six to two dozen), and whether/how we tracked our usage to make sure we were actually using all of the pens in our collection. Later that night, I downloaded Figboot’s “EDC Log” Spreadsheet as an experiment. While it’s going to require an initial investment of time to enter all of my pens and inks into the log, that will give me the the opportunity to take inventory and possibly thin things out.
Let me know! Do you set “rules” for yourself on how many pens you can keep inked at once? Do you force yourself to write pens dry before you change inks? Do you track which pens you are/are not writing with to make sure you rotate through your entire collection? I’m interested in hearing from readers. Drop me a line in the comments or through the “Contact Me” link on the site. If i get enough interesting responses I’ll write a follow-up post with the results.