The Mechanic & the Muse: Get the lead out--or the ink

Reporting

"Made in the Shade"
A package on Southern writers: profiles, interviews and an 11-state directory of writers you may never have heard of but are worth your time. Appeared in Creative Loafing chain.
"Mass Appeal"
A day-in-the-life profile of a telegenic parish priest in Miami. Published in Catholic Digest, reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times
"The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham"
How the first West Point graduate from South Vietnam disappears after the fall of Saigon, only to be rescued by his classmates two decades later. A cover story in The Washington Post Magazine

"The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words."

This site doesn't explain who computed this factoid, tho it may explain why John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway drafted in pencil. True or false, tonight its imagery appeals to me.

Blocked on a project, (what's new?) I broke through today by turning from the computer keyboard and picking up a fountain pen, an Azure Blue Pearl Parker Vacumatic made before I was born. (Several years ago, I became a collector of vintage fountain pens because, frankly, old ones were a lot cheaper than the new ones you find in places like Levenger. Another story for another time.) My pen looks like this one advertised on ebay.

The ink flowed from this exquisite writing instrument, a dark blue river spreading tributaries--of thought, surmise, possibility--on the blank page. It felt like a transfusion--of hope.

Funny but wonderful how simply changing a writing tool can turn things around.