Now and again, a man needs new tools to tackle his work, so yesterday I bought myself a new pen. There's nothing wrong with my old Waterman - I love it but if you were paying attention a month or so back, you'll remember that I dropped the back-up pen and bent the nib beyond being useful for anything. I've never used anything but a Waterman for years and years and years and I was going to get another one, but the whole point of a second pen is that it's not the end of the world if you kill it or lose it.

I tell you - it's like thinking about buying a new car. With the internet in full swing, there's a whole world of options out there but I finally settled on this Duke which is some kind of German/Chinese hybrid as far as I can make out:

It's pretty heavy for a pen (about twice as heavy as the Waterman) which I like very much but the nib moves fast - really fast. For those of you aren't writers, imagine working with a pen that won't move as fast over paper as your brain is able to - going back to the car analogy, it's like getting stuck behind a truck, deciding to overtake it and finding your car is incapable even with your foot to the floor.

And now... I shall go create something with it - or rather, I shall finish something, just to see how it fares in the real world. Another thousand words to go and I'll have wrapped up a short novel called The Man Who Lived Again. In the same vein as The Eternity Ring, this one will be going out as a digital one-shot to see what the world makes of it. Estimated time of completion? A couple of weeks... I think it's that long until the end of the month anyway. Here's a sneak: