Inkless Writing Tool

I feel like I'm between conferences right now, still riding high from the National Writer's Conference in San Diego a couple weeks ago and preparing for the OCCWF conference http://www.occwf.org/ at the end of this month. In fact as I prepare for the next one I still have to use my prize from the last one. I've got my proposal page set up and will be uploading the devotional later today. But back to yesterday. I was suppossed to blog but got busy doing inventory for the conference. One of the things I needed to do was check to see that the pens worked. Face it, pens in storage can dry out. In fact there's one brand I'll be recommending we don't get again. None of the pens left in the box worked and they all had caps. My mother never would have had this problem. Her writing tool was a stylus which is a small tool with a wooden handle and metal end. The end is about the size but not the sharpness of a picture hanging nail. Occasionally it got dull so she'd sharpen it (but not too sharp) on the porch step. Those little styluses last. I still have one Mom used in college. She left me a couple others she'd bought along the way which I use in jewelry making. To Braille on metal requires a hammer and I can't imagine using Mom's college stylus for that. A stylus may not run out of ink but they can get lost which explains the spares. The handles on the newer one are longer and chunkier too and I bought one a few years ago that is plastic and has a saddle shape. This is for user comfort. I keep Mom's, now my styluses in a container on a shelf. In this house there is one more hazard, especially for the wooden handled ones. We have a dog that eats pencils. I can't write Braille quickly enough to use it in my writing. Imagine if I could though. As long as I had paper I wouldn't have my thoughts interrrupeted because the pen ran out of ink or the computer crashed. And no ink smudges on my left pinky.