About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high, which for a time was on display at the Museum of Science Fiction in Seattle. With the exception of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., which I co-wrote with Nicole Galland by emailing Word files back and forth, every book I’ve written since then has been composed with fountain pen on paper.
Read 75% of this article.
To summarise, don’t use cheap pens or cheap paper. Ideally use fountain pens because author does genuinely really love them, but actually this branded product wil get you most of the way.
In final paragraph branded product name dropped twice.
All thats missing is a “backtoschool” discount code and an official sponsor line.
It’s double disgusting, because every corner of the web, even the ones where we try to find genuine content, is full of ads, and also people fall for it as long as it’s just presented with enough appearance of authenticity. That’s why I type my angry rants against consumerism and capitalism on my beloved KMarrrX Ergosynth Keyboard - the radical way to shitpost and comment!
So… People can’t talk about the tools they use to do their craft?
…You think Neal Stephenson is shilling for brands online?
Did you read the Blue Ant trilogy and think William Gibson was in the pay of Big Mechanical Calculator?
I don’t know who Neal Stephenson is and neither can i vouch for their ethics of any partnership they may be bound to.
What i am saying is, an ai could easily spin up advertisement articles like this as part of some small print business contract that they didn’t know they signed. Or just without permission.
Or a legit honest witten article could be tweaked to include an ai inserted sponsorship after the fact. Maybe this text was entirely stolen from their personal blog. Sure you can research to check this but from the information that is here its clear that,
anything is possible,
the internet is dead,
the only way to know anything for sure is if you knew person irl and asked them about it directly.
Obviously
I think this is a generally helpful guide and not spon-con. The g-2 pens he recommends are way better than the cheaper lookalikes that are usually on the same rack so I think it is good that he mentions the brand. Moleskine notebooks do have better paper in them than the store brands that look the same. How could someone recommend a specific product in a way that you don’t see as paid advertising?
They could mention it more briefly and maybe include that they aren’t sponsored to recommend this brand.
Which is actually a compliment to said brand i would take the recommendation more seriously if its explicitly since. but it also cannot be lied about without causing potential legal trouble.
Though i want to conclude i am in no way saying this specific named author is doing anything wrong. my critique is the general state of the digital world. It may not be slop, but it might aswell be and there is no obvious difference.