There’s more to be said about dust – I wanted to make it the character in a book once. Sort of. The book was to take place in a world gradually being subsumed under QQuay Brothers-type dust. Not an original idea, I’m sure; one of the reasons I didn’t write it was that I knew someone else would have done it better. ‘There are seven types of dust.’ That was a possible opening sentence that I knew wouldn’t make it to the final draft; it’s too novelly-discursive. I don’t know how many types of dust there are. On the desk, the majority of it must be me-dust – off the top of my head, emerging from my scratched beard; then there’s whatever floats in from the garden, or through the front door (alternatively, carried on our feet, drying out on the shoe rack, taking flight); then there’s the pencil shavings. One of the crafty almost nothing things I love about being a writer is the sharpening of pencils. For years I’ve used a Palomino Blackwing sharpener, shaped a bit like one of the earliest tanks (without the slope of the tracks). It gently reduces the tip of the pencil to a longer than usual taper. (The fine point of his soul.) It does this by virtue of two holes, the first (on the left) to get the wood roughly in shape, the second to fine hone the graphite. After I sharpen a pencil, I always sniff it. That’s the smell of my work – wood and lead, graphite and cedar. Sometimes I think that I’ll end up killing myself this way, get brain cancer – what particulates are going up my nose? Afterwards, there’s a ready point to be written with; and this makes me more willing to write. My handwriting won’t be a shameful slur; it’ll have something of the morning’s acuity. (This is in pen. Diary in pen.) Pencil is usually for revision – for a second draft on top of the first, to save paper. Recently I bought two pencils from a beautiful new shop in town, one is Prussian Blue (imagine that) and the other is Dark phthalocyanine green. But usually I used Mono 100 HB pencils from the Japanese company Tombow. They are lacquer black with a gold band half an inch from the non-writing end, and a white line bissecting the bit some people would chew. (I’m not a chewer.) Made in Vietnam. For hi-precision DRAFTING (we hope). Highest quality (we wish). HOMO-GRAPH (we are).
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