A lot of my stationery life in October has revolved around having an Autumn refresh. I cleaned out a large number of my pens ready for a refill, and have been rearranging my desk (this was largely prompted by switching from having a laptop to a desktop computer).

I’m now all ready with my refreshed desk and newly inked pens to head into November, and a writing challenge that I’m doing this month. But more on that later! Let’s start with my October fountain pen favourites:

Fountain Pens

This month I’ve been cleaning out and reinking a lot of my pens for the Autumn. You can see here a little snapshot of some of my Autumnal inky choices, but I may do a full post on this soon.

I also decided to bring out a pen that I hadn’t used in a while this month, which is notable as one of only two vintage pens in my collection. I’ve inked this Vintage Pilot Elite with Diamine Chocolate Brown, and it’s one of my favourite pens to use at the minute. I’d forgotten how fine but smooth this nib is!

Notebooks

The main notebook I’ve been working in this month is a Rhodia reverse book, which is pretty unique in my notebook collection as my only square notebook, and one of very few grid notebooks I own.

The grid in this notebook isn’t my favourite, as I feel like it’s a little darker than I’d like, so you can only really use dark inks in it. But I adore Rhodia paper, and I liked the size of the pages in this, as it seemed well suited to what I’m using it for.

Which brings me to my writing challenge:

My 30 Day Writing Challenge

As a lifelong writer, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo many times. If you aren’t a part of the online writing community, and don’t know what that is, NaNoWriMo was national novel writing month, where writers all over the world would attempt to write 50,000 words in a month.

Unfortunately in recent years the official NaNoWriMo organisation was rocked by various scandals, and so the official NaNoWriMo is no more. But November is still a popular time for writing challenges to take place.

There’s various official ones being hosted, but I decided this year to just do my own thing and set my own challenge – preferably one that could involve using my stationery!

So my aim in November is to write a piece of flash fiction every single day. I’ve spent October preparing a huge array of writing prompts, potential story themes and ideas, and doing research on all kind of random things that might be useful as story inspiration (for example, unusual mythical creatures and interesting historical figures). I’ve been doing this prep in my Rhodia notebook, and I’m writing the actual fiction pieces in there too.

My pen of choice for this challenge is my Pilot Decimo, as I feel like a retractable pen is handy for if you have to stop and think about what you’re writing (as you don’t need to worry about capping the pen).

I’m 2 days in, and so far it’s going well, but it’s early days. I know from past writing challenges it’s around the middle where I start to fall off, so we’ll see how it goes!

So how has your October been? What have been some of your stationery favourites this past month? And have you ever taken part in a writing challenge?