First off:

There’s 5 new Bebe Fountain Pens in the shop. (Dark Matter, Fortune, Chimera x 2, Chaos Magic.) The Retrogrades are FINALLY at a point where I can start showing off the progress. It helps if you understand how 3D printing works a bit, but it’s still kinda fun even if you don’t.

I also added a new reward tier option to Patreon pens: The Innovator. It’s exactly what it sounds like: a tier for those who enjoy art pens and prototypes. The perk for members is that you get a one of a kind (working) writing instrument every quarter – something that likely would stay in my personal collection. Even if the design became a regular I make (my favorite personal pen is the Bebe prototype, for example) yours would still be one of the first. (And yes, you can post about it.) The perk for me is that the support from this tier means I can afford to spend a little more time doing design and component development. Definitely a win-win if you enjoy unique pens and supporting innovation. 

There’s only 3 of 5 spots left this quarter, because I’m not sure how many I can manage just yet. Five is doable, and I may add more spots if it goes well. 

If you aren’t familiar with the Patreon Pens: It’s essentially a quarterly pen subscription, billed in monthly installments. You pick the pen design you want, and the pen material/color changes each quarter. Sign ups are opened just before the start of each quarter, and then closed until the next sign up period. There’s now four tiers (each one has a different price point and a different style of pen) and they’re all open right now.

(And off we go)

I’ve been on Patreon for a very, very long time. Early on, it was just for my painting and art, eventually for photography and art, then it was writing too, and now it’s also pens. 

Yeah, it’s been for a lot of things over the last decade plus. I know, I do a lot of things, I know. I wonder often how many people think that someone who does all these things must be bad at all of them – and I wonder if they’re right in the next heartbeat.

The world that pushes specializing and single-subject deep learning, and I’ve always been at odds with that approach. I bounce between my interests like a bouncy ball launched from a slingshot, letting each one inform and inspire the others. My painting influences my material casting and color design, and my jewelry supports the metalworking and fabrication and design for pens. My photography supports social media and my website, sure, but it also helps me tell stories and share behind the scenes of the work I do. My poetry helps me find new ways of writing newsletters and captions, music inspires painting, and let’s be honest, there’s no real separating the casual coding and learning languages that I do from my website work and 3D modeling.

Each one gives me a new way of looking at the world I didn’t have before. Each one gives me one more way of relating to other people, to you. 

I have heard that my doing so many things makes my social media unappealing for people who just want one thing – but in my experience, most people aren’t one dimensional, they’re just reluctant to admit to what they’re interested in. 

The culture we find ourselves in often seems unnecessarily unkind to beginners, but there is so much joy and enthusiasm and fun to be found in doing something without any expectations of being good enough (or even good at all) at it. Being a beginner, an unabashedly awful but wholeheartedly enthusiastic beginner is freeing in a way the world – and all of us – need. The people worth spending time with, they’ll welcome the beginners.

(Trust me on this – the guys in my Barbershop chorus keep dragging me into quartets and I am TERRIBLE.)

Good people won’t shame you for being a beginner – even if you stay at that level. Your enthusiasm and earnestness about what you love is the best part, after all. Life is too short to deny yourself new experiences you’re curious about just because someone once said you weren’t good at it and shouldn’t do it.

Go try. You don’t have to stick with it, but it just might be worth trying for the experience.

-A. Markov

(Before anyone jokes that I’m talking about drugs: This last week marked two years sober for me.)