Do you place a belly weight in your pencils?

no not usually but I have in very large pencils

Thanks, Slip.
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Eric, i use tail weights that will span the distance i want to cover, i find it add a better balance and a more stable playform.
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another trick to get more weight without a pencil sitting straight up and down, is to weight like I do with a needle, drill weight hole a little long and insert weight, then a short length of tubing then tail grommet and wire it. That may get it to lay on an angle but not sure how well it casts.

The small Gibbs pencil has a belly weight but it also is done with screw eyes

If you use the Gibbs shape you want the pencil to sit straight up and down with about 1" of nose out of the water. All the weight should be in the tail. I've played with weighting pencils to float at 45 degrees and they are disappointing. You are stuck working them like a spook only they don't fish as well as a spook. Maybe if you want something to cast far and fish very slow at night they have a niche........but good luck trying to gain enough faith in the design to use at night. I've tried and failed. The more heavily weighted pencil can be made to do much more, both slow and fast than the more lightly weighted pencil. If you build a shape more like an afterhours (shorter neck, longer tail, thicker throat) then moving the weight forward a bit has some role.

Stan Gibbs knew what he was doing and was a better fisherman than you or I. He has handed you a plug design that he tested until it fished better than any other variation. His pencil is one of the very best striped bass plugs ever sold. You can tweak it or change it but you will not improve upon it.........of that I am confident.

The pencil I've been working on is 7.5" with a ~1" hip. The nose and tail taper to 3/8".

I use 1.25", ~.20 oz tail weights that are about 1/4" in diameter; the belly weight is a small bullet at .166 oz and sits just forward of the hip. Total lead amount is about .55 oz. Total finished weight with 2/0 VMCs is 2.3 oz. Wood is AYC. At rest it sits nearly straight up-and-down with about 1" above the waterline.

It walks beautifully, without the zig-zag-killing "nose bob" I experience walking most Gibbs. It thrashes moderately well, but that isn't what I had in mind when I set the hip distance and rear taper. I wanted something with a thin-ish profile that walked better than a Gibbs, and I found it in this design.

In my experience (so far), it seems you can design a pencil that walks very well, or thrashes-in-place very well; but there's too much compromise involved to get one to do both very well -- at least in a slim-ish profile.