The Independent Stitch

NaNoWriMo progress report

I've crossed the 50,000-word finish line. I also "won" in 2005 and 2006. Note that quality of the verbal production has nothing to do with this achievement.

However, I'm not done with what passes for my story this year, so I'll continue to type until 11/30, when I'll slap an ending on the thing, ready or not, and put it in a drawer, metaphorical or actual. Some day I may come back and look and see if I got anything worth saving and editing. At this stage, there's no telling, and it doesn't matter. It does matter that I take my imagination off a leash for at least a couple of hours a day for one month every year, and it also matters that I put a conclusion on the file before I close it out at the end of the month.

Here are three possible conclusions:

1.     Exeunt, pursued by a bear. (Borrowed from a great writer.)
2.     And a bear came in and ate them all up.
3.     And they all lived happily ever after.

See NaNoWriMo central for details of this novel-writing exercise, and No Plot? No Problem! by founder Chris Baty for a comprehensive guide to the insanity.

(I see that the ordering site to which I linked for the book says: "Note: All copies come from the book's second or third printing, with greatly improved boxed text legibility." Mine must be from the first printing, because trying to read the type in the boxes has always been one of the book's major puzzles, possibly even more challenging than writing a novel . . . and provides a lesson in screening densities for book designers.)

Now and then, I need to do something that makes no rational sense at all, especially when the rest of life appears determined to require me to make sense and be rational.

I think this makes the sixth novel I've written, three of them in the past three years. If you can call them novels. In three cases I think you can; in two cases, it's doubtful, although they are not nonfiction; and in this most recent case the file's not ready for even summary evaluation, but what I wrote sure isn't "true." It involves people who never lived and things that never happened.

It's interesting that Wikipedia's definition of the novel doesn't include a fictional aspect: "A novel (from Italian novella, Spanish novela, French nouvelle for 'new,' 'news,' or 'short story of something new') is today a long prose narrative set out in writing." Long prose narrative. NOT "long prose narrative that has been made up" or "imaginative" or "pretend" or any of those other things that imply "not true" or "fiction."

One of the things I'm looking forward to after this month is over is pulling Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel off the shelf again and seeing what I think of a chapter or two after this latest foray into the land of noveling.

I'm also looking forward to reading a couple of novels, at least one familiar and one not. I haven't decided on the familiar one yet, although I have several pulled off the shelf. The unfamiliar one will need to find me.

Yes, life and work have continued while I've been indulging myself in this weirdness. Of course.

Some days are more orderly than others

Ethnic Knitting Discovery, by Donna Druchunas, has just been published and I'm already working steadily on the next two (or three, depends on the day) books that are scheduled (using that word loosely) to come from Nomad Press. In addition to keeping up with the progress of Ethnic Knitting Discovery as it heads out into the world.

(Asides: There's a great review of Arctic Lace in the Fall 2007 issue of Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot. I have heard that there is a review of Ethnic Knitting Discovery in the December 2007 issue of Library Journal, but the magazine is nearly impossible to locate at the libraries here . . . because, sensibly, the librarians are reading it. Ethnic Knitting Discovery has been submitted to its first awards competition, the Independent Publisher Awards, or IPPYs; which both Arctic Lace and Knitting in the Old Way have earned IPPY recognition in previous years.)

I have to start way ahead of when a new book will come out. There's lots to be done between now and then, which is why the word "schedule" is only approximate . . . until early January, when I have to commit (and I will commit) to releasing a book next fall.

Spring's out of the question for a new book; the deadlines have passed, and I was still working on Ethnic Knitting Discovery. Before I take the step of committing to a release date, I want to be reasonably sure that I really can produce the book on time. More than reasonably sure—nearly certain, barring the unforeseen. It's not like I've got a staff I can turn the job over to. And on the other end, announcing a pub date sets all sorts of industry wheels in motion that are really hard (and costly) to stop.

So I'm currently engaged with the rough editing and preliminary layout for the next book in Donna's series of step-by-step introductions to the techniques of ethnic knitters. I want the book 90 percent done before I fill out the forms to send to the distributors. I do already have a cover: wonderful! Inspiring, too, for the micromanaging that's required to get the interior design in okay shape.

Here's part of what I was dealing with yesterday:

1. That's the stitch-count worksheet for one of the Icelandic sweaters (I'm on chapter 4, which means I've already roughed in the two general-information chapters at the front plus chapter 3, Lithuania). There's a closer view of it coming in a minute. The arrows are significant.

2. This is the segment of the manuscript I'm working on. Mostly I keep things electronic. But with the projects, it's good to be able to look at several sections simultaneously. Printing out the eleven or so pages for each project also helps me break down the large process into smaller parts that can actually be completed. And I can scrawl helpful notes on the paper as I go.

3. This is a big envelope balanced between the monitor and the printer. At this time of year, during most of the daylight hours the sun comes through the windows at an angle that produces too much glare on the monitor for ease of working, even when the monitor is canted away from the window. I don't like to work with the blinds down, although that's what I was doing last week, so this is the low-tech fix.

Here's the promised closer view of that stitch-count table with the arrows:

The top arrow is the top limit of the table on the page. The middle arrow is the bottom limit of the table on the page. The bottom arrow is the actual bottom of the table. Hmmm.

I spent some time yesterday exploring different typefaces, to see if there was a solution that would let me keep each table on a single page, as I arranged to do for Ethnic Knitting Discovery. I'm not convinced that there's an acceptable-to-me solution . . . in other words, the best option may be letting the worksheets expand onto two pages. This changes the layout guidelines and constraints for the whole book. (I did review a lot of lovely type. It either doesn't have the character sets I need or doesn't have the necessary legibility or I can't afford it.)

Each book has new challenges. I've already had to change the type I'm using for the main text in order to be able to typeset some Lithuanian words.

By the way, the lines that run horizontally across the pages on the screen are gridlines. The ones that run vertically are guidelines. They all help me maintain a logical visual consistency in the layout.

Changing topics completely, the flowers from last week continue to offer up surprises:

Those two lilies were just buds in the original arrangement. The dark specks on the petals are both color and texture! It's cool.

Holly Lisle requests three favorites each, novels and nonfiction

Holly Lisle has a great site for her own work that also includes generous resources for other writers. She's just started a newsletter that people interested in writing will likely find worth signing up for.

The newsletter that dropped into my e-mail box not long ago contained a request: "Today or tomorrow, send me a list of your three favorite novels (any genre, any time period), and three nonfiction books you've found  indispensable in your own writing." She's going to compile what will undoubtedly be an idiosyncratic list from the suggestions of her newsletter's readers (I suspect we're a varied crew) and will send it out on Friday.

My first response: **ONLY THREE OF EACH???**

And then I realized the only way I could manage to respond was by not thinking about it for more than ten seconds.

Here's the quick list I came up with, top of the head, no sustained thought:

FICTION

1. Clementine, by Sara Pennypacker: I read this short book this weekend. My daughter handed it to me. It's utterly wonderful. Clementine (third grade) has difficulty not paying attention to things, and this keeps her running at cross purposes to what other people think she should be doing.
2. The Song of the Lark, by Willa Cather: A long-time favorite that I need to re-read before too long . . . along with all three volumes of Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset (I have a different translation than I read the first time; Priscilla Gibson-Roberts recommended this more recent English setting of the epic and it's on the shelf but I haven't had an opportunity yet to fall into its world; originally published 1920 to 1922).
3. Pocketful of Names, by Joe Coomer: One of those novels that started well and continued to grow on me as I progressed through it. I think I've already posted about it here.
4. Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver: My favorite Kingsolver novel. The political and ecological strands seem to be handled more gently than in some of her other works: it seems to me to be more of a personal narrative ("personal" meaning "to the characters," not necessarily to the novelist . . . I judge novels on their own terms, not as reflections of their writers). I'm also very fond of her book of essays, High Tide in Tucson. I'm looking forward to reading Small Wonder, and her new title, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I'm always behind on my reading, even when I limit my survey to the most appealing books.

When I went to the bookshelves in the garage to pull out Cather and Undset (both sets), I see that another book followed me in and insisted on being in the photo: The Silver Cloud Cafe, by Alfredo Vea, Jr.

NONFICTION

1. The Man Who Walked through Time, by Colin Fletcher: Fletcher walked through the Grand Canyon, observing and thinking as he went.
2. Streets for People: A Primer for Americans, by Bernard Rudofsky: My large-format paperback copy . . . not mass market . . . cost $4.95 NEW. Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects is another favorite, but it's in the garage and Streets for People happened to be on a shelf in the house.
3. Japanese Pilgrimage, by Oliver Statler: I detect a walking theme in the selections so far. This is about the Shikoku Pilgrimage in Japan. Statler's book came off the shelf from its position next to Ian Reader's Making Pilgrimages: Meaning and Practice in Shikoku.
4. Sheep and Man, by M. L. Ryder: Admittedly, I haven't read this whole book yet because it's more than 800 pages and I've been limited to interlibrary loan access until very recently, when it was finally brought back into print . . . not cheap, but it was completely unaffordable when it was out of print and I've been following the work around for several decades so I am delighted to finally have my own copy. Sample sentence-and-a-half: "My own view is that, though Colchis was known for gold and linen and not for wool, the two theories are not mutually exclusive. A fine-woolled fleece would be more efficient at collecting gold particles than a coarse one. . . . " (p. 147).
5. The Ashley Book of Knots, by Clifford Ashley. . . .
6. Looking for America: A Writer's Odyssey, by Richard Rhodes: This one jumped off the shelf while I was looking for Fletcher. . . .

Okay, so I overshot. But considering the narrowness of the target, not by much! There are so many more. And there's no way to put them in order, these or the others who would be clamoring for inclusion if I'd let myself think about this question for an instant longer.

I only wish I had enough bookshelves. I have quite a few, but nowhere near enough to keep my books in the order that I'd like to have them in.

Here's a few of the knitting and spinning books. These are handy because I use them a lot in the publishing work. My textile library took a beating in the 1997 flood we had here, in which I lost a thousand books . . . all topics, but the textile sections were especially hard hit. Having lost so many makes me even more grateful when I pull an old friend like Rudofsky or the old Cather shown above from a shelf.

I wish everything else in my library was set up like this: organized by topic and then alphabetically by author! And I wish all my books were in the house, where I could use them easily, in warmth, light, and convenience. I know it's possible to have my books that way, because in most of my past homes I've figured out how to arrange them. Not yet in this house, though.

It's good to have dreams. It's even better to have some time for reading.

E, F, AlphaSmart, and more socks

Here are E (Elephant) and F (Frog), whom my daughter introduced into our lives this week:

E arrived on Tuesday, F on Wednesday, and I hear there are also C and D, yet to arrive. Each has been ferried into our lives on a quarter-size piece of scrumptious gingerbread.

Accompanying E and F are the AlphaSmart Neo that I got with the NaNoWriMo discount (alas, ended 11/1). It is the secret to my current NaNoWriMo word-count success.

I've set it for a six-line display (rather than the standard four) so I can still see the beginning of my sentences (and thus their subjects) before I reach their ends (and so the verbs and objects have an increased tendency to agree with the subjects). This would not be so important for someone who writes shorter sentences in first-draft material than I do.

It's a comfortable, fast keyboard and when I am using it I have no inclination to go back and edit.

For me, that's HUGE.

Because the Neo does not connect to the internet, I have no ability to fact-check as I go (I just type in [CHECK] when I am not sure of a detail and keep going). According to scuttlebutt, it has a better display than the net-connectable Dana model (which I couldn't even consider because of the price difference and because the discount applied only to the Neo).

It takes two seconds to turn on, it opens precisely where I left off, it turns off in half a second, and it was built with kids in mind, so it's not fragile. It weighs 1 pound 14 ounces (850g) and fits in my knitting bag. While the knitting's still in there.

I'm not giving up either my laptop or my desktop computer, but this is a wonderful tool. Text is captured in ASCII. It gets dumped into an open word-processor document through a custom USB cable, or you can connect a regular USB cable to a printer and just print direct from the mini-computer.

It probably has more RAM than my first computer (which had 64K). It definitely has more document storage capacity than one of the first-generation floppy disks. All it does it word-processing, though. That's okay.

Apparently people name their Neos. Mine does not have a name yet. It's been working too hard to have a moniker catch up with it.

Accompanying E, F, and the Neo are the carry-around socks I'm working on now. I got the yarn at the Acorn Street Shop in Seattle. I've turned one short-row heel (in the manner of Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Simple Socks) and am in the process of turning the second heel.

E and F seem to be amused by all of this.

Chips and charts and blooms

I'm still working on upgrading the RAM on the computer, although I have managed to complete the first full run-through of the charts for Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' revised edition of her book on Cowichan sweaters despite extreme slowdowns and lock-ups of the machine.

It turns out that the computer's manufacturer uses some proprietary configuration of 184-pin DIMM 128Mx64 DDR PC3200 RAM modules that is not compatible with any other 184-pin DIMM 128Mx64 DDR PC3200 RAM modules. This would not be such a big deal except that (1) the manufacturer is out of stock on these modules and (2) if they were in stock, the modules would cost twice as much as comparable RAM obtained from other sources.

I think it's safe to say I am highly unlikely to be buying a computer from this supplier again.

Meanwhile, I've been looking at this a lot:

So something happened a few days ago that would have been a delight on any day, but was especially wonderful in contrast to the stuff I'd been dealing with.

The doorbell rang, and this was delivered:

There are gazillions of different types of flowers in there (what spinners refer to as "vegetable matter," although look how pretty it can be):

I haven't even gotten snapshots yet of the funny green globe things or the persimmon-colored paper-lantern-like objects (oh! there's one visible behind the yellow lily) or what looks a whole lot like a small pomegranate or the green fronds or. . . .

There are some advantages to passing milestones. Thanks, J, T, & K!

Also many thanks to my daughter for her swift acquisition of a miracle CD, and for C, D, E, and F. I don't know what C and D are yet, but E and F were an elephant and a frog.

Knitting photos to come. And photos of E and F.

NaNoWriMo: I'm plowing forward with good and steady speed. If I could figure out how to install one of the nifty widgets, I'd put a progress tracker in the sidebar. But ten minutes of fiddling this morning did not reveal the secret of doing this and I've had enough computer tech activity for this week.

 

First reader sweater from Ethnic Knitting Discovery

I've got a snapshot of what as far as I know is the first completed sweater worked by a reader from one of the templates in Ethnic Knitting Discovery by Donna Druchunas.

Donna's going to have a gallery of reader sweaters (at www.ethnicknitting.com, which at this writing simply links to a page on Donna's main site). But since the gallery hasn't reached critical mass yet, here's a preview.

I tried to catch the knitter in it, but she's taking martial arts and escaped. So I asked my daughter to model, and she obliged yesterday afternoon as the sun sank low in the west.

It's project 2, the Netherlands pullover with a simple anchor motif, worked in Plymouth Galway Chunky (100% wool), color 26, a rich green that more accurately looks like this, with less blaze of sun on it:

Kris worked the yarn a bit more firmly than the ball-band recommended 3.5 stitches/inch. She put it at just about 15.5 stitches and 18.5 rows to 4 inches (10 cm), which is close enough to 4 stitches/inch (16 stitches/10 cm) for me. The fabric has nice body and drape, as you can see.

The sweater took about 7 balls, or less than 850 yards, of this yarn, at 123 yards per 100-gram ball.

The sleeves are picked up from the body and worked down to the cuffs. Kris used a trick she learned from Meg Swansen at Knitting Camp and put her decreases along the outside of the sleeve, instead of along the underarm, as is usual.

You can see that the technique shapes the garment well. The visible decreases also look nice with the knit/purl anchor motif on this sweater.

Not only am I impressed and intrigued by this sweater in its entirety, my daughter . . . who learned to purl (again) last week . . . thinks she might want to make herself a sweater even before she completes a scarf. She, who resists most wool, also thinks she might look at wool differently after trying this on. (Note: She loves qiviut and baby alpaca and silk and angora.)

Kris, when told about this, said: "Tell her that it would be a great sweater, in that gauge, to start with, because it is SOOOOOOO easy! The gauge makes progress rapidly visible and rewarding."

But it sure doesn't look like a "beginner's sweater"!

The things museums forget to mention (plus NaNoWriMo)

Today my daughter and I went on a field trip that included the "Artisans and Kings" traveling exhibit of objects from the Louvre that will be at the Denver Art Museum until January 6, 2008.

In general, I prefer folk art to more opulent works, but I figured (and I was right) that there would be things in the exhibit that I'd love. There were two statues from the Roman Empire (1st and 2nd centuries CE), a bunch of drawings large and small, a wonderful Titian painting ("Woman with Mirror," 1515), and an exquisite Rembrandt: "Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels" (c. 1654).

(It's not this painting, although there is some interesting historical/biographical information at this site. This is the work, although Rembrandt's paintings are impossible to capture in any medium other than the original.)

The Rembrandt was worth the trip.

The longer I looked at the portrait, the more I expected the woman to blink her eyes. It's not that she was so realistically painted, but that she was so humanely depicted.

I noticed one oddity about the exhibit that most people probably wouldn't think to remark upon. My eyes have been trained to notice this. Even though many textiles were present throughout the many rooms of the show, for the most part they were ignored in the documentation.

The exception was the tapestries. There were several grand Gobelins flat tapestries, and one mighty wonderful piece woven in very fine pile. It's hard to dismiss the textile content of a tapestry.

However, for the times represented in this show, all of the fabrics would have been constructed (by hand) from handspun yarn, dyed with natural dyes.

The case for a set of beverage utensils (for making chocolate, tea, and the like) was lined with very fine velvet (it appeared to be silk). No mention, of course. It was a plain velvet.

Then again, the material from which an exquisite chair was constructed was listed as "gilded walnut." This specification overlooked the handspun, hand-dyed, extremely fine and intricately patterned cut velvet with which the chair was upholstered. The upholstery contributed a lot more to the mass of the chair than the delicately carved and decorated wood. I can't find a link for that chair but this one was also there, with a similar notation: "gilt beech."

Well, yes, in part. . . .

___

My posts during November will be less frequent and shorter than usual (thus balancing out October).

I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the third year in a row.

This is not a sane thing to do. I'm sane too much of the time, so once again I am indulging in this one-month fictional blitz of goals-without-expectations. For thirty days, the inner editor goes out the window (along with the outer editor) for an hour or so every day (I type really fast and the writing doesn't have to be good, for a change).

I'll be here. Just not as much as I am elsewhere.