The Independent Stitch

Book: Secret Science Alliance by Eleanor Davis and friends

So the work continues, but I essentially need to refuel in mid-air. One of the ways I do that is by reading things that come at me out of the blue (often recommended by my daughter). They can't be long. They have to be interesting enough to break through my fatigue, and different enough to provide rest and new perspective.

Sometimes that includes manga, with which I am often disappointed. Frequently I can admire some of the artistic vision and quirky concepts, while I often don't feel like the entire package has been integrated or realized its potential.

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis (and co-conspirator Drew Weing plus some technical allies) is a graphic novel (not a manga, which is a subset of graphic novels) and it shows what can be accomplished when the text and images contribute equally to the storytelling in inventive ways.

The intended audience is middle-graders. The plot is nothing new or different. Who cares? It's fun. It's quick. It's well envisioned and witty. It works. I read the last page with a magnifying glass so I wouldn't miss much. I'm not sure I caught everything anyway.

Cover:

Inside:

Some spreads have significantly more dialog and text. I think the most enjoyable spreads are the most art-dependent ones.

Highly recommended for anyone who is not humor-impaired. That's probably most people I know.

__

Back to the wool for me.

Spinning Deborah Pulliam's wool

On September 24, 2001, my friend Deborah Pulliam sent me a box of fibers.

Inside she tucked a note: 

Deb's Down breed sample assortment

(sock wools to follow!)

Enjoy—

I opened, patted and admired, and set the box in a safe place to enjoy later, when I could truly appreciate the fibers.

Deb Pulliam and I shared a fondness for fleeces from the Down breeds of sheep, which are generally maligned as handspinning fibers. I'm not sure where her affinity for them began. I know it ran deep. In my case, when I started to spin in the 1970s wool in any spinnable form was as challenging to find as a spinning wheel (very), and what I could locate was, generally, grease Suffolk or Dorset from meat flocks or backyard sheep (in one case, the pets of children who were allergic to dogs and cats). So that's the kind of wool I initially learned to wash and then spin.

Years later, when Deb and I got to know each other because she was writing for Spin-Off and I was editing the magazine, I could never take Deb up on her open invitation to come visit her in Maine. I was a single mother in a precarious financial state; both time and money for travel were scarce. But we had hour-long-plus phone conversations, often on Saturday evenings, and we exchanged e-mails, and occasionally we met in person: at a SOAR in northern Vermont and at a Textile Society of America meeting in Northampton, Mass.

In 2007, when Deb was at the end of her fight with cancer, I finally flew to Maine to see the home whose restoration I'd heard about and of which I'd seen many photos. I went to help Deb be in her home, rather than the hospital, during her final weeks. At that point, it was not a time for much talk about about wools.

The project I'm working on now began its life in fall 2007, not quite six months after Deb departed from this plane of existence. Over more than two years, co-author Carol Ekarius and I have been gathering fibers for it. As we have gotten close to our deadline, there has been what I consider a serious gap in what we've been able to obtain: we have not been able to find representative samples of all six core Down breeds. We've located good Shropshire, Southdown, and Suffolk (what I've come to think of as "the S set"). We have been missing Dorset Down, Hampshire, and Oxford.

I remembered Deb's box and thought hard. These wools are special to me, and I wasn't sure I wanted to have them subsumed in the mass of fibers I'm processing. But I decided (no, I KNEW) that Deb would want the Down breeds well represented, and I pulled her box from its safe corner to see whether what she'd sent might match what we were missing.

She had tucked in Dorset, although what she sent is almost certainly (because of where it came from) wool grown by a poll Dorset (white-faced sheep), rather than by the Dorset Down (brown-faced sheep) that we need:

Dorset—from Cummington (?), Mass.

My favorite of this year's fleeces!

Combed w/ double pitch Viking combs

The "Cummington (?)" means Deb almost certainly acquired the wool at the Cummington Sheep and Woolcraft Fair, which she took great pleasure in attending. The wool itself may not have come from the town of Cummington, and she was diligent in her documentation.

Even though this wool wouldn't fill one of our gaps, I spun it. I spun it with more care than I've been able to apply to the other samples, which are being produced with unseemly speed. I may be willing to dedicate these wools to the project, but I am not willing to rush their spinning.

Then I turned to the next packet:

Ryeland from Lanark, Scotland

Combed w/ Louet mini combs

Because of being rolled & shipped, lock structure is messed up—probably should have just carded it all—

(but I love combing!)

Ryeland is Down-like but not from the same branch of the sheep family tree. We have two Ryeland samples. The black is lovely, and I've spun it, but the white was not a good representative of the breed so while I'd pulled sample locks I had not made a skein. So I turned to the wheel with Deb's sample. She had combed about half with her Louet mini-combs. After reserving sample locks, I combed the remainder on my Louet mini-combs and spun a skein that speaks effectively for Ryeland.

I love combing, too. My primary fiber-prep tools for this project are a pair of Louet mini-combs (mine are two-row) and a pair of double-pitch Viking combs.

Change to post: It's morning and the Ryeland's dry now, so I've taken its photo. I also put the Dorset skeinlets in the shot again, because their original photo was taken in my spinning area at night with woefully inadequate artificial light. I knew if I didn't get the post up when I had both the thought and a moment, it would never be written, so I took what I could get. . . . The extra fluffiness in the Ryeland is just part of what good Ryeland does, even when spun with predominantly worsted (unfluffy) techniques. The Dorset is also wonderful. I want to knit it and show what it can do. (Must Move On.)

Within the boxes of fibers we had acquired from other sources, I located a bag of Oxford that I had held off on processing—not one Deb had sent, but wool from a meat flock in the Great Plains. As soon as I had seen it initially, I knew that getting anything from it that would show the potential of Oxford would be a challenge. It was full of the sort of chaff that doesn't wash out and doesn't fall out during preparation and spinning (as a lot of vegetable matter does).

Realizing that this was as good as I was going to be able to get, I sorted through and found enough clean locks to spin a small skein (on the right). I also spun a skein to show the persistence of this particular type of chaff (on the left).

So we have Oxford now. Deb would be happy.

And Deb's taken care of Hampshire for us in glorious fashion, although I haven't spun these yet:

Natural black & white Hampshire from Stillwater, ME *

Carded @ Val Weiland's little mill [DR note: Wood-Stock Farm Carding Mill, Hampden, ME]

* Owners got rid of all Hamps because "We want to sell wool to handspinners" so they bought Romneys. Argh!

I'll also spin her Suffolk, even though I have already spun a very sweet Suffolk that we obtained (through some sort of miracle) on eBay. (Some of the best . . . and some of the worst . . . of our samples have come from eBay.)

Suffolk—backyard sheep in Brooklin, ME

A tad coarse (esp. compared w/ Dorset) but very serviceable

Some extra veg. & dirt but washes up nicely.

Nice counter to "Suffolk is crap/no good for spinning"

Prize comment from workshop participant: "Hey, you can make a nice soft yarn from coarse fleece!"

Combed w/ double pitch Viking combs

I still don't have a Dorset Down sample. I may need to proceed without it (along with a few other breeds, like the Arcotts and Romanov and all of the "hairy mutant Romneys"). We're not being allowed to take forever with this project, much as we'd like to. There's that deadline.

As I've been spinning Deb's wool, appreciating her help despite the fact that she's gone, I've come to realize that I've been a custodian for these fibers. The reason I haven't already spun them is that Deb needs to be part of this project. Her Down breed sample packet was meant not just for me, but for all fiber folk. So now that's the job it's doing.

And I'm going to make one more try at getting some Dorset Down. . . . For Deb's sake. . . .

High IQ Kids wins Legacy Book Award

I just received this message from Free Spirit Publishing (I've added some links):

"High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Personal Stories from the Experts (978-1-57542-261-9), edited by Kiesa Kay, Deborah Robson, and Judy Fort Brenneman, has won the 2008 Legacy Book TM Award in the parent category.

"The Texas Association for the Gifted and Talented (TAGT) honors outstanding books annually for their positive impact on the lives of gifted children. The Legacy Book Award is the only American book award focused on meeting the unique needs of gifted and talented children."

There are three categories: educator, parent/family, and scholar. News of the 2008 awards is not on the site as I write this, but here is information about previous years (and probably 2008 as soon as they update).

Hurray! This project took many years and a bunch of people to put together. Nice (fantastic) to see it being acknowledged.

Finished book: High IQ Kids!

A UPS truck pulled up at the curb in front of the house early this morning and delivered an author's (in this case, editor's) copy of High IQ Kids! This is an "advance" copy, although not an "advance reader's copy" or ARC, because it's the real book, freshly unpacked from the printer's shipment before the official publication date (which is, I think, September 1 although the publisher lists a ship date of August 31, or tomorrow). The books were about four days late from the printer, which seems to be a recurring theme right now. . . . Maybe all the printers are currently overloaded with fall titles. . . .

The volume's 416 pages contain 30 essays and technical papers on raising and educating high-IQ kids.

What's a "high IQ kid"?

Good question. If you want to get precise, which I don't and some of the people involved with this book may disagree with the following statement, it's a kid who tests above 145 on a standard instrument. HOWEVER:

IQ testing is imprecise (several articles in the book go into this in detail). Different sources set up different categories. There's a technical testing definition of IQ scores and giftedness (it's on pages 7 and, with slight variations, 60).

But pigeonholes are only useful in a few contexts, like research. The current arbitrary levels being used by the researchers we included in the book are mildly gifted, moderately gifted, highly gifted, exceptionally gifted, and profoundly gifted. These categories align with standard deviations above the norm.

A rule-of-thumb that I came across years ago that has been helpful to me in a practical sense suggested that kids in the mildly and moderately gifted ranges can do anything they want in life (i.e., they're smart enough to do whatever they choose) and can still cope well with the prevailing environments (e.g., school, home, and regular social interactions). Those at the other above-average levels (highly, exceptionally, and profoundly gifted) are "wired" differently in enough ways that they will not be able to cope comfortably with the prevailing environments. They don't think "better," they think differently, which means they just don't operate on the same wavelength. They don't care about the same topics of conversation and they may come up with questions and ideas that don't make sense to other people.

That's neither better nor worse. People with those levels of intelligence, though, are the ones for whom High IQ Kids offers guidance . . . along with anyone else who fits a similar enough profile that the information might help.

I have a personal theory that everyone comes into life with a package of strengths and weaknesses that's about equivalent to everyone else's. Intelligence, as we measure it in the industrialized Western world of the twenty-first century, is just one component of everyone's package. Because each of us has a unique combination of attributes, the trick is in figuring out how best to use the pluses without being tripped up by the minuses. Or, for parents and other responsible adults, in raising children to enjoy and develop their strengths and to compensate for, instead of being limited by, their weaknesses.

The information in the book will help anyone who is trying to parent, teach, counsel, or befriend a kid who sometimes seems "too smart," whether the child also has learning differences or not (many high-IQ kids do).

It will also help adults who are guiding children who don't seem "too smart"—who appear to be quite average or are putting out so little effort they seem below average—but are having unexplained and serious difficulties in standard classrooms (or in "standard" gifted-and-talented programs, if they've shown some of their potential).

I'm really pleased that Free Spirit Publishing is the press releasing this book. Not only is it independent, it's the publisher of several books that helped me out through all those years. They've got even more great stuff now.

High IQ Kids contains all the best information that I needed in one place while I was working on getting one of these kids raised to adulthood alive and with only average requirements for additional psychotherapy.

Giftedness is generally not an "okay" topic of conversation in our society. Several of the contributors to this book have asked to be identified by pseudonyms. It has not been easy for my daughter and me to go public on this topic, either. However, we agreed long ago that we'd do anything we could do to keep even one other kid or parent from going through what we had to handle. An overview of our school saga, titled "Red Zone," is on pages 246 to 259.

The same impetus that motivates my daughter and me—to help others—brought together the three editors of this book to do the looooooong, complicated work of gathering the pieces, editing them, eliminating some (the book could have been twice as long; trimming was the hardest part), and finding the right publisher.

Between us, we've parented four of these kids, and over the decades we've been in touch with many other parents and children in similar situations. They're everywhere: in all geographic, social, economic, racial, and other environments. And all of them are similarly challenged to just facilitate an appropriately happy (and appropriately unhappy) childhood and an effective education.

The book's full title is High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Personal Stories from the Experts. Some of the essays in it were written by young adults about their experiences when they were younger. They're probably the truest experts.

The sections include:

1. What's in a Number?
2. Take a Number
3. More Than a Number

And
    Resources and more information.

Here's a full list of the contents:

Part 1: What's in a Number?

• 1 Defining the Few: What Educators and Parents Need to Know about Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children, by Annette Revel Sheely and Linda Kreger Silverman
• 2 Normal Kids Don't Quack, by Cathy Marciniak (we editors wanted to lead with this essay, but the publisher preferred to define terms before launching right into the puzzled parents' world)
• 3 Young Gifted Children as Natural Philosophers, by Deirdre Lovecky
• 4 Calculus, Pooh, and Tigger Too, by Courtney James
• 5 Intellectual Assessment of Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children, by John D. Wasserman
• 6 Recommendations for Identifying and Serving Black Youth in Gifted Programs, by Tarek C. Grantham and Linda A. Long
• 7 Twice Exceptionality: Life in the Asynchronous Lane, by Lee Singer
• 8 An Anomaly: Parenting a Twice-Exceptional Girl, by Kiesa Kay

Part 2: Take a Number

• 9 "So You're the Teacher of a Profoundly Gifted Child" (And Then There Was Bill), by Laura Freese
• 10 What Makes the Highly Gifted Child Qualitatively Different? Implications for Schooling, by Karen B. Rogers
• 11 Too Smart for School? A Lesson about Teaching and Learning, by Marilyn Walker
• 12 Becoming an Educational Advocate: Dolphin's Story, by Carolyn Kottmeyer
• 13 The Underachievement of Gifted Students: Multiple Frustrations and Few Solutions, by Sally M. Reis
• 14 Surviving in Spite of It All, by Shaun Hately
• 15 Curriculum Issues for the Profoundly Gifted, by Joyce VanTassel Baska
• 16 Of Importance, Meaning, and Success: Application for Highly and Profoundly Gifted Students, by Christine S. (Tee) Neville
• 17 Homeschooling with Profoundly Gifted Children, by Kathryn Finn
• 18 Unfettered Innovation: The Promise of Charter Schools, by Amanda P. Avallone
• 19 An Early Entrance Program: A Well-Rounded College Experience for Young Students, by Trindel Maine (more) and Richard S. Maddox
• 20 A Longitudinal Study of Radical Acceleration with Exceptionally and Profoundly Gifted Children, by Miraca U. M. Gross

Part 3: More Than a Number

• 21 Red Zone, by Deborah Robson
• 22 The Problem of Pain, by Stephanie S. Tolan
• 23 When the Pop Bottle Overflows, by Judy Fort Brenneman
• 24 Giftedness is Heart and Soul, by Annemarie Roeper
• 25 A Mixed Blessing, by Ilona von Karolyi-Ross
• 26 Out of the Ordinary, by Elizabeth Lovance (also here)
  
• 27 Birds and Bees: Sex and the High-IQ Adolescent, by Annette Revel Sheely
• 28 Abnormally Brilliant, Brilliantly Normal, by Elizabeth Meckstroth
• 29 Rainbow Spirits, by Annamarie Summers

Appendix: Resources and More Information

• 30 Strength in Numbers: An Introduction to the Resources, by Judy Fort Brenneman

Here's the back cover.

The first reaction of all three editors at seeing the cover photos was that we wished our children had been able to experience that kind of joy-in-learning and comfortable confidence.

Our deepest hope is that because of this book more children in the future will look more often like the kids in the pictures.

Ethnic Knitting Discovery: It (and some other stuff) will happen

The pivotal people involved in making a new book come into existence—writer, publisher, production person—often feel like they spend years like Sisyphus, pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll down again.

Fortunately, each time this particular type of rock tumbles it doesn't get quite as far toward the bottom of the hill as the last time. Five steps forward, four steps back. It's a slow means of locomotion, but the progress is in the right direction.

Yesterday I reached the end of the layout file for Ethnic Knitting Discovery for the umpty-hundredth time, but this time it felt like a BOOK.

It's still missing some illustrations; author Donna Druchunas still needs to look it over and see what the heck I've done with the material she sent me (and if I've messed anything up); there's still at least one more technical review (there've been so many already that I've lost count). I have to learn how to get spot colors to work between my computer and the printer's. I need to get print bids. . . .

Okay, I'm going to stop listing the number of things that still have to be done because what I want to do right now is enjoy the fact that it finally feels like this book may actually be DONE some day.

What comes next is writing copy for, and having the designer complete, the spine and back cover. The spine's easy. I'm good at spine copy. I can remember everything that's supposed to go there. The back cover's harder. It's like a bulletin board for the book and I'm way too myopic at this point to be able to see clearly what the big picture is without going through mental contortions (and don't have a natural inclination toward marketing anyway, which is what the back cover is about). I'll get the words written, but I also know I'll have to make myself do the job.

Also today a press release about Arctic Lace was distributed by a service. I don't like writing press releases (again, marketing-brain, which mine is not) and yet they're supposed to be a good way to get the word out about a book. So for the first time I said okay to having someone else do this for us. We've been working on it for about six weeks. I knew exactly when the transmission went out today because my mailbox suddenly began to be flooded with "spam reject" and "mail delivery failed" messages. The service apparently sent the thing with our address on it, which makes some sense, but my immediate reaction was that I would NEVER do this AGAIN. The flood stopped an hour or so after it started. I am very grateful. We'll see what comes of this experiment before I make any hard-and-fast decisions about the future, but yikes.

I did get one response from a real person. Who wanted more information. And this could be a very cool connection. It might make me feel okay about the whole endeavor.

High IQ Kids went to press yesterday at Free Spirit Publishing, so over the past few days we editors-of-the-volume have also been quickly responding to a barrage of last-minute clarifications and adjustments. While meeting the deadlines for our ongoing work.

To stay marginally sane and grounded, I've been taking fifteen-minute reading breaks. Books that work for this have to be interesting enough to distract me, have enough continuity that fifteen-minute segments are satisfying, but can't be so gripping that I can't put them back down and get back to work while still feeling like I've had a short vacation.

Here's what I've been reading:

What do you call a graphic narrative that's nonfiction, not a novel? Whatever the descriptor, it applies to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Persepolis 2, which tell her story of growing up as an opinionated and outspoken young Iranian woman. My currently blogless friend Judy, one of the co-editors of the Free Spirit book, tells me they're graphic memoirs. Not easy; worthwhile.

Susan Conant's Gaits of Heaven is the latest in her series of mysteries set in the realms of dogs and dog training. It's hard for a mystery writer to comply with publishers' requirements for a new title every too-often while maintaining quality. I thought this series stumbled a bit a few volumes back, and as a result I fell behind on reading them. But Conant's got her stride back.

Phoebe Damrosch's Service Included won't be released until September or October (the author's website says September; the back of the advance copy says October). No, I didn't pick up this advance reader's copy at BookExpo America in New York in June. I have access to it because my daughter works in a bookstore and brought it home because she wanted to read it. She's still finishing a few other books and I was intrigued so I grabbed it.

Service Included is about working at a new, high-end restaurant in New York City—the kind I will likely never eat in (and that's okay; I tend to like simple, even rustic, vegetarian food), but I'm intrigued to know something about the world that it's part of. The title doesn't quite fit the book for me, but Damrosch is a smart, sharp, perceptive, and honest writer who's a pleasure to read even if I'm only peripherally interested in the topic. On the page, she's got style. She has it in the food world, too, but what I care about is the prose.

All of these books have succeeded in all the ways listed above. I've actually finished them. I'm sometimes amazed at the number of books I start but don't finish. A book's worth remarking on when I make it all the way through.

And now I'm started on Sy Montgomery's The Good Good Pig. When we got together for a chat last week, Jean Scorgie recommended it with high praise.

This is what else I'm reading. As soon as I get my brain around a piece of software, either the developers change it (I've recently undertaken a long-delayed upgrade of my book-production tools, although I'm still not completely up-to-date) or I decide I want to do something I don't know how to do (make a book with a two-color interior . . . four-color's easier).

It's nice to have The Good Good Pig waiting for me.

Doodle knitting

Some people doodle with pen and ink. When I pick up those tools, I actively sketch some nearby object or person or scene—not doodling, which I think of as having busy fingers and an almost disengaged brain.

I doodle with yarn. Often my doodles end up serving useful purposes, but the time when I’m actually doing the stitching has the mental flavor of putting one line after another without much investment in the process.

While I’m working on the incredibly thought-absorbing and detailed work of final layout for Ethnic Knitting Discovery, my knitting needs to be at the doodle level. All of my brain cells are occupied elsewhere.

That’s the reason why, although I’ve been tagged by my friend Susan for an “Eight Random Things” meme and would like to play, I won’t be thinking about eight random things or other people to tag until I’ve got the layout done. Anyone who has not been tagged for this one and wants to be (or has been and wants to have another go), let me know. It’ll be next week before I get around to this. Assuming I actually get it done, it will also be my first meme participation.

It’s amazing I’m writing a post at all. Except where points and picas are concerned (those are the measurement systems for layout), today I can't think as far as the number eight (much less twice: for items and for tagging). I think I need a break from the layout but I still have no undrained brain cells.

(I did finish the proofreading for High IQ Kids yesterday and sent off the marked pages today. That was an extra 362-page project to fit into the week. The book looks good. I'm especially pleased with the open design Free Spirit managed for the layout despite the magnitude of the project. There were 508 manuscript pages and 125,000 words. The finished product is nicely readable. However, the references needed a lot of additional attention. The goal was "excellence, not perfection," so the job's complete and I retain a slim grip on sanity.)

The goal on this layout pass of EK1 (shorthand for Ethnic Knitting Discovery) is to get the book within the planned and announced 160 pages. The rough layout was 170 when I started this go-through. As I reached page 33, the layout was two pages longer. Sigh. By the time I hit 60-something, it was four pages shorter. Yay! Now I’m on page 102 and the total is still 170 and I still have 10 pages to condense out of it. Sigh. As I get into the back half of the book, I have fewer pages to work with, which makes my goal of reaching 160 increasingly less likely. Layout is weird, though. I might make it happen.

Most publishers, as I’ve noted in previous posts, would cut material. That's undoubtedly wise. I’d rather not. I like what’s planned to be in this book and don’t want to cut a project, which is basically the only way to get 10 pages out . . . other than layout magic.

If I add pages to accommodate my desire not to cut content, the printer will make more money and the author and publisher will make less. I can’t just raise the price by 10 percent to cover the extra printing and paper costs. The price has already been set. Because of the way book distribution works these days, both price and page count had to be announced a good seven months ago and advance orders are being placed on the basis of that information. The buyers don’t mind if you add pages (I've done it before). They may object if you cut pages. Like most of us, they don't mind getting more for their money.

Even now there’s no way to tell exactly what will happen with the layout in the last half of the book, in large part because we don't have about eight of the final illustrations—and illustrations make a huge difference to layout. So I’m forging on, solving problems as I get to them and hoping for a not-so-small (exactly 10-page) page-count miracle.

My modus operandi: What is the ONE thing that I can work on at THIS MOMENT that will make the most difference to all my projects in the long run?

The current, immediate problem that I’ve been punting since last fall (because it hadn't reached the top of the list of answers to that question until today) is that I don’t understand the reference drawings for one of the techniques in EK1. Thus we don’t have final drawings.

This connects to my current doodle knitting, which consists of:

1. My blue socks from Colorjoy! LynnH’s hand-dyed TipToe sock yarn. These are coming into the home stretch. They are simple socks with Priscilla Gibson-Roberts’ nifty short-row heels and toes, knitted in a yarn that continues to delight me with every stitch.
2. Larger swatches for two of the pages of Ethnic Knitting Discovery. I want the scans of actual fabric to match the charts and there aren't quite enough repeats in the swatches that I have. I’ll need to block these tidbits, but they’re completed.
3. Another pair of socks in Opal 4-ply, a ball of which I picked up at Knitting With Class in Sitka, Alaska. (That link comes from Rosemary Brock's amazing Textile Links pages. Long-lived and astonishingly useful. I miss Rosemary from my Spin-Off days!) I started more socks because my first pair of LynnH socks is at the k2/p2 stage and I figured I could get some toes done in bits of time that would accommodate the amount of counting attention required for short-row maneuvers (I do have another ball of LynnH's yarn, but I'm saving it . . . ). These socks will be at the totally brainless level by the time my LynnH socks are finished, so I'll still have an autopilot project handy. I’ve never knitted with Opal before. I’ve never knitted with most sock-specific yarns, because I started knitting socks before there were many yarns available that were intended for making socks. Lots of the new sock yarns seem to be Merino-based, which seems odd to me because I can’t imagine them lasting very long on my feet. Merino = nice sweater. Socks = wool from breeds with sturdier fiber. Kristi tells me the Opal socks should last nicely. She also tells me that the Interweave special issue on felt will not be on the newsstand until July 17, which has saved me from looking for it sooner.
4. A sample of two-color knitting so I can ask my daughter to take photos of my hands as references for two drawings for Ethnic Knitting Discovery that are still missing. The page in the middle of the photo is the page whose layout I can't complete until I resolve this. I will skip over it and work on later pages, although they can't be truly worked up until I get this segment set. Building a book is like building a brick house. Each layer rests on the previous one. I will say it's a whole lot easier to design a straight text book with no critical illustrations or technical information!
5. The weird blue thing (unnumbered) is a yarn bra, a gift from inexplicably blogless Kris. I'm wondering if I can use one to simplify the yarn management for my sock-knitting technique (one sock from the inside of the ball, one from the outside, knit until they meet in the middle). Dunno yet.

Background 1: The printer gets paid before the house gets repainted. It’s a matter of priorities, although very soon the house-painting needs to be bumped up the priority list somehow. The need has been at "critical" for two years already.

Background 2: When I have to choose between cutting material and giving future readers of a book the best experience possible, I go with the readers.

Quote of the day:

    "Tension is a prerequisite for creative living." Agnes Meyer

Tension is also required for knitting, doodle-type or more elaborate. And, as I keep learning, it is also an unavoidable component of independent publishing.

(The quote comes from a page-per-day calendar called Wild Words for Wild Women. My niece started us on this calendar several years ago by giving us one for Christmas. It's become a regular part of our lives: the daily page gets ripped from the pad and tucked into the edge of the bathroom mirror every morning. About one out of ten is a true keeper, and the rest are at least amusing or odd. The calendar doesn't give much background on quotees. It was fun to do a quick look-up on Agnes Meyer and discover who she was.)

• Reading for brains that are preoccupied with layout but need a break: Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich.
• Movie for same type of brains that also need respite from 95-degree heat (F; = 35 degrees C): Ratatouille, matinee.

Okay, enough escape. Back to the pages.

The Free Spirit Book

I've been promising to talk about the book that's coming out this fall from Free Spirit Publishing. I've heard back from Free Spirit that it's okay to put the cover up here, so it's time. My understanding is that the book's scheduled to be released in September 2007.

The name of the book is High IQ Kids: Collected Insights, Information, and Stories from the Experts, and it's edited by Kiesa Kay, Deborah Robson (me), and Judy Fort Brenneman. It took a long time to put the book together. The publishing house that decided to take a chance on it, after many others had said they thought it would be a great book but not one they could publish, is the perfect publisher to be issuing it and the people there are wonderful to work with.

So here's the cover:

That boy looks like what all three editors (and many of the contributors) wish our kids had looked like in school. Our kids didn't. We put the book together so maybe other people's similar kids will look like that. We've asked the press if there might be a similar photo of a girl elsewhere on the outside of the book—maybe the spine, since so many books are displayed spine-out. Our own kids, whose experiences motivated the creation of this book, are 50/50 split between boys and girls.

A quick overview of how this book came together

I wish I knew where I'd picked up the concept that I'm about to mention, which has helped me a great deal over the past couple of decades, but I don't. I probably came across it thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I was scrambling to learn what I needed to know about high-IQ kids, because my parenting responsibilities suddenly required this type of information on an emergency basis. The idea stuck because it's served as a compass point ever since.

The concept is that there is an “optimal” IQ, say between 100 and 145, with which people function easily and well in contemporary society. The idea is that people with IQs between 115 and 144 are smart enough to do anything they want but aren't so smart that they have trouble fitting in.

I just had to look up the latter set of numbers in the manuscript of High IQ Kids. I don't know all that much about IQ stuff, although I probably know more than most people because I've had to learn.

Personally, I view IQ like height: some people have more, some less. Some people need to use step stools while others bump their heads on doorways unless they duck. IQ is an arbitrary measurement, just like height is. It has nothing to do with the spirit inside. Height might have something to do with which rides you're allowed on at an amusement park like Elitch Gardens, and IQ might have something to do with which activities you enjoy most, but neither of these even remotely describes the entirety of a person or a life.

The helpful idea that I came across, though, is that children with IQs of 145 and up don't just have an extra dose of the same thinking ability that their peers have. They think differently. They may have trouble understanding, and being understood by, their age-mates—and their teachers and their parents, and the psychologists who are often called in to help everyone get along. Like extremes of height, extremes of IQ make a profound difference in daily living until you learn how to navigate in your particular vessel.

Most discussions of IQ don't differentiate between the experiences of people at different points above a certain IQ level (whatever that is). From X on up (choose a number), all is assumed to be peachy.

Not necessarily.

Many high-IQ kids don't appear to be smarter than average because for many of them the extra IQ points come bundled with learning challenges: for example, an inability to remember math facts, or cerebral palsy severe enough to prevent speech, or Tourette syndrome, or ADHD (I'm skipping a digression here on ADHD and intelligence), or a combination of these and other factors.

About fourteen years ago, I found myself struggling to get my brain around all this stuff while in crisis. One of the resource people I discovered was Marlo Rice, a psychologist who specializes in high-IQ kids and also has helped advocate for individual students' needs in the schools. A few years later, because she knew I'd been engaged for a while in a self-directed crash course in parenting a high-IQ kid, Marlo gave my name and phone number to Kiesa Kay, who was dealing with similar issues for her children, who were younger than mine. In the middle of this, I also met, and began to work on freelance jobs with, Judy Fort Brenneman. On behalf of her son (mid-range in age between Kiesa's kids and my child), Judy was paddling her own canoe upstream on the gifted/learning-different river.

Kiesa, Judy, and I all came out of our experiences with a strong desire to help other parents avoid some of the pain, frustration, and expense that we and our children had encountered.

Kiesa's first project to put this into action was an anthology she edited on “twice-exceptional” kids (gifted and learning-different), called Uniquely Gifted. She asked me to contribute an essay.

Then Kiesa and Annette Sheely began assembling another anthology, this one on high-IQ kids (those above 145 IQ). Judy and I first got involved  as contributors to this work, and later as co-editors with Kiesa while Annette devoted more time to her counseling practice and her own incipient parenting.

We've been passing the responsibilities for this project back and forth for a number of years. Now we finally have a book that's on its way to being published . . . on its way to doing the work we want it to do.

It's the one book we wish we had been able to consult while we were doing our best to raise our kids. It contains personal stories that are funny, heartbreaking, and sometimes both, as well as academic papers that discuss researchers' studies and insights. It's as quirky and wide-ranging as the experience of being one of the adults in a high-IQ kid's life.

“Experts”

First the people at Free Spirit said, “This book willl need a different title,” and we said, “Sure. That's fine. We aren't attached to the one on the manuscript, but it's the best we could come up with over the years.”

They went into a huddle and then said they couldn't come up with anything better, either.

They did suggest a variation on the subtitle, which we had phrased as something like “for adults who care.” They shifted this to “from the experts.”

Because I'm a contributor to the volume, as well as an editor, I gather that I'm being included with the “experts.”

I think of an expert as someone who knows a great deal of what there is to know about a topic . . . therefore, not me. I'm always aware of how much I don't know about any given subject.

So I've looked up the word expert. I seem to have greater expectations of someone to whom the word is applied than the dictionary does.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives this definition for the noun form: “A person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject.” Here's what it says about the adjective form: “Having, involving, or demonstrating great skill, dexterity, or knowledge as the result of experience or training.”

The meaning of great is open for debate, but on the subject of raising a high-IQ kid (and a couple of other topics), I do have some experience that seems to be helpful to others. I guess the word applies, although I still don't accept it comfortably.

However I'll accept easily that all of the contributors to this book are sharing their hard-earned knowledge, acquired as a result of experience, training, or both. I'm one of those contributors. And I'll accept that it's the right subtitle for this book.

Are we there yet?

High IQ Kids is a big book—about 550 manuscript pages, which will be fewer pages when it's typeset but there's no changing the fact that it's approximately 124,000 words, including the short extra list of books Judy and I put together on Wednesday night for the reference section, at the in-house editor's request.

I'll be so glad to see this as a real, useful book that's out in the world, available to help parents, teachers, counselors, and others involved with high-IQ kids' lives, so the kids themselves can figure out how to get through doorways without bruising themselves or others.

Although we've been through the acquisition-level editing, we've still got in-house copy editing, proofreading, and indexing to manage over the next couple of months before this book goes to the printer.

But at the moment, it's off our desks and on someone else's! YAY!

Free Spirit Publishing

Free Spirit Publishing, founded by Judy Galbraith, is a strong, well-focused, independent publishing house. Several of its early titles helped the editors of the new book stay sane (or as sane as we did stay). Among those books are The Gifted Kids Survival Guide (both versions: the one for under-10s and the one for teenagers) and The Survival Guide for Parents of Gifted Kids.

It's nice to think that with our own book we are now able to contribute to the ongoing dialogue and to support the next generation of parents and kids.