• I finished watching Standoff, a canceled procedural from last year. There’s something sort of geeky and atypical about this show that I find really captivating. Anyway, apparently they made more episodes (18 in total) than I ever saw when it was airing. Also, it’s a show that I watched pretty religiously on Tuesday nights last fall with R. and so I have particularly fond memories of it.
• The boyfriend socks are to the ribbing, both of them, so I only have a little bit of ribbing and then they’re done.
• Did some tweaking of the tychoish design. basically what I did was make everything fixed width so that the design of the site doesn’t change if you resize your window. At Dave’s request/suggestion, which I think was helpful. It’ll be easy at this point to set up a second sidebar, if I ever decide I want more sidebar room.
• I’ve critiqued my first story for the group. I feel good about what I had to say, but still a bit unsure. I’m feeling better about writing short fiction and submitting it, though I’ve yet to muster the skill of reading though something that clearly opens on the wrong foot. Good practice for grading papers I suspect, but right now I don’t have it. I’m just going to do one story a week for a while.
• There’s a knitting guild meeting today, so I’m going to work at the store for a few hours.
• I had a knitting disaster last night: I started a shawl, and switched to circular needles too soon, and then couldn’t get the knitting off the needle. So I had to *cut it off. Going to try again soon hopefully with better luck.
• I’ve been thinking of ways to increase the color and what not of the posts here, but everything I try looks dumb.
• I’m stalled on the writing project for today with a part that’s going to call for some fast paced dialogs, and I haven’t found the right mindset yet, frustrating.
• I’m having some impostor syndrome stuff, related to the fact that I now have a lot of dedicated writing time. I’m thinking about new project,s how to capitalize/monitize on and develop old projects and the like, and I feel like a giant hack.
• The upside of this, is I don’t have the brainpower to feel like an academic hack/impostor, or to angst about my grad school applications. It’s all out of my hands.
• The knitting/sweater class continues to grow. This is totally the project that I envisioned when I did my internship a year ago, and it’s fun to be able to actually make it work. When I’m in the shop today I’m going to spend some time with my coinstructor, and see if we can iron anything specific down about the class. While we had planned to alternate weeks, there might be enough people to treat it like two sections of the same class. Neat.

Because I’ve fallen into to this rhythm of writing about what I’ve read the previous day/night in the morning, I though I’d continue today.

I’m reading Tiptree’s last novel/novella `The Starry Rift <http://www.amazon.com/Starry-Rift-James-Tiptree-Jr/dp/031293744X>`_. I’d been idly reading it during cereal time, and in fact I bought it a year ago when I was buying my last bunch of text books and I thought that it would be good to read some classic SF. I read Brightness Falls from the Air this summer, and wanted to take a break before I read though all of the Tiptree. Because you know, you should horde the reading experience of books. (Not at all.)

It’s fun, though I haven’t made all that much progress yet. A couple of things. It’s very much a product of the 80’s, though. The technology is based on “tapes” as a storage method. And in a way I see the main character as being a sort of hard core old space opera response to cyberpunk. I’m not sure if I’m articulating that correctly. The character has a sort of high-tech-rebel feel, except Tiptree doesn’t delight in the grunge and grit that so typifies cyberpunk/steampunk.

I’ll point you to a nifty piece that I happened to comment on a lot yesterday, on the livejournal of Steve(n H.) Wilson, the writer and instigator behind Prometheous Radio Theatre. Good stuff on writing.

With that, I don’t think I’m going to have writing blogging today. There might be knitting blogging, but my plan for the day is to write, to knit, maybe go to the knitting guild meeting (gasp, I know!), and maybe maybe do some work on the new TealArt.

On this last point, I had a great talk with Amy, a ‘net friend from way way back, who I’ve adopted as my drupal mentor. The bad news is I still have a ways to go, the good news is that I haven’t been going about this in the wrong way, so with luck, there’ll be a new TealArt soon.

Onward and Upward!

I wrote less than 200 words yesterday, but I did a couple of important things with those words, so I’m not complaining.

They were:

• I broke the 10k mark on the new novel. Lets hope I can get the next 15 or even 20 k done in the next month.
• I started the third chapter, and did some associated outlining and note taking. These are really independent chapters, and sometimes starting a new one can be a bit tough. Good that its over.

Also on the writing front, I read the novella that I mentioned yesterday last night, when I was too brain dead to do anything else. (Note to self: read more before bed.) The novella was Alastair Reynolds' “Minla’s Flowers,” and I quite enjoyed it. For those of you keeping track at home. In some ways the story was very much a “first contact/Prime Directive” tale about interference in lower cultures, and even though we have a succinct way of categorizing this story, it was fresh and added a good new perspective to the general model. And on top of that, the really rich “world” or setting was spectacular.

Though I fear that this makes me sound like a horribly trite SF fan, there are a couple of more complex appreciations here.

• Somehow I always think that because short form works are, well short, that you have to strip away anything that’s not The Plot, and The Characters, but to be honest, I think by proportion this and the Wolf 359 story I read the other day, had more “setting” and “world” than the long form stuff that I’m working on.
• There’s a huge historiographical component to this story, which I think is really cool, and makes me seem not so much like a freak in some of the stuff that I’d been playing with. But that said, I like the way that “cold storage” was used to make this happen, and how the short(er) work was able to both sand alone and work in a larger framework.

I learned a lot. So I’m happy. Time to make tea and actually get some stuff done.

Talk with you soon!

Onward and Upward!

In terms of knitting…

I also did my steeking demonstration, and one of the attendees offered to cut her own sweater, which meant that I didn’t have to do something crazy with the sweater that I’m currently working on (ie. take the sleeve I am currently knitting off the needle and cut the other armhole.)

At t he moment I have no real knitting deadlines or “things I must get done.” I’m going to take a break on the morocco sweater for a while. Maybe.

I want to knock out the pair of socks that I have in progress pretty soon. It’s a close deal, so I’ll probably get that done this week.

Boring and really heavy. Nothing much worth noting.

One of the things that we’re doing at the shop coming up here is that we’re going to do a “my first sweater” class. Sweaters are big projects, daunting, and complicated-seeming. But the truth is that they’re not really that hard, and most people who know how to knit can probably make a sweater. So I’ve written an EZ inspired yoke sweater pattern, and in 4 bi-weekly sessions myself and one of my coworkers are going to help people through this sweater. It’s going to be fun. If you’re in the area and want to make a sweater, here’s more info

Also at the shop, next thursday we’re starting a pi-shawl along. I haven’t knitted lace in a long time, and it might be fun to do that. In honor of the occasion I got, a 4.2 oz/3100 yarn skein of Tencel/Merino yarn. We’ll ignore the fact that I already have way way too much lace weight and nothing in mind for it. I have guilt about my stash, but the truth is that there isn’t much there.

That means, the things currently on my needles--and active--are:

• The socks (see above).
• The Morocco Sweater.
• The Turkish Tile Sweater.
• A Turkish sock.

So that’s not bad, and I know people who say that “socks don’t count,” and I’m sort of inclined to agree.

Ok, enough blathering, I’ll be off somewhere knitting now.

Onward and Upward!

This post on writing has made it’s rounds on the SF writing blog circuit today John Scalzi" and Tobias Buckell; posted here, and here,) and I’ve been thinking about it a bunch.

So I’m posting it here, because I think its a good resource, and it’s interesting.

As a blogger myself, I’m not sure that I have anything substantive to add to this discussion other than to say it’s interesting and to ask you what you think…

The other thing that’s been weighing on my mind with regards to revisions and copy, is the blog of deanna hoak, a SF-specializing copy-editor.

Copy quality is something I worry about a lot. With reason, I mean you all read a bunch of pretty rough copy that I put out here. At the same time I think I’m generally better than I used to be, though you can of course come to your own conclusion.

At the same time I’m pretty good at getting the structural level squared away, or at least being sensitive to this.

shrug one word at a time, one day at a time.

Onward and Upward!

In the end, I think my last post begins to ask “at what point do we say ‘I’ve made progress on this project’,” is it when you’ve written a given number of words or pages? Is progress measured by units of meaning (ie. paragraphs, chapters, or sections)?

I’m not sure that there’s a great answer to this quandary, and I think that the social scientist inside of me gets a little too giddy at the prospect of thinking about the possibilities and challenges of various metrics.

One thing that I’ve been doing recently is using subversion or SVN to manage basically all my files.

Subversion is a program that, mostly programers, use to track and organize code incrementally as it develops. This is important because if a programer is working on fixing a problem, of connecting, say widget a to command b without needing script c, and then later decides that they liked script C better than anything they come up with, they have a back up of the earlier program. With a program like subversion, one or two commands and everything is back to the way it was.

Now, if there are even two or three programers (“writers”) working on the same project, you can imagine how being able to track who has added what and when on a really atomic level, can be really powerful.

One of my problems with backup is that I would always backup files and then six months hence when I actually needed something that was backed-up, I wouldn’t have a clue where what I needed was. Or worse, I’d know what the file was called, but I’d have four versions of it, and none were the right version. SVN fixes this.

But this creates another possible marker of progress: the commit. Every-time you send in your files to the subversion repository it’s called a commit. Commits are all numbered (and dated, and tracked with a message describing what is contained in the commit). So in a vague way you can sort of see how much work is getting done by tracking the number of commits. It’s certainly not foolproof, but I have had weeks and weeks where I’ve done maybe 10 commits total, and weeks like today when I’m averaging like 4 commits a day. I dunno. I mean it’s not perfect, but it does reflect my state of mind. I don’t tend to do a commit unless I think I’ve crossed some threshold of accomplishment.

That’s worth something.

I’ll post more at some point about this system, because unlike previous data organization systems, it doesn’t ware out or go stale. I like that. But right now I’m going to go write something interesting or else you’re all going to run away in boredom, and we can’t be having that.

Onward and Upward!

I read “Whose Afraid of Wolf 359?” by Ken MacLeod last night. I liked it.

Stories like this remind me that I don’t actually dislike short stories, and that I’m not really opposed to conceptual SF. I’m just--in part--not familiar enough with what I like. This is why my reading list was a good idea. Another part of this puzzle is that most of my exposure to shorter form works, hasn’t been to SF (hi H!), and while my grasp on the SF short story might be tenuous, my grasp on “Literary short form¹” is virtually non existent.

Next up from the same collection The New Space Opera (ed. Straham & Dozois) is a novella called “Minla’s Flowers,” By Alistar Reynolds. I’d like to explore the “short novel” form a bit. There isn’t much of a market for them, so they don’t turn up very often, but I’m interested. Anyway, after this one I might go back to the Tiptree for a while.

That’s all background, what’s more prominently on my mind at the moment, is the quick little action scene that I’m gearing up to write.

This, like much of the action in the last project has a sort of vague cyberpunk aesthetic, in that it occurs in a sort of stylized “virtual reality” setting. I like this mode because it makes it possible to have action in side of situations that are pretty realistic. I mean, there isn’t a lot of “real” action, in the sense that fiction writers depict, in our lives Truth is, without alcohol, there’s not much in the way of personal conflict and as we all know, tales of inebriation are never as interesting unless you’re a) there, and b) similarly inebriated.

I also like the way that these kinds of scenes form “world within worlds,” and further layer the narration in a sort of clear non-abstruse sort of way. Ironically, but moving “action,” out of our character’s reality, the whole thing becomes more realistic for the reader, because the characters aren’t super spies with improbable missions and tools, but regular folks, with regular jobs, with a jack behind their ear. I mean, my current main character is totally a librarian, and it totally works. Or at least, give me a while and a room of my own, and it’ll totally work.

Anyway, time for more tea. And work.

Onward and Upward!

A long time ago, I thought I’d start meme, were people would list five books that they’d read more than once. Sure the “list the five last books you’ve read” meme travels around a fair bit, but this is sort of an interesting turn. In most cases, you’re not likely to have read a book more than once unless you really liked it. But, sadly, I felt that my contribution wasn’t good enough, so I sat of the post forever.

Then as part of my bah-humbag New Years post I mentioned starting a “read.txt” file to track my reading accomplishments. I put in the highlights of 2007, which read the world like the “The Best of Feminist and Queer Science Fiction,” but no matter, I will present for your download, a copy of this file:

read.txt

It’s in Markdown format, and I’ve decided to granularly list short stories, because they’re distinct, I need all the encouragement in the world to read more of them, and I want to be able to keep track of which authors and what not I read.

Below the fold, I present to you the “books you’ve read twice meme” post. Do play along!

So we all read books, and we’ve all seen the “select books you’ve read from this list” form of meme, and while I’m not claiming that this is original, I think it’d be cool for people to post lists of books that they’ve read more than once. Because that’s an endorsement if there ever was one.

To make it a meme, I think it would be great to post, links via comments or trackbacks so that lea, so that we can all browse through these posts to see what books people geek out on.

I’m also going to include a list of books I want to read a second time, but haven’t yet.

1. Ender’s Game by Orson Scot Card
2. Three-Fifths of Heaven (a trilogy) by Melissa Scott
3. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
4. Angles in America: The Millennium Approaches by Tony Kushner

I seem to have a thing for trilogies. Books that I want to read again, but haven’t gotten to:

1. Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Alison
2. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
3. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Onward and Upward!