I wonder if it’s redundant for me to tag posts “knitting” and “writing.” I keep doing it.

I feel like I’ve been pretty productive today, even though I worked a lot of the day, and have had chores to do. I have a little mini workshop on steeking that I’m giving tomorrow evening. That’ll be fun, but I had to write a handout this morning, which I think is pretty good.

Though I’m no Stephanie--in terms of entertainment value--or Elizabeth--in terms of pure genius--I find writing about knitting to come very easy, and while I don’t know that I have enough to offer in terms of content, I really would like to work on putting together some sort of collection of knitting patterns or something. I don’t quite know.

Nevertheless, knitting writing means less fiction writing, but I got some done. I’m basically done with chapter two. I need to spend some time tomorrow morning laying out and chewing through what goes into chapter 3 more clearly. Frustratingly, I’m only 140 some words away from the 10k mark. Having said that, it’s really good that the second chapter wasn’t any longer. My target for these first couple of chapters was 4500 words, and the first was 4750, and the second one is 5k. While you might be inclined to say “but you got writing done, that’s good,” in point of fact, no matter how many words you use in a chapter, each chapter contains about the same amount of story. That is, the point A at the beginning, and point B at the end of a chapter are the same no matter how many words it takes.

But that’s what second drafts and editors are for.

Joyce Williams, the knitter whose sweater I’m working on at the moment, is fond of saying if you’re knitting at a given gauge it will take you the same amount of time to knit a sweater on size 0 needles (most round toothpicks are about this size) or size 6s (about a pencil). The corollary is that, there is no way to knit a sweater at a gauge of 9 stitches to the inch with any speed at all.

Which is why there isn’t much about my knitting, except that I’m about half way to the middle of the forearm where the pattern changes. One stitch at a time.

Here’s some rambling thoughts on writing, learning, and sort of a “what I’ve been doing today,” post.

Maybe this is a new years thing, but I’m re-upping myself at critters because, it seems like the thing to do. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to be able to go to Clarion or Viable Paradise this year or any time soon (frankly, I’m pretty up in the air about knitting camp, even), not that I’d want to, given that both seem really centered on short fiction. This is an aversion that I really have to get over, and maybe joining critters (for real; I started last year while I was busy graduating, and really couldn’t find time. Now is a bit different.) will help with that.

I also found Nancy Kress' Blog today and was immediately struck by this post. A few thoughts:

• She writes--or drafts--long hand. There are a number of great SF writers who do this. Connie Willis, Kim Stanley Robinson, come to mind. I’m in awe.
• She mentioned in another entry that she had had a number of stories published in Asimov’s and that she still liked a few of them. This is pleasing because, she doesn’t like some of her stories after the fact, which is sort of how I feel about all my short stories about half way through. If I could just learn to push the onset of this feeling back a month or two, I might be able to finish the story and get it out before the malaise sets in. Interestingly, even though I know it’s crap, I still kind of have a soft spot for the novel I wrote when I was 16/17 and the novella that I’m still revising.
• People can and do draft short stories in a day. Amazing.

I wrote today. The little substory inset that I was working on for chapter two looks like it’s going to spill into chapter 3. I’m ok with that, because the spill will be pretty small and my projects always seem to grow between outline and draft. I’m worried because thus far, I’ve been spending a lot of time in a part of the story that isn’t “the core” of my initial plan.

Here’s the scoop, I’m telling a semi-parallel narrative, in three different settings. The earliest happens about 30 years before the primary story, which is ~100-200 years after the primary section of the story. I seem to have a thing for doing stories about historiography these days, so having some sort of temporal contrast is important to me (perhaps why I’m having trouble doing shorter work). Anyway, chapter two, with the exception of a brief interlude is set entirely in the earlier portion of the story. The first chapter was probably about half and half. The next chapter will probably be 1/3d early, 2/3ds late. While I think this part are really crucial, and pretty active, I’m not sure that they’ll reflect the overall tone of the book. And given the power of early impressions… I worry. My most current thought would be to find something that I could do that would be peppy, use the characters from the “third” phase, and frame the other two stories. But I want to have a more firm handle on that setting before I write about it.

I’m probably a day away from crossing the 10k line, which in my mind signifies a change from an idle project to something that will probably turn into a novel. Given how long the chapters are, and how I expect that I’ll be pacing myself for the next two months, 10k increments will probably less of a big deal from here on out (knock on wood,) but this first one is big for me.

I’ll be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

Good Morning, and good new year to you all.

I was greeted this morning with a broken tea pot in my office. Thankfully we have a spare, so a wonderful pot of strong english tea is brewing downstairs. I got a lot of new teas the other day at an international food mart.

My new years eve was pretty uneventful. I went to bed at 11:30, I woke up at a quarter to 8. That’s good. I got knitting done. I wrote 1200 words yesterday. Can’t argue with that.

There are a lot of new folks reading tychoish, thanks to my post over at zimmermania. While I do a lot of knitting and I talk about it a fair peice here I think as a knitting blogger I’m pretty bad at it. Except occastionally, on a day to day basis, my projects don’t change that much and would make for really boring pictures. I’m no WendyKnits, that’s for sure.

So I hope the rambling about my life and my writing is interesting. I implore you to read the site, and maybe even subscribe to the feed.

I’m going to go off in a moment and do some writing. I’m in the middle of the second chapter of Breakout, the novel project that I’m working on. The chapters for this one are a bit longer. I’ve worked through the story a half dozen times, probably, so I know how it’s all going to work out, but I’m at that stage--that I think is inevitable at the beginning of a project--where you’re not quite sure that it’s all going to actually come together in something coherent. In an academic paper, this is the first 500-1k words, in the novella it was 6k-9k, but it looks like in this project it’s not going to really come together until 10k-20k. Nerve wrecking, to say the least. Maybe this is part of the reason why I don’t “get” short stories: I feel like they need to come together in the first 200-300 words, and that’s not enough room for me to even get my barring.

Anyway, I’ll be around today. Thanks for reading. Do drop me a line, and I’m sorry if it sounds like I go off the deep end from time to time: I always come back, so just stick around and it’ll be worth your time.

Onward and Upward!

ps. Somewhere in this post, I passed the 300,000 word mark in my presently archived blogging career. Woot.

As my previous post probably indicates, I’ve been reading wikipedia recently about fairly elementary astronomical concepts and facts. While this is an enjoyable project all by itself, it’s clearly in service of the fiction I’m writing.

I’d also take a moment to note that in the biggest web traffic I’ve gotten in a month or more due to a post I made on zimmermania, and the pictures I posted yesterday, I’m going to have a post about science fiction and near-Earth star systems. Sigh

Anyway back to Wolf 424. All this is all well and good, but the truth is, I don’t write hard SF, and to say that I have a somewhat tenuous grasp on mathematics. Nevertheless, reading about stars which are pretty close on a cosmic scale, is something that I find really helpful and inspiring for my writing.

I think because thinking about Barnard’s Star, or Wolf 424, Epsilon Eridani is about leaning into a sort of existential sense of wonder and amazement. I mean. Wolf 424 is moving--relative to the solar system--at hundreds of miles a second. I mean wow.

So that’s what I think science fiction should, in an ideal world aim to communicate, I mean, among other things, of course. I made the point a few weeks ago that, space opera should attempt to make going Alpa Centuari, or Vega being substantively different than going to Montana or Nepal, even if the story is mundane, even if the boundaries of realism are pretty flexible.

My two cents at least.

Onward and Upward!

I posted something along these lines to the writing list a few days ago, and I kept meaning to write some sort of bah humbag post about new years eves and new years resolutions (because thats my M.O. about holidays.) But then I realized that somehow it was already New Years Eve, and that I’d end up posting my non-resolution at the same time that everyone was posting theirs, so… whatever. Here we are.

Truth is I think the January 1 marker is a sort of lame beginning of the new year. I think August/September is a much better point in the year (at least in the northern hemisphere). I can’t decide if it’s the academic or the jew, but whichever, I tend to do most of the resolutioning then, and often pretty much ignore Janurary 1. Tonight, I’m siting at home doing the same thing I always do. But that’s the way I am.

So anyway, the resolution.

This year, I’m going to create a file called “read.txt” and list the books that I read as I read them. While I’ve been reading more in the last year, and this is a good thing, I still think that I need to read more. I hope that by tracking the books--just the titles and authors, too much work and I’ll loose interest--I’ll read more. What’s more, I think that I often read more than I think I do, I just never seem to remember it in the moment. Having a list will help this.

That’s all. I want to write in the new year, but I’m doing that now, so no use to resolve to do it. So I’m done.

See you on the flip side.

From the Wikipedia page on Wolf 424

Due to its proximity and fast motion towards the Sun, Wolf 424 will brighten by more than 2% over the course of the 21st century. In approximately 7700 years it will make its nearest approach at a distance of about 1 light year.

See ya in 9700.

And here’s a picture for your records:

A light year is pretty darn close, and astronomically, 7k years isn’t that long at all. I’m thinking someone needs to write a story.

As I’ve thought about this some more, I’ve realized (with the help of wikipedia) that Wolf 242 is moving, relative to the speed of the Solar System, at 555km/s, which is almost 2 percent of light speed.¹ Right? There has to be a story in this.

So, I’m really bad at this whole “posting pictures” part of blogging. I don’t have a good excuse, thought I will admit that if there was a good way to manage the Wordpress uploads via XML-RPC, in a standard easy to manage sort of way. Actually, if someone could give me a more clear way of naming and organizing pictures on the server, with points for the fewest steps, and/or greatest automation. Anyway, I’ve gotten off my duff and I’m ready to actually post some pictures.

These are all on my flickr and of course also on Ravelry, where I’m, not surprisingly known as tychoish. Today, we’re going to get pictures of the Morocco sweater in it’s current state. (Hence the title of the post). Lets remember that the name “Morocco” is a sort of inside joke, because although it looks Moorish, the pattern is taken from a Latvian weaving pattern. The design is from Joyce William’s Latvian Dreams, though I must admit that I have not yet really read the pattern, so much as copied the chart and inspected the picture in the book closely. I seem to enjoy it better that way.

Here’s a good picture of the bottom rear of the sweater. Note that the ugly green yarn and the curling will be gone when the sweater’s finished as I intend to undo the provisional cast on and knit a turned hem. I’ve even bought a 60" Size 0 needle:

(It’s a jacket/cardigan, so the middle front is obstructed at the moment.) Here’s a closer view of the back of the sweater in total. It’s about 30-32" long from shoulder to lower edge.

You can probably see from that, how the sleeve’s are set it, and the armholes are shaped. I’m not doing it in one piece, but it’s cool none the less. Look at this:

I picked up stitches holding two colors, continuing the patterns on their sides. Also the shaping is occurring the top/sides of the sleeves rather than at the bottom. Here’s a better shot of this from the top.

I’m probably most proud of this. Look how the patterns meat from the shoulder. You can see the “seam,” and I think the half stitch discrepancy that grafting would have provided wouldn’t have been preferable in this situation. It looks good and it’ll look better when it’s blocked. Also the way it shifts direction without much fuss is pretty cool as well.

But as you can see I have a lot to go on this sleeve. Better get to it!

Onward and Upward!

I think I may have mentioned a recent foray into spinning. I got some BFL, and attempted to do some navajo plying, and it ended miserably. Later tonight I’m going to spin up a sample in 2 ply and see how that goes. Also, I’m going to slow down the ratio, because I think I was over spinning the singles as well. This is hearty fiber, but it’s longer staple than merino and I don’t need to twist the hell out of it, I think. It’s damn nice, and pretty easy to get a hold of, so I really want this to work out. Heh.

In other knitting news, having procured the proper replacement needle, I’m back to knitting Morocco. The secondary sweater, code named “turkish tile” is about 15 inches long, give or take, and I’ve officially moved it into the other room and on hiatus. I need to work on this sleeve, and if I need distraction from that there are socks.

You hadn’t heard about the socks. Oh dear. Well, for reason’s I can’t quite comprehend, I have taken this sock back up, ripped out the heel flap which just wasn’t working out for either of us. We’re going to do some sneaky stuff with a thumb trick heel. You know where you knit across half of the stitches with waste yarn and then pick it out later and knit a toe (which is actually a short row shape heel. Wacky). And then of course both boyfriend socks, which I’m uncharacteristically knitting at the same time.

I had a talk with the owner of the store about ordering/carrying a spinning wheel(s). We’re still not sure what the options are. We’re going to have some sort of relationship with this company, but we’re not sure if it’s going to be an ad-hoc or more ongoing sort of thing. I’m going to spend some time tomorrow afternoon working on prepping another spinning wheel for sale, and spinning. It’ll be nice to have my own wheel for real, again.

Anyway, I have something of a deadline (steeking demonstration on the 3rd) and a lot of sleeve to knit before then. If I’m not writing fiction think I had better be knitting on this.

Onward and Upward!