I didn’t write yesterday. I didn’t even write a blog post (which you already know, but I was just underscoring.) But I did edit, and that was a victory. What follows is a reflection on what I’ve been up to for the past few days, because. I haven’t done this in a few days and I feel out of touch.
I’ve decided that I need to rip back, damn near the whole sleeve of the morocco sweater. This is because I have nearly enough length for the sleeve and I have 50 rows of the pattern left and the sleeve is still 7-8 inches wide (so 14-16 inches around.) For those playing along at home, I like my armholes to be between 9 and 10 inches long (so 18-20 inches around.) That’s not enough decreasing, and it’s not something I can just rip back a little to correct. To be fair, this is a jacket so the armholes have to be a little longer, which is why I didn’t catch the problem sooner.
I can’t bring myself to rip it out quite yet, so I’ve moved on to knitting the turkish tile, which I’m really enjoying. I had a lot of “knitting back and forth in color-work short rows” to shape the top of the sleeves and the shoulders.
While I think the “tile,” is a good sweater and I really liked the pattern, and it’ll fill a niche in my wardrobe, there are a couple of things that bug be a little bit about the pattern: I was hoping for something that looked a little bit darker, and I’m just not sure that I’m absolutly love this sweater the way I like some sweaters.
I haven’t had a sweater like that in a while, but these things happen, and it’s true that these sweaters that I’m working on will turn out. I just the the feeling that I’ve gone an entire year without knitting a sweater that I really really like.
I think I’m having an existential crisis and my knitting isn’t immune.
I didn’t get any writing done yesterday, but I was able to help a friend out with his computer (good!) and I got some editing done. I’ve both started a pile of hard copy edits on the novella that I’m progressing through steadily, and I have two sections/pages of the hypertext that I’m pleased with enough to sort of let go of for now. I think I’ll probably post them here in the next few days, just because some publication is a good thing, and I need to start getting my fiction “out there” even if it is just on the ‘blog.
The suck-y thing about editing like this is that its really tiring work, and you don’t have very much to show for it. Like “I’ve just spent an hour annotating three pages and now, once I go through it again at the computer, which will take another significant portion of time,” then they maybe won’t suck as much. Because the editing process must be a sort of private affair, it’s hard to recognize this kind of work as part of “being productive.”
Other than that there isn’t much. I think I need to zap my sleep schedule again tonight: my body has gotten too comfortable with the 11:30-7:45 routine, and that’s not where I’d like it. Though in the grad scheme of things that’s better than the 12:30-9:00 that I had been stuck in for weeks before. If I’m not ready to get in bed at 10 and read (or write longhand) for a bit before I go to bed, I’m going to try sleeping 3-6, in an effort to shock myself into something more reasonable. The knitting time will be nice, and I think if I went for a walk or something midday it might help reinforce things.
Maybe I’m thinking about these things too much.
Time to feign productivity.
Onward and Upward!