Topic: Posts

My past several posts about knitting and fiber arts have all been along the lines of “I haven’t been knitting much and I’d like to more,” but this post reports some success.

I’ve been working on things. I don’t yet really have a niche in my life for knitting, still--before, there were things that I always knit during, and now I either don’t do those things, or have gotten out of the habit of knitting during them--but I spun and knit a lot this past weekend: and I got other things done as well. Successes all around!

For starters I spun an entire skein of yarn, and it came out pretty well, or at least better than my last skein came out. I think on the last one I had forgotten that I had been plying using the “scotch tension” of my wheel. While I absolutely adore the double drive for spinning singles, but I apparently like to ply at really high tension. Having remembered this fact, spinning is going well. I have about 250 more grams of this current project to spin, though I did give my mother 100 grams of the project because I think it unlikely that a sweater to fit me would weight all of 2 pounds.¹

After I get done with this project, my mother and I are going to try a tandem spinning project. I have 2 pounds of Corriedale-cross (the cheap but sturdy wool undyed from the Yarn Barn), and we’re going to set our wheels to the closest ratio we can, and we’re going to both go for a sort of semi-worsted sport/dk 3 ply. It’ll be interesting, and I’ll keep you all posted as it develops. We won’t start until I get done with the current project (which I estimate will be in a couple of weeks.)

In terms of the knitting, I’ve made progress on the sweater. I finished the second skein’s worth of the body, and it’s about 8 inches long by now. And I started the first sleeve, which after a false start (too many stitches, I was just guessing,) it’s coming out fine.

As I had hoped, working on the plain sweater has revived my interest in two-color knitting. I knit a couple of rounds on it. The yarn is-- I think I’ve mentioned, heh--very fine, and the kittens have on several occasions managed to attack the yarn between the ball and the sweater and sever one or both strands. Thankfully this yarn splices really well. so it’s not an issue, but it is sort of annoying. I also got full look at it laid out on my desk and I’ve realized that I have more done than I thought. Still not “enough,” but a fair piece. It’s worth something.

Anyway, it’s good to be knitting again. Really good. Knitting is something that I really do enjoy (obviously) even though I’ve been off of it lately, and it’s something that I think I do really well, or at least, I don’t ever find myself questioning my ability to knit, in the way that I find myself constantly questioning my ability to write, or tell stories, or do research, or write code/use technology. That’s a nice feeling. I’ll have to write about that as I ponder this more.

It’s good to be back, at any rate.

Via: 43Folders and Mur

So this video popped up a couple of times in my news reader today, and I think it’s good enough to repost with some additional comments. It’s a video with Ira Glass talking about how creative people who are getting started doing something now need to give themselves permission to make crap and that the most important thing is to keep doing it, because the only way to learn is to make a lot of crap.

This has become a virtual mantra for me, and I think it’s good to have people remind us of this from time to time. This is why I’m starting a fiction blog. That’s why I write blog entries every day.

I think it’s true of knitting, as well. I have scores of horrible sweaters, and while most of my sweaters work now (and the ones that don’t are ill conceived from the beginning,) that’s a technical skill that I worked pretty hard for. So I’d say, not only does Ira Glass have it correct¹ for things like writing and audio/video production, but I think that he succeeded in expressing it in a way that’s applicable to everyone that makes something.

Today I edited the first sequence of the novella I wrote nearly a year ago. While I’ve been dreading this for a long time, I think it went off really well. I added a line that a test reader (whose unfamiliar with the work) really liked, I tweaked some things in a way that tie this scene (which I went back and added later) into the story more closely.

I made this one sequence better in fairly concrete ways, and I think every previous time that I’d tried to do this before I hadn’t been good enough to make it better. But a year later, I am enough better than I was that I was able to do this one thing better. I don’t think I’ve “made it” or anything, but it’s nice to have some sort of verification of improvement.

This scene that I talk about will be part of critical futures at some early point in that sites' development. Maybe a week from today?

Stay tuned.

Here’s what I’m planning on writing (and revisiting to post) for the new site, Critical Futures which launches on Monday and that I wrote about here. I’m going to go from the stories that I’ve talked about least to the stories that you’re most familiar with, and I’ll include a little bit of background with each story/series.

• Trailing Edge, is just a working title for a nexus of stories in a future world that’s been left behind. Humans have been moving out, continuously for hundreds of years and this has had a huge effect on the people and worlds left in the wake of these great journeys. This is the anti-epic story of those people and worlds.
• So this is an interesting story, I tried writing a story (which I might post, and that I’ve blogged about extensively) that I was calling Breakout about what happens on the “Leading Edge” of this “progress,” and it was during a rough space inside my own head, and the story didn’t really want to be in novel form, so I tried writing it has a hypertext, and that didn’t work either, so I just let go. And then, I realized that maybe the more interesting part of this world would be the “other side.” And while the original story had merits, and I might return to it in some form, it’s not calling to me in the same way.
• So I started writing this story, and I was thinking about the new site at the same time, so as a result the story really fits this new structure. The stories have a loose versioning system (so far I have “Episodes” 1, 2, 2.1, and 2.2, and 3 in progress or completed), and I write a page in one part or a page in another part, pretty regularly, and it’s good stuff. Like the Mars story, I particularly enjoy how the narrative is multi-modal, that there are different types of stories, different forms that I get to explore. And the concept is pretty fun.
• It’s a story written for the media: I talk about a handful of things on tychoish, productivity, technology, knitting/spinning, science fiction/writing, and in a way all of these are telling a reasonably consistent story of me and what I’m interested in. Critical Futures is sort of the same, except that rather than technology and knitting, there’ll be a couple of stories. And within those stories--as within my discussion of, say, technology--there’ll be a number of different threads to the story. And I’ll write it as I go, and the experience of writing fiction this way, is really appealing and compelling. Hopefully you’ll feel similarly.
• Knowing Mars, this is the novella I wrote last fall about a group of human telepaths who are forced to leave Earth in order to keep the secret of their ability safe… for a while.
• Interestingly, since I’m getting in the habit of explaining the origins of the stories, this story descended from a novel that I wrote while I was in high school. This isn’t part of that story, but rather an elaboration of the first six pages of the prologue (which really didn’t work). It’s clearly a sort of quirky coming out tale, and it’s a fun story. It’s a universe that I’ve got worked out, and I expect that there’ll be more related stories. (I have one plotted out, mostly that I just have to write, and another that isn’t coherent in my mind, yet.)
• By the way there are about 30,000 words in this story, and one of the biggest goals of this new site is to provide inspiration to plow through and get the final edits done.
• Station Keeping, the story that I (and others) wrote last year, as a sort of precursor to the current project. It’s a far future space opera, where “progress” has slowed to a crawl because of the relativistic effects of travel, and the eons old social and political institutions that hold humans together are beginning to crumble. These stories explore the lives of the crew and residents of a space station above a critical world in the budding new order.
• I think of it sort of told in the style of a TV show. Indeed I intended to post a series of episodes as a teleplay, because you know, I can. 12 episodes and about 10,000 words of this are old material, and then I’ve written 4 more that haven’t been posted anywhere and I have plans at the moment for 36-40 episodes (of uncertain total length).
• This is the remaining of a novel that I started writing but that sort of fell apart on me when I was a teenager. The characters and the setting were great, but the story is really a loose serial and not novel-like so it’s understandable that it didn’t work out. Its much more fun in this form.

And you know, odds and ends. I haven’t given a lot of to the pacing. I know I have enough content, and I do think that with a little inspiration I can write enough, so we’ll see how it goes. I also have an inkling of some other folks that might contribute some stuff from time to time, so we’ll see. Stay tuned.

I only learned early this morning that Tom Disch had killed himself July 4 in his New York City apartment….

Suicide is always, I think, something of a mystery. Even when someone is in poor health, in bereavement, feeling isolated, we still say Why? How could he end his life, be so sure that nothing would improve? Things always change over time. Tom was only 68.

I don’t know the answers to those questions for Tom Disch. I only know that the SF field has lost a major talent, one of our own.

From: Nancy Kress' Blog

I didn’t really know his work, but he’s been on my list of things to read for some time. My internal database on him pegs him as the sort of “less pornographic Delany, with a greater tendency toward ‘dark material.'” That’s woefully insufficient. I’ll get on remedying this file.

I do remember that I’ve been nagging H. to read his stuff because I think she’d like it. I’m oddly struck by this, because although I didn’t know him, and haven’t been as familiar with his work as I’d like to be, I completely concur with Nancy Kress’ final sentiment.

On Monday, that is next Monday (there! a firm week from now--if slightly relative--commitment) I’m going to start a posting to a new blog. This isn’t breaking news to readers of this site as I’ve been talking about this with some of you for weeks, and mentioning it sporadically on the blog. Let me tell you about the site, and what I intend for it.

The site will be called Critical Futures, and it will be a fiction blog where I (and possibly others) will post a new piece of science fiction every day. Not necessarily, as 365 Tomorrows posts an new independent story every day, but rather a new section or part of an ongoing story. I mean sometimes I might fit a whole story into a single post, but that’s not a goal that I’m aiming for as a writer.

ETA: The site isn’t, of course, up yet, but you can read the about page if you want a sneak preview. Remember next Monday.

I’ve really grown to be fond of the regular blogging rhythm, and I think it would be nice to expand that habit into fiction writing. So the prospect of having a regular commitment to write and polish fiction for publication, will be a good thing. Kind of like the 365 projects, only different.

And I’ve been talking for a long time about a few things for a while: how blogging as a medium has potential for story telling, about how I want to write a story intended for online distribution. So I’m going to do it. Now. Because there’s no time like the present, and because I think that the most important thing for me to do right now is to just get content out there, and I think I’m at a point where I’d rather write toward a digital rather than a print audience. All the stars seemed to align, and in these cases I think it’s important to seize the moment and get stuff out there. So that’s what I’m doing.

So stay tuned. I’ll be posting little mini-entries here to announce the stories when they start to go up, and I have an entry for tomorrow that will cover/overview the story projects that I’ve been working on for the site. I’m really excited about this.

I penned, recently the following (compound?) clause in one of my projects: “my research program for the last 30 or more years.”

You’ll see what that’s in reference to in a while, ultimately it’s minor and my aim with this passage is to cement the “book within a book” feeling that I’m so fond of. But it also indicates that this character, who is older, but still very able bodied (the narration is the result of him taking a rather lengthy intra-solar system journey alone) I has had an active academic/intellectual career focused on one subject for at least 30 years. In point of fact, he’s probably even a bit older than that. Having characters that are older than they appear or would be in our contemporary world is something that I’m pretty fond of. And it’s science fiction, so having a character that’s pushing 200 is something that isn’t patently absurd.

This got me thinking to other things, namely, about the genre tropes that I am fond of using in my stories. So here’s a partial list:

• Space Opera. I like space opera because it’s fun and enjoyable, because I know that readers “get it,” but probably most importantly because it makes it possible to talk about political ideas and have interesting plots that aren’t over complicated or grafted onto popular/contemporary notions of politics and history.
• Within space opera it’s also possible to complicate plots in productive ways using various technological phenomena which might make stories difficult to tell in contemporary worlds? You need characters to be out of touch for a chapter? Relativity or a solar flare clears that up, sending your main character to the woods without a cellphone for the weekend, is kind of hackneyed.
• Globalization is changing the way that just about every group people on the planet interact with each other, and I think it’s very true that this process is only going to continue, and there are situations common to space opera where it becomes possible to talk about cultural difference and divergence rather than convergence.
• I like to use telepathy and telepaths as a way of talking about privacy, and subjugated classes of people (on the assumption that if there are human telepaths, there are probably also humon-non telepaths.)
• I think relativistic time-travel effects are incredibly fascinating, and the Station Keeping stories are--at least in part--an exploration of what happens when these sorts of effects are normalized in a society.
• I totally have a soft spot for cyberpunk style virtual reality interfaces and direct neural interfaces, even though I don’t expect that either of these are technologies that are likely to come to pass. VR makes it possible to toy with the mechanics of reality, and it makes it possible to have awesome battles/confrontations without needing to be contrived about it.

Now I think I should probably make a list of tropes that I don’t really get. Like super heros. Hmmm….

What are your favorite tropes? Have I forgotten a big one that you really like? Are the tropes that you just don’t get?

I look forward to hearing your responses.

I’d like to talk a bit about what I’ve come up with in terms of data management/research organizational tools. So in my last post on this subject I mentioned that I had hacked together a shell script that did a lot of what I needed. Rather than look for the “one right” OS X tool (which I don’t think really exists at this point,) I’ve worked on collecting extant tools and programs and figuring some way of making something that would really continue to work into the future and that would be more tailored to my particular workflow.

I’m going to outline and present what I’m doing for the public betterment anyone else looking for something like this. Also I hope that people with a similar sort of need/workflow might be able to contribute tools or offer enhancements.

Let me outline the pieces of the puzzle, first:

• OS X/UNIX shell.¹ Having access to all of these great unix tools makes it reasonably easy to write scripts to automate the key parts of this workflow. Also, as most of my system reilies on Apache (which comes installed on OS X) and web servers, having this kind of low level access to the system is great.
• ikiwiki. So this is a great little program that takes a directory of text files, and turns them into a wiki/website via a markdown interpreter. It also connects and automates through subversion, an open source version management tool (it can also use git and others if that’s more your speed.) This part of the project is probably the geekiest and most difficult part to get working, particularly if you don’t have access a good package installer. But it’s possible and totally worth it.
• Several bash/shell scripts that I have written to insert data and clips into the wiki.
  • One script that, with a command in the form of, clip [FileName] [Space delinated tags] will create a page in a research clipping section of the wiki with the contents of the clipboard, and the proper notation for tag organization and the date of collection. The script then opens the file in the text editor. I wish it could capture, more automatically the citation information (author/url) but I think this would require the browser to expose more information than it currently does. But it’s pretty good.
  • One script that create new “tag indexes,” which makes it easier to see all the pages tagged with specific labels. If I were more clever I could probably tie the scripts together so that whenever I added a new tag that didn’t already exist that it would generate the new tag page. Except that this wouldn’t cover all instances of new tag pages, so it’s ok to have separate tag pages. This also helps control “tag sprawl,” and prevent metadata from getting out of control.
• A set very quick functions that let me append text any text file, as well as a quick command to append lines to the end of a general “inbox” or “codex.txt” file for quick thoughts, notes, todos, and tasks. This is outside of the wiki and not a new tool, but it works.
• Fluid - This is a really nifty program that uses OS X tools to build “programs” built around single, site specific websites. Basically this is the ideal bridge between “web apps” and “desktop apps,” particularly once Google Gears begins to work with this kind of app² amazing things are going to happen. Since I’m running the wiki locally, this is moot. There are other non-mac options like Mozilla Prisim, though I don’t have experience with it. This makes the wiki more useable and open I think.

Here’s a file with the relevant scripts and ikiwiki templates that I’m using. It’s rough and kludgy, but if people are interested or willing to contribute (feedback, knowhow, etc.), I’d certainly be willing to work on making this more polished and accessible.

ETA: I just discovered bsag’s textmate plugin, which might be a little more prime-time ready than my script, but I think with ikiwiki’s tagging function and potentially a recourse to spotlight/etc indexing, my solution works better for me. But, bsag is awesome and the text mate bundle is totally way more hard core than my kludge.

So this is supposed to be, at least in part, a knitting blog. My apologies for not writing about my knitting much of late. I’ve been thinking about knitting a bit and finally starting to do some knitting again. But I have a confession to make: I’ve started on a new project.

I’m knitting a new sweater out of some stash yarn. It’s just going to be a teal (big surprise) pullover with plain knitting. I want to do an EPS-style raglan pullover when I’m at knitting camp this year, and I thought it would be good to get started on that. I have about 5 inches done, and it’s my intention to get the body and the sleeves to the underarm, and maybe do a little bit of the yoke before my camp at the end of July. I’m going slowly, but I seem to be able to make time to regularly work on this project. That’s a good thing.

There’s not much more to talk about there. I think, at least in part, my issue was that the knitting I was trying to concentrate on was the kind of knitting that needed a lot of sustained attention, in a global sense. I could pick it up for a few moments here and there, but if I wasn’t picking it up pretty regularly, the rhythm and energy behind the project faded away. And since I was trying to not divide my knitting energy between multiple projects, I pretty much stopped knitting. While the more complicated project, the Latvian Dreaming project is something that I want to continue to do in the future, it’s not working for me at this instant.

Speaking of getting back into the swing of things, I also did some spinning. Egad, I’m out of practice. I enjoyed it, but wow, I totally over-plyed the skein of yarn in question. It’s been long enough that I can’t quite remember how it was that I was plying the yarn. I might have done it with scotch tension (the plying not the spinning) rather than double drive, or it might have been a lazy-kate issue. Though I’m not discouraged enough to stop spinning, because I think I can find my mojo again, it did give me a little pause.

I think I need to do something to get a little more control over spinning and knitting time, which probably means figuring out some way to balance other projects more effectively. How do you all--who aren’t students--manage to get knitting time, particularly if you work a lot, and/or have a number of freelance-ish projects, that can suck time in a major way?