Topic: Posts

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!

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.