Topic: Posts

So there’s this saying that floats around, and there might be science fiction lore that surrounds this, but it says, basically that every writer has about a million words of crap in them that they just have to get out. After you write the first million, the thought is that you’ve written a certain number of words, you’ve learned how to write, found your voice, learned what you’re interested in and gotten over your youth, which makes you prone to writing all manner of foolishness.

Now it’s of course a rough estimate--your milage may vary--but I think being ok with the fact that I’m still learning, that it’s ok to not be perfect, because after, I’m still under my million words. If I’m still writing crap at 1,500,000 words I might get a little ticked, but where I am right now, it’s ok.

I have an informal tally of my fiction writing at about 150k. I wrote a novel in high school that was 100k, I have this novella (32k), I have about 10k in station keeping, and about 20k in the the project that preceded station keeping, not to mention, a couple of assorted little projects that never panned out. It seems like a good number.

I, on a whim, installed plugins that basically do a worcount on your wordpress (blog) postings and archives. In the past five years of TealArt, we have amassed a total of 269k words, 214k of which are mine. In four months of tychoish, I’ve written 69k words.

I think it’s time to readjust the crapo-meter a bit.

I posted pictures yesterday of a sweater that I had just finished.

It’s a jaunty little number, and I’m glad that I’ll have it in the pile, even if I do have to do a little bit of extreme blocking first. This is probably my best design to-date. Of course there are others that are good, certainly others that are more impressive feats of knitting engineering, but there aren’t a lot of other ones that look good as consistently, and regularly. It’s a good sweater, testified by the fact that I’ve knit 3 versions of it by now, and am probably going to knit another version soon.

There are a couple of things that make this sweater so delightful to knit and wear. First it’s knit entirely in the round, so there’s not a lot of thought involved, and while I certainly like complex projects, sometimes it’s nice to have something plain going on. Because it’s knit in the round there are a number of knitterly wisdom that’s incorporated into the design: gussets at the underarm, combined front and back neck shaping, a slit neck which regulates temperature for those in more hospitable climates, short rows that keep the back from riding up, and so forth. Secondly, as a design feature, the fact that the top of the shoulders and sleeves are a different color gives this sweater some of the appearance of having saddled sleeves, which ameliorates the problem of drop shoulders, and the problem of boring solid colored, without going crazy.

I call it the sport sweater, mostly because I think that the split neck is kinda sport-like, and it emphasizes the fact that this is a casual, comfortable sweater, not a formal blouse or jacket-type sweater. I dunno, it seemed like the thing to call it. This sweater would be my submission into a book of “house sweaters,” that I’ve thought of putting together for a while. I think it’d be cool to ask a bunch of designers to submit designs for the sweater that they find themselves reaching for when ever it gets a little drafty. I think we all have “that sweater,” and I think it’d be an interesting collection of “real” people sweaters (as opposed to most of the sweaters that make it in, say Vogue Knitting.)

So I wanted to post pictures of the other two sweaters in this series for reference, and because I finally have pictures of these sweaters.

Here’s the first iteration:

and

Here’s the remake version that I did two years ago, in attempt to get something that was a little bit more fitted, out of better yarn.

and

Enjoy. Working an unusual Saturday at the Yarn Store. Hoping I’m not too worn by the end of the day.

Onward and Upward!

It’s black friday and while I’m not hopping or anything like that. I have gotten some things done that I thought I’d share with you. So I think a good old fashion list was in order:

• I did some updating to the tychoish.com theme. There’s now a tag cloud and tag support in the theme. I like how this is working. I don’t want the site to look too much like “yet another WordPress” blog, but it works, and I like the look of the site.
• I took a lot of pictures of knitted things today, and I’ll be posting pictures of these projects here and on raverly as this proceeds.
• I finished the first chapter of the novel, or at least a good first attempt at said. My current novel-related project it to work out more clearly how I’m going to procede. It’s steeping for the moment
• I was talking with dave last night about cool blogging things, and it inspired me to work on Station Keeping again. I have done the necessary editing to the file for the season one recap, so it all works great. I also wrote the first third or so of the next episode for Season 2. I think this beginning of January start date might be real.
• I forgot to take pictures of my current knitting. Oops, I’ll have to fix that.
• I finished a sleeve yesterday. I’m chugging along on the second and my last sleeve of this sweater. When it’s done, I feel like I should be able to cast on another sweater. ;)

Here’s the picture of my red sport sweater that I (also) blocked right after dinner yesterday:

It’s big. Really big. I’m going to felt it, I’ve decided, because it’s too big length wise in every direction, and pretty good width wise. Some concern about the sleeves (of course), but it’s sort of silly looking, and I think a little bit of fulling will add some much needed stability.

I wanted to get before pictures of it in any case. The first sweater that I made in this style (I got pictures of it, don’t worry) is also fueled for much the same reason, so I’m not concerned.

Anyway, There you have it. Have a good day not shopping hopefully. I’m going to go do something utterly lazy.

Onward and Upward!

1. Honeycomb
2. Meaty Cable Twist
3. Twisted Backwords Loop
4. Brioche
5. Mock Ribs

So, Christina, wrote a comment (thanks christina!) regarding my little tirade on NaNoWriMo, that basically said, the project might allow (if I’m reading this right) for non or new writers to get a more clear understanding about what “being a writer” is, and maybe make it more accessible. But you can read the comment in more depth here.

I replied (as I do try to do to many comments), and when I was done I found that I had basically written another blog post on the subject, and I think it moves the conversation around, so I’m going to post it. I’m interested in what you all think, though I suspect that the NaNo-ers are deep in trenched in their novels, and the remainder probably don’t care all that much. Anyway, here’s my little response:

I really don’t have anything against NaNo, and think it’s a goods project. For many years now, I’ve been the leader of a small science fiction writers list on yahoogroups, and there’s a way in which these folks who very much want to be writers, are sometimes afraid of plowing through a novel, so having a project like NaNo makes a lot of sense, and can sort of light the right kind of fire under peoples asses. So it’s a great project for people who already write a lot, who haven’t made the jump to novel writing, but maybe have always wanted to.

In this respect, I think the NaSweKniMo (national sweater knitting month, which is the brain child of Shannon. Okey (I think), is a great project in the best sprit of NaNoWriMo. then again, I think sweater knitting leaves you less prone for burnout than novel writing, but maybe that’s just me.

And maybe this is the price of success for NaNoWriMo, but in the past couple of years, there are people who do NaNo because it’s some cool social bonding ritual. There are write-ins, there are support groups, and it’s all focused on the word count. Which really so not what writing is about, at least to me. Writing is so often a solitary practice that means neglected social ties, nights of insomnia when you can’t get a story out of your mind, haggard pushes to deadlines, and a lot of time sitting around having arguments with yourself while scribing unintelligible notes on things that weren’t meant to be written on.

I think that while this invokes a nativist-type epistemology that I’m not entirely comfortable with, it’s true: writers write, not because they want to, but because they can’t not write. I took several years off of fiction writing (the past four, or so,) but in that time managed to amass 200,000 words of writing for my blog, plus tons of stuff for classes, and I’m a better writer for it, so I think that still counts.

Anyway, there you have it…

Onward and Upward!

I write science fiction, and truth be told, and I think the space opera form has life in it yet. While my last story was set on Mars and didn’t have a lot of interplanetary travel, this project does. Mostly because I want to cover a long period of time in the stories that I’m writing now, so that we can see characters relate to histories. So I have characters on space ships.

One thing that I have yet to do, is create some sort of FTL (faster-than-light) construct in the stories, and while I’m not hyper vigilant about making sure that planets are actually going to be where they are in relation to each other when I say they are, I’ve built transit times into my plots and stuff like that, so that there’s at least some sense of a “price” for technologies that seem too good to be true. And I think in some ways this connects to some sort of notion of constrained creativity and particularly in fiction this is what makes stories interesting

So, in pursuit of making this work I occasionally find myself looking up orbital mechanics and interplanetary transit systems, to figure out how to get ships and planets to be in roughly the same place at the same time. There’s only a little bit of this, in the current book thankfully: most of the story takes place on ships bound out of the solar system and on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. But at the moment I’m following a ship that’s making it’s way to Titan, with a brief detour to Mars. So I once again find myself trying to figure out Martian orbital dynamics and distances. Sigh.

This website about Martian Orbits is quite helpful.

Also, for those of you playing along at home, I think--think here--that an object that was .25 of a martian year behind mars in orbit would be about 17 light minutes away from Mars. This is between Mars and the L4 (or 5 if mars is ahead) Lagrarian points, which are, despite being farther away only 12 minutes away. (.25 of a year, is 45 degrees ahead/behind mars, the L4/5 points are 60 degrees ahead/behind. I’m figuring that the Mars Orbit, at 1.5 AU, to Earths 1 AU has a radius of 12 light minutes, or 134123326 miles.)

This ignores the fact that the orbits are all elliptical, and the effect of gravity on light/radio waves, which exists, surely, but not I think to a degree great enough to affect the truthfulness of a character that says “The message is about 20 minutes old.”

I wonder if you can get a job doing something with rudimentary orbital mechanics with an undergraduate degree in psychology and no college level math. Sigh. Guess I better stick to writing.

Hope your turkey preparations are going well.

So today is a writing day, because, I say so. Though given how closely the 10th of December is coming (and my first graduate application due date), I will admit and allow that I might not get to spend the whole day writing what I want to write.

This is something worth being thankful for, I think. In honor of this, I’ll have good content up here that’s writing related, today I think. There should be enough stuff running through my head to keep us both entertained.

I’m in the middle of writing a pretty quick scene that leads directly into the main story of the next chapter or so. My very modest goal is to finish this chapter and get a start on the second chapter. I’d also like to start on my statement for grad school: this is the hardest part, and I need to just suck it up and write it. Alas.

In terms of knitting, I think I’m basically to the cuff of one of the sleeves, and it’s been under a week since I started it, so that means, likely in about a week, I’m going to have no (0) sleeves to knit. Amazing really.

I/we don’t have thanksgiving plans, it’s a nice long weekend but, my general response is pretty “meh” to the whole ordeal. The last two years R. and I, being the last people left on campus, went out for Indian food, which in retrospect sounds like a confused gesture of resistance but I assure it was just rather nice. This year, I think we’re going to have fish.

Sounds pretty good to me. Just saying.

1. Come on, a hobby that you need both hands for that you don’t need to look at? Foul! 2. What’s with the sharp sticks in the cat toy? 3. __________. 4. That’s a poor replacement for fur. 5. Finally, we have something in common.

I think the hardest time to be a wannabe writer is November. But, you ask, November is when `NaNoWriMo <http://www.nanowrimo.org/>`_ is, isn’t that the best time to be a wannabe writer? Well maybe, and I think NaNo is a great project that is I think a really great thing, lets not misunderstand this comment, but it’s a really bad way to write a novel, particularly a first or second novel.

Novels take time, novels are complex, and even if you can pound out 50k words in a month, you still have to edit those words, and while there’s a lot to be said for getting peoples asses in chairs to write, I think we do a better service to writers by creating support/structures/etc. around getting people into their chairs and writing, consistently for the other 11 months.

Also, pacing is a big part of my issue with NaNo, it is surely possible to write too much, and wear yourself out to the point that it takes a few days to recover. I think this probably has to do with the fact that many of us do a lot of pre-writing by rehearsal that we don’t realize, and if you write too much without giving your brain time to think, you have to replenish the reserves. So while you can push yourself for a day or a few days in the end progress is probably more steady. I suspect this goes for all sorts of things, in addition to fiction writing.

So, I’m not doing NaNo, but I am writing. And that’s good enough for me.

1. You really don’t like ubuntu.
2. You think beige is the new black.
3. You don’t have the balls for FreeBSD.
4. You don’t have any concept of the value of your own time.
5. You miss your 286’s boot disks.