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.