I’m editing a story for Critical Futures this week, and I’m re-encountering an old problem with this novella.

There are some characters without specified genders, it’s important to their characterization, and I’m pretty wed to it, though I did slip up and use some he/she in the first drafts, which I’ve since edited out.

Interestingly, or maybe not, the real effect of doing this is that the characters don’t really relate to each other’s bodies. Maybe I’m just a n00b, but I from a theoretical place it makes sense.

In any case it’s really interesting, and also damn frustrating.

That is all.

Periscope down.

I just finished spinning the Corriedale Cross (basic plain wool) that I’ve been spinning for months. I had 2 pounds (900 grams) which is my standard amount, and I have 9 skeins. I think I was less that pleased with two of them, but they’re fine, and all the other ones are great.

I started spinning some dark brown blue faced leicester (this stuff, in fact).

Wow, in a word.

It spins like butter. Only better, because it’s an interesting color the picture doesn’t quite capture it (and it’s reasonably priced to boot!)

I’m going for a lighter and loftier aran weight (as opposed to a more tightly spun Guernsey-style yarn.) Very pleased.

In other news, as of Monday, after a week of scaling back on the caffeine in an attempt to de/resensitize my body to the stuff, I’m going back full bore, because I can’t live on 16oz of tea a day. I might not get a headache but I’m too scattered and I drag too much midday without more. Hopefully I’ll be able to scale up in a healthful/productive manner.

Sometimes the biggest jobs are the easiest. Last night I got inspired to make a sort of major change to my website: give up the “plain old blog” look and build a more intense “full featured-type” site. I thought this would be a good afternoon project for the weekend, so I made a list, mocked something up, and went to bed.

And then I got up this morning and in several hours, I was able to concoct what you see here. It’s “beta” in the tradition of web 2.0 (rough around the edges, but fully deployed.). I’m still not quite sure what wordpress is thinking on the tag archive pages, but maybe I’ll figure something out.

Here’s the larger plan: The regular daily blog posts, which I’m now calling “essays” in sense of “an attempt,” not a particular forum. The new kind of post will be shorter, more “bloggy” somewhere between the rest of the world’s typical blog post, and a twitter.

There are also new “static” pages, and separate syndication feeds if you want to have a little bit more control over how tychoish is syndicated for you.

Also, to readers in livejournal land, if you want all of everything, subscribe to the old tealart syndication feed. Otherwise my livejournal (which had previously just been cross posting all entries will now have a more cherry-picked selection of entries.)

I’ll have a more coherent post together on monday. I swear

Otherwise tell me what you think.