tychoish, now without a net

I’m sure in a year or two I’m going to look back on this summer and say “that was the in-between summer,” and shudder. Indeed this past year has been a series of “hurry up and wait,” games, but that aside, as I’ve been struggling to write more effectively this past week, I’ve realized that my writing problem–such as it is–and my life problem–such as it is–are really the same. I’m in-between big things and I’m not sure how to keep things moving. This entry is an exploration of this.

The writing first, on the assumption that you’re much more interested in that anyway:

I’m I don’t know where I got the idea that trailing edge was going to be something really long term, but it’s becoming clear to me, that while I have a few weeks worth of posts that aren’t edited and posted yet, it looks like this piece will turn out to be a novelette/novella. And strangely I’m ok with that. In fact, I think this is a good thing, as it means that I have something of a concrete plot, a goal and a plan, and one of my larger concerns/worries at the moment is that I feel like I have weak/cerebral plots.¹

The problem with this is that the idea that this was a long term project was one that I was pretty fond of, and it means that I have to think about starting a new project sooner than I had planned. I think I’m going to go back and write a prequel to Knowing Mars that I sketched out and then put on the back burner, (because it’s a cool story, and because someone asked for it.) And I want to work on getting more Station Keeping nailed out. I have about half to three quarters of the second (new!) season of station keeping to write. The third season, I plan to write as a single script², possibly in conjunction with script frenzy, and that’s what I want to write more, but I need to get everything setup for that first.

But these are all shorter term projects (which is odd, given that I don’t think of myself as being incredibly useful or coherent with fiction under 25k words.). And not only that, but they’re old shorter term projects. While Trailing Edge is new (though connected to previous projects) and the KM prequel is newish, it’s an elaboration on something old. Station Keeping, is basically something I came up with during my junior/senior year of high school. Knowing Mars itself is reasonably new, but it grew out of an outline (that I didn’t realize was an outline at the time) that I wrote even earlier. Though I’m not sure what form it will take, I’m itching to work on something new. For some reason I’ve been completely enraptured by concept ships and I have a couple of ideas that might work in a gritty space-opera-style world.

But that’s all a ways off, and it’s not the doing as much as the amorphous uncertainty that surrounds the future of my writing projects. I said at the onset that this was both a post about writing uncertainty (as above) but also personal uncertainty. And I have enough of that too: my current work contract is up, and while I’m employable enough and I have a few prospects nothing is nailed down. Same about school: it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that when I go back to school it needs to be for something else. For the sake of not being overly confessional, I’ll spare the details, but I think it’s at least passingly interesting that the feeling of being snagged by the in between works in parallel for the “life stuff” and the “writing stuff.”

Knowing is half the journey. Onward and Upward!

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tagged: journal • writing

I’m sorry for not posting when I got home or twittering from the road, but I seem to have survived the ordeal of the drive. I did the drive, which is about 520 miles, in almost exactly eight hours. Which means I averaged did the speed limit In any case, I think that was pretty good. In any case, by the time I got home, I was in no shape to do anything except sleep and knit. So I didn’t get an entry posted yesterday.

I seem to have gotten unstuck in my knitting by the weekend. Latvian Dreaming has progressed into the gussets, and I expect to start the armholes by this weekend. I hope to post instructions for starting the armholes next week, and the neck shaping options somewhat after that. Also, pictures?

I bought some yarn at camp, mostly schoolhouse press‘ “Quebecois,” enough for two sweaters (in charcoal and navy), and most of the yarn needed for a handdyed and black pullover from Jocelyn’s Fiber Farm. Counting my handspun, I do believe that I have what might be known as a stash, at the moment.

I also must confess to having three sweaters in progress/need of finishing. I have the fingering weight grey sweater that I’ve been working on for years that needs a collar and sleeves (I knit the last saddle/strap at camp), I have the latvian sweater mentioned above, and I have this raglan yoke sweater that I started to knit at camp (but didn’t). And five sweaters worth of yarn stashed. I need to keep knitting.

I also got a lot of (friendly) encouragement to work on knitting designing at camp. While I’m wary of this, I’m not going to start another project until I get (more) settled in the routine of daily blogging and regular fiction production for Critical Futures. I sort of thought that the next thing would be a podcast, but maybe it’ll be working up and publishing a couple of knitting patterns instead. In any case, I’m not going to add any new commitments before, say Labor day.

Other misc. thoughts:

• I recommended John Scalzi Old Man’s War to someone at camp. I like when geek threads cross.
• A friend from camp said that he (this narrows down the field of possibility a bit) enjoyed knitting the edging of shawls more than the shawl centers. Given that I feel exactly the opposite, I’m thinking about coming up with some sort of barter agreement. Just the thought of this makes me want to get back into lace knitting, and I have two shawls in progress, and a plan for a third one. We shall see.
• I will be knitting more. This is a good thing. I have my mojo back.

That’s all that’s on my mind right now. The rest of the week’s posts won’t be as consistent as you’ve grown accustomed to, but there’ll be posts, and when things get settled everything will return to normal.

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tagged: journal • knitting

1. Franklin tried on my tychoish henry viii sweater.
   • I need to take such better pictures of my knitting.
2. I did pretty well in the contest, I got some hemp/wool yarn. The shawl I raffled off to support camp scholarships, did pretty well, and it went to Carol Anderson of Cottage Creations who is a great deal of fun.
3. There were great dirty jokes at the end of class. I think someone needs to introduce a skit night.
4. I’ve actually gotten some knitting done, and no longer feel so hopeless about my project and my knitting. So I think, I’m back.
5. I should expound upon this further in the coming weeks, but I’m still thinking about the various merits of knitting work and not knitting work.
6. I bought long inox knitting needles. There will be gansey knitting.

That’s all for now. I have a long drive tomorrow, so there might be something that jott will transcribe for me at the end of the day, but regular posting will resume after that.

Oh, and I have a lot of knitting to do between now and then.

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tagged: journal • knitting

I don’t have a lot to report.

I knit a lot, that was really good. The party promises to be great tonight.

I got my 1000 Knitters Project portrait taken today. I’m somewhere in the 900s, and I’m within 20 of people like Meg (and Cully!) Swansen, Medrith Glover, and Emily-freaking-Ocker. How cool is that.

I’m also going to be in the project as tycho garen, rather than my real name. That felt like a big decision, but meh.

I got yarn, including an order that I put in more than a year ago. So much cool stuff to knit, I swear. I’m probably in stock with yarn for the rest of the year. And a fun year it will be indeed.

I thought that I’d be more reflective, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get this out earlier. Anyway, back to the festivities.

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tagged: journal • knitting

Knitting camp. Where to start.

This is an analogy that will only make sense to the morris dancers in the audience, but it’s sort of like an ale, with more yarn and less dancing (of course) and much less singing. It’s the lack of singing that I find most disconcerting actually.

This is the session that has history, out of all the sessions of this camp. There are a few people who have been coming for 35 years, and many people who have been coming for way more than 20 years. And that history is something that’s really important to a lot of people, and it’s cool to see that and be a part of it.

I’ve been knitting on the latvian dreaming, mostly and I have two other projects lurking around that I will probably work on today. A lot of people come to camp and start new projects and I think that I’m unlikely to do that, because I need closure on my current projects and, I don’t have fully formed ideas of what I want to do next, anyway.

I’ve tried four times to write a paragraph here and I have too much flying through my head to make sense of that so here goes a list:

• There are so many famous and amazing knitters here. I’m a little star struck, actually. And a couple of times had lengthy discussions with them before I realized that I was talking to someone who’s name I had recognized in a book. And then, somewhat after the fact I learned that cookie a was “camp newbie sitting across the table from me.” Sigh.
• On top of all the other interesting discussions last night we had an interesting conversation about social dynamics on the internet and the knitternet.
• At 9pm last night, I got a pot of hot water and had a caffeine party. It was good stuff. Unlike a Morris Dance Ale, it’s all over by midnight, which means it’s possible to get an at least passable sleep in, but I needed the extra kick to stay up for that. Because:
• The drive was intense. Not bad, but long and I really pushed pretty hard. I’ll post about the podcasts and other listening materials I went through later…

Anyway I have so much to knit. I’m going to go take a shower and then go down and get started with the day.

Onward and Upward!

(ps. Just a program note/reminder: There’s a new critical futures story today. CF, is my daily (science fiction) story blog. I’ll blog over the weekend here, and cf will return, as usual on Monday.)

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tagged: journal • knitting

Hey friends!

So I might have mentioned that I’m going to knitting camp at the end of the week. A long drive on Thursday leaving far to early in the morning. Followed by four whole days of intensive knitting, and then a drive back. As a result the blog schedule will be a bit–disrupted. Last year when I was at camp I posted a fair piece, and I suspect that I’ll want to opportunity to recount camp stories a bit as they happen.

At the same time, I probably won’t have the time to do my usual writing cram over the weekend to make sure that there are fun and interesting posts for you during the week. So here’s the deal:

• There’ll be new critical futures stories posted every weekday for the next two weeks. This won’t change, fear not. - I’ll post new things here, through the weekend. - I’ll probably take a brief tychoish vacation for a couple of days next week, I think there’ll be three posts, but I’m not sure when they’ll hit yet. It’s a blog, after all. Don’t be worried.

Because I doubt that administrivia is what you all came here to read, I think I’ll pass along some links and thoughts and questions that you might enjoy.

• The cats are still nibbling toes. This remains not cute, though they haven’t gotten this memo yet.
• Though I’m only really interested in talking about electoral politics in the historical sense, or as a venue for placing friendly bets,¹ but I’m not going to lie this is funny. “This is the internet!” heh. Actually I’m more worried that someone has cracked Randall’s secret sauce
• A git-wiki that really rocks. It’s still early on development, and it’s lacking some features that would make it useable for me at the moment, but I can totally see a place for such a thing for some future projects.
  • The ruby guys are totally awesome, and I like a lot of ruby projects, and I think that in some ways ruby is going to be the “next php,” even I have a soft spot in my heart² for Python, but I said to chris the other day that “ruby is the visual basic of our generation.”
• I’m thinking of starting to hard wrap columns in my text files, because it would make running diffs and file histories easier, grepping is easier, it makes the text more spatially consistent, it would make using vim easier, and so forth but I seem to really enjoy changing the window size a lot, and he is probably right, there’s very little practical value, and hitting ^Q for a vestige seems ill advised. That doesn’t mean I won’t try it, you read my post about my email after all.
• I just finished reading “Star Surgeon podiobooks,” a delightfully quirky public domain science fiction novel by Alan E. Norse, and read by my friend Scott Farquhar of Promethesus Radio Theatre, which was delightful even if it wasn’t a fine example of tightly structured prose. Scott’s next book is “Black Star Passes” by John W. Campbell, which I intend to start while I’m driving to camp.

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tagged: Announcements • journal