Kicking this off with the usual internet fare

This is my dog.The cold makes his old joints hurt, and I let his hair grow out so he wouldn't need to be stuffed paws-first into sweaters, so at the moment he's sort of a curmudgeonly muppet-creature. He just walked outside and planted his entire face in the snow bank for no good reason, so I thought I'd take a picture and post it on the internet. I understand this is the standard protocol with pet pictures.

I promise this blog won't be entirely about my curmudgeonly muppet-dog. Mostly it will be about my projects.

Here's what I have going at the moment:

• Novel #3 (Sum), third book in a fantasy trilogy I've been working on since high school. I'm about 1/4 into this one. The characters are behaving so far, which is a nice change of pace.
• "No and the Walking House," a short story, currently drafting.
• "Or Your Money Back," another short story, currently in revision.
• Both of these short stories are going into my application for the Clarion 2009 Workshop, which is a bit of a project in itself.
  
• No Tears Socks for my roommate, a belated Christmas present. (A deceptively named pattern - there have been many tears shed on this project, most of them right after I've poked myself with size 1s while cabling.) One down, one to go.
  
• Feater the Waves Socks for myself. I don't know what the name means, either, but they're very pretty. One down on this pair, too.
  
• A Snow White sweater for myself. I've been wanting to make this sweater for months, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE Ysolda Teague. The cast-on for this sweater was four rows of bewilderment, but I'm an inch into it and I'm already in love. Helps that I'm using Malabrigo.
  
• A Haruha scarf for myself, in gorgeous red and orange yarn that makes it look like it's on fire. This is a long-term project that's sitting by my bedside waiting to get worked on when I have a free half-hour. I'm usually listening to Savage Love while I knit it, so this scarf may also be a pervert. It's only about three inches long now. (That's what she said.)
• A wood burning of Dr. Horrible, which is sitting half-done in my art closet. Wood burning, for those who haven't tried it, is the most badass of the 2D arts. You take red-hot metal to wood and draw with the charred remains. The resulting image is sort of rustic and classy at the same time.
  
• A scarf made out of spare audio cables at my work, knitted with two #2 pencils taped to a cable to make circs. This is how MacGuyver would knit (if he worked university tech support over Christmas break).
  
• A pair of improvised slippers, which I'm about to frog because they're being very disagreeable.
  
• Two pairs of mittens which are currently stuffed into cubbies in my room because I have Second Mitten Syndrome something terrible.
• Another sweater, complicated, largely self-designed, and full of cabling, which is waiting on back-ordered yarn.
  
• Peter Apterix, a potential webcomic I've been working on at Black Hat Collective meetings. It's about a little kiwi bird who gets fired from his accounting firm in Minneapolis for not wearing pants. It's a legal drama. And also a romance. And there might be drug trafficking. The whole thing is done in ink and watercolor, and I'll be testing the medium for a while to see if it's feasible before anything goes online.
• And in the very background, I've got mental plotting going for a handful of novels, another comic (two?), and a creative nonfiction book celebrating zombies as a cultural phenomenon.
  

And that's what I've got going at the moment. Snippets about all of these projects (and more! Call now, toll free!) will show up here more than occasionally.

The muppet-dog may make a cameo every so often, too.