Three outta four ain't bad.

I've been in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin for almost a week now, staying at my usual retreat: my favorite aunt and uncle's house. This trip had been planned and thwarted twice in the last six months by events out of my control, and finally getting to go has been such a relief.

My aunt and uncle's house is outside a small town on a few acres of wooded land with pockets of rusted horse-drawn farm equipment and 50's era car husks. The biggest excitement of the week is driving down to the recycling center. The coffee pot starts brewing at 6:15am every morning, and I wander out of the spare bedroom and curl up on the sofa with a cup of coffee and a blanket until the wood stove warms the house. I'm never happy about being awake before 9am except when I'm here. At home, being awake before 9am means I've got a workday ahead of me or a massive to-do list looming. Here, being awake before 9am means drinking a hot cup of coffee, having breakfast cooked up for me with a side of sarcasm by Uncle Larry, and getting a good view of the day ahead, which is always laid back even when I have a to-do list.

Aunt Suzy's cat Kolipoki demonstrates how I feel most days that I'm here:


Yeeeeessssss.

On top of the laid back lifestyle up here, this house is just about humming with creative energy. Suzy is a jack of all arts and crafts. She's painted, drawn, woodburned, thrown pottery, carved, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. The house is covered with her handiwork - my room is the one least touched by Suzy's art, and it still has a lamp she woodburned, two framed paintings, and a large underwater mural on drywall screwed onto one wall. Being surrounded by things she's created makes me want to surround myself with things I've created. She's been working on a new carving while I've been here, but it's large scale and won't be done before I leave.


Larry is an inventor. He spends most of the day up in his shop, welding together weight lifting machines of his own design. Three days a week, he's also the personal trainer for the household and his and Suzy's friends. He invents things other than weight lifting machines, but they're not for sale. He makes up songs to sing as he walks around the house, episodes of CSI that ought to get shot, ways to tease me, and over J-term of 2008, "Bidet in a Box" - which, combining his singing and inventing talents, had its own theme song at one point. Every morning for three days when I woke up, Larry would pass me at the coffee pot and say, "I made probably a million dollars this morning working on my Bidet in a Box idea. What did you do this morning?"

It pains me that Bidet in a Box will never be an actual product, not because Larry won't get his millions but because I would love to see a commercial with a cartoon box of toilet wipes singing, "Bidet in a Box, Bidet in a box! Buy it and you'll feel smart as a fox!"


(To answer your questions about this picture: No, he only wears a coat when it's below 0 degrees F; about 65 years old; and yes, he could bench press you.)

Anyway, so: Peace? Check. Quiet? Check. Crazy creative people? Double check. Perfect creative sabbatical.

My to-do list for this trip was:

• Finish a chapter from Sum (AKA book 3 of The Fantasy Series What Ate My Life)
• Finish knitting my Sylvi coat
• Write the first chapter of an upcoming novel, which I plan on submitting to the WisCon writers workshop at the end of the month
• Work on the multi-chapter fanfic I've had in my head since the fall

On Thursday night, I finished a chapter of Sum that I had started in 2008.

On Sunday night, I posted the first chapter of the fic.

And today, with the exception of buttons and a good soak and blocking, I finished this:



This coat was the knitting project mirror to Or Your Money Back, a project I took up thinking I could sit down and knit on it when I was stuck on the story. It turned out that the story itself had few places to get stuck, and the coat turned into more of a symbol of my confidence regarding the project. For a long while it was on hiatus, then it came creeping back into my current WIPs once I was submitting queries, and this week, watching my aunt read (and cry over) OYMB, I finally worked up the guts to finish it.


Like the book, the coat turned out whimsical, twisty, and just a tad shorter than I expected. It also took a mad dash of what seemed like for-fucking-ever to get the finishing done.


I did wind up making some progress on that first chapter I need to get done, but not as much as I had hoped. Normally, not hitting an intended deadline drives me a little nuts. Today, though? Too much else has gone right, and I am far too relaxed to care.


Big dumb grins all around.

I go home tomorrow.

Sherwood shrug and Star Trek geekery

Last week I was having a hard time pinning down the protagonist's voice for the novel chapter I'm writing. Her name is Sherwood, and you'll see that chapter here in the next week, along with the last of my work for the Apocalypses class. On top of being awkward and seventeen, Sherwood has some abilities that could make her life suck rather epically, but I didn't want her to come across as dour or depressed. I wanted a fun, sarcastic, slightly world weary voice for her - something I would enjoy writing for the duration of the novel - but I just wasn't hitting it. And the draft sort of sucked.

So I cast-on for Liesl, a cute lace shrug by one of my favorite designers. I figure since I'm only writing a chapter of this novel now, a shrug's the perfect sized project to accompany it - a mini novel knit.

Knit the shrug while brainstorming for the chapter, rewrote the first scene, and ta-da! The first scene totally works, the chapter is falling into place, and I've got a cute, super-soft shrug to wear in my favorite color.

The lace pattern looks like alien skin to me, so the shrug's first outing was to the the theater to see the new Star Trek movie. Kiah and I have classy rings for this kind of event. They come from the tops of 6-pack grocery store cupcakes. We are fancy.


Star Trek was fantastic! We saw it with our friend Reed, and all three of us grinned for pretty much the entire length of the movie. I'll admit, when I first saw the trailer months ago, I dismissed it as just another flashy remake, but I'm so glad I went. The movie managed to hit a sweet spot somewhere between cheesy and bowl you over in your seat awesome. The story was strong, the characters dead-on, and the visuals stunning (slight overuse of lens flare aside). J.J. Abrams and company somehow managed to flawlessly blend the old series and this newer, shinier universe and make something that works for both old fans and Trek virgins.

To sum the movie up in two words with inappropriate dialect: frakking awesome.

Afterwards, Kiah and I did our traditional movie day Burger King stop and made giant dorks of ourselves buying collectible Spock glasses. Our cupboard is going to be very logical.

Also, I spent the latter half of the movie trying to figure out the construction of Scotty's hat. It's basically a big floppy hat knit flat in garter stitch, but with a wedge of fabric knit perpendicular to the rest of the hat. Pattern should be up here in a few days, once I figure it out.

<3 Scotty <3

Writing + Knitting = The Novel Knits Project

Writing and knitting are complimentary activities. This is one of the things that drew me to knitting in the first place - it keeps my hands busy while my brain is off in story space. If I've got nothing to do with my hands while I'm plotting, I end up losing focus and, say, spending 45 minutes looking at affordable hovels on the MLS website. So in a weird way, knitting - distracting and life-consuming as it is - helps me focus on writing.

In August when I started working on my current novel, I started thinking of ways to tie the two activities together in a meaningful way. The resulting idea was a long-term project with three rules:

• Each novel I write will be assigned a knitting project.
• While I'm knitting that, I need to be focused mentally on the novel.
• The knitting project should suit the novel in some way.

I've been looking forward to this for months, partly because of the first pairing I had planned: my current novel, Sum, and Meg Swanson's Saddle-Shouldered Aran Cardigan. Sum is the third and final novel in a fantasy series I've been working on since I was fourteen. This series is what made me want to be a writer in the first place, and over the last ten years it's become a huge part of my life. I'll miss it deeply once it's over. So it makes sense to make myself something woolly and comforting to snuggle into for comfort when that day comes.

Remember that rule about the knitting suiting the writing? These projects go together better than I expected.

Both are complex, do-it-yourself deals I never would've dreamed I could get away with when I started in these crafts. Sum interweaves loads of plotlines, uses multiple POVs, tackles subjects I'm not used to, involves major world-building, and brings a story that started out as a lonely boy with strange abilities into the epic fantasy level. (Hopefully, I can do all this successfully.) The sweater pattern is cables upon cables in a style I've never knit before, working from a two-page pattern that throws some basic guidelines at you and leaves you on your own with a tape measure and calculator.

Both are slight variations on the traditional form they're imitating. Sum treads into epic fantasy territory, but instead of swords and sorcery, my characters are packing mp3 players, psychic powers, and a desire to get this over with so they can get back to drinking and schoolwork. The battle soundtrack is Queen, not Howard Shore. Meanwhile, I'm making an aran sweater out of non-traditional (bright fucking blue!) yarn and inventing my own cable pattern for the back.

Both also scare the crap out of me. Finishing Sum closes an era in my life. I don't know what will happen to these characters I've lived with for the last decade once I've stopped writing them, nor do I know how that will change me. I've been dragging my feet in writing the book because of this. The sweater for Sum, appropriately, has steeks. If that word doesn't make your stomach plummet into your shoes, either you're a far braver knitter than I or you don't knit. For non-knitters, steeks mean this: you reinforce your fabric and then cut your knitting apart. With scissors. Yes, "Augh" is the correct response.

And if that wasn't enough parallels, the sweater also has a giant cabled tree up the back, meant to remind me of the giant non-yarny tree where the climax of this book will play out.

I cast-on the Sum Sweater this weekend.
About three inches in, and the scene I've been stalled in is finally over.