Things I learned from Moby Dick

This morning I finished Moby Dick, and I have to say I'm a bit proud of this. I see it as an accomplishment. It's not something I ever thought I would read, or really ever had any interest in until recently, having assumed erroneously that I probably wouldn't like it much. And though I personally feel that Melville's later writing (especially Billy Budd) is actually better than his great sprawling opus on whaling and obsession (in part precisely because it is so sprawling - I seem to like Melville the same way I like Tolstoy, that is with a reasonable word limit) Moby Dick's still a damn god book. And surprisingly accessible.

Anyway, Moby Dick might have a claim to be one of the forerunners of edutainment, what with all the digressions on whales and whaling life. So, in that spirit, here's what Melville taught me along with a few observations of my own:

• Quakers are badasses. Seriously, Ahab's a fucking Quaker! I mean, I know there's more to Quakerism than sitting around quietly in rooms and being conscientious objectors, but this sort of gave me a new-found respect for them. Ahab certainly has his faults, but a lack of badass-ness is not one of them. If anything, he's too badass, know what I mean?

• I can't really imagine how big a whale is. Like, I kept picturing them as a manageable size and then having to stop and be all 'wait, no, it's so much bigger than the boat!' or 'holy shit, you can drown in a whale's head!' I bet Freud would have had a field day with this book, and likely whalers in general, as they all clearly have a deathwish.

• Melville thought whales were fish. Despite the fact that he discusses that they need to surface to breathe and have nipples, he was totally convinced they were decidedly not mammals. He's got a whole chapter to this effect.

• Harpooners were the rock stars of whaling ships.

• Ishmael and I are two peas in a pod. There's a sort of running joke between me and Jon, and before that me and my father, that I'm substantially more difficult to match with fictional characters than most people. I think this is because I'm a fundamentally boring person who doesn't do much and those aren't the sort of people one often writes about unless one wants to write a fundamentally boring book (case in point: I bear a number of similarities to Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's snarky, hermetic, fat older brother, but Doyle didn't make Mycroft his protagonist precisely because the man was rarely out of his bathrobe and had no interest in actually proving his theories via legwork, and the legwork's the interesting stuff). But, all that said, me and Ishmael are of like minds.
  

• Starbuck is one of the most tragic characters in fiction.

• Stubb is one of the most ambiguous characters in fiction (although I read him as a canny, clever sort in line with the Fool in King Lear) and one of the only ones I've ever read that's able to get away with referring to himself in the third person without it being obnoxious.

• I knew Melville was prone to homoeroticism (it's one of the reasons I like him, frankly), but it's hit critical mass here. Well, technically, I think Billy Budd's got it beat in terms of density, but it was a major driving force of the plot there and here it's just sort of incidental. In any case, there was a moment where the whalers were carrying around a giant whale penis on the ship -- past masts and other sundry already phallic things -- which was just hilarious. This was is in addition to the rom-com tone of the first section where Ishmael and Queequeeg become 'close' and the much famed "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter.

Week of Socks!: Baudelaire socks for me

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Ah, we've reached our week-long excursion into the glorious land of socks. And now you're up to speed on what's been going on knitting-wise with me. Although, I guess I should say that these were finished a couple of weeks ago, which means that they weren't really completed in the summer. But I guess that's neither here not there.

Yarn - Dale of Norway Baby Ull (100% wool, 180 yards) in firetruck red. I bought 2 skeins of this and one skein of pale gray to make a second pair of red herring socks, but I just never could bring myself to attempt the color knitting again. It's a nice, soft, squashy yarn.

Needles - Magic looped on size 1 Addi Turbos.

Pattern - Baudelaire from Knitty, which I've done before for sockapolooza. But this time, I shifted the pattern so it's spread across the outer edge of the foot/side of the leg. And, as promised in the spiral socks post, I mirrored them for extra-cool symmetricalness. Besides this obvious deviation from the original pattern, I made the following modifications:

• I worked it toe-up and did a short-row heel.
• I add calf shaping on the inside leg about 4" into the leg.
• I wanted the lace section to neatly divide the sock in half, so I slightly altered the pattern to be 13 sts wide.

Week of Socks!: Vinnland socks

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This is about the point at which I started running out of creativity. As explained below, both the pattern and the yarn are repeats and/or cop-outs in one way or another. I blame that on the fact that I was making them in August while I was working on drafts of like 6-7 articles (seriously, I was swamped) and visiting the family back in Texas. Didn't have a lot of brain power available, you know?

Yarn - 2 skeins of Lang Jawoll Cotton (49% new wool, 35% cotton, and 16% nylon) I had leftover from these socks. This yarn is still pretty awesome. Good thing I overbought (I might actually have enough for another pair lying around.)

Needles - Magic looped on size 1 Addi Turbos.

Pattern - The Vinnland pattern from the Anti-Craft. I really like this pattern, but if you're astute you may have noticed that in the grand sock queue, it's been slated to socks for Van, not me. Well, hopefully I'll finally make him some awesome Vinnland socks of his own one day (I really am planning to, I swear), so I'll consider these a dry run. Hell, maybe if I have enough I'll make him a matching pair out of the same yarn. The pattern called for it to be done toe-up with a short-row heel, so the only modification I made was using the magic 8 CO instead of doing a short-row toe and adding some calf shaping (see the photo above).

Week of Socks!: Spiral socks for me

(click for bigger. Also, note that though you can't actually see it in full, the leg of the socks is about mid-calf, so about 10" long. Yeah, should have taken better pictures, my apologies.)

I've made socks like this before - once for my mom, and once for my sister. And I've made awesome spirally hats (a set of them from the same awesome yarn, one for me, and one for Dani). But, until now, I've never made myself spirally socks. This terrible oversight has now been rectified and my life can go on.

Yarn - Yarn Botanika Radiance (merino/tencel blend, 400 yards) in jewel. This yarn is odd. It's lovely, with a really fluid drape and a nice shine to it, but it's not terribly soft. Not scratchy, just a bit stiff. I think it might be due to an overabundance of dye or something, it might soften with a couple of washes. But a very pretty dye job nonetheless.

Needles - Magic looped on size 1 Addi Turbos.

Pattern - A pretty simple travelling yarnover stitch loosely drawn from the spiral boot socks pattern. I followed the pattern for my sister's socks, but not my moms, and this one I did mostly by sight but used the pattern's trick of using the yarnovers to incorporate calf shaping. Basically, that means that every inch or so I didn't decrease once when I added a yarnover (which if you look really, really closely, you can spot).

I worked them toe-up, casting on 28 sts and increasing to 60. A short-row heel was worked with all sts wrapped but the center 10. The cuff was about an 1.5 inches of 1x1 rib. The actual spiral pattern was worked starting with 8 sts between YOs, and eventually went up to 12 sts between YOs. And, last but not least, I mirrored the direction the spirals travel in because I love symmetry (stay tuned for more symmetry!).

Week of Socks!: Smockings

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Like the socks I posted yesterday, this is a pattern I've been toying with for awhile and finally got around to actually fleshing out and knitting up. I think these came out pretty well, too.

Yarn - Claudia Hand Painted (100% wool, 175 yards) fingering weight in Ingrid's Blues. I've actually had this yarn for years, Jon bought it as a Valentine's day present for me awhile back, so it's all special and stuff.

Needles - Magic looped on size 1 Addi Turbos.

Pattern - I wanted to do something that had a little texture and visual interest, but I was afraid that the vibrancy of the colorway would overwhelm something very intricate. I'd been toying with the idea of incorporating smocking into socks for awhile, and it seemed like a good fit. I worked it toe-up (CO 24 sts, increased to 60) with a short-row heel (wrapped all but the center 10 sts).

All the smocking goodness was done on a 20 st-wide panel on the top of the foot/front of the leg. When I was working it, the panel was just done as a rib (p2, k1, p2, k1, p2, k1, p2, k1, p2, k1, p2, k1, p2 with the 5 remaining sts on either side done in stockinette). The sole/back of the leg were worked in plain stockinette, with one set of calf increases (inc 2 at center back every other row 5 times) about 6" up the leg. The cuff was done in about an inch or so of p2, k1 rib.

The smocking itself was done as a finishing technique after the whole thing was all knitted up. I used this as a rough starting point, and it basically entailed threading the leftover yarn up six stitches and wrapping the seventh stitch together with the knit stitch to the immediate right of it. I really like the way it turned out, the closeup above gives you a sense of how it looks unstretched and the top photo is how it looks when you wear it.

Week of Socks!: Split Cable socks

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I really really like this pair. I think this might be the highlight of Week of Socks! for me. It's just one of those nice little projects where I love everything about the end product, and I think they'll get a lot of wear this winter.

Yarn - This is from Zeitgeist yarns, and it's lovely. It's super soft (though slightly thicker than I usually use) and the shifting shades of blue are subtle and complicated at once. Really good stuff, I definitely recommend checking out her yarns. And her blog is awesome, too.

Needles - Like I said, it's on the slightly thick side, so I magic looped it on size 2 Addi Turbos.

Pattern - This one I totally made up from scratch. I've been batting around this idea for a good, long while and kept tinkering with it until I had the perfect yarn for it. I worked them toe-up (CO 28 sts, increases are done in 1x1 rib pattern on the top up to 56 sts that eventually feeds into the cable panels, you can see it if you look closely at the photos) with a gusset and a sort-of dutch heel (with the cable pattern worked along the edges and the center part of the heel just knit in regular stockinette with no slipped stitches).

Calf shaping was added by increasing 2 sts at the center back every other row three times when the leg was 6" long and once more when it was 8" long. The cuff is just an inch or so of 1x1 ribbing.

The cables twists on the sides of the foot/heelare simple mirrored braids, and they join when the leg starts into a more complicated 6-stranded cable panel along the outsides of the leg. Eventually, I'll chart it out more thoroughly and post it so I can make more of these bad boys.

Week of Socks!: More Jaywalkers for me

This is the second pair of jaywalkers I've made for myself (here's the first pair). I finished these sometime in May, I believe, and rather like the way they turned out.

Yarn - Spunky Eclectic¹ skinny superwash sock yarn in Dinah. This yarn was a total impulse purchase and when it arrived in the mail I wasn't really sure what to do with it. I wasn't sure I really liked the colors after all and it looked all wrong when I rolled it into a ball. But I actually really like the way it knit up. Sometimes yarn surprises you that way - there are some skeins I've bought that are just ridiculously beautiful int heir natural skein-ish state and then look kind of wonky in actual knitted garment form, and this one was quite pleasantly the reverse.

Needles - It was indeed quite skinny sock yarn, and I believe I magic looped it on 47" size 0 Addi Turbos.

Pattern - The ubiquitous Jaywalker pattern. I mean, it's ubiquitous for a reason, right? It's easy and it looks great with crazy hand-dyed yarn like this. I made these mods (and they are about the same as always):

• Went toe-up this time instead of top down.
• I worked a short-row heal instead of doing the whole gusset song and dance. This helped nicely to keep the yarn from pooling, actually.

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¹I totally joined the Spunky Eclectic sock yarn club, so I guess that whole out-of-yarn-thing is now officially being rectified.

Week of Socks!: Fargyles for Jon

I have seven brand news pairs of socks to present, because I did knit this summer, but through a combination of being away from my computer for extended periods of time, not being able to find my camera, not being able to find my camera's USB cord, laziness, etc., I haven't found the time to post them. But today, while I caught up with last (and increasingly terrible) season of Heroes, I've finally finished them and taken some barely adequate photographs of them. Yay, progress!
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(tiny tissue box included in photo for scale. Jon's feet are gigantic)

I finished these ages ago, sometime in late April/early May. But, actually wrangling Jon into taking pictures with them on was hard, since he's constantly wandering off or losing them or both. In any case, what this means is that I am (more or less) done with the sock queue! Check it:

1. Charade socks for Brian
2. River Rapid socks for Jennie
3. Vinnland socks for Van (permanent hiatus)
   
4. Millicent socks for Sam
5. Rhiannon socks for Mandy
6. Spiral boots socks for Leila
   
7. Socks for Mom
8. Socks for Stepdad
9. Something sockish for Dani (possibly booties?)
   
10. Indestructible socks for Jon

Awesome. Finally. Guess this means I need to start a new one, though. Which, since I am now officially out of sock yarn (the Week of Socks flood of productivity ate through my stash), means I need to buy more yarn. Food for thought. But back to the socks:

Yarn - The foot/leg were worked in Peace Fleece DK (70% wool, 30% mohair). It took one skein in violet (Jon specifically requested purple socks). But, as his feet are massive, there wasn't quite enough to go around, so I did the toes/heels with some Knitpicks Swish DK (123 yards, 100% superwash merino) in mist leftover from these. The Peace Fleece, in addition to being a total hippie yarn that tries to end what's left of the cold war, is pleasantly sheep-smelling. Lots of lanolin.

Needles - magic looped 'em on my trusty 40" size 3 addi turbo circulars.

Pattern - Based it off the Fargyle pattern from Knitty, which is a nice mindless sort of pattern if you don't mind all the purling. I made the following modifications:

• I did them toe-up instead of top-down.
  
• I worked an afterthought heel instead of a dutch heel/gusset.
• The original pattern calls for a 23 stitch wide fargyle pattern, and I increased this to 30 stitches. I just took the logic of the existing pattern and made it bigger for the most part.
  

The perfect video game is Rock Band.

Well, perfect for me, anyway. Because I suck at most controller-based video games (not Wii, though, where my tendency to jerk around like a twitchy idiot actually helps), and I compulsively sing along to music and I really like playing it, too. Or, in this case, pretending to play it. Add to that the ability to make and play dress up with avatars how who cool hair options and I'm done for.

It all started last month when I went home to Texas for a week or so. First it was "hey guys, nice to be back."

Then: "Oh, is that a plastic baby guitar used for that game with the flying notes and what have you?"

Then: "Hey, I'm kind of not sucking at the drums, here..."

And finally (over and over): "So...if we're not doing anything...WHO'S UP FOR SOME ROCK BAND?! IAMIAMIAM!!"

And it hasn't really stopped. I sent jon out for an Xbox 360 literally the day we flew back into Michigan. I can now play most songs on hard on all three instruments (and a couple of songs on expert. The really easy ones, but still) for both Rock Band 2 and The Beatles: Rock Band. And sometimes I balance the microphone on some jars on the coffee table and sing along while I play my plastic baby guitar. Sometimes, people walk by my window and I feel terribly conspicuous about it, but...I mean...I'm still sitting there doing it anyway. Turns out I do a mean Ringo Starr impression. In the right octave and everything. Thanks, man voice.

What are all those things on the sidebar, anyway?

Just in case you were wondering, since I never did break it down or anything, here's a fairly comprehensive of what I've been writing/what stage it's in/etc:

The Border Wars:
Ah, the genesis of the Jarthenverse. This set of stuff is the most closely tied to Jarthen, the Border Wars, and where this whole thing began.

Border Wars: Book 1
Finished, for the most part! Being read by fabulous beta readers all over and getting last minute feedback before it's finalized. It has a storied career, starting from the infamous prologue and eventually getting totally torn apart. Still needs a good title, though.

Border Wars: Book 2
In the late stages of some pretty intensive planning right now (stay tuned for a more fully fleshed out post on this). I have written a decent chunk of it, but who knows how much of that will actually make it into the actual text? Look for posts of the first draft to start popping up over here sometime in the next two-three months. I think this book is going to kick ass, I really do.

Border Wars: Book 3
Still sort of in the primordial ooze stages. We do have an ending in mind for it all and know who survives until the end and who doesn't, so that's something.

The Raven and the Dove
This is really Moshel's story - it tracks him from adolescence up through the end of the Border Wars. I rather like it (despite the fact that it's a sweeping grand romance sort of thing and aside from Dr. Zhivago those don't really tend to be my bag) but it definitely needs work. But that work really has to wait until the actually Border Wars books are done, since it overlaps with them a good deal. The ending is my favorite ending I've ever written, though.

Jarthen's Travails novella
Book 2 is starting 2-3 years after Book 1 and Jarthen's had a bit of a time of it in the interim (he gets found at a slave market in the Elvo-Felintark Empire...how does he get there? This novella hopes to answer that question!). It's got some loose outlines to its name already, and there are plans to publish it along with a truly fabulous memoir of Atelon Scrudton Jon's been writing the hell out of in the lull between Book 1 and Book 2.

The Satyr Novita:
This is a set of four interrelated novellas that span several generations and track the changes undergoing satyr society. The gist is that they're from the mountains and space there is tight, so they send people into exile whenever they've had a child. The satyrs are stuck down with the rest in the Jarthenverse until their kid has grown up enough to have their own kid and comes down to tell them they can go back. And eventually, this whole cycle gets totally undermined. It's a little wacky for that alone, I guess, but it's also all written in a series of scenes done in first-person present tense (because I felt the satyrs had a sort of peculiar way of experiencing the flow of time) with no chapter breaks or what have you. I think it works. This one, by the way, is actually ready for other people to start reading it. So if you feel like it (no pressure) and you don't mind a few spoilers regarding the Border Wars, drop a comment and I'll send it to you (but, seriously, no pressure).

Johannes
The first novella centers around Johannes's exile (he's the satyr Rethnaki and company hitch a ride back across the Fethil with, by the way) and it overlaps a good deal with the Border Wars books. He doesn't quite see the end of it all but he gets pretty close and a lot of it hasn't appeared in the Border Wars books as of yet. But it's all really a backdrop for him more than an actual plot. The actual plot revolves around his attachment to a few non-satyrs which is a sort of no-no to begin with, but especially his relationship with Parlandor (an elf), who it turns out, can speak his language. Which he and everyone else were always taught no one but them could learn. Johannes is easily one of the most cereberal and articulate characters I've ever written.

Abraham
Abe is Johannes's son, and this one tracks his exile, too. He runs into Parlandor and eventually teaches him everything his father didn't teach him -- something that he's pretty sure will lead to the other satyrs either excommunicating him or killing him (because the satyrs? totally have their own badass assassins).

Yohanni
Yohanni is Parlandor's daughter. She inherited her father's ability to speak the satyr's language and ends up spending most of her formative up in the mountains with them, and they have very ambivalent feelings about her being there since she's an elf and all. Half-satyrs, see, are totally not kosher, so to live with them she sort of has to give up having a family (or even, really, anything more than friendship). While she's in exile, she manages to secure more land for them which she hopes will ease the pressure and make exiles unnecessary, which doesn't go as well as she hopes. She eventually founds her own village in the mountains where she takes a husband of her own and ends up adopting a half-satyr brought to her by an assassin.

Kellibin
The half-satyr Yohanni adopts grows up and essentially exiles himself, of his own free will. He ends up running with pirates, having a whole mess of children, and adopting a bunch of half-satyrs the assassins start bringing to him. And when they start refusing to kill the half-satyrs, the cycle has fundamentally broken down. There's a lot of references to The Tempest scattered throughout this one, it felt appropriate.

City of Mages -- First Generation:
So, the City of Mages is introduced in the first Border Wars book very breifly as a happening, cosmopoliton, culture-clashy sort of place. The kind of place ripe for identity issues and interesting cultural interactions -- in short, my kind of place. This set of stuff centers around a group of what are essentially street urchins (most of them mixed race) living in the City around the end of the Border Wars.

Kellidion Novella (Prequel)
Kellidion (a full red elf) used to be the leader of the Natives, that band of street urchins mentioned above that the bulk of the characters involved in this set of stuff are part of. But at some point, he decided to skip out fo the City and join up with the Rebel Army. This novella tracks his reasons for it and develops him as a character through the perspective of those around him. Kellidion, by the way, is a supporting character in the Border Wars: Book 2. This one's pretty much done and polished.

First Book
This takes place in the space between Border Wars Books 1 and 2 (and was originally conceptualized as a set of short stories that could be posted on the Jarthen blog in the lull between them. That has not come to fruition). The planning for this was very, very different than the planning I do for the Border Wars books, and the first draft was definitely internally consistent, and readable, but ultimately, I think it was just too much book for one book. Three loosely related plot lines developed (plot 1: Dran, a red elvish gambler, pisses off the wrong people and gets assassins set on him; plot 2: Ezra, a half-human, half-red elvish violinst falls for a satyr named Gabe which gets a bit awkward when it turns out that this is a big no-no and Gabe gets an assasin set on him; plot 3: Dran gives up gambling and turns into a private investigator), each of which could be unraveled and developed more fully into their own books or novellas. So that's what I'm doing now -- splitting it apart and trying to figure out what to do with it all. Right now, I'm rewriting Plot 2 (surprise, surprise! It's a gay love story. Because I love branching out, obviously) from multiple perspectives and beefing up a subplot involving a kid with drug issues related to it. I think it will turn out well, but it's an organic, slow thing that looks like it's going to require me writing about three times more text than will actually make the final cut.

Second Book
This centers around the same basic group of characters as the first book, but right after the end of the Border Wars, so it's set about ten years later. I'm still very much feeling out where this one if going, because the original dominant plot line I thought I was going to use wasn't working. There's a couple of subplots (one, actually, involving Moshel. He gets around.) that are developing nicely, but I can't say there's really all that much to say about it yet.

Pirate Book
Alright, so this is that plotline that I thought I was going to use for the second book and didn't. It's now developing into it's own self-contained story. I cut it out of the other book because it was turning into a very narrow narrative focusing on a guy named Nuri (a silver elf who ends up the business partner of that red elf who stops gambling) and his past catching up with him in the form of a pirate he knows a lot better than he wishes he did. It just wasn't gelling with the sort of ensemble-cast thing the other book has. But it's coming along pretty well, I'm about 80 pages in and approaching the final chunk of it (I'm letting that final chunk of it percolate for a bit). There's a lot of interesting things going on with the fluidity of identity and the various instrumental uses of sexuality and things like that.

Po and Ezra Novella
Ok, so I stuck this one here but it really works as a bridge between the first generation stuff and the second generation stuff. It's a fairly in depth exploration of the relationship between Ezra (that halfie violinst from the first book) and Po (a healer introduced as a supporting character in the first book) pretty far down the line. Remember those exiles the satyrs go through? Well, eventually they end, and eventually Ezra's satyr lover's ends and he goes back up to the mountains and leaves Ezra behind. This novella jumps back and forth between Ezra and Po's perspectives as the two of them deal with the fallout this major shift causes in both their lives and their relationship with each other as they approach middle age. It's very much finished, and pretty polished.

City of Mages - Second Generation:
This set of stuff traces the lives of the children of the folks from the first generation of the City of Mages and othersaround that age group. It's taking place a good 100-200 years after the end of the Border Wars, so the lay of the land is a bit different. A number of characters in this set were first introduced int he Po and Ezra novella.

The Refugees
Remember how I said I meant for that first City of Mages book to come out as a set of short stories and it didn't? Well I meant for this one to be a novel and it came out a set of short stories. Funny how that happens. Anyway, it's a bout a set of mixed-race young adults in the City of Mages from all sorts of backgrounds, and the stories more or less deal with their relationships with each other. But it also shows a burgeoning movement to claim their identites as mixed-race individuals, develop a community, assert themselves through various forms of expression as well (Jon keeps referrring to it as the "Elvish Harlem Renaissance"). Each of the stories is from a different persepective, but the same cast of characters shows up over and over again, so there are a few plot threads that get played out across a number of stories. This has sex, drugs, and what passes in a pre-industrial society for rock and roll. And it's finished and polished enough for someone other than me to read it if you're interested.

Reader and Apprentice
This one's a bit of a doozy. It features the single most autobiographical character I've ever written and it's not the easiest thing for me to write, actually. Well, no, I take that back, it's really easy for me to write, but the stuff of the writing itself is not always things I really want to admit to myself. That said, I think it could turn out to be very, very good. I generally feel about the stuff I'm writing that it's entertaining and well-executed but not that it's really 'good' by some imaginary litrary ruler. This one might be. With a bit of patience and elbow grease, it could be. I'm working on finishing up the first draft, though, so I'll let you know if I still feel that way after it's all done.

No spring chicken, me (but that's alright)

I turned the big 2-5 yesterday, which puts me solidly in my mid-twenties. Last year, when Dani hit this milestone, I taunted her mercilessly and informed her over and over again that she was old. There were many jokes about broken hips made. And so, this year she returned the favor.

This is only underscored by the fact that I have been introduced around the psych department as "one of our advanced doctoral students." When did that happen? I don't think I was advanced last year. There's a similar thing happening in my grad union, for which I am one of two Solidarity and Political Action co-chairs. And one of three of the officers who actually remembers the last contract negotiation. So it's always like, "well, you, X and Y were there. Let's ask the old-timers."

This whole old-timer thing isn't bad, understand, I'm having no crisis about the fleeting nature of youth or anything. It just...sort of...snuck up on me. Damn you, time, and your unstoppable forward progression!

OK, now that that's out of my system...birthday news! Since Friday, I have done exactly three things: play The Beatles: Rock Band, watch Planet of the Apes and its numerous sequels of varying quality, and get this tattoo.

old-timey quote for an old-timey gal

It's from (not so shockingly, considering) Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (no whales are involved), which I highly recommend if you've never read it. It's brilliant. And I like it, especially the end (which is where the quote is from) and the dead-letter office passage, because it brings up a lot of interesting questions about the insignificance of life and the paradoxcial myopic importance it holds for us anyway. Why does polite society matter? Because we think it does. So, does it really matter at all? Perhaps not, suggests Bartleby, but it is sort of the only thing holding us together. Maybe that makes it matter enough. As a psychologist, I find it to be a work of fiction that addresses the underlying motives for social constructions and why we tend to get so profoundly disturbed when someone doesn't buy in to said social constructions. I have to admit, one reason why it resonates with me so much is that there's as much Bartleby in me as there is the lawyer. It's a tension I face every time I go to (what I consider) another useless meeting and one of the underpinnings of my now-legendary avoidance of my phone. In any case, it seemed a fitting if highly nerdish tattoo to get.

A final note: I will update this blog! It will happen! I have posts planned, see?

• a discussion on Rock Band in general and how I'm terribly addicted to it
• Fat Girl Face Off '09
• the Decemberists in concert
• the planning of Jarthen: Book 2
• how writing an autobiographically-based character unnerves me
• many, many socks (a week of socks! huzzah!)
  

Rewrites Re-railed And Jontastic tidbits

Good news! Jon decided to go with my Massive Proposed Change. The rewrites are back up and hurtling towards the finish line. I still don't think I'll finish before the first because I doubt I can write six more chapters and then go back and change everything else in the next 29 hours. I'm shooting for sometime next week. So, stay tuned for that.

Also, this weekend we were visiting our friends in Chicago (those of the vegan Thanksgivings) and Jon was really in top form. Check it:

• He coined the term 'parson berries', which are cherries, specifically those which have been pitted by Jon with his bare hands ("You see, they're called parson berries because only parsons have the time to sit idle plucking pits from cherries on a weekend," he explained.)
• He declared that he wouldn't be gay if he was in love with himself, he would instead be an egosexual.
  
• He referred to me on more than one occasion as "an intemperate witch."
  
  

Rewrites Derailed

I've been meaning to write a post about how the rewriting of Jarthen Book I is going and now is as good a time as any. Mostly because I'm kind of stumped by it.

Here's what happened: Jon and I compiled Book I into a massive 270 page word document, reread and annotated it mercilessly, and then compared. When I was rereading it, I was trying to conserve as much as what we'd already written as I could, but when we touched base and started divvying up the sections, it became very clear very quickly that there were some really major changes that needed to happen. Characters were mercifully renamed with less retarded-sounding monikers. Some characters were dropped completely. Other characters were aged. A race of sentient beings was dropped since we weren't really using it. We made a really major revision regarding the central characters and POV. Dialects were made less impenetrable.

Jon's been tackling the Bertronius side of things and I've been working on the Jarthen side of it. I essentially rewrote the first half of the book from scratch. I think I used maybe about five pages total of text for the first seven or so chapters from the stuff we've published over on the blog. The general storyline is the same and everything, but the tone was wrong and given all those aforementioned shifts it was really just easier to scrap it and start fresh. It was going pretty well for awhile there, I was clipping along and feeling good about it and I was totally on track to finish the rewrites by the end of the month, which is what we were shooting for. Looks like for the first time ever, Jon's going to make that deadline and I'm not. The shame.

And now I'm derailed. At first, I thought it was because the pirate book and this other book that came out of nowhere (more City of Mages 2nd generation stuff) were sucking up my time and brainpower, but it's not really their fault. The reason those were easier to write was because I was slamming up against an invisible wall with the rewrites everytime I tried to work on them.

Yesterday, I finally caved and proposed a truly major change to Jon about it. One that I think might make more sense in the long run by sort of fundamentally undermines his initial conception of the Jarthenverse. He said he needed to sleep on it (that's how big it is). So, I guess I'll just wait it out and hope for the best, but either way I'm sort of screwed:

• Change is not made - still have to deal with the hurdles that have been derailing me, and likely will be plagued with doubts regarding said change for the rest of the books

• Change is made - sweet, things make more sense now! Except that I have to go back and rewrite substantial chunks of stuff that's already done.

Damn it.

Dear dudes who complied Time's 100 Best Movies List,

Man, do I have a bone to pick with you. I understand that narrowing down all of cinema to an essential list of the top 100 films is tricky business. In all honesty, I think I'd have some difficulty making a top 100 list just out of movies I personally own. 100 slots is really not that many, when it comes down to it, and it's likely a thankless task the two of you were saddled with.

Still, though, you botched it. And not just botched it, but botched it in some really irritating ways. Just to set the record straight and to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I'll now lay out my top five movies of all time ever ever (no easy feat):

1) Wages of Fear
2) Rashomon
3) The Duellists
4) Lawrence of Arabia
5) The Seventh Seal

Let's discuss that list for a second. Three out of the five are in black and white. Only two are in English. Not a single one was made during my lifetime. That is a list that could only come from some practically housebound film geek who didn't get out enough as an adolescent loner (which is a shamefully accurate description of me). And not just any loner film geek, but a film geek of the rather art-snobby pretentious variety. A hipster-style film geek who has never seen American Pie. In short, one of your own. Yet, you still managed to piss me off.

Reason 1
Would you like to know how many of those five films up there you included on your list-to-end-all-lists? Huh?

One.

You gave Lawrence some props, and I thank you for that. And, hey, The Duellists is a personal favorite of mine but I understand that there are bigger, better movies out there, so I can let that one slide. Wages of Fear is a woeful oversight on your parts, but hell, it's kind of been a woeful oversight on everyone and their mother's parts since it was made. I honestly don't understand why it's never been more widely viewed than it is, but it isn't, and though I don't approve I can't say its omission surprised me.

But Rashomon? What the hell is wrong with you? It's goddamn Rashomon! It's a landmark in so many, many ways! The direct shots of the sun through the trees! The multiple perspectives and retelling and non-traditional narrative structure that was so awesomely, shockingly new at the time that it's been done and re-done now into cliche! Mifune while he was still young and untamed and really, freakishly hot! I mean, come on.

The same goes for The Seventh Seal. It's the ultimate Bergman, the Bergman to end all Bergmans. For folks not so into slow-moving subtitled films it has been and always will be synonymous with bizarre art house movies. The characterization of Death is so inescapable and prevalent that people who have never seen the movie and have no intention of ever seeing the movie can recognize it instantly when it's being referenced. And on top of that, it really is one of Bergman's most watchable films. I'm totally not kidding -- it's got sex and Death and death and plagues and Max von Sydow's bony-ass face and a rather wicked sense of humor all wrapped up in one fairly straightforward tale. How could you make any film list and not have it float to the top? Just...wow.

Reason 2
Here's where I try to give you some benefit of the doubt and end up failing. You ready? Ok, here we go. So you didn't include Rashomon, but you did include to others by Kurasawa: Ikiru and Yojimbo. Now, being a huge Kurasawa fan (and I mean, like, rabid - I have twelve of his films, no exaggeration), I was all like, yeah! Ikiru! Yojimbo! Woot!

And then, I was like...Seven Samurai much? Because, let's face it, as awesome as Ikiru and Yojimbo are, Seven Samurai is the Kurasawa film to end all Kurasawa films. And if there were slots enough for two Kurasawas, we go right back to square one with Rashomon.

Here's the problem I have with your Kurasawa choices in particular, above and beyond the fact that in his wide and varied ouvre (see? playing your game here with the fancy, pretentious film-geek lingo, fellas) these two films are really second-stringers. They are fabulous films -- I am not undercutting them in any way, and in fact I was all sorts of excited to see Ikiru in particular get some love because I think it's horribly overlooked more often than not -- but they are not the ones he is most famous for. And he's not famous for them because they weren't massive game changers and sprawling opuses (opii? who knows.) like a couple of other films of his I have previously mentioned.

We run into a similar issue with Bergman. There are two Bergmans on the list: Persona (which I am 100% on board with) and Smiles of a Summer Night. Dudes. Smiles of a Summer Night, really? Honest and true, you're going with that over our ever-present chess-playing buddy Death and co.? That's just so wrong. Smiles of a Summer Night is like Bergman's version of a Lifetime movie. I've seen it, I know all about his little foray into comedy and sexcapades. And you know what? He should've stuck to the dour, depressing descents into madness like he was good at. I...just, well, I just don't even think it's that good a movie, frankly. And with that catalogue to choose from, I mean, jesus. If you really have a beef with The Seventh Seal, at least give that other spot to the Through a Glass Darkly/Winter Light/The Silence trilogy (hey, you collapsed Godfather I and II and the LOTR, you can do that here) or Cries and Whispers or Wild Strawberries. Those are Bergman movies. Real Bergman movies.

There are other examples of this weirdness, too. For Kurbrick, you nailed it with Dr. Strangelove, but then passed over 2001: A Space Odyssey and Full Metal Jacket for Barry Lyndon. Again, it's not like I don't like Barry Lyndon, but it's just not up there with the other two. Or even up there with A Clockwork Orange, which while more recognizable and famous, is probably not as good or important a film as the others. You went with Chungking Express over other Wong Kar-Wai's, and while it's a lovely and charming little thing, it begs the question of whether you've actually seen In the Mood for Love. And the nail in the coffin: Purple Rose of Cairo over Annie Hall. how do you sleep at night? Apparently not with Annie Hall, and so I guess it sucks to be you.

You see a pattern developing here? I do. This is like a weird, paternalistic way of peppering the list with 'forgotten gems.' Movies that the rest of us really should have seen that just never get their due. Or something. Because anyone who goes with Smiles of a Summer Night over anything else Bergman did is just throwing it around to prove they can. It's like when hipsters say they only like the bands no one else has ever heard of. It's just showing off for the hell of it. And I find it rather condescending, frankly, because I can't believe you're actually serious about some of those choices, considering.

Reason 3
Like I said before, 100 spots is really not that many. How then, dare I ask, did the 1986 The Fly make it in there? No room for anything by the Marx brothers (the goddamn Marx brothers!) or anything by Sergei Eisenstein or apparently by any black people at all (not a single Spike Lee movie? Really?), but, sure, Jeff Godblum with a fly's head get's a pass.

That's just not right. So not right. I can't be alone in thinking this.

Now, I can see that you got a little playful, there, with your listings. I appreciate the sentiment behind Drunken Master II, although it wouldn't have been the kung fu movie I'd have chosen (hell, give it to the original Drunken Master if you've got to give it to Jackie Chan, otherwise there's always Enter the Dragon), and I think it's impressive that you've got I believe not one, but two Bollywoods in there. I honestly do. I can even kinda sorta see where you were going with The Fly -- something along the lines of hey! let's include some guilty pleasure-ish horror flick!

To which I respond: flies over zombies? Because I think anything by George A. Romero can do the double duty of genuinely influential and important historical film/awesomely gory guilty pleasure, plus the added benefit of the Living Dead. Ok, maybe you've got a shared zombie phobia or something. Whatever. How about Rosemary's Baby, then? There's just so much genuinely right and deliciously wrong with that one. How is The Fly going to top that?

But when it comes down to it, I don't even know if I can support you on this, either. Because if my back was against the wall, there's no way I could look at myself in the mirror if I took anything I just mentioned over Dr. Zhivago. Which you left off your list. In favor of The fucking Fly.

Conclusion
Your list fails. Not just because you left off any number of my all-time favorites, but because it's full of purposely irreverent inclusions that seem to serve no purpose but to make it look like you're trying to tell us that a) you've seen way more movies than anyone else and the obvious choices are just too obvious for you and b) you're really not a movie snob - honest! You like all kinds! To which I say, that's just obnoxious. Give the greats the credit they're due, man.

-- a fellow film fan

PS -- all ranting aside, I do agree with you on leaving Gone With the Wind off the list. That is just the most overrated piece of schlock ever.

The Ever Elusive Short Story

So, I think I may have finally written a short story. I think so. It's a bit touch and go and I can't really say for sure until I get some outside confirmation on this, but all signs point to yes.

It's part of a set of stories dealing with a bunch of mixed-race kids in the City of Mages that takes place about 80-90 years after the end of the Jarthen books. We might end up throwing them up on the Jarthen blog, actually, since there not really any Jarthen-related spoilers in them. Anyway, these stories, I don't really know what they count as. They're pretty squarely in the short story range in terms of length (only one gets past 10,000 words, which for me, is a rather big change of pace), but in terms of structure things get a bit murkier.

See, the same loose cast of characters shows up in story after story, so the characterization gets diffused and spread across them. And there are three, maybe four storylines that get picked up and developed across a few of the stories. I think there really is just the one section (incidentally, the last section) that could be counted as a standalone. There's a little bit of characterization that's borrowed from the other sections, but it's minor and you probably can read it in isolation and still catch everything just fine. And the plot of it is totally unintegrated with the rest of them. The themes are congruent, sure, but nothing that happens in it happens because of what's in the other stories. I...I think it's a real, honest-to-god short story.

But, having said that, I have no idea what the rest of them are. To call them short stories, when part of the point of that form of fiction is precisely to present a self-contained plot and develop characters within that limitations of that length, feels a little like cheating. But I really don't think it's a novel, either. There's no overarching, unified plot, just a few threads that intersect and reveal themselves over the course of a few sections. But, it's not like the stories build on each other in a clear, progressive way.

I don't know what the hell it is. It's 10 thingies plus a real live short story.¹

I still kind of like it, though. I still think, despite it's rather schizoid and somewhat unclassifiable form it's readable and interesting. I'm biased, though. I'm not one of those people who doesn't like the stuff they write, I tend to spend a few hours hear and there rereading sections of the books I've finished just for the sake of reading them. Which is maybe a little embarassing to admit. But still, point is, I think in it's weird flipper-baby (Dani, if you're reading this, that's a shout out for you) state it still kind of works.

But that one story, it works all by itself. I'm so proud.
_________________
¹Ok, I'm also rather proud that it ended up with 11 sections instead of 10 or 12. I have a weird, slightly OCD thing with numbers, especially multiples of 5. But I also like multiples of 12, if multiples of 5 are unavailable for whatever reason. Like, I'll buy extra things in stores just because it feels wrong to only buy 3 items. Because 5 is just so awesome. So, I'd specifically planned this for 10 sections, but one of the characters kind of took on a life of his own and got his own section, so I revamped it to 12 sections, but then this other character totally skipped out of town on me and couldn't really get worked in and I just...settled on 11. It's a prime number, and usually me and prime numbers are like oil and water. But I'm alright with this. I think it's a good sign.

I swear it's the weirdest and most OCD tick I have. Well, that and compulsively writing things in my planner (this post is in my planner, for instance). Other than that, I've got a clean slate.

Random and very scattered update

1) I have knitted objects to blog about again! 1 and 1/2 pairs of socks, actually, and the one pair has been done for awhile. I just need to get around to taking pictures of them.

2) I saw the Doves in concert last week. I actually bought the tickets the day the advanced sales were available, a good while before Kingdom of Rust was actually released just on faith. Because they may be my favorite band. They're at least in the top five, but I think they may be number 1. There were fantastic, just buckets of awesome, and played a good wide sampling of stuff from all of their albums, which was nice. And the tickets were ridiculously cheap -- $20! $20 bucks and I was right up to the edge of the stage! What you have to understand is that these dudes are huge in England, like with number one albums and such, and here no one but me and a handful of hipsters (of which, I grudgingly accept, I am one) pay any attention to them. Tell you what, I was glad to be American that night.

The opening act was a band called Wild Light, which I think I would have enjoyed more if I'd just listened to them instead of having to watch them, too. See, thing is that they (well, three out fo the four of them, the drummer stayed put) kept randomly switching instruments between songs - practically every song - and I just wanted to yell out that they should maybe have planned their set better and each members' facility with bass, guitar, and keyboards was growing less impressive with each handoff. Also, they kept turning around when they played and showing their skinny asses shoved into ludicrously tight pants for no discernible reason. Which was distracting. I kept worrying that they would get blood clots.

But the best part is that one of the multi-insturmentalists bore a rather striking resemblance to Trent Lane from Daria. Good show, that.

I also kind of think the dude behind him looks like Jonny Lee Miller when he was all blond in Trainspotting.

3) I'm growing rather improbably attached to crayons. One of the characters (who is a sneaky surprise character that sort of popped up out of nowhere and is steadily taking things over. There's a looming blog post in that phenomenon, I think, so stayed tuned. If you're so inclined.) from the 2nd generation City of Mages thing I'm working on is a painter, and I have felt compelled to replicate what I imagine his style of portraits of the other characters would be if he existed. I'm not sure why, it's not like I'm terribly artistic. In any case, I have no paint, so I've settled for a somewhat strange mixture of a black sharpie and crayons. You can do a surprising amount with crayons if you get creative - lots of shading and using the direction of the strokes to heighten shapes and simulate thre dimensionality. I never knew that way back in the day. One thing though, all the colors are so damn bright that everything I do looks a little too pop art-ish. Because apparently children hate muted, rich dark colors and they don't make a box of crayons for adults who like to channel fictional elvish painters. Crazy world.

Where are the ladies?

I'm having this weird problem. I've mentioned before the preponderance of gay elves in the stuff I've been working on, which is a little odd, and leads to a lot of LGBT themes I may or may not be wholly qualified to discuss. Probably not. And generally, this doesn't bother me so much. But one problem with it has been that this means a lot of the stuff I've been writing inadvertently turns into a bit of a sausage fest.

In the course of everything I've written, there have been any number of strong female characters (especially in the first half or so of the surprise novel about the gay dudes) but these have largely been relegated to supporting roles. To my credit, they are not always just lame love interests pining away for dudes, but still, the point stands. In terms of main POV characters, I think I've only written three female protagonists in any real depth. One had her very own novella, which I actually think worked out rather well, and the other two are POV characters in a novel. One of those has a storyline that's fairly mushy and makes me vaguely uncomfortable, and the other dies halfway through the damn thing. I didn't want her to -- she's such a badass and isn't tied to traditionally feminine themes at all -- but she did. She totally got herself killed.

I'm working on something right now that still very much in the primordial ooze stages (as in, I'm not entirely sure what the structure is (novella? loosely structured novel? interrelated short stories -- probably not given my history with those) and I've subsequently been playing around with various POVs, which is kind of my favorite thing to do. Blame the years of psychology classes, I guess.) and I thought it would be a good way to work in some ladies, but so far that hasn't been the case, either. There's a minor character who's mostly kind of a ho, and two more major characters, one of whom is tied into a love subplot which I like, but still kind of too close to Lifetime territory for me to feel comfortable with her hoisting up the vag flag alone. And the other chick in it is awesome, but she's not really going anywhere in it. Dammit.

So, what's the deal? I figure people tend to have a range of POV characters they feel particularly comfortable writing from, or groups with whom they have a particular affinity, but why are mine by and large gay men? And more often than not, gay men who are bicultural, when I myself am just a straight white girl? I actually seem to find women harder to write than straight dudes, I'm not sure why, even after meticulously creating societies that are fairly gender egalitarian. I'm starting to wonder if this is something I should be a little worried about. It is an odd sort of drift, and I do think the inclusion of strong non-stereotypical female characters is an important thing. So why aren't there any in my stuff? This is something I really feel like might need a more methodological, explicit approach to fixing, where I make myself write something with lots of women in it that doesn't devolve into pillow fights and such and perhaps keep the gay dudes on th periphery instead of vice versa. But then it feels forces and weird.

Food for thought.

I love a good map.

Seriously, for someone like me who is a total logic/consistency fiend they are so necessary. It's like a cheat sheet - it tells you where you put things so you don't have to go wading through mountains of text, or how apart things are, or what borders what. All good things. The oldest map, Jarthen-wise, is not actually by my own hand, it was drawn by my friend Van two (maybe three?) Thanksgivings ago:

(this is a photo of the original I printed out, annotated, then scanned. It is a storied document.)

We drew this when Jon, Van, and I had a dispute about how big Elothnin was. Apparently, in that historic prologue, Jon had assumed it was rather small - maybe the size of Wales. The kind of place where battles happen between armies of tens of people. And I thought it was roughly the size of China. So, kind of a gap there. Van mediated us into settling on something about the size of the American West roughly the shape of the Indian subcontinent. The really lovely thing about this map, though, is that it gave us a chance to nail down the surrounding areas, those places outside of Jarthen and the Border Wars that had to exist (since it's not like Elothnin was a damn planet or anything) but hadn't really been discussed. Fun fact about this map: the provinces of Elothnin are outlined up there, but all the names we came up with (besides the Fethil, which was well established by that point) were so shitty that none of us wrote them down.


This is the most recent map. Partly I drew it because I firmly believe that despite what Jarthen and Queen Lilhelndine and Jon would have you beleive, Elothnin is not a goddamn empire. But the Elvo-Felintark Empire, is. And is totally sprawling and shit. But this really got drawn because I have a character that ends up traveling through it a good deal (starts in the City of Mages, hops down to Elothnin for a bit, then over to Shalakesh, then up to Shangri, then he runs around a bit in the Elvish Grasslands for awhile before making the long walk back to the City of Mages) and I literally just needed places for him to go. Period. Becuase even though I wrote a novel that is set in the Empire here for the first third of it and it is the only really nation besides Elothnin that we've developed I had no idea what was actually in it. Or how big it was. Or what (if anything) lay beyond it. I rather like the way it turned out -- especially Sparky the Sea Monster.


This, though, this is a beauty. This is a map of the City of Mages, probably my favorite spot we've written about. It's a bizarre place, built by a race of hermits who no longer live there, abandoned and repopulated with a whole mess of races that have turned it into the most cosmopolitan place in the Jarventherse. It's a place full of culture clashes and weird little cultures of its own, a great place to explore identity issues for sure.

And until I drew this map, I had no idea what it looked like. I've been filling it in as I go, noting who lives where, how far this shop is from that one, and so forth. Some of the dots up there have popped up over and over and over (Moshel's apartment, for example, is a point of interest in the book about the gay elves, shows up in the first City of Mages book and a scene or two in the still very unformed and amoeba-like scenes of the second City of Mages book, a novella about satyrs, and will likely at least be referenced in the second or third Jarthen book. It's a happening place. Not really, it's actually full of clocks and books and grumpy gay elves, but whatever.) and some of the dots I thought would appear but never did (Theo's apartment, I'm looking at you.). It's got multiple generations overlapping in it - for example, one character has lived in four different places labeled up there across hi life span. This map is basically always out when I'm working on the City of Mages stuff. This map is canon, I'd live and die by this map. Go, CoM map, go.

Maps that will likely be drawn at some point: Susselfen, Neerhemhind (with special attention to Elftown and Captfael Castle), Opleneer pre and post war, Tarquintia, possibly Norsa, the T'Langan archipelago in greater detail (and possibly full scope. I wonder what's east of the Erkenheld Forest?), and some continent on the other side of the world. Oh, we have plans for that. Oh yes. They involve black elves and slave traders, woot.

Non-sequitar rant: the horrors of spring

So, I have terrible allergies basically year-round. I have built up enough of a tolerance to Benedryl that I can take three or four at a time and not get sleepy. Which is kind of ridiculous. In the spring, it gets worse because things bloom and there's pollen and nature is awakening and what have you, which apparently my nose is not designed to handle. Even though it was designed by nature. Whatever. So, I usually take more anti-histamines than usual and throw a few decongestants and just go with it, and usually that works.

But for some reason, it is not working this year. I'm not sure what it is -- the crazy roller coaster Michigan temperature, the roofing work the landlord is doing on my apartment building, the cactus that has recently taken up residence on my desk, the Hand of God striking me down (via clogged nasal cavities) for my rampant and unrelenting blasphemy -- but it is ridiculously bad this year. I'm popping more pills than a bored WASPy housewife and burning through tissues like there's no tomorrow.

But the worst part is the sneezing, hands down. I'm sneezing in strings of five or six at a time, and they are always, always followed by a string of expletives just as long. Which makes me look like I have Tourette's. Thank christ the semester's over and I'm working from home most days. Still, though, it's only a matter of time before I drop the F-bomb in a lab meeting.

A Change of Course (or what I've been up to since Christmas)

So, as you may have noticed, there's been a dreadful lack of knitting content lately. Or any content lately. Now, I did finish the fargyle socks I was making for Jon and have yet to post about them, but that's a product of my inherent laziness and my inability to find my camera. And I'm working on a nice brown sweater with a really kickass nickline (it's all floppy and asymmetrical), but it's at that stage where you have to pay attention because you need to separate the stitches for the sleeves and join the body peices together and I just have been able to muster the attention for it. But I will. Because that neckline is the shit. You will see. What I mean to say is that I haven't given up knitting entirely, I've just cooled on it a bit.

And the reason for that is that all that time I used to use cranking out socks (or blogging about them once they were done) I now use to write fantasy fiction about elves. Usually gay elves. I don't really know why all my protagonists end up being male gay elves, but they do. And this is quite shocking to me (the writing part, not the gay elf part, that is perhaps not all that surprising).

See, I've always been a reader. I didn't really have a choice in the matter, I went straight from Red Fish, Blue Fish to Beowulf. I am so not kidding about that at all. My dad was a bit of a literature pusher, so I was the dorky kid reading The Mysterious Stranger and Canterbury Tales and Dune in, like, the fifth grade. Blessing and a curse. Anyway, to make a long story short, like most voracious readers I kind of secretly wanted to be a writer when I grew up. So, when I was seven or eight or so, I tried my hand at writing some short stories of my own. One, I remember, was set from the perspective of a robot. It was ver HAL 9000, or it would have been if I could get more than five pages of it out. Another one was about a group of anthropologists who unearth a robot (by the way, my robot fetish remains strong to this day). That one, too, went nowhere. I just couldn't ever seem to get anything to happen in them and there always seemed to be too many characters and not enough space for them. So I gave up, and for the next 15 years thought of myself as decidedly not a fiction writer. Just didn't have a knack for it. And that was that.

But then, Jon started the whole Jarthen thing and I pushed him, kind of hoping to live the glorious life of a fiction writer vicariously through him. I outlined with him, and made him do some worldbuilding, and edited the stuff he wrote. The worldbuilding I found I really enjoyed - check out the Jarthenpedia for proof. Over a hundred posts, all thoroughly categorized and linked up with each other. Jon was all "check it, you're creative!" And I was all "nah, I'm just a mega-dork making the Silmarillion to your Lord of the Rings and nobody really ever reads the Silmarillion except for those dudes who speak Elvish, do they?" And I thought that was that.

But then, I started writing Jarthen, too. And I sucked at it at first. Like, so so bad. All of my parts came out like a script -- a line about where the characters were and then endless, unadorned dialogue. But whatever, I kept churning it out and making Jon fill in the holes. But it was his story and the end result was his. No biggie. Still not a writer, really just a producer-of-dialogue-templates.

And things kept chugging along like that right up until last Thanksgiving when Jon and I decided that two of our relatively minor characters were going to hook up near the end of Book I (and I'd love to tell you who, but it hasn't been posted yet). And something inside me just sort of latched onto it - there was this moment that popped into my head when he said it, a scene so clearly drawn and totally visualized that it could have come straight out a movie and I couldn't shake it. Something about those two characters ending up together just made them so real all of a sudden, it revealed all these tensions and all these possibilities and all I wanted to do was write that scene right then.

I didn't though, because I couldn't bring myself to write anything out of order (I have since abandoned this). Instead, I used that week I had off for Christmas (remember? Back when I was a hermit?) and churned out 30-odd paged single spaced in order to get to it. Characters died without warning - Tlin was never supposed to die, he just did and I couldn't see to stop it - other characters made mush and still others got their little hearts broken all so I could get to this scene. And the scene was awesome. Well, it was alright, but I still love it and it was totally kickass to write it.

Anyway, something happened during my hermitage. It was like a switch flipped. Before that, writing had always been this incredibly slow, deliberate process guided by a ridiculously long outline. And after, it was this easy, effortless thing. Words just flew out of their own accord (not necessarily always good words, but words nonetheless). I finished my part of Book I within a month, and Jon did not. So, I sat around, frustrated and irritable, and started something else. Just a short story, I thought, about one of the gay dudes from that kickass scene that started all this off to begin with.

And then the strangest thing happened. The short story ended up being 213 pages long. It went from "oh, I think I'll just work on a little story" to "you know what, I think this really works better as a novella" to "fuck, this is a novel. What the hell?" Yeah, within ten days I'd churned out 113,491 words about those two gay elf dudes. After it was done, I wasn't really sure what to do with myself. Jon still wasn't even close to done with his half of Book I.

So I started something else. There's a character that's just about to be introduced in the Jarthen blog, he's only in two scenes, but he was one of those characters that just came out so fully formed that I kind of became infatuated with him. So I decided to write something about him - a novella that detailed his culture (he was not, in fact, gay or an elf) and his perspective on some of the scenes in the book. Luckily, it remained a novella. But his novella spawned another novella, and that one spawned another novella. And the three of them together, according to Wikipedia which at this point I would trust with my life, make up a novita. And by the end of February, there was another 160 pages in the can.

Jon was still not done with Book I. I was shocked at this point with my apparent unfettered prodcutivity. The seven-year-old inside me kept scowling and pointing out that all 373 pages I'd managed to write must be utter shit since I couldn't get out 5 way back in the day. I told this to Jon, who in his infinite, unflappable wisdom just shrugged and said maybe I just wasn't a short story writer.

I spent March compiling Book I (or what we had of it) into a manuscript and tidying up the blogs. Until I was struck by a scene for Book 2. A set of scenes for Book 2. A delicious storyline for Book 2 featuring (prepare yourself) gay elves! So I wrote a bit of that. But how much can you really write of that before you take over the book and it's no longer collaborative? So I put it down and twiddled my thumbs for a while. I started playing Warhammer Online. I became really obsessed with TV blogs. But I was, like, fiending for the writing. I was all nervous and twitchy, I practically had the shakes. I really, really needed to start something new.

But what? I wanted to write something that was in the Jarthenverse but not actually related to Jarthen. Both the things I'd written so far had overlapped to some degree with Book I, so I couldn't really get started on editing them until we finished not just Book I but Books II and III, as well. And I kind of wanted to do something we could possibly serialize in the inevitable gap between the end of posting for Book I and the start of posting for Book II. So I thought "Aha! I will write an interrelated set of short stories taking place in the City of Mages, because it's a cool place and we haven't really done much with it. And maybe if I do it all Martian Chronicles style I'll trick myself into actually getting out a short story!"

I started jotting down these ideas for plots and characters and places. And then some of the characters got a little clearer and I drew pictures of them and wrote out these overly elaborate backstories and I had ten or so within two weeks. And another ten or so after another week along with a map of the City (I'm sure at some point some or all of this will make it onto the blog). And a few days after that I started writing out these little scenes, a few pages here and there. Sometimes one character, sometimes another. No real direction or anything.

I honestly thought they'd work as short stories until the characters started popping up in each others' scenes and the storylines turned out not to be all that distinct after all. Yeah, so now I have a 190 page novel about assasins and identity crises and more gay elves.

Finally, Jon finished the book! So I edited the bejesus out of it really fast and Jon edited the bejesus of it much much slower and I was left bored and twitchy again. And now I have a novella that is essentially a prequel for the 190 page novel and 3/4 of a novella based on characters from that novel a good deal later down the line and about 30 odd pages of scenes that will likely become a sequel to it that has something to do with pirates. In the desert. Yeah, we'll see how that goes.

So, that's why I haven't been knitting so much. And I still can't bring myself to think of myself as a writer - it just feels wrong and off and patently untrue, kind of like I'm wearing a blue shirt backwards and telling you it's a white one. But I have been writing like it's the end of days. And as you can tell from this, I write at some length¹.

Bottom line is, I'll be blogging again but probably more about gay elves and cat people and typologies of magic than about socks and yarn and needle sizes. And this is mostly because otherwise it's all I talk about with Jon anymore and I think he's about to shoot himself if he hears me talk about so-and-so's difficulty accepting his sexuality because he's having problems integrating the warring cultural identities that come with being half-human and half-elf. He's a nice boy and I think he deserves a break. And blogs don't have feelings.
___________
¹This post is about four pages long single spaced.

I will post again soon

But for now I'm trapped in the Kingdom of Rust.

It is possibly the best album ever. I'm in a Doves coma.

My apologies.

First FO of 2009: Wheelie Socks for Dani

(click for bigger)

They are very, very, late, but Dani has her socks! And she loves them, too, which is nice for everyone involved. She should though, since I let her go through my socks and pick a pattern she liked and go through my sock yarn and pick what she wanted them made out of. That mercifully took the guesswork out of it for me. Of course, this means that the sock queue needs updating:

1. Charade socks for Brian
2. River Rapid socks for Jennie
3. Vinnland socks for Van
4. Millicent socks for Sam
5. Rhiannon socks for Mandy
6. Spiral boots socks for Leila
   
7. Socks for Mom
8. Socks for Stepdad
9. Something sockish for Dani (possibly booties?)
   
10. Indestructible socks for Jon

So close to done! Actually, I'm closer than this would suggest - for reasons to be detailed at some later point I think Van's socks are on permanent hiatus, and I've actually started Jon's socks (which will hopefully be durable) already. I will conquer you yet, Sock Queue!!

Yarn - Hipknits sock yarn in pudding (100 grams, 100% wool). I bought this yarn way, way back when I first started the sock queue because I liked the contrast in the colorway, and planned to make socks for myself from them. I even started a sock, once, but I didn't like the way the pattern looked and ripped it. It's found a better home now.

Needles - Addi turbo size 1 circulars. So trusty.

Pattern - I used this pattern, which I adapted from the Wheelie steering wheel cover from Knitty. I love this pattern, and will probably mae myself another pair of these socks. They're stretchy without being all lose and floppy and still fun to knit because of the dropped stitiches. Here are the modifications:

• I did these toe-up with a short-row heel instead of top-down.
  
• I shifted the pattern on the top of the foot over by one stitch, so that the first and last stitiches were purls instead of doing it as a straight 2x2 rib.
• I worked a 2x2 rib (no increases or drops) on the back of the leg for the five rounds at the start of the leg section. It just looked nicer this way.