Writing – The Knitting Doctor

Rebel

i had good intentions to do Nanowrimo this year. Since I’m retired, I really have no excuses*. For the uninitiated, this organization encourages people to write a 50,000 word draft of a novel during the month of November. Last year, there were around 380,000 participants. I’ve done this before, but it has been several years.

I sort of planned ahead, had a crazy-ass shell of a plot, and waded in on November 1st. November 3rd, not having fun. Came up with a totally different seat of the pants plot, started over. November 5th, still not having fun.

I have no illusions that I’m going to ever publish the great American novel. I finished my career, I don’t need a new one.

So I bagged the whole thing, and here is what I’m doing instead.

My book weight is hiding the author’s name, this is the Fiction Writer’s Workshop by Josip Novakovich. It is set out in clear chapters, with a ton of writing exercises for each section. So I started a new project file**, and am writing away.

It’s not a novel, and I may not hit 50,000 words by the end of the month, but I’m having fun, and learning some things in the process.

*No excuses, other than the fact that I can’t write my way out of a paper bag. There is that.

**I’m using a writing project app called Scrivener. If you’re a writer, check it out.

November Wrap Up

And December Goals, of course!

Here was November’s one big goal:

And here’s how I did:

Yee Hah! I wrote a 50,000 word novel in just under 30 days. I actually finished a little early, on Monday. It’s not ready for prime time by a long shot, so don’t even think of asking to read it. I am sort of jazzed up about writing again, so I might continue to work on it. Right at the moment, I’m ready to drown all my characters in the Atlantic Ocean. For those of you who have always wanted to write a novel, I would highly encourage you to try this next year. It’s loads of fun, and at the end of the month you end up with a rudimentary first draft.

I also managed to get myself to work every day that I was supposed to, I showered and slept, and I cooked a Thanksgiving dinner of gargantuan proportions for 11 people. For those of you on the edge of your seat about the gluten free gravy and how that worked out; I ended up using brown rice flour to make a roux for the gravy base. I made both varieties of gravy base the night before, and the brown rice version needed to be re-thickened with cornstarch, but otherwise it worked just fine.

Very little knitting or spinning took place, though I’m almost finished with that first mitten from the previous post.

So, December Goals:

Continue to write.

Finish the grey mittens, my hands are cold.

Get a grip on the True Blood Faery sweater sleeve problem. I need to mostly MacGyver the whole thing, so I might need some whiskey. I may not finish it, but I am going to figure out what to do with it.

That’s it. It’s December, the month of endless holiday nonsense and very long to-do lists. I’m not over-extending here. I’m off to dance around with my winner’s certificate a bit.

Mid-November Update

Now there’s a catchy title for you! Let’s see, what’s going on at the Knitting Doctor Palace?

Hardly any knitting. I started a pair of mittens a couple weeks ago. Here’s where I am now.

Yes, I know my desk is a mess. But those are damned pretty mittens. And since it’s gotten cold here, I need them.

By the way, when I’m Queen Of The World, I’m going to make it a rule that every electronic device that needs a cable to hook to your computer has to use exactly the same cable. I’ve got a cable for the phone, a different cable for the Kindle, and yet another cable for the camera. They are all white, the end that hooks to the computer is identical, and they lack any other identifying markings, so I spend at least twenty minutes trying to find the right one every time I try to download photos or charge the Kindle. I should come up with a system for keeping track of them.

Back to the update.

I’ve written 28,327 words so far for NaNoWriMo. To stay on schedule, I should be at 28,333 by the end of today, so I’m in good shape. Of course the damned thing makes no sense, but that’s not the point.

I have to work every day next week including the whole weekend, except I have Thursday off. I have a dozen people that will be around my Thanksgiving table expecting to be fed, not expecting me to brag about how many words I’ve written, so I probably won’t get much writing done. I suppose I should spend the next few days banking some extra words. Blog posts don’t count in the Nano world. Neither does a swell turkey dinner with all the trimmings. And we’re having three kinds of dressing, since I’m an overachiever. Most of the family like bread dressing, but some are gluten intolerant*, so there will be wild rice dressing too. And there is a contingent of Southerners that insist on cornbread dressing, though I think that’s heresy. I suppose that makes me a Yankee. I farmed out the making of the cornbread dressing to one of those Southerners.

Last but not least, you’ve all met Sweetpea, or at least you have if you’ve been here awhile following me around in my travels. She joined our family back in about 1994, I think, and has been on every world travel trip we’ve taken since then. She’s gotten dragged around on buses, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Oh, and boats. And river rafts, on a camping trip. She also went camping on a two week horse pack trip way back when in Montana. She traveled by pack mule on that trip. She has gotten dragged around the bedroom by a dog once, pawed by the cats, and I sleep with her. Every single night.

Up until today, she has never had a bath. There was that close call on the Mediterranean Cruise in 2006, here’s what I wrote then:

I promised a bear tale a few posts ago. Sweetpea is a rather unadventurous bear, at least up until now. Generally, she’s been satisfied to hang out in hotel rooms and ship cabins. Occasionally we get a room/cabin attendant with a sense of humor, and we find her perched in different places in our room when we get “home” at the end of the day. But that’s about as much fun as she usually has.

Until now. One day on the cruise we came back to our cabin after being out and around the ship, and found our room all cleaned up, as usual. Don’t ask me how, but the cabin attendants unerringly know when you’ve left the room, and whiz right in to tidy up and make the bed. This particular day I was rummaging around to find my knitting, and noticed that Sweetpea was gone. She was nowhere to be found. I rather frantically called the number listed on the card that our attendant had left. I found that she was on a break, and I had reached room service. They listened quite patiently to my rather lunatic-sounding story of the missing teddy bear, and I could almost hear the eye-rolling and snickering in the background, though the man on the phone was well-trained enough to not laugh out loud. He said he would look into it.

Not five minutes later there was a knock on the door. A young woman had rescued Sweetpea from the laundry, where she had apparently arrived wrapped up in our sheets. She was very happy to be home, and did not even think about having any more adventures for the entire rest of the trip.

She’s been looking more and more bedraggled looking as time went on, so I decided to give her a bath this morning. She’s drying out now, but John snapped a photo before she came out of the washer.

I can see why children are terrorized by their parents tossing their favorite companion in the wash. I paced nervously the whole time she was in the machine of death, but she did fine, and smells a whole lot better.

Enough stalling, I need to go make up some more words.

*Does anybody know if there is a way to make gluten free gravy? I’m pretty much a gravy making traditionalist, make the turkey stock from the inside parts, then do the flour thing in the turkey drippings and it all takes about a zillion hours to make, but boy I never get any complaints. Except it would be nice to have something without flour for the ones who can’t eat it. Any ideas?

Not Crabby!

I figured that I better get off my butt and put up a new post, since my crabbiness really has gone completely away. I hope to God I never get sick with anything serious, or everyone that knows me is going to suffer. I’m pretty sure I had a mild case of the flu a few weeks ago. I did get my influenza vaccine, but it had only been a week before, so I think I was only mildly affected, but still got it. It’s all gone, I finished the socks, and I’m happy happy happy. Not crabby crabby crabby.

So just to do this properly, let’s make this an October wrap up, shall we? If I wait much longer, it will be sort of a moot point. And I do have some November goals to post.

Here’s what I listed as goals for October.

Finish the red socks.

Finish at least one sleeve of the True Blood Faery Sweater. See photo below.

I’m spinning up some lovely merino/tencel stuff. I have it about half done and want to finish it.

Finished Project:

Project: Socks! The pattern is the usual, the one over in the right side bar. It’s the same one I always do. You’d think I’d have learned to do it right, and faster, by now.

Yarn: Lisa Souza sock yarn, color Little Devil. This is some very nice stuff. I was going to go buy some more, then was reminded that I have yarn in the stash for 196 more pairs of socks, not including the new ones I started after I finished these.

Needles: Ivore, 2.25 mm

Started: February of this year.

Finished: last week

For: Me

What I learned: Try on those socks before you finish off the toes.

OK, November goals. This is simple, I really only have one goal. That is if you don’t count making Thanksgiving dinner for 11 people while working 6 out of the 7 days of that week. I love challenges. At least it won’t be like the year (hopefully) that we had about 12 people for turkey day, and the oven door fell off in the middle of cooking. I’m not kidding about that. I have a relatively new oven, so while I won’t rule out other minor disasters, it should be a good day.

Back to my one goal. Here it is.

Yup. I’m participating in the Nano insanity again this year. It’s a little unnerving, I actually sort of have a plot this year. Who knows what kind of trouble that might get me into. Generally I just go by the seat of my pants, which can lead to some very weird scenes. It’s 50,000 words or bust by the end of the month. So far I’m on schedule, at 9000 words so far.

That’s it, my only goal is to finish a 50,000 word novel. Anything else, including knitting, spinning, and reading, will be gravy.

Here’s one more photo for you. When I turned away from the computer just now, here is what I saw.

Lots of napping going on around here. Not me, I’m back to my writing. If you have any favorite words for me to put in the novel, leave them in the comments. I might need them.

I Did It!

I slid across the NaNoWriMo 50,000 word finish line on November 30th, at approximately noon local time. Local time for me at that particular moment was located on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. November 30th also happened to be my 10th wedding anniversary, and my sweet husband took me on a 14 day cruise that left from LA, sailed around western Mexico, through the Panama Canal, through the Caribbean, and landed in Ft. Lauderdale Friday. We had several “at sea” days, and those were perfect for sitting in the observation lounge staring at the water and pounding out a 50,000 word novel.

Towards the end I had to bribe myself. “I can’t go to lunch until I write another 1000 words.” Then, “I can’t order another Bloody Mary until I get to 45,000”. Now, THAT was a motivator, let me tell you. I was one of a very few oddballs that had a laptop computer on the ship, and I do believe that I was the only one of the 700 passengers that finished a novel while on board.

The Panama Canal almost did me in. I was more or less on track to finish the thing by that point, but only if I wrote like a maniac and skipped the bingo and shuffleboard sessions. The Canal journey took me away from the computer nearly all day. We started our transit through the Pacific side of the locks before dawn, and most people, including me, were up on deck by 5:30 or 6 AM to watch the proceedings. We stopped just short of the Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side for several hours, and took a tour by bus of the Locks facility, then back on board and through the Gatun Locks just as the sun set. It was a marvelous day, and worth the whole trip. We have the Ballard Locks in Seattle, which work on the same principle, but the similarities end there.

I didn’t get much knitting done on board. The time I didn’t spend writing was spent mostly in eating. One of the restaurants on board ship had a Cordon Bleu chef. There was also a chef from the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Ottawa on board giving cooking classes, which we took. I have a little diploma that says I am a graduate of the Cordon Bleu cooking program at sea, as well as a lovely white starched apron and chef’s hat.

This is the certificate that I am most proud of, however:

I have no illusions that I will be short-listed for the Booker Prize for this one. I discovered in writing this that yes, I can write a novel in 30 days. Crap it may be, but it’s my crap, and I figure that I have nowhere to go but up! No, I probably won’t ever try to publish this one; yes, I will try to write a better one next time; and emphatically no, you can’t read any of it. If you are one of my readers that also happens to be in my family, yes, you are probably in it. Next time I’ll try to disguise you better so you won’t need to go into the Witness Protection Program when I get famous.

I should be off sleeve island with the purple cotton cardigan in a few days, then on to button bands and sewing up. Rogue is my next sweater project, and I can’t wait to dig in to that Beaverslide Dry Goods yarn.