Fidelity Issues

I've been working on this sweater since December, and while I do enjoy the knitting, especially now that I know how to do cables without a cable hook, all I do is fantasize about other projects. Yes, I'm having some big-time fidelity issues with this sweater. I want to start up something new, something exciting! But I feel like I've made a promise to this sweater, to get it done by St. Patrick's Day, which I, uh, obviously did not honor. Now my goal is April ...ish. And I don't want to get distracted by some other pretty project, which will keep me from making slow and steady project on my cardigan. So I spend my evenings lusting at pattern porn on Ravelry and thinking, "Someday, Di. Someday."

What's left: I'm just starting decreases for the sleeve cap on my second sleeve (got there last night at Knit Night ... hi S if you're reading this!) Then I just have the two front cardigan panels, button bands, neck band, and seaming. I'm feeling more confident about seaming now that I've found some good YouTube videos on seaming moss stitch. Really, the only tricky part left is the picking up of stitches for the button bands and neck band.

So yes, that photo above ... I showed this to S last night and I'm tiny bit concerned. The yarn is all from the same dye lot, but there's definitely a color difference between the sleeves and the back panel. The sleeves are much more yellowish. Here's why I'm trying not to freak. The back panel has already been blocked; the sleeves haven't. If there was something wonky with one of the skeins, it would have showed up in the back panel because I used nearly two skeins of yarn there and you can't tell where one skein ends and the other begins. So I'm hoping when I block the rest of the pieces, the yellowish tint of the yarn will wash away. Fingers crossed.

The puberty talk

A couple weeks ago the school sent a form home asking for my permission to talk about puberty with my son. Of course I signed it. The more sex ed he receives from knowledgable sources, the better.

I have always been open with O about things like sex and puberty. When he was three or four, I remember walking him through the childbirth exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston, where he got to see, soup to nuts (no pun intended), how babies are made. We refer to our genitals by their proper names: there's no cutesy "weiners" and "va-jay-jays" or the vague "down there" I grew up with. We try to be scientific without being too clinical. I've noticed in the last year or so, O gets a little embarrassed talking about certain aspects of sex, which is completely normal for his age, but oddly, he'd still rather talk to me about it than his father.

O was telling me his gym teacher last week was explaining how the talk would work and he said, "I'll be talking to the girls and Mrs. S will be talking to the boys." When the proper amount of outrage and shrieking registered, the gym teacher held up his hands and said, "Just kidding, kids. I'll be talking to the boys." O said he leaned over to his friend and whispered loudly, "Perv!"

That's my boy.

How times have changed. I remember when I was in fifth grade (1975?), the whole talk was sprung upon me with no warning. I had to be led out of the darkened basement cafeteria, sobbing, when I learned that soon I'd be bleeding every month "down there," and that there were three holes, not two, and that babies didn't come from wishing really hard for one, which explained why motherhood wasn't really working out for me, and that someday a boy would be sticking THAT into me. And not just to make babies!

My mother had to come over to school and pick me up, and I sensed that the school was not happy with her as she led me out of the principal's office. I found out later that the school had mailed a little package home a couple weeks before, complete with a flowered booklet -- written by the friendly folks at Tampax -- my parents were supposed to give me and talk to me about. That evening I could hear my parents, who had just filed for divorce, fighting about it, my father arguing that my mother should have been the one to sit down with me and my mother saying, "But I didn't think she was old enough!"

The result was I became the resident fifth grade sexpert. I had to. Kids were brutal in those days, so I had to fight back with solid information they could use, information I picked up wherever I could. I remember telling some girl that her mother was having twins because her father had sex with her ... twice. Then there was this thing called a "blow job" and it worked by just blowing air on a boy's you-know-what. And that if you looked at too many pictures of naked ladies in the stack of dirty mags your older brother kept in the secret fort down in the woods, you'd turn "gay." Whatever gay was.

Sex education. It's a good thing.

Much Ado About Nothing

I loved Kenneth Branagh's version in the 90s, but Josh Whedon's b&w version looks like it could top it. My favorite Shakespeare comedy, set in modern times ... can't wait till June!

TGIM

Yes, that's Thank God It's March.

If I had to go another month without being able to walk or ride my bike, I might be tempted to throw in the towel on my car-less in suburbia experiment. I think I can make it, however. Today I'm going to take the first bike ride of the season to the post office so I can get a package in the mail and renew my p.o. box.

I've been super busy with work, sometimes putting in 14 hour days. My coauthor and I got the rights back to our Renegade Writer books last year, so we've been working to build our brand. In the last month, I've edited and formatted one of the books so we could release it electronically through Amazon.com and BN.com. I also wrote an eBook of my own and released it.

On top of this, I've started writing fiction again and released my first title under a pseudonym a couple weeks ago. This spring, I'm releasing a novella that's part of a trilogy, and I'm super excited about it. I've worked with big publishers and small publishers; I've been lucky enough to work with some terrific literary agents, too. But I have to say, working independently is far more fulfilling. I love everything about it: hiring my own editors, proofreaders, and graphic artists, getting to pick what I want on my book cover, and, of course, pocketing more money per book than I would ever get with a traditional publisher. Of course I love the creative side of writing, but I'm also very left-brained and enjoy marketing and the business side of writing. I'm not sure I ever want to publish a book with a traditional publisher again.

At any rate, all this is making me a terrible blogger and I'm sorry. I haven't even knit very much. Obviously my Aran sweater won't be ready for St. Patrick's Day. Oh well, it's not a race. It'll get done when it gets done.

How are you doing? Is anyone still reading my blog?

Getting stuff done

Sorry I've been quiet. I've been knitting away on my Aran sweater, some days accomplishing a lot, and others not doing much at all due to The Other Projects (see below). The back and one sleeve are done and blocked, and I'm at the quarter mark on the second sleeve. This leaves the two front cardigan pieces, knitting the buttonbands/neckline edging, then sewing it all up, which, frankly, I'm sweating over. Can I finish by March 17? It's just under a month away.

So, The Other Projects. I'm giving up my office so that my son can have his own room. Technically he does have his own room right now, the biggest one in the house, but he shares it with my husband's home office. And O is miserable in there. Let's just say that my husband is something of a packrat and there's just no room for O to spread out his toys, or even have a friend sleep over. The plan is, O will move into my office and have the space completely to himself, and I'll move my books, fabric, sewing machine, and yarn to his old space and set up a little workstation for writing out in the livingroom. It's not an ideal set-up for work, but it's more important to me for O to have his own bedroom and some privacy. Plus, he'll have his "own" bathroom downstairs, which he'll share with visitors, of the course ... and the cats! Anyway, these plans have led to purging and cleaning, which feels great, but is time-consuming.

Then The Other Project is that I've been revising a book for electronic publication. IRL I'm a freelance writer and author/co-author. Back in the early 00s, my co-author Linda and I published a book called The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success, with a small publishing company called Marion Street Press. The book ended up being a big hit, with great reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Investigative Reporters and Editors, The Writer magazine, and, happily, readers! We followed up with a second book, The Renegade Writer's Query Letters That Rock, and a second edition of The Renegade Writer. Unfortunately, our publisher decided to sell his press, and the new owners were ... well, let's put it this way: We missed our old publisher, Ed, who was fair, honest, and dedicated to our books. Even though our books were doing well and we'd long earned out our advances, the new owners weren't paying our royalties. Finally, we consulted with an attorney and discovered that non-payment of royalties violated the terms of our publishing contract so we could take full-ownership of the rights to our books. This was about a year ago.

Anyway, Linda and I have long been talking about updating The Renegade Writer, since the second edition was over five years old, an eternity in publishing. So I spent most of February going through the manuscript, and finally this weekend uploaded .mobi and .epub files to Amazon.com and BN.com and now The Renegade Writer 2.5 is live! (The Kindle version can also be purchased through most of Amazon.com's international sites, which is awesome because the physical book was hard to find in England, France, Japan, etc.) It feels good to have it done and out there, although I'm fretting that I've made some terrible error, like forgotten to take out the Rickrolling link I put in to entertain Linda as she proofed, hee hee. (I'm not sure she saw it ... either that, or she's chosen to ignore my childish pranks.)

BTW, what is so bad about Rick Astley? He's awesome! It's a happy tune! So, the video's a little lame, but it's waaaaay better than Gangnam Style, which my son informed me this weekend is the most popular YouTube video ever with over a billion page views. Ugh.

So besides cleaning, sorting, editing, and uploading, I've been shoveling (more snow this weekend) and now O is out of school for February vacation, so that means playing Chief Entertainment Officer, unless I want him glued to Minecraft for the next five days. How is your February going?

Yarn Along, February 6, 2013

What I'm knitting: the first sleeve of my Candide Aran cardigan.

What I'm reading: The Vows of Silence, the fourth novel in the Simon Serrailler mystery series by Susan Hill. I'm on chapter 43 and find it hard to put down, even though I know who the killer is. Hill draws marvelous characters, ones I've grown to care about. Couple this with the English setting? I'm all over these novels!

Part of Small Things' Wednesday Yarn Along.

English king's remains found

One of my favorite Shakespeare plays is Richard III. One of the few lines of Shakespearean drama I can remember years after college is the king's dying cry on Bosworth Field: "A horse, A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

Scholars have long searched for this medieval king's remains, and today the University of Leicester, along with the Richard III Society and the Leicester City Council announced that remains excavated from underneath a city parking lot are indeed the remains of the last English king killed in battle. Mitochondrial DNA from the skeleton was matched to a Canadian man who is a direct descendant of Richard III's sister, Anne of York.

The video above explains how the remains were discovered. A friary once stood in place of the city parking lot. The king's body was rumored to be buried in the choir area of the church. Since researchers knew the geography of the former church, once they started digging and found location markers, they were able to figure out where the choir would be. Luckily, the rumors were accurate! One thing I've never thought about is how often archaeological remains are found and we never know much about the person they once were. In this case -- what a story!