cate polacek

not-quite-S: hands not idle

2012-01-31T17:28:00.000-05:00

The past two months have been...interesting. Is it something in the air or the water? Is it the violent solar flares I keep hearing about? It's been a whirlwind that included bumps and bruises and worries and a huge mistake, and I am only recently feeling recovered.

I kept my hands busy throughout, in an attempt to keep some form of normal routine going. This week, I'm going to show you the projects that don't fall into the S category - that is, none of them are scarves, shawls, socks, or sweaters. I'll get back to showing those next week.

Mom and I both worked on crocheted blankets while she and Steve were here for the holidays. She finished up a zig zag blanket I'd barely started I don't know how long ago:

And I got it into my head to do a crochet version of the Moderne Log Cabin Blanket. I got this idea because while I like the look of the knitted version, committing to that much garter stitch has always given me pause, not to mention hearing and reading complaints from people about how bloody long it takes to make. It required some gauge swatches and math (and a false start that had to be ripped out) to figure out a crochet version, but it turned out well. I adjusted the pattern a bit to suit the color placement (the color inspiration came from a sweater I've had for years), which was easy since the whole thing is made up of blocks that attach to other blocks.

A few people have mentioned that it looks like a Mondrian painting. I wish I'd thought of that sooner because I would have outlined all the blocks in black.

The cats like both blankets:

I also made a quick cowl out of some handspun yarn that owldaughter sent me (yes, she spun it herself):

It's a blend of blue-faced Leicester wool and hand-dyed tussah silk.

I'd made a cowl out of it soon after she sent it to me, but I had the feeling the pattern I'd chosen hadn't done justice to the yarn. Eventually, I unraveled it and started looking for another pattern. I finally found Anne Hanson's Poinsettia pattern, and it was off to the races. It only took a few hours to make, and I'm pleased with how it turned out:

I think the pattern shows off the yarn a lot better.

I also have enough left over yarn to make another cowl. I have quite a few possibilities saved in my ravelry queue.

Warning: There will be a small parade of brightly colored socks next week.

2012 revolutions

2012-01-01T20:18:00.000-05:00

As I have done for several years now, I have a list of specific things I want to do in the coming year, rather than things I think I should do, and that makes resolutions easier to keep. And actually enjoyable. Here is this year's list:

Gardening

I learned many gardening lessons last year - namely, that wildlife may be cute, especially the way they come right up to the windows to chat with my cats, BUT THEY ARE ROTTEN LITTLE SEEDLING THIEVES, TOO! Two gardening goals this year are to get things planted earlier and GUARD THE CROPS!

Cello

I am thisclose to starting a new study book, and the first piece in it is the Breval Sonata. I'm already quaking in my boots at the thought of it, because I've heard things about it. Things that make me shudder.

My teacher has informed me that there will also be some non-study book pieces as well, just for a change of kicks and giggles, because, as he frequently reminds me, we're doing this cello thing for FUN!

Travel

Scotland in May. More details to come.

Also might go see the Dickens exhibit in London, since I'll be passing through. It's his 200th birthday this year. I feel the urge to re-read Bleak House all of a sudden.

Knitting

Catalog the stash and knit down more of it. I knit, and finished, a lot more projects last year, and yet, the yarn stash didn't seem to get any smaller. That may be because the lace projects didn't require as much yarn as something like a sweater or blanket project would need. Lace projects usually require only a skein or two of yarn, whereas a blanket or a sweater can use up to a dozen skeins or even more.

I've already put aside stuff for the next yarn swap, which will reduce the stash somewhat. I didn't buy much new yarn this year, mainly because I didn't go to the Sheep and Wool Festival in May owing to a monster of a sinus headache that weekend. My LYS had a big sale on its birthday this summer, so that added about two projects' worth. Most of the other yarn I bought or acquired from last year's yarn swaps went directly to a project, often for someone else, so it was in and out of the stash pretty quickly.

I may even assign projects to yarn, just to see if that gets them knit quicker.

Writing

It's a revision and publishing year, I think. I have complete drafts of several novels that need revision, and they're piling up. Now that I (more or less) have the hang of e-publishing, I have a good excuse to clear out the backlog before the stories get so stale they aren't worth reading.

My sonata novel is still missing "that certain something," and I think I've figured out what it is. My cello teacher explained the sonata form to me recently, and it's given me ideas for what I hope will be the final re-write of this novel. It may prove to be disasterous, and I'll have to take it all out again, but I'm curious to see what can be done.

Career

I have a new job as a medical information specialist for a small pharma company. I start this week. I was getting stale and mushy-brained in the old job, and feeling bored and increasingly useless. The new job scares me a little, because it's bigger than I am, and I'll be back into hardcore clinical science. I like the idea of growing into a job, though, and my brain will hopefully soak up the science and feel more alert and challenged.

I've also been musing on the crazy idea of another master's degree, this time in public health or clinical research. I probably won't start this until mid-year. Even I know that starting a new job and a science-heavy master's degree at the same time can only end in madness and tears. Best to get used to the new job first and figure out which degree would be the most useful for it.

Purely for Entertainment

Audiobooks! My commute time to work is going to double. Given the nature of my job, as well as the looming possibility of a master's degree, not to mention dealing with more heavy downtown traffic than I am used to, I suspect I will need the mental indulgence of fiction being read to me. I've already saved an embarrasingly long queue of books on the Maryland Digital e-Library Consortium page via my county public library system. I'm working my way through the five books in Anne Perry's World War I series, and they have a lot of her other books as well. (Yes, I know who she is and what she did as a teenager. No need to tell me. I still admire her writing.) I noticed that audible.com has the first of Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde series on audio finally, so that's been added to my to-be-listened-to list as well.

If you have audiobook recommendations, let me know, and can someone please ask Richard Armitage to record some more Georgette Heyer novels or other novels in general? I'm afraid I've become addicted to his reading voice.

(nearly) a year in the Treehouse

2011-12-31T15:05:00.000-05:00

I can hardly believe I've been in the Treehouse for almost a year already. (January 15, 2012 will officially be one year)

I got the red couches. And the bookcases. I also set up a guest room, painted the downstairs bathroom, and replaced the front rain gutter.

I'm calling this my "observational" gardening year. My front garden did far better than my side patio garden. I did next to nothing to the front garden except cut back the rose bushes. The previous owners were clever with the front garden - it pretty much takes care of itself, and the plants and flowers in it are seasonal, so there's always something new coming up as something else has finished for the year. There was also so much rain this year that I didn't need to do much watering at all. It may need another layer of mulch next year, but that looks to be it.

The side patio garden was more of a ~~headache~~, er, challenge. The side patio gets a lot of attention, both from afternoon sun and from the local wildlife. My next door neighbors puts out birdseed every morning, which the birds and the squirrels take full advantage of. Then they come next door to my patio for second breakfast. I didn't realize how much digging they were doing in my raised beds until I found one of the seedpods I'd used for seedstarting lying well outside the box. I got some wire hoops and netting for the boxes, which served as a decent deterrent, but the damage was already done, and most of the loot was already stolen, so there wasn't much of a harvest. My tomato box did okay, though, courtesy of Gardener's Supply Catalog's Organic Tomato Success Kit.

Writing

While all that was going on, I got Tempus House published as an ebook. It went through a title change and an unexpected major edit, but it's out there finally. Yay!

The next novel is STILL in revision. I did a major re-write on it and added a character, which certainly made it more interesting. That was a relief because I was beginning to think I would have to abandon the story, and I didn't want to do that because I have an odd faith in it. There is another character, though, that either has to come out or at least be diminished. I used up too much story space on his past with the main character. It explains the main character's motives, but it could be done more succinctly. And while he's meant to be an antagonist, he doesn't have to be such a bloody insufferable one.

I finished a children's novella, and did some digging on e-publishing for children. Just as I ran into problems with a new title for Tempus House, I ran smack into a wall with the cover for this novella. I'm not liking this last-minute calamity pattern. Anyway, a new cover is in the works. I am a slow writer/reviser/editor (or perhaps "an annoyingly/alarmingly thorough" one would be more accurate), and I'm an even slower graphic designer. You do not want to know how long it took me to find the perfect image for the Tempus House cover.

I spent just about all of October outlining the novel I worked on in November for NaNoWriMo. This definitely gave the actual writing a lot more direction, so writing sessions were more productive. Unfortunately, I was plagued by severe right-side neck and shoulder pain for most of the month, so I had to cut back on the daily word count goal. The draft is done though, and acupuncture and physical therapy helped me do battle with the neck and shoulder pain...which was then all undone by the car accident I was in last week.

Cello

I've worked on the Prelude to Bach's "Suite No. 1 in G major" off and on over the year as a kind of independent study experiment to see what two-and-a-half years' worth of lessons have taught me as I attempt a piece on my own, outside of what I work on for lessons. The result showed me that I can analyze it, recognize the patterns, break it into chunks and layers to work on, listen to versions for comparison, and more or less chip away at it a bit at a time. So it's fair to say I get the concept of "strategy."

However, I was not able to devote as much practice time to it as I had hoped because I hadn't factored in the increasing complexity and length of the pieces I would be working on in my lessons with Ben. Meaning I spent more time on them in my daily practice sessions than I had spent on pieces in my first year of cello study. This is logical of course, and it was silly of me not to have taken it into account ahead of time. So the poor prelude was often pushed aside while I struggled with the other pieces. I humbly apologize to it and to Bach, and I will soldier on with it into the new year.

I've done a bit better with vibrato. I incorporated it into scale practice (I love two-fer efficiency!). Decent first-finger vibrato still eludes me - I'm just overly stiff with that finger, and I swing my arm well into my body, which I don't do with the other fingers - no idea why I think of first finger as its own entity. Consequently, vibrato with the other fingers is improving and starting to feel a little more natural. Only problem is, I often don't think to use it in anything but scales, so it's going on the layering list as a reminder to work on it in actual pieces.

I already have plans for next year, which may or may not be a good idea, although the intent is to keep me productive, happy, and out of trouble. Saving those for the next post.

reluctantly slowing down

2011-11-20T20:42:00.002-05:00

I've been pretty diligent with my daily goal of 3000 words. However, the extra sitting and typing isn't doing my neck and shoulder much good. Neither is long stretches of cello practice. In fact, all that is making it worse.

The neck and shoulder pain has been bothering me off and on since the last week of October. It led to an adventure on Wednesday evening. When I was driving home from work, the ache started radiating up to my ear and was making my right arm feel a bit tingly. I had considered getting a doctor's appointment, but the soonest mine can see me is the 28th. Then I considered going to urgent care to see if I could get some pain meds to tide me over until I could see my doctor, but I wasn't sure if this qualified as "urgent." I called the 24/7 nurseline number on my insurance card, and I told the nurse that I'd had this pain off and on for three weeks. I asked if it would be appropriate to go to urgent care.

She said I should call 911 because those symptoms could be heart attack.

This is not a good thing to tell someone with a history of panic attacks. Most of me didn't think I was having a heart attack, but a teeny bit of me started to worry about it because of the family history of heart problems. It was really hard not to listen to that teeny bit, especially when the nurse was so insistent that I call 911.

I realize it's a CYA mentality for the nurse and the insurance company to assume the worst so as not to appear negligent. On the other hand, the nurse discounted much of what I told her, and took the neck pain radiating to ear and arm out of context as the only important things to consider.

So panicky me calls 911, the EMTs show up, I tell them what's going on, they take my vitals, and they tell me they don't think I'm having a heart attack. However, they said if I wanted to go to the ER, they'd be glad to take me. At which point I said I would go, because the only thing that was going to stop me panicking was a doctor telling me that I'm not having a heart attack. They understood, and were as nice as could be about the whole thing. I appreciated that.

I was in the ER for four hours, grappling with waves of panic on top of the neck and shoulder pain. I finally saw a nurse practitioner. She felt around my neck and shoulders, and when she pressed on a particular spot, I could feel the tingling in my right arm. She decided on X-rays, which turned up negative for anything overt that she was looking for, like a bone spur, so she diagnosed it as a pinched nerve, not a heart attack, and recommended that I see an orthopedist. She also gave me a prescription for Flexeril. I've only taken it at night, and while it helps me sleep, I go through most of the next day feeling groggy and drugged. Don't like that.

I saw an orthopedist on Friday, and I've been prescribed four weeks of physical therapy. The pain is now moving around a bit. On Thursday, it felt like it was pulling down on the inside of my ears. Yesterday, it had moved to the back of my neck and radiating up to the crown of my head. Sometimes, I feel it down further in my right shoulder blade. It's less sharp than it has been, but it's still there. And it's affecting how much time I can spend sitting at a desk comfortably writing.

I've reached 50,000 words on this writing project, so I've met the official NaNoWriMo goal, but I have to slow down the writing pace because of the neck and shoulder pain. This means I won't reach 90,000 words by the end of the month.

I'm very disappointed. I can work on it into December, of course, but I had really latched on to the idea of getting the entire first draft done in a month. It's taken the wind out of my sails to keep working on it at all. In fact, the only reason I have any desire to continue with it is because there's some good stuff that's come out onto the page, and I want to see what happens. It also feels like the story is going to be longer than I'd anticipated. This isn't a bad thing, and who knows what will happen in the editing phase when I start ruthlessly chopping stuff out?

I will still keep posting my daily word counts on Twitter until I finish this draft, and thank you so much to everyone who has popped in to ask how the writing's going and to find out the latest word count. I appreciate it muchly.

a third done

2011-11-13T17:36:00.000-05:00

I'm closing in on 39,000 words written. Toward the end of next week, I will hopefully have reached the NaNoWriMo official goal of 50,000 words. However, I've still got a ways to go to get to my personal goal of 90,000 words by the end of the month.

Week 2 was a slog, as predicted. Right-side neck and shoulder pain plagued me all week, which made it painful to type for long periods of time, let alone do much cello practice with the bow. I managed some word sprints with breaks in between, which seemed to help. I had some acupuncture last week, which also helped, and I'm getting a massage tomorrow. I've been using heating pads and ice packs and all that, too.

In addition, week 2 writing resulted in things starting to make themselves plain to me the more I wrote.

Thing 1: my main and impact characters are switching places. This is not a calamity, merely unexpected. And interesting. And worth pursuing. Writing is like that.

Thing 2: At least two characters, possibly three, will need to be re-named, since two sets of characters each have names that begin with the same letter, and sometimes I'm mixing them up. What was I thinking doing that, especially when these sets of characters are often in scenes together? And I need to come up with names for two other minor characters that showed up - I can't keep referring to them as "so-and-so's relative" - it's getting annoying having to type that over and over again. I do a lot of research to come up with character names, and yet I also tend to change them despite the research. As you do.

Thing 3: Two major scenes at the beginning will be switched. Because it will flow better that way. That is all the reasoning I have for the switch.

I still like the story. I like how it's progressing. I'm nearing a plot point where things seem to be going well, but they soon won't, and conflict is always so much more interesting to write anyway. I'm focusing much more on action and dialogue than on description, but I can add more atmosphere when I revise.

Back to it.

fast drafting

2011-11-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

At the end of week one of this new story project, I have 15,103 words written. I will add another 3000 words today. So far so good. Next week will be the test - week two is when the "ooh, shiny!" of working on a new story wears off all of sudden, and I'm left with slogging through. Having experienced a similar phenomenon with cello practice, I'm not too worried about it. Yet.

I've managed the increased word count this week by adding a second writing session. I normally get out about 1500 words in the morning, first thing. I considered attempting all 3000 words in the morning, but that would mean getting up even earlier, and with winter coming on, my hibernation instinct is already in full swing, so an earlier rising ain't happenin'. Instead, I do the other 1500 words in an evening writing session after my cello practice. It's worked well so far, seeing as cello puts me into a structural-considering mood, which I can then carry over into writing a scene. It's all working in layers and bits at a time, I tell you. Cello, writing, knitting, life. 's only way I get anything done.

I do have to push myself to do that second writing session though. I'm much less energetic in the evening and not feeling as creative after a day at work, so it takes longer to do that second set of 1500 words. Still, that was the idea of this experiment - to make it more of a challenge. And it is.

I've also had intermittent, right-side neck and shoulder pain this week. That's made not only typing a challenge, but cello practice as well. I've been doing short bursts of typing and practice so as not to further strain the muscle but still be able to get something done in each endeavor.

My outline for this novel is more detailed than usual. With about 60-ish scenes to write, I can write two a day, one in each 1500-word session, and that will get me to 90,000 words and hopefully all scenes written by November 30.

If this higher daily word count approach works, I may adopt it for future projects, whether I'm participating in NaNoWriMo or not. I like being able to get a complete first draft done so quickly. I find that the longer it takes me to do the first draft, the less steam I have for revision and publishing, which ends up causing a backlog of manuscripts that have been drafted, but not polished.

Speaking of which, I've gotten a few questions about The King Tree, which I had intended to publish at the end of the summer. The manuscript is done and formatted. It's the cover that's holding things up. I lucked out big with Tempus House. I found an image I liked, after much searching, and was able to get copyright permission in only a few days. I naively assumed the same would happen with King Tree. But alas, no. Once I had the cover concept perfected, I stupidly set my heart on it. Without copyright permission for the main image, however, I can't publish it. I'm trying to avoid a complete re-do of the cover, but that may be my only option. In a way, I'm not surprised. I had to change the title for Tempus House from the one I'd wanted, so to have to change the cover for King Tree appears to be establishing a tradition. That I don't like. At all.

I've been considering writing goals for next year, and I've decided they will actually be revision and publishing goals instead. That backlog I mentioned? That's what I'm going to tackle next year. It's like having too big a yarn stash languishing in a closet. Makes me twitchy not to have it serving a more useful purpose.

5S: nostalgia knitting in the future

2011-10-30T13:13:00.002-05:00

I've been beavering away on Christmas knitting lately, none of which I can show you.

I can show you this though:

The late-for-spring shawl on the blocking boards. The short sides are now about the width of a queen-size bed (which is what the blocking boards are laying on, that's how I know). Yep, huge. I have 900 yards of yarn in a dark green colorway, so there will be another huge shawl project in my future.

Here's a closer view of one side:

I can also show you the yarn for a future sock-knitting project:

Look familiar?

No?

How about when it's knit up into a swatch?

Still no?

Final clue:

The colorway is called Time Traveler, from Knit Picks' Felici line, and I could not resist it.

Tom Baker was my first Doctor. I started watching the show with my dad back in the early 80s - a fun kind of father-daughter bonding time. I even remember our collective gasp when Tom Baker regenerated into Peter Davison (whom I also thought made a darn good Doctor).

I'd knit this up into socks for Dad, but he's not one for brightly colored footwear. However, there is a TARDIS pattern, in a more guy-friendly dark blue, so I might make those for him.

I'm itching to start knitting this yarn into socks, but I'm waiting until I've finished my Christmas knitting. I just got Clara Parkes' new book, The Knitter's Book of Socks, and there are several patterns in there that I might use for these socks. One pattern is called "Firefly," which amuses me, because really, would there have been a Firefly series without Doctor Who? Particularly when it comes to the humor in the latter series? There's also a pattern called "Salted Caramels," which is probably as close as we'll get to a Jelly Babies pattern, I think.

As for a nickname for this sock project, I'm leaning toward Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey socks, just as a nod to the newer incarnations of the series, which I've also enjoyed. I'm open to suggestions, though. Maybe Allons-y socks? Or Still-Not-Ginger socks? What do you think?

And here's a bit 'o trivia: Clara Parkes and I have the same birthday. We also share a birthday with fictional detective Albert Campion (and his creator), ably portrayed by the above-mentioned Peter Davison. Heh heh, these socks are going to be heavy with connections.

music mapping

2011-10-22T16:39:00.002-05:00

Warning: This post contains Cello Geekery. If that's not your thing, I won't be offended if you choose to look for something else to read.

I haven't written a cello post in awhile. No particular reason, other than I'm carrying on in the roll-up-your-sleeves-for-the-long-slog bit of transitioning from a beginner to an intermediate cello student. I'm starting to work on what my teacher calls "real music" (ie, not just little exercises and etudes that are meant for technique practice and don't necessarily sound nice or like real music...or something).

My current piece is La Cinquantaine. I've read Michael's blog posts on this piece, and he kindly put together a master list of stuff to wrassle with when learning it. I think #6 is my favorite. And also #4. I printed the list and taped it to the wall next to my music stand.

In addition to my cello lessons, Ben has been coaching me in music theory. I won't pretend that I thoroughly understand it all, but I get the gist (usually), and now we're starting to apply it to "real music," so the concepts are starting to make sense.

We're at that part of theory that gets into the nuances of structure and form, and I got a real-time demonstration when Ben mapped out Cinquantaine for me:

(I suggest clicking for big if you want to read it.)

Basically, the piece has two main sections (A and B) with sub-sections (a,a1, b, b1, c, etc.). The numbers represent measures, and there are key changes as well.

This map helps with practicing since I can practice in chunks and apply the practice techniques elsewhere in the piece where similar patterns show up. I can also add the bowing pattern as another layer on the map for hyper-analytical kicks.

I'm fascinated with this music mapping concept because it reminds me so much of novel outlining (at least the way I do it). If you wander through a novel without any sort of scrutiny, you miss so much. A novel is made up of chapters. Chapters are made up of scenes. Scenes are made up of layers of description, action, and dialogue. You can structure the pace of a novel by the patterns you put into each scene in a chapter - action that builds to a climax, dialogue that starts out innocently and rises to an argument or a revealing of secrets, narration/description/explanation that slows things down and orients you to the setting and the situation.

Musical structure can show you the same thing - how the composer is carrying the listener, as well as the musician, along to keep both interested, settle you into patterns, change the patterns for interest, and bring you home with a satisfying ending (Ben was explaining circle progressions to me - vi-ii-V-I).

I'm looking forward to more music mapping. The Breval Sonata is in my near future (hint hint, could do with another list for that one, Michael).

5S: finished objects!

2011-10-22T15:49:00.000-05:00

No idea how I managed to miss posting last week. To make up for it, you get a two-fer this week.

First, the late-for-spring shawl is off the needles!

Here it is unblocked:

It has a wingspan of 55 inches, and a length of 26 inches from top middle to bottom tip. That means when it's blocked, it will be far larger than that (read: HUGE!). That's the idea though - it's meant to be shawl to wrap up in in the winter.

This took about one and three-quarters skeins of yarn. I still have another skein and the leftover quarter, so I can probably get another smaller shawl out of what's left.

I also finished the fallberry scarf:

Blocking really makes the pattern pop out. The Cascade 220 Sport Superwash has a nice drape to it. I've got more of it in a beige color, so that will be another scarf at some point.

Loved the pattern - easy but interesting, and it knit up quickly.

I am well into Christmas knitting, so knitting posts may be skimpy for awhile because the recipients of my Christmas knitting read this blog, so I won't be able to post progress pictures until after the holidays. Posting will also be skimpy in November because I'm participating in NaNoWriMo, and will be attempting to write 3000 words a day, which is double my usual daily word count. My hands are going to be very tired by the end of this year.

October is for outlining

2011-10-12T19:12:00.009-05:00

Fall never fails to put me in the mood to nest. All I want to do is make a lot of soup, knit, and write. And now that I'm ensconced in the Treehouse, I see a lot of squirrels burying food (and also unburying it) and birds landing on the windowsills to show off to the cats the latest twig or piece of straw they've found. The cats "ack ack ack" at them, in what sounds like some sort of conversation or approval.

I've worked on writing all summer, although I've blogged more about knitting than anything else lately, now that I think about it, and I've got several things close to publishing. It's the formatting and front cover stuff that is a real slog and slows things down, and I have a bad habit of doing major edits as I clean up formatting problems. Probably why I've not blogged about it - how many interesting ways are there to say "wrote x number of words this week, revised x number of scenes this week?"

A couple of weeks ago, I had several story ideas brewing, so I started outlining. If it does nothing else, outlining tells me if the ideas would be novel length or short story length. This is helpful because if I start writing a story assuming it will be a novel and then things run dry, it's frustrating trying to find more story to tell, when in fact the idea may have been better suited to a short story all along. If I can figure out ahead of time which story type it is, then the writing process is a lot less stressful.

Anyway, after some outlining, it looks like I have another novel and several short stories. Seeing as November will be here in a minute, I think I will write the rough draft of the novel as part of National Novel Writing Month. And I think I'm going to increase my word count goal.

NaNoWriMo considers a draft of a novel to be 50,000 words. This is based on the program founder's oh-so-scientific analysis of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (the thinnest book on his bookshelf), which is about that length. However, the average amount of words for most novels is more like 90,000, but 50,000 probably sounded more do-able when he first got the idea for this project. I admit that when I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time in 2005, 50,000 words in a month seemed impossible, and yet I did it with a day to spare while working full-time and going to a week-long medical conference.

I've participated several times since then and have yet to miss the 50,000-word mark, but I always feel like I only have half a novel written, so I usually spend December writing the other half. To write 50,000 words in 30 days, you need to write a minimum of 1667 words a day. Now that I've done it several times, I don't find this to be a difficult daily task. So I thought I'd try to write 90,000 words in November, which is 3000 words a day (if I did the math right). It's more of a challenge since it's nearly double the usual word count, but I think it's still possible. And I can get an entire novel drafted in one month instead of two.

This year's NaNoWriMo project will be a doozy. A Southern gothic tale, into which I can still include some of my beloved magical realism, along with tragedy, family secrets, an abandoned abbey, and other juicy stuff. I may go for all-out decadent with this one, just for kicks.

I'm not sure where the story idea came from. I've read Southern gothic novels in the past, so I'm familiar with the genre, but it's not been my recent reading. I read The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood in one sitting two Saturday mornings ago. I'm also reading the second Claude Izner novel. I'm listening to a radio adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. And I'm working my way through Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. I saw the BBC adaptation several years ago (my introduction to Richard Armitage, who was unbearably good as a dark, smouldering, and tempermental John Thornton), and I'd wanted to read the book ever since. I like it so far. It reminds me of Pride and Prejudice in its plot points, but with a layer of Dickens-like illustration of and commentary on the suffering of the working poor as the age of industrialization gets more of a grip on the nation, not to mention the string of deaths that occur. P&P was published 40 years before N&S, so possibly Gaskell read it and/or used it as a model - although she's more closely associated with the Brontes than with Austen - and apparently Dickens edited the magazine in which N&S was serialized, so he may have had some influence on its writing.) Fascinating reading, whatever its origins and influencers.

So, 3000 words a day, every day, in November. I'll post daily word counts on Twitter, which you should be able to see in the right-hand side bar here on the blog (if you scroll down a bit). I might do quick weekly posts to tell you about my ~~agony~~, er, progress. We'll see...

5S: purple project

2011-10-09T16:44:00.002-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock/Sweater Saturday (or Sunday)

I finished the Fallberry scarf yesterday afternoon. I even soaked it and pinned it out. Twenty-four hours later, it's still slightly damp, so I don't want to unpin it yet.

I'm still slogging through the middle section of the late-for-spring shawl, but I'm nearing the end of that.

Instead, I've got another of my startitis projects to show you.

This is the beginning of the Stacy Shawl by Wendy Johnson, from her new book.

The pattern calls for DK weight yarn, but I'm using worsted weight, which is slightly thicker. I've got just over 500 yards of it. The yarn was recycled from a sweater, and is 100% wool. I love the color. Since this shawl won't be worn next to the skin, I'm not worried about the scratchiness of the yarn. In other words, it's a layering piece that would go over other clothes.

The picture above represents the first of four charts. I got through it in an evening. It's an interesting pattern in that it starts at the top middle and is worked outward toward the bottom edge.

The only problem I'm having with it is that I'm always two stitches short on the right-side rows. I poked around on ravelry, and found a post from someone else who had the same problem. However, there's no explanation as to how to fix it. So I'm winging it by adding a stitch where needed. So far, it seems to be a good solution.

I've also altered the middle section. Rather than a yarnover spine (yarnover, knit 2, yarnover) as shown in the original, I'm just knitting the four stitches, which you can see in the picture above. I'm not going to do the bottom border from the pattern either. I might just do plain garter stitch instead.

There are two other shawls in the book that I want to make, and I already have the yarn for them in my stash. It's definitely going to be a stash-busting winter.

5S: sushi sweater starter

2011-10-01T18:02:00.005-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock/Sweater Saturday (or Sunday)

October 1, and the weather is appropriately chilly and brisk. Fall knitting season has begun!

I, um, anticipated it (ie, gave in to startitis) by making a swatch for a cardigan early last month (a cardigan is a type of sweater, so I'm counting it as an S - my blog, my rules).

I had some Knit Picks Merino Style DK weight yarn in the Edamame colorway in my stash. It's a cleverly named colorway, I think. It looks like the color of steamed soybeans. It also reminds me of the horseradish you get with sushi (hence the Sushi Sweater nickname).

I hunted for a pattern on ravelry, found one I liked, and cast on for the swatch.* If I have to adjust needle size to get gauge, I usually only have to go up or down one size. This time, it was more like four needle sizes, which seemed odd to me and resulted in a swatch of overly loose-looking stitches. I didn't like the way it looked at all.

I did more research on ravelry and started reading posts by other knitters who had made this project. Apparently, the yarn the test knitter used for the prototype was a worsted weight yarn, even though it was labeled DK weight (DK is thinner than worsted). Lots of knitters were using true DK weight yarn and were having the same gauge-getting problems I was.

I had a choice: I could change out the yarn for a worsted weight yarn so I could still use the pattern, or I could change the pattern so I could still use the DK weight yarn. I chose the latter option.

Back to pattern searching on ravelry. Found another pattern I liked, double-checked that DK weight yarn would work, and swatched again. (I just added to the previous swatch, but with a different needle size.)

I'm still working on a 4 x 4 swatch of garter stitch just to be sure, but so far, the gauge is correct.

This is the Greenfield Cardigan by Melissa LaBarre from the book New England Knits. Top-down (meaning start at the neck), garter stitch, with a nice leaf motif along the bottom for some visual interest and to break up all that garter stitch. And the prototype is green, so I have a fair idea of what mine will look like in a similar colorway.

I'm going to make the neck slightly more narrow, and I'm going to make full-length sleeves. I don't look good in three-quarter sleeves - they make my arms look stubby. I may do buttons all the way down.

I'm hoping this knits up as fast as I think it will.

I'm also nearly done with the Fallberry scarf and the Late-for-Spring shawl. Hope to show one or both of those off the needles and blocked next week.

*For non-knitters, a swatch is 4-inch by 4-inch (or preferably larger) sample knitted piece using the yarn and needles you intend to use for a larger project. Patterns list a suggested yarn weight and needle size. You knit a sample with those to see what you get and adjust from there.

A swatch serves three purposes. First, it lets you see how the yarn you've chosen knits up, so you can decide sooner rather than later if you like how it looks and if the yarn or needles annoys you in any way. Nothing worse than bitching your way through an entire project because you don't like the materials you' re using. All that frustration ends up knitted into the garment and gives it bad energy, so you don't want to see it or wear it, even after all the work you put into it.

Second, you can try out any stitch patterns used in the garment to get a sense of how easy or hard they are, and if you like doing them. You'll be committed to doing them on a larger area if you decide to go ahead with the pattern, so best to find out early what you're in for.

Third, a swatch helps you determine gauge - how many stitches per inch you get with a certain yarn weight and needle size combination. This is important when you choose the size of garment you're going to make. Most knitted garment patterns will list what the gauge should be for the sizes of that project. However, gauge is individual to the knitter - some knit more tightly or loosely than others. So whoever knit the prototype for the pattern then used their gauge for all the measurements and stitch counts listed in the pattern.

Bottom line: you must get the gauge listed in the pattern to have any hope in Hades of a properly sized garment. If you have too many stitches per inch compared to the listed gauge in the pattern, your garment will end up bigger. Fewer stitches per inch compared to listed gauge will make the garment smaller. To get it just right, you often have to go up or down a needle size or two (or more) depending on how tightly or loosely you knit compared to the test knitter.

Lots of things affect gauge. If you're tense or tired when you knit your swatch, you may end up knitting more tightly or loosely than you normally do. If the pattern's test knitter used wood needles, and you're using plastic or metal needles, the drag of the yarn on the different needle types may cause slightly more or less yarn to get into each stitch. If the prototype was made with wool yarn, and you're using acrylic or cotton or some sort of fiber blend, the stretchiness, or lack thereof, of the yarn can change the gauge.

A swatch tells you volumes before you even start in on the project proper. Always worth doing, as it helps you avoid a lot of frustration and gives you a sense of what the project will be like.

4S: I confess...

2011-09-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday)

Startitis got me. I made a major mistake on the late-for-spring shawl, so once I tinked back two rows, I needed a break from working on it, so that was my excuse to start something new.

Anne Hanson released a new pattern called Fallberry. It's a hat, scarf, and fingerless mitt set. I'm just making the scarf.

I have enough of the yarn to make the scarf a little wider and somewhat longer. The yarn is Cascade 220 Superwash Sport. The colorway is 811 - a deep, jeweltone teal blue (which my camera isn't reading well for some reason). It's 100% merino wool, so it's quite soft.

The pattern is a 16-row repeat, and eight of those rows are just knit and purl across.

Translation: This thing is flying off the needles. I started it last Saturday, and I've got 13 of the recommended 20 pattern repeats done already. I'll do more repeats until I run out of yarn.

Looks a lot like fish scales at the moment, but once it's blocked, the yarnovers, which you can barely see now, will show more and give it a lacier look. I'm looking forward to having a new scarf for fall.

4S: fighting startitis

2011-09-18T20:00:00.000-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

Suddenly, we have fall weather. This causes many a knitter to fall prey to startitis. For non-knitters, startitis is the overwhelming urge to start lots of projects. I think there are two reasons for this: fall is high season for knitting, and knitters panic when they realize how close the winter holidays are and how little they've accomplished on gift-knitting goals.

I'm doing my best to resist startitis, but I must confess to casting on another pair of socks and a wrap, as well as winding yarn for two scarf projects. These are classic symptoms.

However, in my efforts to ignore the call of new projects, I've made good progress on the late-for-spring shawl.

Tristan is supervising:

I'm about halfway through the middle section, which is chart B. This is just under four repeats of the chart:

Chart B looks like lattice work to me. I like the look of it, but it seems like an abrupt change from the edging of chart A. If I were to make this pattern again, I'd try to find a design to put between these two for a more subtle transition.

Four more repeats and one round of chart C to go.

4S: we pause again

2011-09-11T19:04:00.000-05:00

It doesn't seem appropriate to do a knitting update today. There will be one next week.

Instead, I would just like to say that I am grateful to have things like knitting and cello playing and writing to provide distraction and comfort when I encounter, either directly or indirectly, evidence of people doing insane things to each other.

I am also grateful to have found a knitting group of people with whom I can sit and chat amicably despite any and all ideological/religious/political/everything else differences we may have. It reminds me that it IS possible to have civil conversations with people who have different views.

Be well, and we'll get back to knitting next weekend.

4S: late for spring

2011-09-04T19:43:00.000-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

We had fun times at the Treehouse last weekend. Got quite a soaking from Irene - enough to prompt me to bring in the patio furniture and weigh down the outside basement window covers with bricks before she arrived. She left a mess of leaves and branches strewn everywhere, which in my densely tree'd neighborhood is quite a lot for clean-up. The floor drain in my basement overflowed and soaked the nearby rug. The power went out a few times, but thankfully came back on. No sleep at all on Saturday night for all the noise from the wind and rain. In short, a hopping time was had by all, which did not leave me in a fit state for blogging about knitting or anything else.

If you had to deal with Irene, I hope the damage was minimal to none.

The up-side to being stuck inside during a storm and unable to sleep was that I made some decent progress on the late-for-spring shawl:

I'm 2 rows away from completing chart A, which was a 56-row section. Then it's on to six or seven repeats of chart B, which is an easier chart to follow, and is only 12 rows.

I tried to resist buying a copy of Wendy Johnson's new lace book, but I made the mistake of looking through a copy that another knitter brought to knitting group, so I crumbled and ordered my own copy. It's a beautiful book with great patterns. I don't buy pattern books or knitting magazines unless I like and would actually make at least half the patterns in them. Otherwise, it's a waste of money. So it's always a big deal when I come across a book like Wendy's. When my copy arrives, I might do something similar to Carin, who is knitting her way through Cookie A's sock books.

Maybe that will be a knitting goal next year - a whole year of lace knitting. Maybe a project a month? There are a bunch of Anne Hanson lace patterns in my queue as well as ones by Wendy. A mark II of this for mom, one of these, and this, and this, and maybe this.

Knitting lace and socks through this spring and summer was a great idea. I wasn't sweltering under heavy yarn, I got to work on smaller needles for a change, I made leaps and bounds improvement in my chart-reading skills, I got some good brain workouts, and I managed lots of de-stashing. There's quite a bit of room in the storage bins in my yarn closet now. Just in time for my knitting group's yarn swap at the end of the month.

re-Kindle'd

2011-09-04T13:09:00.000-05:00

I got tired of waiting for Smashwords to hook itself up to the Kindle system on Amazon, so I uploaded Tempus House to Kindle myself.

Yay!

Here it is. And still only 99 cents.

My next book has hit some picture problems, but they are being sorted out, and I hope to have it published soon.

4S: a solemn pause

2011-08-21T21:55:00.008-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

I apologize for not posting last weekend. There was a death in the family, so I drove up to Ohio to go to the funeral. I was glad to see family, even though it was for a sad reason. If you wouldn't mind thinking a good thought or saying a prayer for a dear old uncle who lost his devoted wife after 55 years of marriage, I'd appreciate it. It still makes my eyes sting to think of the sight of him struggling to stand up from his wheelchair, putting a shaking, wrinkled hand to his face, and sobbing over my aunt's casket while three of his sons held him up and sobbed with him.

He and his 10 children and my grandmother (his sister) all wore something pink to the funeral. It was my aunt's favorite color.

My grandmother's pink sweater had a stitch pattern that I couldn't take my eyes off of. It occurred to me that I've not knit anything for her yet, so I think the blue-gray shawl I'm working on will go to her for Christmas. (It gets damn cold up in Ohio in the winter - lake effect and all that.) She doesn't read this blog, not being one for using the Internet, so it'll be okay to write about it and post pictures, I think. I'd ask all of my family who do read this blog to keep quiet about it please.

You'll be seeing the shawl inch along because I can't show you the other project I'm working on until the recipient, who does reads this blog, receives it.

I can at least show you one finished project:

I can't seem to get good pictures of this yarn. I've tried it in all kinds of light, and it just doesn't cooperate. It's brighter than it appears in any of the pictures I've attempted to take of it.

This is the wool/soysilk/cotton/chitin blend yarn I mentioned in a previous post. I like the color pattern, although it pools at the top of the instep since I didn't bother to do an afterthought heel, which would have preserved the color progression. S'okay, though. I don't mind it.

For non-knitters, an afterthought heel is just what it sounds like - you knit one row on the back of the sock in a different yarn to mark where the heel would be started, and then you complete the sock in the original yarn. You undo the marker yarn and put the stitches back on the needles to knit the wedge that makes the heel. It's great for striping yarn to keep the stripes from going all wonky when you increase and decrease at the heel. I have some striping yarn, so when I get around to using it, I'll do an afterthought heel and take progress pictures, which might better illustrate the concept.

I'm tempted to start a sweater, but it's still too warm out to have heavier yarn in one's lap, so I'm putting it off until late September at the earliest. I've got the yarn for it already, though, and the pattern. The colorway of the yarn I'm going to use is called Edamame, and it really does look like soybean pod green. It also reminds me of the green horseradish and the avocado you get with sushi, so I've already started to refer to it as my Sushi Sweater.

I'll have some late-for-spring shawl progress for you next week.

4S: friends again

2011-08-07T21:04:00.002-05:00

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

Here's the veggie shawl off the blocking board:

It turned out well, and it will be great to wear in the dead of winter when I'm desperate for some color.

Last week, I reported on some frustrations with the late-for-spring shawl. After ripping back the row for the tenth time, I was able to correct it based on the information I got from another knitter on Ravelry who had knit the pattern and verified the mistake in the written instructions.

The offending row was finally conquered, and I was ready for the upcoming row that required the stitch marker dance again, so no yarn was beaten with a tree branch after all. The shawl and I have made our peace with each other.

Progress so far:

The pattern is knit from the bottom hem up, which is definitely my favorite way to knit these things. You start out with a huge number of stitches and decrease the number on every other row until you're down to only a few stitches for bind off at the top center.

This will be bigger than the veggie shawl. I had more yarn than the pattern called for, so I did some math and worked out how many pattern repeats I could add in (two on each side of the center).

The yarn is Cascade Heritage. The color is 5602, a nice blue grey in a tight twist, so the stitch definition is showing up nicely.

Really loving the Signature needles for lace work. Well worth the money, and made in the USA! The pair in the picture are size 6.

4S: it's not me, it's you

2011-07-31T21:49:00.001-05:00

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

The veggie shawl is finished!

Here it is unblocked, about two and a half feet wide and a foot and a bit long:

Here it is on the rack, er, blocking board, now at just under four feet wide and two feet long:

I am rather merciless when I block lace.

The new shawl I started was going along swimmingly until I hit row 15 of the first chart, and then I ended up with an extra stitch where there shouldn't be one. I re-checked my work on the row below, and it was correct. The stitch markers hadn't worked their way under a stitch, which can sometimes happen and cause stitch counts to be off in a section. I re-checked my work on the active row, and that was correct, too.

I re-read the instructions, which mentioned having to move stitch markers around on four rows where there are double decreases. However, the row numbers listed for this in the instructions didn't match what I saw on the chart (ie, the designer made a boo boo when typing the instructions and was a row off, and the tech editor didn't catch it). Working on this late at night didn't help matters.

Funnily enough, while I was calling the project unladylike names, an old episode of Fawlty Towers was on. It was my favorite episode, which contains this scene, which I immediately related to:

Bless you, John Cleese, for showing me the absurdity of yelling at yarn. (And living mere feet away from a patch of woods means I could have run out the front door, found a sturdy tree branch, yanked it off the tree, and run back inside to beat the yarn. However, it was late at night, I was in my jim jams, and whatever would the neighbors think?) Instead, I calmly wrote out a post on Ravelry asking if anyone had encountered this problem while knitting this pattern. Then I went to bed.

Sleep being the great healer it is, I was in a better frame of mind to face the blasted project this morning. I also found a response to my post, which confirmed my suspicion of typing error, and the extra stitch is accounted for since it's on a double decrease row, which requires deliberately moving stitch markers.

There are three other rows on which this spiciness will occur, but I'm ready for them now.

practice with the moon and stars

2011-07-29T21:43:00.004-05:00

I had a cello lesson tonight, and it occurred to me that it's been awhile since I posted any cello progress updates.

I'm going to have hour-long lessons starting in September. Looking forward to that.

I'm working on a Bach minuet, an etude, and the E flat major scale. I learn a new scale every few weeks, and I've racked up quite a few. I like scales. Nothing has helped me attack my intonation problems more than scales, and I also use them to practice vibrato, shifts, extensions, and bow direction changes.

Lately, whenever he assigns me a new piece, Ben asks me how I might go about learning it. Since I have two years' worth of study under my belt, I seem to have learned enough about practice approach to have a little more say in it. The layering method is working well for me, and really helps avoid mindless practice that usually results in frustration rather than progress. So when I tell him my plan, it's in that framework.

We've also added the "targeted approach" to the layers - once I'm familiar enough with a layer, it's time to really zero in on the details I might be tripping over. In other words, an even more thorough learning of a layer. For me, this is usually extracting a tiny section in a line to work on in isolation, and then gradually adding in a note before and after that section until the whole line is added back in. It's sounds tedious and laborious, but I don't mind it, and pieces aren't feeling so slippery under my fingers these days.

I also recently encountered an etude (Dotzauer Grant #120) that I got the hang of right away. The note pattern, slur pattern, and fingering pattern all made sense at first glance. This has never happened before. Ever. Even Ben noticed that I wasn't struggling with it.

Which isn't to say that this etude sounds good when I play it, because it doesn't. Playing the right notes at the right time with the right slurs isn't the entirety of making music. But the fact that I could analyze it and figure out the technical aspects and the structure without help is a milestone for me.

It's a nice little confidence boost to know that my usual slowness and stupidity at this cello stuff is absent for a change. It will likely come back with a vengeance, but for now, I'm enjoying the holiday away from it.

4S: knit your vegetables

2011-07-24T21:44:00.004-05:00

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

Welcome back to 4S! No socks this week. I bring you a shawl-in-progress instead.

The knit-along Mystery Shawlette was my test drive of one of Wendy Johnson's lace patterns. I liked it enough that I decided my next shawl project would be another of her patterns - the Japanese Garden shawl. All of the money she got from the sale of the pattern went to Japan's earthquake and tsunami relief efforts. She raised more than $6000!

I had some Knit Picks Stroll Tonal in the Springtime colorway that I thought would be good for this pattern. (I seem to be on a Knit Picks yarn kick. I do have other yarn brands to get to this summer. Promise.)

Is it just me, or does this color look like lettuce and other munchy greens?

I've taken to calling it my veggie shawl because the green reminds me of celery and cabbage. Nearly finished with chart B. Just chart C and the bind off to do, and then a soak and block.

I had the sudden urge to cast on another shawl since I'm so near the end of this one. I have some lovely blue gray Cascade yarn (see!), and I figure a three-fer is as good as a rest, so I went for Wendy's Vernal Equinox shawl, which I'm calling my late-for-spring shawl. I'll probably have it finished by the time her book comes out at the end of August.

Yes, I admit it. I'm now a lace knitting addict, but it's all her fault.

4S: and again with the socks

2011-07-16T19:32:00.004-05:00

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

Hello friends! We are back up and running after last week's techno-hiccough.

So, I finished these:

And I gave them to my sister, who is a handmade socks convert. She wore out the previous pair I'd made for her last Christmas. That's the best thing you can ever do for knitters - wear out what they knit for you. They don't spend all that time and all those thousands of stitches to have the finished object just sit on a shelf or in a drawer because "it's too pretty to use." I look forward to hearing that the blanket I made recently for the making-her-appearance-any-day-now owlet has had food spilled on it, and has been spit up on and drooled on and dragged around, and gets washed so many times that it pills, and the colors fade. That's what knitting is for.

I started another pair out of TOFUtsies yarn, which I also got from the yarn swap. It's superwash wool, soysilk (get it?), cotton, and chitin. I avoid knitting with pure cotton yarn because it's so hard on the hands, but blended in with other fibers, it isn't too bad. Still a bit squeaky though.

More bright colors, although my camera isn't doing them justice:

I also have more of this yarn brand in a strange shade of pink. I have enough of it to make several pairs of socks. I'll see if my sister likes the feel of the yarn, and if she does, I'll make a pair for her and a pair for me. It's handy that my sister, my mom, and I all wear the same shoe size. If I make a pair of socks to fit me, they'll fit either of them.

I have quite a bit of veggie shawl to show you next week.

4S: not wounded, sire, but dead

2011-07-09T23:25:00.001-05:00

Scarf/shawl/sock Saturday (or Sunday, if I forget to post on Saturday)

There's been a slight hitch in the proceedings. Namely, my laptop gave up the ghost last night. (I'm writing this on my iTouch.)

I made several attempts to save the old girl, but to no avail. The new laptop isn't arriving until late next week.

I have photos of the socks I showed you last week. They turned out well. I finished them and gave them to my sister. I also have photos of the shawl I'm working on. All the photos are on my camera, and I can't download them until I re-install the software on the new laptop.

Hopefully next week we'll return to regularly scheduled knitting progress reports.

4S: lace socks

2011-07-03T21:59:00.002-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

My first sock post for 4S.

I've been knitting socks for a few years now, and I've refined my recipe quite a bit. Lately, this involves starting with a size 1 needle for the toe section, switching to a 2 for the foot and heel depending on how stretchy the design for the instep is, and then to the next largest needle for the leg, and maybe even one more size up for the cuff. I do this because the first pair of socks I made for myself were a little too tight in places.

One thing that hasn't changed is that I knit both socks at once toe-up on a long circular needle - ie, the "magic loop" technique. (I can't wait until Signature comes out with sock needle sizes in their circular line.) I love this method of sock knitting, and it works for sleeves as well. My knitting method is cobbled from Melissa Morgan Oakes' Toe-up Two-at-a-Time Socks and Wendy Johnson's Socks From the Toe Up (particularly the pattern for the gusset heel - no more picking up stitches!)

My latest pair are knit from yarn I got at a yarn swap.

Rather bright, aren't they? I pulled this yarn from my stash when I was working on my mom's scarf, which was white, and my stepdad's socks, which were brown. We were also having quite a lot of rain on a near-daily basis for what seemed like weeks on end, so days were often dull gray. I suppose I needed something colorful to work on to brighten things up.

The label is skimpy on details, but I can tell you that it's 75% wool/25% nylon, and there's no official colorway name other than 528. The brand is called Vinca, which I've never heard of. The two skeins I got were from the same dye lot, but the color repeats start and end in different places. Trying to make them match up is more trouble than it's worth, so the socks will be somewhat mis-matched, which is fine by me.

The pattern is Wendy Johnson's "Dead Simple Lace Socks" from the Socks From the Toe Up book. It is indeed a dead simple pattern - a two-row repeat, easily memorized. Good TV or sociable knitting.

oh, and another one...

2011-06-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

I had my first cello lesson two years ago yesterday.

As far as progress goes, this post that I wrote recently sums it up nicely.

Excuse me, but I need to go roll up my sleeves for another lesson this afternoon. That Scherzo is slowly but surely finding out that it is NOT the boss of me.

4S: fernfrost

2011-06-25T21:50:00.002-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

Welcome to the second edition of 4S.

I recently finished this Fernfrost scarf for my mom:

I've made several of Anne Hanson's sock patterns, and really liked them, so I was eager to try one of her lace patterns. Mom picked the pattern and the yarn color. (Apparently, this is the "wrong" side of the pattern, but I actually prefer it to the "right" side, which shows all the purl stitches. If you click on the Fernfrost link above, you can see what the "right" side looks like.)

That there is eleven-and-a-quarter repeats of a 32-row pattern. Here's a close-up of a 32-row section:

I used Knit Picks Palette yarn in the Cream colorway and their size 5 Harmony wood needles. There is pattern work on every row, so no purl resting row. This is probably the most complicated lace knitting I've done so far. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Despite the complexity, it gave me a lot of focus and relaxation. I will definitely try more of Anne's lace patterns.

children's e-book question

2011-06-23T19:06:00.000-05:00

Seeing as today was filled with news about JK Rowling's announcement that she's (finally!) releasing the Harry Potter series as e-books on Pottermore, it seems appropriate to ask a question about children's e-books.

The background to this question:

I'm finishing edits to my next e-book. It's a children's novella for the 9 to 12 age group. Obviously, there will be a cover image.

Here's the question:

For a children's e-book, is a cover image enough, or do you think there should be some illustrations within the story, or does it matter?

If you have children who read e-books, or know children who read them, I'd especially like to hear from you. And your children, or the children you know. Feel free to ask them their opinion on this question. Also feel free to forward this question to anyone you think might have an opinion on it - I'm data gathering, you see.

4S premier

2011-06-18T16:51:00.002-05:00

Scarf/Shawl/Sock Saturday (or Sunday if I forget to post on Saturday)

I'm totally cribbing this themed-post idea from Gwen's T-shirt Tuesday posts. She's okay with it, though.

I can't remember the last time I showed you any knitting progress, let alone finished objects. To remedy that, you lucky readers you, I'm going to attempt weekly posts on Saturdays (or Sundays) with photo updates of projects I'm working on.

I generally have at least one scarf, shawl, or pair of socks on the needles, hence the S theme. These three projects are my favorites to knit because they fulfill the three Ps - portable, practical, pretty. (I promise to stop with the alliteration now.) The materials for all three project types don't take up much room, so they fit into a small bag you can keep with you all the time so you can knit on them when you have a few spare minutes or fifty. These project types can all keep you warm as well as make you look spiffy. And there's so much pattern variety, both simple and complex, to keep your visual interest.

All of them are good for spring and summer knitting, too, because you don't have a lot of heavy yarn in your lap like you do when you knit a blanket or a sweater. (Ooh, this may renamed 5S in the fall, when I start knitting sweaters again.)

I'm going to start 4S with a photo essay of a shawlette knit-along I recently finished. I tweeted updates and pics after each section was completed, but I realize not everyone is on Twitter.

I've read Wendy Johnson's blog for awhile now, and I've always admired her lace patterns. She's got a new lace knitting book coming out in August and ahead of that, she's been doing a few group knit-alongs. For non-knitters, a knit-along is just what it sounds like - a group of people knit the same pattern and compare notes in the process. Everyone's using different yarn in different colors and maybe even different needle sizes, so despite it being the same pattern, there is lots of variety in the finished results.

It gets even more interesting if it's a mystery knit-along. You know what the finished object will be, but not what it will look like in detail. Sections of the pattern are released (in order) at regular intervals. The good thing about this process is that you work on the project a bit at a time, and it seems far more manageable that way. There's no real deadline, so you knit at your normal pace. There's no problem if you fall behind because the next pattern clues will still be available when you catch up.

For this mystery lace shawlette knit-along, Wendy suggested fingering weight yarn without too much varigation, and size 5 or 6 needles. I decided to use Knit Picks Stroll in the Tidepool Heather colorway.

(All photos taken with the Instagram app on my iTouch - I'm having a little too much fun with the retro pic options on that app.)

This is 239 stitches cast on with two rows knit.

Unfortunately, I had to rip all this out because the stitch count was incorrect in the pattern. It was supposed to be 241 stitches. Wendy discovered it pretty quickly and alerted the group. She even had a fix if you'd cast on the 239, but it only worked if you hadn't started the first lace row, which I had, so after a short visit to the frog pond, I was able to re-cast on with the correct number of stitches.

First 14 rows:

Twelve rows added:

Tristan wanted to help:

Another 72 rows added:

The last 20 rows added and the whole thing bound off:

Blocked! (For non-knitters, blocking means stretching a piece and pinning it to get it sized correctly, and for a lace project, to get the pattern to pop out and not look like lumpy tangled noodles.

I think it turned out nicely, and I'd probably knit it again. The only changes I'd make are to take out the "spine," since I generally don't like that look in shawls (it's easily done by omitting the yarnovers on either side of it that make the line of holes), and I'd make it a little bigger since the average yardage of fingering weight yarn that I buy would easily cover another pattern repeat or two.

anniversary

2011-06-07T20:35:00.001-05:00

Oscar-the-cello and I have been together for a year.

It's been a good relationship so far. Oscar sounds better in the new practice space (the room with the moon and stars). It's a smaller and cozier room, so I can hear his tones a whole lot better.

We're up to fourth position and about to dive into thumb positions. Our vibrato is coming along nicely. Well, all but first finger vibrato, but we're working on that. We have a better bow hold, too. A nagging ganglion cyst on my left wrist sometimes gets in the way of developing our relationship. However, my left hand grip is a lot looser than it used to be, so the cyst doesn't bother me as much as it used to.

The kitties like Oscar, too. They take turns hanging out in the room during my practice sessions.

Appropriately enough, I had a cello lesson tonight. More work on the Scherzo. Funny how relaxed you have to be to play the frenzied bits so they sound convincing.

Oscar puts up with me even on my bad days when I'm cranky or tired or depressed or angry or doubtful or dejected. Some days we sound truly awful together, and we can occasionally find humor in that. Some days I tell him I don't feel like practicing and can only manage a scale or two. He's okay with that because he knows that more often than not just getting started with a scale can be enough momentum to get me to stay seated and continue with an étude and maybe even wander over to tackle a bit of the current full piece I'm working on.

Here's to many more years together with Oscar.

the ugly teenage phase

2011-05-20T21:32:00.013-05:00

I'd mentioned on Twitter and Facebook that Ben gave me a pep talk during today's lesson. Several people asked me what it was about.

For background, during this lesson, we were working on an etude and a minuet. Both involve moving in and out of a lot of positions. This can be tricky with an instrument that doesn't have frets on it. You have to go by sound alone. You can cheat a bit and use a tuner to tell you if you're too sharp or too flat, but eventually, you play so many notes over and over that you start to recognize when they are too sharp, too flat, or just right.

The etude focuses on going from first to fourth position and back again. I thought I'd been doing fine in my practice sessions with it, but when Ben played the second cello part along with me, it was obvious I was playing a hair too sharp in first position and a hair too flat in fourth position. This really threw me, and I got flustered with how to fix it. (I did figure out that since the width of the fingerspace in positions narrows as you go down the fingerboard, I'm overcompensating for it when I change positions.)

I've been working on this etude for awhile, and I was starting to doubt my ability to improve on it, ie, I wasn't sure what to work on anymore, sharpness and flatness aside. I can play the right notes at speed, and my shifts are a lot better (no pausing to get from one to the other). However, it's nowhere near the joy-to-listen-to point. In fact, nothing I play gets to that point.

Ben said that I'm at that stage where the novelty of learning to play the cello has worn off, and I'm not satisifed anymore with "it's okay to sound bad since I'm a beginner anyway," but I've also not had anywhere near enough experience with the instrument yet to show deep mastery of anything. What he sees and hears in my lessons is that I'm in the thick of rolling up my sleeves and working at fundamentals and details so I can eventually get to the I-sound-and-feel-like-I-know-what-I'm-doing stage.

I heard a similar statement from one of my art teachers years ago. She said all creative works go through an "ugly teenage phase," where the shiny new project enthusiasm fades, and you have to work and develop the substance that turns it into something worth looking at (or in the case of music, worth listening to). That can be a long and tedious slog that requires the P word.

Patience.

I've never minded doing the work to get good at something, since I am more process-oriented than product-oriented when it comes to creative endeavors, but there comes a point where it gets hard to sit down every day and do the work when it seems like I only see a drop of improvement every once in awhile. (My latest drop was getting a quick eighth-note run in the minuet to sound and feel accurate, smooth, and comfortable enough that even I thought it sounded good.)

I suspect that's why Ben makes me keep a cello journal. He's forever pointing out how many pages I've filled and saying, "look what you were working on a year ago that seemed impossible, and now you can do it easily." It's his way of saying that I may be good about not resting on my laurels, but I suffer from a serious case of not acknowledging what I've accomplished.

His advice was to "keep being consistent and organized." Practice every day, no matter what, and continue to write down what I do. Approach a piece in layers so it's less daunting, which results in less procrastinating about even starting it - focus on one thing until I have it, and then add another layer, and then another - pizzicato to get the left hand comfortable, then bow in rhythm on open strings, then add the left hand back in, then add slurs and dynamics. It's the least stressful way to learn a piece thoroughly and not get permanently hung up on any one thing, and it sneaks patience in there at the same time.

Now he's assigned me a frenzied, someone's-had-caffeine-haven't-they scherzo to work on for the next few weeks. I've overcome tripping over eighth notes. On to sixteenth notes.

"You'll get there," he says. "And remember, we're doing this because it's fun!"

Never underestimate the power of others having faith in you when you run low on your own reserves of it.

a novel debut

2011-05-01T10:46:00.002-05:00

Finally! My first novel is out in the world!

I've been sitting on the announcement for weeks because of the time it takes for the upload and distribution process.

You can now find Tempus House on iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Smashwords, Sony E Reader, and Kindle. Getting it from Smashwords is probably easiest - it's available in all formats there.

Even if you don't have an e-reader, many of these vendors have e-reading software for desktops and laptops. The book is the same price on each vendor's site. (It's $0.99, so if you don't like it, you're only out a buck.) You can download a sample for free.

The teaser:

Jillian Luell is a photographer with an unwanted habit of seeing things other people miss, even when she’s nowhere near a camera. When she inherits a house from her aunt and uncle, she discovers there’s more to her inheritance than just a creaky place full of a lifetime’s worth of other people’s stuff. A long-buried story of tragic young lovers requires an ending from beyond the grave, forcing Jillian to wrestle with reality giving way to impossibility in her new home. However, a mysterious man with connections to the lovers is doing his best to get in the way and keep the secret hidden.

This book has been six years in the making. (I cringe writing that.) I wrote the first draft in October 2005 for my first attempt at National Novel Writing Month. I put that draft aside for a long time, not sure what to do with it. I brought it out again and revised it for my master's degree thesis in 2009. I shopped it around to agents and publishers for more than a year with no bites.

I decided to try self-publishing since I was hearing and reading so much about it. So far, I've found Smashwords to be a decent e-pub site. They have a detailed style guide to help you format the final manuscript and cover image, and they can distribute it to all the major e-readers (and even to some I've never heard of). Within an hour of going live on Smashwords, people started downloading the sample and actually buying the book. That floored me.

The only bug I've encountered on the site is the cover image issue. You have to upload an image file, which is used for the book blurb, and is also automatically inserted into some, but not all, of the e-book formats. They insist that having a cover image makes the book look more "professional," and that if you want to be sure the cover image shows up in all formats, you should insert the image on the first page of your manuscript. This makes sense, but it also means that some versions will show the cover image twice, depending on if the software auto-inserted it or not. Can't really win that conundrum.

I've only had two hiccups with self-publishing this novel:

First, I had to change the title. There's a film that came out recently that had the same title as my original one. For such an unusual word, this surprises me. Since they "published" first, as it were, I had to come up with a new title. It was hard to let go of the old one, seeing as I'd been carrying it around with me since 2005 when I first had the twinkle of an idea for the story. My fault, though. If I'd published it sooner, I could have kept the original title. However, the current title will do. It's easier to pronounce and spell at least.

The second reason is also my fault. Due to the title change, I did a mass search-and-replace in the manuscript, and then went through the final draft to make sure the house name didn't read weirdly anywhere. As I did so, I started editing, and therein lies a trap. Every time you re-read something you wrote, you get the urge to revise it. I changed a lot more than I intended to. And then when I formatted the manuscript and went through it again to make sure nothing wonky had happened, I did yet another edit! You'd think I'd learn...

Also, because I'm so good at overthinking, I started doubting whether I should publish it at all. Maybe I should re-write the whole thing. Maybe some of the descriptions would work better as scenes or journal entries. Maybe this. Maybe that. In the end, I reminded myself that trying to tell three generations of story in a novel without slowing the story down too much isn't easy, and in all my drafts I was trying to do that by balancing full-on scenes, quick descriptions, and journal entries. Some days, I think it more or less worked. Other days, well, we won't talk about those days. A benefit of finally publishing this story is that I can't revise it anymore. I've had to let go of it once and for all.

Over the many versions of this book, I've learned a lot about novel writing, and it's clearly showing in the upcoming books that I'm going to release. More detailed outlines to work from (I've tried pantstering, and it just doesn't work for me; I need some structure to start with, darn it), more scenes, more conflict, and less description, for starters.

Go read it. I hope you like it. I have more stories in me. They are coming soon. (The next one is a children's story!)

P.S. If you do find any typos or wonky formatting, please let me know and I will do my best to fix them. Since Smashwords distributes the manuscript in various formats to accommodate all the different e-reader platforms, things can obviously go pear-shaped in one format or another, despite their auto-vetter, which tries to catch errors before the manuscript goes live.

critiques

2011-04-06T11:37:00.000-05:00

Continuing the cello and writing theme from the last post, my most recent lesson reminded me a lot of the writing critique process.

I credit my ability to gracefully handle (most of the time) critiques of my writing to Dr Ruth Ann Ragland, who was my advisor in the journalism department at Texas Woman's University. (Alas, the department no longer exists.) The degree requirements included several newswriting classes. Dr Ragland taught one of them, and part of the set-up of her class was a regular one-on-one coaching session.

You had a recurring appointment in her office every week. She had marked up your go at the previous week's assignment (the pages were near pink after she'd taken her red pen to them), and in this weekly meeting, she'd sit next to you and go over her mark-ups one by one. She was patient and careful to explain the why behind her edits. It didn't feel so much like criticism as it felt like enlightenment. It wasn't painful, and her points were always logical. After my first few experiences with her coaching method, I actually looked forward to the critique sessions.

I used to keep a running list of the edits she tended to make on my assignments so that I could self-correct before she ever saw the draft - passive voice, too many "that"'s, unnecessary words, making sure all the important points were in the paragraphs "above the fold," tell all sides of the story.

At the end of each session, she encouraged you to revise the article and submit it to the university newspaper, which would often get you a published article and a byline. (Ah, I have fond memories of The Lasso and working in the newsroom.)

Dr Ragland's coaching method changed my thinking about constructive criticism. Anyone who read the published version of my article had no way of knowing how much she'd red-penned the draft. All they saw was the final polished piece. Her criticism wasn't intended to ruin my day or build up self-doubt - it was meant to make my writing better and up my chances of getting praised for it, rather than blamed, since it was only my name on the byline.

My weekly lessons with Ben are similar in approach. I play for him what I've worked on in the past week, and he takes notes as he listens. Then he goes over each "edit" that he thinks I should make to improve the piece or etude or scale - more distinction between short bow strokes on dotted notes and fuller strokes on non-dotted notes, keep shoulders down even on the tricky bits that make me nervous, a little more bow pressure on the C string for better intonation, don't overthink position shifts since that leads to overshooting or undershooting them, pay attention to dynamics where overtly indicated and where they could be logically placed if not overtly indicated.

I now have a sticky note on my music stand with a running list of the "edits" Ben suggests in an effort to self-correct ahead of time while I'm learning a piece, so that when I present a version to him for critique, it's hopefully a bit more polished.

Should I ever get to performance level, an audience won't have a clue about my coaching sessions with Ben, although they will see the results of those sessions. I wonder if I could get away with putting that sticky note on the music stand while on stage.

cello novelization

2011-02-25T22:29:00.006-05:00

Tonight's cello lesson was more Gavotting in third position. Surprisingly, I've picked up the fingering and rhythm of this piece pretty quickly. I suspect this is because I'm becoming fairly familiar with the Baroque style, which is the club some of the really good cello music finds itself in - the Bach Cello Suites being the most well known.

The dotted notes are really important in this piece. However, I tend to play all the notes either as dotted notes or non-dotted notes, instead of going back and forth between the two kinds the way the blasted thing is written. I get into the flow of one and keep going with it, rather than switching to the other and back again where needed. At least no one can say I don't know how to focus on one thing at a time.

Ben noticed this right away, and the analogy he came up with to help me fix it really made me perk up my ears.

Normally, when more advanced musicians start talking in abstract concepts, my face takes on the deer-in-the-headlights look. This is because, as a word person, I'm over-sensitive to the idea that a word can take on different nuances of meaning for different people, especially abstract words, like "deeply," "fully, "round," "bright," and so forth, so I am often not sure what the advanced musician really means, and I feel too stupid and embarrassed as a beginner to ask them to clarify and really show my ignorance. When I have been brave enough to ask, I tend to get an answer like, "well, if you draw the note out more, and really dig into it, you can amp it up." And out come my deer eyes, because, really, HOW do you do that? I need a different vocabulary to grasp what they mean. Something more concrete, or at least more familiar.

So those dotted and non-dotted notes? Ben said, "they're all about characterization and motive." Ooh! I know those words! As a fiction writer, they are rather important to a story. In fiction, motive is the drive that makes a character do what he does and makes him continue his quest in spite of the obstacles. A character's motive will re-surface in the story repeatedly to get him through all the events. Characterization refers to traits about a character (physical features, mannerisms, personality, interaction with others) that can hint at, or point directly to, his motive.

Musically speaking, motive can be a phrase or pattern that occurs repeatedly. The first movement of Elgar's Concerto showcases one of the most overt motives I've ever heard - "lament" always comes to mind when I hear it. It was his musical response to the first World War, which saw the loss of nearly an entire generation of men. Lament, indeed.

Gavottes have such distinct rhythms that they were the dance tunes of their day. The dotted notes in the Gavotte I'm working on give the piece a spring and bounciness that a good dance tune needs. The non-dotted notes have a smooth glide, which also makes for good dancing. Those are its character traits, and they come around again and again in the rhythm.

Ben said that playing the whole thing as dotted or non-dotted notes makes for a flat piece. It's the difference between a vague, never-changing character whom you don't want to pay any attention to and one who rubs his neck when he's thinking and eats shortbread cookies before his weekly session with his therapist. Small details like that make him, and a piece of music, more interesting.

Ben knows that I am a writer, but I don't know if he deliberately chose his analogy because of that. Either way, I get it. I feel a smidge less musically stupid. Finally.

the sweater that wasn't

2011-02-06T16:09:00.000-05:00

One phenomenon of knitting that I encounter every once in awhile is a change of plan for a particular yarn or pattern. Sometimes, the pattern I have in mind doesn't fit the yarn I have in mind. I'm not sure why this happens - I'm going for the same weight of yarn that's called for in the pattern or I go for a pattern that fits the weight of yarn that I want to work with. But sometimes, the match just isn't meant to be.

When this happens, I've got to let the pattern or the yarn sit for a bit until something else comes along that fits better with one or the other.

A recent case:

I had several skeins each of these two lovely colors:

My original plan was to make a bold-striped sweater or cardigan out of them, but I couldn't find a pattern that I liked, and I am not a good enough knitter to be able to make up a pattern on the fly - I need guidelines at least. It was driving me crazy because these colors go so well together. I finally gave up trying to find the perfect pattern and let the yarn languish in a box for a bit.

I have a closet in my office/writing/cello practice room, which now houses the yarn stash. A week or so after I moved in, I was putting the various bags of yarn up on the shelf in the closet, and I came across the bag that had this yarn in it. I remembered the sweater/cardigan that I wanted to do, but the image of it had gotten fuzzy. Then another thought occurred to me...

I recently got some red couches:

I love them, and they are exactly what I pictured for the living room. However, I'd started to wonder where I'd find blankets that I could lounge with on these couches that would go with the red in them, and then I came across the yarn I'd wanted to use for a sweater, and the little voice said, "make a blanket out of it, silly."

And so I am:

the stars...the moon...they have all been blown out...

2011-01-30T21:38:00.004-05:00

..and I am left in the dark, here in my new writing/cello/knitting room, but moreso because the walls and ceiling are painted dark blue than because there was a short circuit in the heavens caused by someone leaving someone else and a song being written about it and played with really loud drums. (Great song by the way, especially with the volume turned up. Great album, too, come to that. She gives me the urge to dye my hair bright red.)

This room used to be a nursery, and there is a moon and stars mural painted on the walls, like so:

The mural drifts across the top of all four walls. My astronomy is a little rusty, but I believe the dots on the ceiling are meant to resemble actual constellations. Groups of them look like constellations, anyway.

It's a tiny room, and too small for a guest room, so it's become a creativity room instead. For the first time in my life, I have a whole room devoted to nothing but creative stuff. I'm already spending a lot of time in here writing and sawing away on my cello. It's a cozy knitting space, too, especially while listening to audiobooks (just downloaded Brian Greene's latest book through the local library, along with American Bloomsbury, which is about the writers living in and around Concord, Massachusetts between the 1840s and 1880s - Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller).

The biggest revelation for me in this room is that since I don't have downstairs neighbors anymore and since the walls of this room don't share common walls with my new neighbors, I can play my cello whenever I damn well please. I hope my timidity and embarrassed self-consciousness while playing will decrease and my volume and practice hours (and hopefully, skill) will increase as a result of this new-found playing freedom.

I think the moon and stars mural will stay up for awhile. I like it. It seems to me that when you have the moon and stars in your very own creative room, pretty much anything is possible, don't you think? Oscar Wilde did (..."with freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, [and cello and knitting], who could not be happy?").

childhood comfort

2011-01-26T08:59:00.001-05:00

I always think of Narnia whenever I see a lampost in the snow.

This one is just outside my front door and a few steps down the path. Granted, it's not as impressive as some people's lampposts, but it'll do nicely for me.

I think Aslan is sniffing around down by the frozen creek (you can see a bit of it where the tree is bending its elbow and toward the left). I'm hoping he'll ask the fairies if it would be okay for me to bury Hunny's and Louise's ashes down there when the ground softens again.

I wonder if he'd like to come in for tea.

Would it be rude to ask him to wipe his paws on the doormat first?

new nest

2011-01-01T15:27:00.007-05:00

There's one thing I've figured out about resolutions and goals - you are more likely to accomplish them if they are less things you should do and more things you want to do (I've probably said this in a previous resolutions/revolutions post - the "don't should on yourself" philosophy). This goal-setting method has worked well for me for the past few years, so I'm using it again this year.

The first couple of months of this year will be all about leaving the old nest and settling into the new one. (Treehouse. Tree. Nest. Get it? I'm sorry. I'm so so sorry. Couldn't resist.) New red couches will be involved. I'm not a red person, unless it's a deep raspberry or purple red, but every time I look at what will be my new living room, all I can picture in it are red couches. No idea why, but I'm going with it.

Also, new bookcases, seeing as I can't take the built-ins from my condo with me. More's the pity. But there will be a wall of bookcases in the new nest, and a big red chair in front of them.

I'm also going to learn to garden. I have a front garden and a patio on the side of the house. At settlement on Thursday, the previous owners gave me a map of the front garden. I thought that was very nice of them. Now I at least know what's there (I have rose bushes! And hydrangeas! And astilbe and hosta! [whatever they might be]), so I don't have to waste time figuring that out, and I can research how to take care of each thing. The side patio will be for container gardening - finally, my own veggies and herbs!

I will get Eidolon House up on all the e-reader platforms. I shopped it around to agents for a year with no luck, so it's time to release it into the world in another way.

I will finish revising the next book, The Phoenix Sonata, and get it e-pubbed as well.

I will finish at least one of the children's novels I've written and do some research on e-pubbing children's stories. Are kids using e-readers?

I will outline the novel I will write for NaNoWriMo 2011. I didn't participate last year since November was my month of house buying and selling and showing and paper signing. A novel drafted at the end of 2011 means a third novel epubbed in 2012.

I will learn the entire prelude to Bach's First Suite for solo cello (meaning, I will imperfectly but valiantly attempt to stumble through it at written speed and with the printed bowings). Emily got me started on it last year, and I practice a measure or two of it at each practice session. I'm not playing at speed yet, and I'm still playing it with separate bowings. I'm focusing on getting the left hand fingers to not trip over each other. This piece is a real finger workout! And I am a slow learner. This is quite possibly too ambitious a goal. We shall see.

I will work on vibrato. I've learned the mechanics of it, and I get the concept, but I'm not able to do it yet - see slow learner above.

It's looking like it will be quite the creative year.

'scuse me, but I have more packing to do.

years go by, will I still be waiting...

2010-12-31T16:37:00.003-05:00

This end-of-the-year moving house saga was a real side tracker. As I've been packing, it occurred to me that there were things I managed to accomplish this year:

de-stash the yarn collection: I've done two things to de-stash the yarn - I've knit from my stash, obviously: socks, blankets, scarves, shawls, sweaters (I need to photograph a bunch of this stuff and put up the specs on Ravelry). I also culled my stash and took a HUGE bag of yarn to a yarn swap to give away. I also donated some yarn to Knitting Behind Bars, which the founder of my knitting group started.

And then I bought more yarn at Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival at the beginning of May. However, I knew I would be doing that and had a plan for what I was looking for, which resulted in a reasonable and not overboard haul. (I believe the correct term is "stash enhancement adventure.")

re-commit to the morning writing, reading, exercise, and cello practice routine: I did really well with the morning pages until I went to Paris in late May. I kept a travel journal while I was there, but when I came back, I struggled to pick up my morning writing pattern again. At least in the handwritten form. I've done quite a bit of journal writing on the laptop since May.

As for reading, I've gotten through a fair number of books this year, both physical and electronic. I particularly like Daily Lit online. I've gotten through quite a few classics this year using that service - the latest being Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I've just started The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I'm still wandering through the tome that is The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, and I'm still enjoying the atmosphere of it; really is a savory read. I also just finished the latest Anne Rice novel, which I got through in an afternoon - I'll do a book review of that later.

I went for near daily afternoon walks until the weather got yucky hot. All that exercise served me well as I continually got lost in Paris. Speaking of lost, my weight is down, also thanks to exercise and getting back to a real foods diet.

Morning cello practice was hit or miss. I was too conscious of my neighbors being able to hear me, even with a mute on the bridge. I seemed to be less worried about it with evening practices. I think this will be less of a problem in the new house - no downstairs neighbors, and my practice room doesn't share any common walls with the new neighbors.

post a blog entry once a week: Including this entry, I have 44 posts for the year, so that's not quite one a week. I think that posting more about my cello lessons and practice, in addition to what I typically write about, will up the numbers next year.

finish short story/novella/novel: I completed a draft of a new novel, and then realized how utterly boring the story was, so I set about revising it, which involved introducing a new character. The second draft is better, but meanders too much. Way too much. So I'm into the third draft now, plus I've outlined several other stories. I also investigated publishing e-books, and my first novel will be available as an ebook early in the new year - I got image use permission for the cover art, and I'm getting help with formatting and uploading. I'm hoping to get the current writing project wrapped up and e-pubbed next year as well.

make a cello commitment: I bought a cello in July, after a year of lessons with a rented instrument. Having my own cello has been a great investment and a nice upgrade from the rental. I've signed up for another round of lessons with Ben. I finished two etude books, and Ben is starting to talk "ensembles" and "quartets" and "trios" and "duets with a pianist." I think he's crazy.

So besides the above, I went to Paris for my 35th birthday in May. I really like Europe, and I plan to go back. I've surprised myself with the international travel in the past couple of years, in that provided I'm armed with a guidebook, a map, a metro/tube/bus pass, comfortable shoes, an umbrella, a water bottle, some snacks, ~~a towel,~~ and a backpack to put it all in, wandering around an unknown place doesn't faze me a bit. It's nice to know I have an adventurous streak.

And as you've heard ad nauseum, I decided toward the end of the year that 11 years in my condo was enough. With the help of a fabulous realtor, in the span of about 30 days, I found a townhouse, put an offer on it, which was accepted, submitted paperwork right and left, put my condo on the market after getting new carpet, got an offer on it, submitted more paperwork up and down, and had the air ducts cleaned. I'm moving in mid-January. I'm calling it the Treehouse from now on - "townhouse-in-the-trees" is too much have to type. It's not technically in the trees, but it's pretty damn close.

movie review: The King's Speech

2010-12-30T17:58:00.009-05:00

I went to settlement on my new townhouse this morning. Although it was nerve-wracking to sign all those papers and hand over a huge chunk of money, it went as smoothly as anyone could hope for. The sellers are nice people, and they were easy to deal with. I'm well aware how lucky I am for how everything has worked out with this home transition. I will spend the last days of this year packing, so I'll be ready to move later in January. Seems like a fitting end to the year actually.

I had the rest of the day off, and I needed a distraction after all that important paper-signing and money-handing-overing, so I went to the movies. I'd been keeping an eye on local showings and finally, The King's Speech was showing nearby, after a long period of limited release.

This movie is about King George VI's ascension to the throne, after his brother Edward abdicates so he could marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, and just before the start of World War II. More importantly, it's about George VI's quite noticeable stammer, which I'm sure made speech-giving an agony, especially in a position such as his, and with radio broadcasts of important events becoming more popular.

Colin Firth has come a long way from Mr Darcy to George VI. If you're looking for him to be a romantic hero, this film isn't for you. He's a hero in it, certainly, but a bashful, self-doubting, uptight one. It's painful to watch him literally stammer through speeches and conversations, even with his daughters - the scene in which he tells them a bedtime story will make you sigh and wince at the same time. I don't know how or with whom Colin Firth prepared for the role, but he was stunning. The gulping, the hesitations, the furtive nervous looks. The man did his homework, that's for sure.

Helena Bonham Carter played Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, George's wife. She gave an incredibly balanced performance - sympathy with George's problems but not sinking into pity, an authoritative royal manner but not dictatorial or annoying, and just enough wit and humor to make her fun. I suspect a great debt is owed to the queen mum for supporting George throughout his reign.

Geoffrey Rush is the king's speech therapist, Lionel Logue. He's portrayed as also something of a psychotherapist, as there is some emphasis on the emotional and mental things that can make a stammer worse or better. An interesting aspect of this relationship is how the therapist takes the king out of himself, tries to get him to relax, insists on calling him "Bertie" (the king's full name was Albert Frederick Arthur George, and he chose "George" as his name on becoming king, supposedly in a move to provide continuity from his father, who was George V). Lionel is a bit eccentric, but sympathetic with those who have trouble speaking, and he's good at his job. You learn some interesting things about him during the preparation for George VI's coronation. There are a few scenes that focus on Lionel's acting ability - I'm not sure what the point of them was, I have to admit.

Most of the funny scenes occur between Lionel and George, especially when Lionel points out that when George gets angry and starts swearing, the stammer disappears. I think it's this scene that got the film its R rating. The St Edward's chair scene is the tipping point between them, and really, the whole point of the story - everyone has a voice; if someone takes it away from you, or suppresses it, or mangles it, take it back, even if it means getting help to do so. There was great rapport between these actors to make the relationship appear believable.

Timothy Spall makes a great Winston Churchill, without going overboard into parody. Derek Jacobi is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he probably has the worst line in the film (after Colin Firth finally makes a successful speech, he responds by saying, "I'm speechless!"). Jennifer Ehle is Lionel's wife (coincidentally, she was Lizzie Bennett to Colin Firth's Darcy in Pride and Prejudice). They only have one little scene together. I liked the parallel of her support of her husband and Elizabeth B-L's support of her own. Subtle, but well done.

The climax of the film is George VI's speech to the nation in which he announces that England was now at war with Germany. He starts out hesitating and halting, but Lionel is right there with him, coaching him through it in a small, claustrophobic-looking room. The background music for this scene is the second movement from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. A great piece, and one I'm putting on my list to learn for cello someday. Perhaps the way she does it.

One of the captions at the end of the film states that Lionel was with George for all of his speeches and that they were friends for the rest of their lives. George even inducted Lionel into the Royal Victorian Order, which is only given out of gratitude to people who perform a personal service for a monarch.

I'm saving the gushing for the very end - thank me as you will. I really wanted to see this movie when I first heard about it - partly because I thought the premise was intriguing and partly because I wanted to see if Colin Firth could pull it off. I was not disappointed on either front. I loved this movie. I can't remember the last movie I saw that I could say that about. I've heard Oscar rumors about Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. It would be well deserved for both.

a sneak peek

2010-12-28T18:44:00.001-05:00

A glimpse of something coming to an e-reader near you in early 2011:

Photo by Gary Cowles

upgrading

2010-12-27T18:33:00.001-05:00

I'm not an early adopter of anything. I tend to observe for a bit and see how a thing develops and what people think of it and what they do with it, before deciding if it's worth my time, effort, and money.

Take smartphones, for example. My biggest beef with them is that I don't necessarily want to be "connected" and "available" at all times. I find that idea rather scary, to be honest. And I don't use my cell phone much at all anyway - so rarely in fact, that the phone company called me to ask if I wanted a lower-cost package since I always had plenty of minutes left over every month (I took them up on that offer).

iPods are the exception. I was a fairly early adopter of the iPod, largely out of practicality. At my last job, I traveled somewhat regularly. I can't read in any kind of moving vehicle because I get an instant nauseating migraine. Before mp3-style audiobooks were available, I would lug at least two books' worth of CDs and a CD player in my carry-on luggage to have something to listen to while tooling around in the aforementioned moving vehicle. With the up-and-coming (at the time) audible.com, I felt fully justified in buying an iPod for both efficiency and sanity while traveling.

However, I have not, until recently, upgraded from my little iPod Shuffle. It's traveled all over the world with me and was even treated to a UK/Europe plug adapter for charging AND a handknit case to hold the headphones, pod, and charger.

One thing that had got me leaning toward some sort of upgrade recently was ebooks. I love the concept - portable ereaders are great if you're waiting in line or for an appointment or a meeting or want something to read while eating lunch or lounging in a coffee shop and don't want to tote around a book in your briefcase or purse. (I have been known to have a book in both.)

So it was a nice surprise to get a 32 GB iPod Touch from my mom and stepdad for Christmas. I've already loaded audible onto it with a handful of my favorite audiobooks (seriously, if you get stuck somewhere, you want Stephen Fry narrating a book to you - really, you do; I know of what I speak; your blood pressure will thank you). I dived into the ebooks as well - some Wodehouse, some Gaiman, all the Jane Austen novels, and the complete works of Oscar Wilde: my physical copies of each set of the latter two are doorstopper-worthy, so I'm tickled by the idea that I can access them in their entirety on this credit-card-sized device. I wonder what the Lady Author and the greatest aesthetic writer who ever lived would think of that?

And just for kicks and giggles, I added a stash of Crowded House, Keane, Zoe Keating, Apocalyptica, Kate Bush, Pomplamoose, and Florence and the Machine songs. I'm toying with the idea of loading the Bach cello suites onto it as well, but which version do I want? And then Mom and Steve also sent me the complete works of Chopin...

And Ben and Emily told me about the cello tuner and metronome apps...

And Autumn and Erin told me about to-do list and grocery list apps...

Oh dear, I've adopted, haven't I?

Anyone know where I can donate my iPod Shuffle?

dusty

2010-12-20T20:54:00.003-05:00

Look closely at that thing.

Does this mean my dreams are dusty?

It wouldn't surprise me actually - years of insomnia and panic aren't really good for dreaming.

However, the i and p aren't as bad as they used to be, so maybe my dreams were just sitting around waiting to get through, and when they finally did, the catcher filtered out the dust for me.

I've had a few good dreams recently.

In one, I'm looking up at a huge dark wicker chair with back and sides flaring out like wings. The chair is floating next to my mom's closet in some house I don't recognize. All her best clothes were hanging from the bottom of the chair, like they do.

And flying dreams, I have lots of those. No planes or gliders or kites or anything, just me with arms outstretched zooming around and dive bombing just for kicks and giggles, and getting that buzzing funny dizzy feeling in my stomach that I also get when I drive down a hill or a long stretch of road too fast.

The writing dream is my favorite - sitting at a table wrapped in a fuzzy sweater, writing by hand by candlelight, and there's a man with dark hair standing behind me, leaning down to read over my shoulder. He rests his cheek against my head and his hand on my shoulder - my right shoulder, which is good, since I'm left-handed, so when the words come out of my head down my neck and through my arm and hand onto the page, I don't want my left shoulder weighted down with anything or there might be a back-up of words, and I get moody when that happens. I don't know who he is when I'm awake, but I seem to know who he is in my dream, and he likes what I write even if my handwriting is bad and the story is plodding along and there's too much passive voice. He knows I'll fix it eventually, and he just tells me to keep writing because he wants to read more of the story

My sister bought this dreamcatcher for me at a shop near the beach years ago. I'm about to move it for the first time in 11 years. I hope there aren't any straggler dreams that haven't come through yet because my time in this condo is running out.

long tones

2010-12-20T20:21:00.000-05:00

We spent part of my last lesson on long tones to focus on bow control (for non-cellists, long tones, are, um, well, exactly what they sound like - drawing the bow across a string for a certain period of time).

We started with 15 seconds per bow draw on open strings, trying to go for even volume and pace from frog to tip, with no scratching or skips. It's amazing how this exercise amplifies how wobbly one's bowing really is (not to mention how long 15 seconds really is).

Ideally, I'm to work up to 30 seconds per bow draw; however, given how yucky it sounds at 15 seconds, it will be awhile before I get there.

We then tried out varying the volume to counts of four - dividing the bow in quarters to gradually increase volume, and also counting 1, 2, 3 to get to the middle of the bow, then a quick middle-to-tip on 4 for the loudest tone, and then doing it all in reverse for kicks and giggles. It's still a long tone practice, but with an added layer of volume.

I'm also working on #88 in Book 2 of Dotzauer Grant - Ben calls it a "one-and-a-half position" exercise (third finger where fourth would be in first position). So far, position shifts aren't too much of a bear for me - I tend to get in the right vicinity and back again without much or any pausing to figure out where to go (although I've noticed that if I overthink position shifts, I overshoot them. Funny that). 'S more a matter of honing more and more precisely - a comes-with-practice thing.

slur where you want to

2010-12-13T19:18:00.003-05:00

The only good slur is a musical one.

Do you think that will catch on as a quote?

Likely not.

Oh well.

I have officially graduated to Book Two of Dotzauer Grant's Fundamentals of Cello Technique. This series is my primary source of etudes.

I love etudes. (The "why" of that is a whole post in itself, but not the point of this one.) I even love etudes that annoy me.

The last one I worked on from Book One was annoying, which somehow is a fitting end to the book. It shows that I'm not just mindlessly playing them to be able to play the notes and leave it at that. I get into them enough now to have an opinion on individual ones.

This etude (#80) is almost entirely sixteenth notes. There are a few shifts and extensions, and then there are the slurs all over the place. (For non-cellists, playing a slur means playing two or more notes with the bow going in only one direction, as opposed to changing the direction of the bow every time you change the note. It's a neat trick.)

I am used to slurs occurring at the beginning or end of a note grouping or covering an entire note grouping. This was my first mistake. Note groupings help readability, but otherwise, one shouldn't think of them solely as groups and play them as such, even though they (maddeningly) look like groups. Anyway, this etude puts the slurs in the middle of a grouping and across groupings. The immediate problem I had when I first tried this piece was that I either wanted to play separate bows throughout or rearrange the slurs to occur at the beginning and end as I was used to. My bow hand was so adamant about this that it would go in the direction it wanted to go, regardless of what was on the page.

Of course, Ben-the-cello-teacher wasn't going to let me, or my bow hand, do that. Do you remember Ben? Here he is.

Whenever I get stuck or stubborn like this with a bow hand technique, Ben says, "let's work it out on a scale first." Since I always warm up with a scale or two before a practice session, my left hand movements are pretty automatic, so I can focus more on the right hand. It's how I learned slurs in the first place. Ben's idea again.

Funnily enough, this etude runs very like a G scale in notes involved, so that's the one I used. It took slowing the movements down to molasses pace before my right hand caught on to the pattern, and then there was the inevitable, "oh, I get it now!" So in practice sessions, I played the scale a few times at faster and faster speeds, and then without pausing, launched into the etude - getting a running start with the scale and then sliding right into the piece, in other words. The etude was suddenly much more manageable and much less annoying.

Clever fellow, that Ben.

baroque bowing

2010-11-30T23:34:00.002-05:00

Several of my cello friends blog about details of their lessons: techniques they learn or discoveries they make. I love reading these blogs, although they often leave me mystified because I’m not yet at a playing level where I can fully understand what they’re getting at to be able to apply it to my own practice (nothing makes me more aware of my own ignorance like cello does; Kermit is right – it really is not easy being green). I suppose reading these posts also leaves me overwhelmed because of all the detail – how do they keep it all in mind and active when playing a piece? That is a skill I would love to have.

I’ve avoided writing posts about my lessons and revelations because as such a beginner, I’m not sure what words to use to describe these things in a way that would be useful not only to me, but to anyone reading the entries. Pretty much all of my cello friends are way ahead of me in skill, so my learnings and discoveries would be old-hat yawns. (And we’ll take it as a given that non-cellists would want to skip these posts.)

I have been keeping a handwritten cello journal, however, at the request of my teacher. I log my daily practices and include what pieces I’m working on and any relevant notes (or more often than not – frustrations) with each piece. It’s rather sparse as journals go, which is odd for writer me. With just about any other topic, I can write volumes. With cello, not so much. I get finger-tied and only seem to manage a one- or two-line Twitter post or a vague and cryptic phrase in a journal entry. The desire to write about it is there, but the words aren’t.

And it’s annoying The Hell out of me. Something must be done about it.

So I’ve decided on an early goal for 2011 – more blog posts about my cello lessons and practices. If only for the sake of a personal need to better articulate what I learn so as to, er, learn it better. Or something. Anyway, they may be clumsy and vague and oh-so-obvious, and I apologize in advance for that, but hopefully, they will get better and more interesting.

Here’s my first go at it, because Michael asked:

I’ve been working on Handel’s Bourrée for a couple of weeks now. A light, skip-hop-jump piece with some position shifts and slurs to make it interesting. I’ve got the rhythm fairly accurate, and I can play it at a decent pace.

I’m slightly off with the fourth finger in the position shifts in the second half of the piece, especially after coming from a first-finger extension from second position. I tend to want to keep my first finger down (and with my long fingers, I can very nearly get away with it), but I’ve figured out that if I lift it as the fourth finger goes down in second position, the fourth finger is more accurate since my hand has more range of motion to go further south, which it can’t have if I use my first finger as an unhelpful anchor. (Go ahead and yawn here if you need to.)

I’m at a point in my cello studies where I’m starting to pay more attention to the layers of a piece instead of focusing solely on playing the right notes at the right time and calling it a day, which results in only really half-learning a piece that doesn’t sound very musically satisfying.

One layer of the Bourrée is volume. There are a number of sections that go from piano to forte. My teacher pointed out that the obvious thing to do to play louder is to put more weight on the bow with the right hand. However, there are other ways to get volume.

Since this is a Baroque piece, if I were to play it on a Baroque cello with a Baroque bow, weight on the bow would not be an option. The gut strings and the bow shape wouldn’t allow bow pressure because it would just be a mess of strings mashed against fingerboard and stick mashed against hair. In plain language, yucky-sounding.

Instead, we played around with how much bow to use – shorter sections for piano, gradually increasing to just about full bow length for forte. At the moment, the difference in sound is very subtle to my ears, but I’m hoping more practice will make it more obvious while still having a nice, smooth, watercolor-like gradation (slowly bleeding one into the other, rather than hard stops between). This method of volume is more in keeping with the Baroque style and therefore the thing to do in a Baroque piece. (Bloody obvious, right?)

Oy! It took me a ridiculous amount of time to write the above six paragraphs. Quite unlike me. How do you all do it?

on the market

2010-11-03T19:32:00.006-05:00

Right. In my last blog post plus one, I listed a bunch of things I was taking on this fall. I added something to the list because I'm just on the greener side of crazy:

I decided to sell my condo and move somewhere else.

I know people do this everyday, but I've been in my condo for 11 years, so this is a big change for me.

And a fast one. I started looking at places before the economy tanked, and then decided to sit tight for a bit, Just In Case. I started looking again recently, found a few I wanted to see, contacted a realtor for one of them, and then things really got moving. I contacted a lender and got a pre-approval letter, which took all of 10 minutes, and had a copy of my pre-approval letter in my e-mail inbox soon after. This is about when the dazed feeling started to settle in.

I saw several more places, and was appalled at what people do to their homes, and they think they can sell them in that condition. Maybe they can. Not to me, though. And architects and builders these days have wacky ideas for layouts, which in no way amuse this potential buyer. In several instances, my realtor and I were both wondering "WTF?" as we were walking through. It's good to know that I'm not alone in my ideas about house set-ups that make sense.

I was expecting to possibly have to move out of the county to find a nice place that was reasonably priced, and I had resigned myself to that. Then I saw a townhouse just down the road from where I am now, and it was perfect - just the bit of upgrade I was looking for, more room, more storage space, a bit of yard for me to learn how to garden, cute overall, quieter neighborhood, and both interior and exterior were well-maintained. So we started the paperwork. And then it all went wrong.

The owners didn't want to do a contingent contract - meaning my offer was contingent on me selling my condo. Not unreasonable on their part, so I didn't mind that bit. I could put enough down with an FHA loan on a non-contingent contract.

But here's a piece of trivia to keep in your back pocket: You can't have two FHA loans at the same time. Maybe lots of people know this, and I'm just ignorant. The lender caught this as he was getting ready to approve my final loan application - I had an FHA loan for my condo. No one ever told me this could be a bad thing. Nor did I read it anywhere. FHA loans are handy because you don't have to have as much of a downpayment. Conventional loans require at least 10% down, preferably more. I didn't have enough for a downpayment with a conventional loan. Since I hadn't sold my condo yet, that meant I couldn't take out another FHA loan for the townhouse. So we couldn't submit the paperwork for it after all.

Not a week later, someone else put a offer on the townhouse, and it was accepted, so it's off the market. The listing said "Contingent (kick out)." I was curious what that meant, so I looked it up:

A term that refers to a real estate contract contingency that's often used when a home buyer places a house under contract with the understanding that he must sell his current house before finalizing the new purchase.

Sellers holding a contract with a kick out clause continue to market the home. If they receive another offer the buyer has a specific amount of time as stipulated in the clause to remove the contingency and move forward to buy the house, whether his existing house is sold or not. If the buyer cannot move forward, the seller can back out of the original contract and sell to the new buyers.

In other words, the owners accepted a contingent contract with a buyer...a week after saying they wouldn't do the very same thing with me.

This is when I got irritated.

I decided to put all my focus on selling my condo. My realtor sent a "staging consultant" to advise me on how to present my condo to the best advantage for photos and walk-throughs. I had a couple of cosmetic things to fix, and then it was a lot of "get rid of as much clutter as possible," which is a standard thing they tell home sellers. I never thought I had clutter, given that the condo is so small, so there's no room for it. Since I discovered freecycle.org, I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff. I re-organized some things, and got rid of even more stuff. However, personal family photos that you might have on your mantle are considered clutter. Displays of collections on shelves are considered clutter. The stager told me that potential buyers aren't there to see how I made the place homey, they're there to look at room size and whatnot for THEIR stuff. So I started packing stuff up even before I had a buyer, let alone someplace to move to, but I latched on to the idea of "act as if." It's one thing to say I'm going to move, but actually packing stuff up makes it much more of a reality.

Then the realtor suggested new carpet - apparently carpet allowances aren't the thing these days. I did have old carpet, so I went ahead with replacing it - that happened last Friday. I piled a ton of stuff into my dining room and kitchen (the only two places with bare floors) and holed up in the kitchen for the day with knitting, my laptop, and a bunch of Futurama DVDs. It was an odd but nice way to spend most of a day.

I managed to get Lyra-the-cat into the bathroom, but couldn't catch Tristan, who is surprisingly good at hiding where he can't be gotten at. The carpet installers said not to worry, if they needed me to come get him as they moved stuff around, they'd holler for me. So he spent the day dashing from one hiding place to another amid pushed-aside furniture.

Once the carpet was in and the installers had left, I let Lyra out of the bathroom...which is when she started chasing and hissing and swatting at Tristan. She acted as though she didn't know who he was, like he was a new cat in her territory (they've been here with me for three years). I assume this was because with the old carpet gone, all the familiar smells were gone too and that somehow blocked her sense of who he was. So I had a fun time this past weekend trying to keep them apart while making my condo look presentable again. At least I got to watch the Rally for Sanity online while I tidied. I would have liked to have gone to DC for the day, but I was on a deadline.

It took a few days, but Lyra and Tristan are friends again. Here is evidence from last night:

For several days before this, if they got within three feet of each other, there was hissing and swatting (mainly from Lyra). For them to peaceably lounge on the couch in bored contentment mere inches from each other like this is major progress.

Anyway, pictures of the condo were taken, papers were signed, and it's all live and official now.

I also looked more closely at the company stock I own, and it turns out I have enough from the sale of it for that magic downpayment percentage. I wish I'd known that sooner.

I looked at some more places today and put in an offer on one of them - a gorgeous place inside and out. It's bigger than the other townhouse I was interested in, but it's the same price - so more house for the same amount of money. That's a yay, I think. More paperwork, but looks to be worth it. Will find out tomorrow sometime if the offer is accepted.

I'm having trouble focusing on work and cello practice and writing projects with this Big Change happening. (I may not get very far with National Novel Writing Month, let alone the Bach prelude.) Now I realize why I put this process off for so long. It really takes it out of a girl, both physically and emotionally. I need to move though. I need the change. I've been feeling stale and cramped for a long time.

One thing I've not been feeling, however, is panicky. Not a shake, not a tremor, not a butterfly in the stomach. I guess if I'm the one initiating something like this, my psyche and my body are okay with it. Whereas when stressful and/or unexpected events are thrust upon me, and I have no control over them, nor can take an action to deal with them, I fall apart. Weird, huh?

shiny new-ish

2010-10-08T07:52:00.002-05:00

Ahem:

Welcome to my revamped blog! New look! New pages!

Sorry. Had to get that out of the way. Onward.

For awhile, I've wanted to highlight some of the topics I'm most interested in, rather than just having them get lost in a topic list in the sidebar. I toyed with the idea of a personal web site, but blogger has a lot of features, both new and established, that suited the purpose just fine. If it were possible to have RSS feeds on the topic pages, you could follow specific topics of interest, and we'd be golden, but one can't have everything. Still, I think it's easier to read about specific topics in this new format, should you be so inclined. I've added some background information on each topic at the top of each page as well.

I'm still working on links for a few of the pages, but they all have intro essays. Links are arranged with newest at the top of the list.

So:

Home is the main blog with everything and cherries on top.

Reeling and Writhing is the writing, books, publishing page.

Rumored Cellist is the cello exploits page. It's the thing I'm newest at, hence it has the shortest intro essay.

Yarn Over is the page of fibery crafty goodness.

Girl in a World is the travel adventures page.

Hope you enjoy the new layout.

plunging

2010-09-03T20:56:00.005-05:00

I had a little panicky setback last week, which has put me off-schedule with a lot of things - mainly writing projects.

What irritates me the most about this latest round of panic attacks is that I have nothing to panic about at the moment. Life is pretty damn good and humming along. I have a productive routine of early morning writing, day job, lunchtime reading, evening cello practice and lessons, and yarn projects. Throw in a renewed commitment to eating only real food and not junky, processed, food-like products (just because it's dairy-free and gluten-free doesn't mean it's healthy food), which has resulted in some weight loss as a delightful side effect, and some evenings out at the movies and to hear some hard rock cello as played by classically trained musicians from Finland, not to mention fall coming on and lots of creative stuff in the works, and what is there to worry over?

Still, this bout has been relatively mild so far, and I'm grateful for that. In a way, it feels like I hibernated all summer due to the yucky and oppressive heat, which really seemed to knock me flat this year, and the panic attacks are waking me up for fall, which is generally my most productive time of the year.

About that creative stuff in the works - I have a personal website in development, which will have five blog pages on it, including this one, and I'm going to release my first novel as an e-book. I am deep into revisions of the second novel, and while I would like to focus solely on that, I'm itching to try out e-publication. The more I hear and read about it, the more I like the concept. If musicians can bypass record labels and get their music directly to audiences, be they big or small followings, why not do the same with books?

I know quality is the biggest argument against self-publishing. Many people think publishing houses are the filter that makes sure only the good stuff gets out there. I would counter that there are quite a few books that get published through a traditional publishing house that aren't good at all, and they make you wonder what the publishers were thinking. In addition, quality is sometimes a matter of opinion. A book I think stinks may be gold to someone else, and vice versa.

If nothing else, the sheer variety of reading material will improve. We're already seeing that in the indie music scene - musicians that would otherwise be passed over by record labels are being heard and becoming popular, and deservedly so. Pomplamoose, anyone?

So Eidolon House will be my Grand Experiment, my Big Plunge, to see what happens and to see what I can learn and to see what people think of my writing. It will be available as a PDF, and if I can figure out how to get it formatted for Kindle and other e-readers, it will be available for those as well. No idea how easy or hard that will be, so it will be an adventure! Or a royal screw-up!

I'm doing one final copyedit first, though, and that's putting me behind in Phoenix Sonata revisions, among other things. I also need to finish the outline for the novel I will write in November for National Novel Writing Month. I'm looking forward to this one - it will be a fun novel to write, I think. I'm considering a 3000-words-a-day writing goal for this year. That would get me a more-or-less finished first draft in a month. It would also up the stakes for a me a bit. In my three other NaNo attempts, I didn't really have a problem getting to 50K words in 30 days, so a little more of a challenge could be a good thing. Still pondering this.

I've nearly finished crocheting a blanket. It's a star shape, done in green yarn. Actually, it looks like a giant lily pad, and I'm not sure that's a good thing. At least the pattern is addicting and fairly easy. I need to get back to the other blanket and the sweater I abandoned at the beginning of summer. I have cowls to show you, too, knit with handspun yarn from my friend Autumn. I think my next project will be a vest with yarn from the Sheep and Wool Festival.

Cello playing progresses slowly but steadily. Me and the new-to-me cello are quite chummy these days.

And fall's only just beginning...

book review - The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2010-08-25T19:23:00.008-05:00

I think The Little Stranger could be called a thriller. More in the traditional gothic style of thriller though, rather than a heart-pounding, non-stop action, people-running-all-over-the-place, car-chases-and-stuff-exploding thriller. Is there such a thing as a quiet or muted thriller?

See, what quiets this story down are the hard-to-miss elements - class structure and psychology.

Let's start with class structure. The first person to sense something weird going on in Hundreds Hall is the maid, Betty. As a servant, and a barely teenaged one at that, her fears are attributed to homesickness and an overactive and childish imagination. At best, she's not abused by her employers, and they come to rely on her for companionship in the big, lonely house. But even with such decent treatment, her employers wouldn't hesitate to ask her to do some chore or other at a moment's thought - she and they never forget that she is a servant. Even at the end of the story, when she is the chief witness of the final event, she is not believed, and for the same reasons she was not believed at the beginning of the story. Her triumph is that she soldiered through all the events and came out relatively unscathed, which can't be said for other characters.

Next is Doctor Faraday, the narrator of the story. His mother was a servant at the Hall. She wanted him to have a better life and saw to it that he got a better education. He becomes a doctor, but only a local one with not much of a practice, although he does start to make a name for himself and become more well-known and respected toward the end of the story. He might be above the station of a maid, but not by much. He often comments on feeling out-of-place with the Ayres family at the Hall, and with others he considers above himself. The evening party at the Hall is the prime example of this, although he ends up being the hero of the evening when a major event happens. He is ever sensible, honest, trustworthy, sympathetic, the one you rely on for stability, and little seems to shake his beliefs or determination, even when facing impossible things or Caroline's rejection of him in the end. He has moments of doubt, which increase the longer he knows the family and the goings on at the Hall, but he clings to the rational despite that. He's boring, and he knows it. Oddly, this is a good thing because as narrator, he's not getting in the way of the story. I appreciated that.

There's Seeley, a rival doctor, and there's the family lawyer, both of whom are a bit better off than Faraday, and he feels it and lets the reader know it. Dr Graham and his wife seem to be the only ones on his level, as it were, and he has a genuine friendship with them.

Finally, we have the Ayres family. Shabby genteel is probably the term for them. And getting shabbier all the time. Roderick served in the war and was badly injured in it. His sister and mother nursed him back to some semblance of health. He's head of the household, at least for awhile, and then he falls apart trying to contain "the infection" of the house. Faraday attributes this to latent stress from his war experiences (I suppose today it would be called post-traumatic stress disorder) as well as the strain of trying to keep the estate going with no money or resources. About halfway through the story, Roderick's part is done, and he's packed off to a mental hospital. One expects a downward spiral for the family after that, and one gets it, almost too predictably.

The mother is next. Mrs Ayres represents old-fashioned grace and stiff upper lip, and is the most class-conscious character in the story. She is fragile, stronger in mind and resilience than her children give her credit for, at least for awhile. It is the loss of her first daughter, years ago, that is her undoing. It is an oddly calm undoing, too. Unlike Roderick's.

Caroline was the character I grappled with the most. I kept picturing her as an older, frumpy woman; however, I think she was meant to be younger, but stout and healthy. That Faraday would find her attractive seemed odd to me, and their relationship fizzling wasn't a big surprise since she had an air of reluctance about it all the way through. I wanted to root for her at the end. I wanted her to succeed and start a new life after all the tragedy she'd been through. It was disappointing that it didn't happen, and her exit was abrupt.

Now for the psychology. This book has an even rhythm - almost too even. Things are humming along, normal as anything, for about a third of the book, then (finally!) something weird happens in the house. Things settle down for awhile after that, and then something else weird happens in the house. This goes all the way through to the end. Is that to lead the reader to think that this is nothing more than a chronicle of the destruction of a mentally unbalanced family? Faraday certainly wants to believe that's all it is. In a number of scenes, he's rather condescendingly trying to get the family to buy into his idea of the true cause of their troubles - war weariness, lack of money, just the three of them in a crumbling house. After all, it's safe, logical, and sound, and perhaps makes the manifestation of events a little more bearable for those involved.

Interestingly, Faraday is never in the house when the mysterious happenings, well, happen - he sees the result of them and hears about what happened from the family, which lends credence to his theories. Still, the events are described in such a way that it's easy to see why the family are inclined to a supernatural explanation, and why they're frustrated that Faraday doesn't believe them. The story ends with finality for the family, but none for what caused it. I have a guess about who the "little stranger" was, and I'm not sure why this wasn't brought out more explicitly. The ambiguity of was it all in their heads or did something supernatural cause events isn't satisfying.

One thing that was satisfying was the narration. Faraday narrated the story in a first-person voice, and it actually worked really well. It read smoothly and naturally and believably. Unlike the first-person narration in The Swan Thieves, which sounded clunky and forced. Obviously, first-person point of view is hard to do well. Sarah Waters definitely knows what she's doing with it.

Another strong aspect of the story was the house itself. Waters captured the atmosphere of a crumbling English estate just after the war just about perfectly. And she shows it decaying even further throughout the story, which lends weight to the supernatural possibilities and the menace of the place.

Overall, it was a good story, well told. I quibble with the ambiguous ending, but not much else.

My next read is The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. It's a doorstopper!

movie review - Scott Pilgrim vs the World

2010-08-20T23:38:00.010-05:00

I'd point you to this review, and say, "what she said," but I rarely do movie reviews, since I rarely go to the movies, because there are rarely any movies that I'd want to see, so I thought it would be a nice change from book reviews.

Let's get my ignorance out of the way first, shall we? I'm not a gamer, never was as a kid either. I've dated a few gamers in my time, but never got into it myself. I've read some comic books/graphic novels - mainly the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman and a few by Alan Moore, and more recently the Hatter M series by Frank Beddor and the Fables series by Bill Willingham. But that's it. I do want to read the Scott Pilgrim series after seeing this film, though.

It was solidly funny all the way through, with the touches of seriousness just when needed. The special effects were in the gamer style, which even a non-gamer like me could get. The acting was pretty damn near perfect - Michael Cera in the lead plays a geek with surprises: without depth in that character, this wouldn't have worked; Ellen Wong as the starry-eyed, naive girlfriend who grows up a little; Keiran Culkin as the gay roommate and conscience. The story was solid, and nothing was wasted, not even Ramona's constant correction of Evil Exes rather than Evil Ex-Boyfriends. The soundtrack would make great workout music. There's lots of violence in it, I warn ya - done in a kung fu/Matrix sort of way. The defeat-by-coffee creamer was the funniest though.

My only beefs with the film were that the finale seemed to go on a little too long, and I couldn't figure out who Scott would end up with. Scott facing himself didn't need to be there, but the twist was fun, so I almost didn't notice how long the ending was. Almost. And having not read the comics the film was based on, I don't know how it ends on the page. Perhaps the point was to keep the audience guessing until the very end? I'm satisfied with who he ended up with. I'd have been equally satisfied if he'd ended up with the other one, possibly even the third one. Or was she the first one? Anyway, Scott picked one. Can't ask for more than that. And who doesn't love to see a geek win? However awkwardly and clumsily he goes about it.

A fun film, and well worth seeing. I can't remember any kind of movie like this when I was a teenager. How disappointing!

I mainly wanted to see this film because Edgar Wright directed it. The first of his films that I saw was Shaun of the Dead. I watched it late one night while eating Ghirardelli chocolate squares and snuggling under blankets in a hotel room in San Francisco several years ago. Now, I'm not into horror films At. All. But I loved Shaun of the Dead. It's the perfect film for horror film lovers AND for those dragged along to see them or for those who would never otherwise watch them no matter how much dragging was attempted. Who would have thought you could make a horror film deliberately funny?

I went to see Hot Fuzz when that came out. I'm not into cop films either, but I loved Hot Fuzz for the same reason I loved Shaun of the Dead. Lovingly tweak the nose of the genre and do it well, and you have my interest.

Somewhere in there, I discovered Spaced, which is one of the funniest sitcoms I've ever seen. And for the record, I liked where it ended.

So anytime I hear that Edgar Wright or Simon Pegg or Nick Frost or Jessica Stevenson have a new project out, I take notice. When is Paul coming out?

Oh, that review I linked to at the beginning? I'm in the author's demographic to a T, and agree with all her points, which the professional movie critics have obviously missed. What she said.

And I SO want Ramona's hair. When it was pink. I'd never get away with it at work though.

book review: The Forgotten Garden

2010-08-17T09:45:00.004-05:00

Huzzah! One I actually liked!

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton is a detailed, slow read, but really worth it.

The story is told from the third-person perspectives of three women - Eliza, Nell, and Cassandra. As such, it skips around in time. It actually reminded me of several Doctor Who episodes where the story is told out of order, chronologically speaking, but as you see bits of it, other bits make sense and/or take on more meaning, and you eventually get a complete story. It's actually not too hard to keep up with the time shifts in this book. The location and date is listed on the first page of each chapter, so you're immediately oriented as to which main character you're tagging along with.

Speaking of characters, there are a lot to keep track of, and not just because the story is told in three time periods. Cassandra is Nell's granddaughter. Cassandra's mother more or less abandons her with Nell when Cassandra is a kid. However, Cassandra and Nell get on well together, and as Cassandra gets older, she starts helping Nell run her antique shop. After Nell dies, Cassandra is left not only with the remnants of Nell's life, but also her belongings, including a cottage in Cornwall and the beginnings of a mystery. Cassandra's own personal tragedy seems too briefly touched on, and I sense it was put in merely to give her more in common with the other two women. It doesn't quite ring as true as the traumas the other two women suffered.

Nell's sisters eventually reveal to Cassandra that Nell was a foundling. She arrived on the docks in Australia as a four-year-old with a white suitcase and no name. The sisters' father took her in and she became one of the family. Just before her wedding, Nell's "father" told her of her origins, which she could only dimly remember - time having fuzzed them out and replaced them with her adopted family. As a result, Nell canceled her wedding and withdrew emotionally from her family. Eventually, she decided that she wants to know who she really was. We follow Nell a bit as she finds out her real name and pieces much of her background together, but she has to abandon this endeavor abruptly. Years later, Cassandra picks up where Nell left off and finds the remaining clues.

Eliza is the pivotal character. She is referred to as The Authoress throughout much of the story, and she had the worst life of the three women. Her mother, Georgiana, coming from a rich old family in Cornwall, runs away and marries a sailor. He dies at sea, leaving her with twin babies. She doesn't want to return home to the family seat disgraced, so she takes lodgings in a filthy hovel in London, making what money she can. She dies of tuberculosis, and her children are left to fend for themselves, under the abusive gaze of the lady of the house, who constantly threatens to send them to the workhouse, although they each bring in rent money via various forms of child labor. One twin dies in an accident, the other, Eliza, is sent back to the family home, much to the displeasure of Aunt Adeline, who married into the family after having been Georgiana's companion, and who lives for respectability and for advantages for her only daughter, Rose, whom she feels should be given precedent over Eliza. However, Rose, who is an invalid, and Eliza get on well together, so Eliza manages to earn her keep, as it were, as the BFF of the daughter of the house.

Eliza has quite an imagination, which was an obvious escape from her circumstances. She starts to write down the fairy tales she makes up to entertain Rose, and eventually gets them published. She also gets to know the house staff, the gardener in particular. With her uncle's consent, she helps the gardener restore a garden next to a cottage on the estate. There is a hedge maze that separates the cottage from the mansion. Years later, when Rose announces that she is engaged, Eliza moves to the cottage in a sort of self-imposed exile as well as to be out of the way of the newlyweds, but still near enough should Rose need her. She's rather more passive and naive in adulthood - blindly agreeing to anything Rose wants in hopes that Rose will be happy and always need her. Personally, I liked the more adventurous, mischievous, and defiant Eliza as a child than the woman she became. Once Rose and her husband return from a trip, Eliza plans to travel, but her plans abruptly change as a result of tragedy, and she disappears.

Eliza moving to the cottage and then being gone from their lives are joyous events as far as Aunt Adeline is concerned. Bluntly, Adeline is a scheming, selfish bitch for whom one's place in society is everything, something that Eliza could care less about. She very nearly lets down her guard after the tragedy, but manages to contain it. She's interesting, if loathesome.

Rose is slightly annoying and weak-minded. She has a bit of her mother's selfishness, and she does not have a close relationship with her father, which is far more his fault than hers. While she understands her mother's obsession with societal standards, she can't resist Eliza, who is the most authentic and lively person in her circle.

There are a line of people who pop up to give Cassandra information about aspects of the mystery - they serve their purpose and then pretty much go away.

If there is a pointless character in this story, it's Rose's father. He was close to Georgiana (his sister), felt abandoned when she ran off, instigated the search for her and her children, and insisted on Eliza being brought to live in the family home, despite Adeline's protests. He's a photographer who often goes on expeditions for months at a time, hence the lack of relationship with his daughter. He becomes obsessed with photographing Eliza, as she is his only link to his sister, but she manages to elude him. He's rather like a living ghost roaming about the place. I was never sure what to make of him, other than as a barrier to Adeline throwing Eliza out on her ear.

Frances Hodgson Burnett makes a cameo appearance in the story, so the similarities to The Secret Garden are not coincidence. Thankfully, Morton doesn't dwell too much on the connection, but just leaves it as a nice bit of detail.

Morton did really well with the settings - Brisbane, Australia; London and Cornwall in the UK. You definitely get a good feel for the atmosphere of each place. I've already put Cornwall on my list of places to visit someday.

The whole thing does have a layer of melodrama running through it, in a Dark Shadows sort of way (if Johnny Depp really does go through with the film version and plays Barnabas Collins, I'm SO going to see it). I was in the mood for that kind of thing at the time, and the parallels between the lives of these three women, not to mention the connections between them, are intriguing and distracting enough, so I found the melodrama amusing more than irritating. I can see that others might roll their eyes at it, though.

It's a relief to find a good read after several duds, although it was short-lived. The book I started reading after this one didn't hold my interest At. All., so I had to abandon it. I've just started The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, which looks more promising.

book review: The Swan Thieves

2010-07-18T18:56:00.005-05:00

I could sum up this review in one sentence:

This would have been a great story if it had been told entirely in third-person point of view.

No no, there is too little. Let me elaborate.

This is Elizabeth Kostova's second novel after The Historian. Now, The Historian is also written in first-person point of view (hereinafter referred to as "POV" so I don't have to type it out over and over again). For whatever reason, this didn't bother me at all. Either it was better written or my narrative viewpoint taste has changed in the last few years or I perceive POV differently in The Swan Thieves. I dunno.

The novel is primarily told from Dr Andrew Marlow's POV. Dr Marlow is a psychiatrist recounting a patient case - essentially, this novel is an extended patient history. His patient, Robert Oliver, is a gifted painter who nearly slashes a painting at the National Gallery in DC. Robert is brought in for psychiatric evaluation, which is how he ends up in Marlow's care.

Dr Marlow is also a painter, so he does take an artistic interest in the case. He also breaks a lot of professional rules in the pursuit of resolving this case, including traveling all over the place, getting involved with one of Robert's ex-loves, even yelling at Robert at one point, and no one he works with seems to notice this or question it except the doctor himself, and then he only acknowledges it briefly before he plunges ahead anyway. He also goes to the National Gallery to see the painting that Robert nearly destroyed. While there, he glimpses a woman who also seems to be interested in the painting.

Robert is not an interesting patient. The story is about him, but in the sense that the doctor is finding out about him from everyone but Robert himself. Robert says little to nothing until the end of the novel, and even then, it's not much. Instead, he draws and paints the same person over and over again (Marlow provides him with art supplies). We're only reminded of Robert when Marlow goes to check on him periodically and finds that he's still not talking. Instead, he has a packet of old letters, which he leaves out for Marlow to read early on in the novel. The letters are between a painter, Beatrice de Clerval, and her uncle by marriage, Olivier Vignot, who is also a painter. They were written during the Impressionist movement. I think the best adjective for them is "charming." A slight bit of simpering in them, but not too bad. Actually, I think these letters have the most authentic voices in the whole novel. And oddly, Beatrice's and Olivier's scenes are the only ones written in third person. I'm not sure why.

Dr Marlow, renowned for being able "to make a stone talk," contacts Robert's ex-wife since Robert himself won't volunteer any information. The doctor visits the ex-wife, Kate, in North Carolina. Over the course of two days, Kate tells Marlow all about her relationship with Robert. These chapters are told from Kate's POV as though she is talking to the doctor. In other words, still first person POV, but now it's Kate's, not Marlow's. Kate seems a little bitter, and Marlow's musings on her lead the reader to think he's attracted to her. Then he meets Mary, Robert's ex-girlfriend and the mysterious woman who was interested in the painting at the National Gallery. Mary is also a painter. In fact, she started pursuing an art career after taking a painting class with Robert. We get her POV on Robert, and Marlow also writes about being attracted to her.

All this is meant to parallel Olivier's attraction to Beatrice, but the parallel doesn't quite work, mainly because it's too obvious a parallel. Chapters mirror each other, and only change out characters and time period. Something more subtle would have been appreciated.

This novel presents what's called a "slow build." It's not a quick read - facts and details are revealed gradually, and parallels are drawn between the Beatrice's life, Robert's life, and Marlow's life. I don't mind reading novels that do this. In fact, I rather enjoy sinking down into all that story. However, in this novel, it takes so. bloody. long to get through all the people recounting their memories of other people and Marlow figuring out who Robert's painting subject really is and why she's important. Things only start to pick up in the last quarter of the novel. I had to repeatedly fight the urge to skim and/or read ahead.

One thing really threw me. Kate tells Marlow about an incident in which her mother, who had been living with them for awhile, is dying. She calls to Robert, who is elsewhere in the house. When he comes into the room, he stares transfixed at the scene in front of him - the daughter kneeling on the ground cradling her mother and looking up at Robert. A couple of chapters later, Marlow sees one of Robert's paintings that depicts this scene but the subjects are wearing different clothes and are on the street. He states that he can't imagine where Robert got the idea for it. I had to go back and re-read the chapter in which Kate describes the scene with her mother to make sure I hadn't read it wrong. Marlow heard the story and then saw the painting, so of course he knows where Robert got the idea from! Possibly that was an editing blip and the Marlow-seeing-Robert's-painting scene should have come before the interview with Kate. Although, other plot details would have to change to make that work. Later on, the Beatrice's letters reveal a similar scene, which Robert would have read and then seen the image of in the scene with his wife and mother-in-law, which he then painted. Even I got all the connections, and that's saying something.

Overall, it's the awkward first-person POV that bugged me the most in this novel. I think it was the overabundance of detail - settings, people's facial expressions and mannerisms, what they ate, endless descriptions of how they feel and how they suffer all their angst. It's far more detail than makes sense for first-person POV. It's as though the whole thing had originally been written in third-person POV, and then changed to first-person at the last minute before being sent off to the printer. I understand the whole suspend-disbelief-this-is-fiction-after-all argument, but it's hard to do that when the voices don't read naturally and sound forced and almost silly in their descriptions of scenes and conversations.

I don't know what it is about second novels not being as good as the first ones, but I'm down two for two now, which doesn't bode well. I hope my next book review will be more positive.

socks!

2010-07-05T13:22:00.011-05:00

Yes, it's 90+ degrees outside most days, and I'm knitting socks indoors with that lovely invention called air conditioning running in the background.

However, knitting socks in summer is not as odd as it sounds, really:

Socks are small, so I don't have a lot of knitted fabric in my lap like I would if I were knitting a blanket or a sweater - two projects I've put on hold due to the heat of the season.

They're portable projects, so I don't have to have a ton of yarn with me, but if I'm going to be stuck in the doctor's office waiting room an hour past my so-called appointment time, I have something to do to improve the inevitable blood pressure reading before the half-hour finally-in-the-exam-room wait that precedes the seven-minute visit with the actual doctor.

Socks knit up fairly quickly, despite the small needles and thin yarn. It's truly amazing how many rows you can churn out in a doctor's office waiting room.

I can practice new knitting techniques on the small space of a sock before I attempt them on something larger, thereby eliminating most of the strange looks my cats give me due to the swearing at the inanimate object in my hands whose real task is supposed to be keeping me calm and happy and feeling all productive-little-house-on-the-prairie-pioneer-woman-despite-living-in-the-suburbs-like.

Ripping back to fix a mistake or to start over isn't as traumatic or frustrating on a smaller scale.

I'm only dealing with about 64 or so stitches on the needles in an average pair of adult-size socks, and even fewer for kid-size socks.

I only need one skein of about 400-ish yards of fingering-weight yarn for a pair of socks (compared to seven to twelve or more skeins for a sweater or a cardigan or a blanket). This is great for the budget of a girl who went to Paris and bought a cello in the space of about a month recently.

There's no lack of sock yarn or sock patterns in the knitting world. Seriously. I mean, jeez.

Hand-knit socks can be custom fit for foot length, width, heel, arch, extra-pointy toes, etc., which makes them preferable to store-bought socks.

They can be practical and interesting looking, or dare I say "pretty," all in one.

I can get a little wild with sock design and color since, especially in winter, they'll be in shoes and under pant legs, but only I will know my crazy socks secret, which will remind me that color will indeed come back in the spring rather than just being one of those wacky concepts that I sometimes hallucinate about.

For all that, though, I've only recently come around to knitting socks as a routine project. I attempted to make a pair several years ago, and things went so very terribly wrong (poor instructions, too complicated a pattern, wrong yarn, wrong size, unwieldy double-pointed needles (DPNs) creating ladders, holes in the gussets, I could go on...). I assumed I was not meant to be a sock knitter.

Then a whole slew of sock knitting books were published, and they were more interesting and had far better instructions and visuals than what I'd been using, which made the process look more do-able. I also learned magic loop technique (knitting small circumferences with one long circular needle), which means I don't have to knit socks on DPNs. And then there are all the YouTube videos - instead of trying to figure out something from text and pictures, I can see the technique in action. Knit Picks has a series of sock-knitting videos that are really good - clear instructions and demonstrations, and Kelley Petkun talking with her hands is hilarious.

I wanted to try knitting a pair toe-up since I like the idea of trying it on as I go to make sure it fits properly as well as eliminating the risk of running out of yarn before the foot is finished, not to mention knitting the leg portion until I do run out of yarn, so no leftover bits that I can't do anything with.

I got Wendy Johnson's Socks from the Toe Up book and actually squealed when I saw the gusset heel sock pattern because you don't have to pick up stitches in this pattern - just increases and short rows with no wrapped stitches for the heel. Love that! I also learned Judy's Magic Cast-on, which creates a seamless toe.

So using the gusset heel pattern, I started a pair of toe-up socks. However, I didn't want to do just stockinette stitch for the majority of the sock, so I went looking for a stitch pattern that would be easy to memorize and would give the top and the leg of the sock some texture and interest. I found Hermione's Everyday Sock pattern (yes, that Hermione), which is actually a cuff-down pattern, but looks just as good knit toe-up.

Combining the two patterns resulted in these:

And they don't look half-bad with shoes:

Knit with One Sheep Hill Superwash Merino fingering weight yarn in the Fading Roses colorway. I used Knit Picks Harmony wood 40" fixed circular needles size 2 for these. Great needles! Nice point, smooth wood-to-cord join, no kinks in cord when folded for magic loop.

I've got a tidy stash of fingering weight yarn that I use to make lightweight scarves, and it now can also be used for socks. When I look at sock patterns now, I'm just looking at the stitch pattern on the top and leg of the sock, as I can adapt it to my beloved gusset heel pattern. Oh, the possibilities!

Using the magic loop method on one circular needle or using two circular needles with toe-up socks also offers one other advantage - knitting two socks at the same time:

The same number of rows, the same height on the leg when they're worn, no having to keep notes on number of rows or changes made on the fly, and NO second sock syndrome!

This is my only concession to efficient knitting. I don't knit continental style. I don't knit backwards so as to avoid having to purl stitches. I don't do cable stitch patterns without a cable needle. In other words, I don't knit to be efficient. I knit, as the amusing T-shirt slogan proclaims, so I don't kill people.

This yarn is also from One Sheep Hill - a merino and nylon blend fingering weight in the Juniper colorway. The pattern is Gridiron by Anne Hanson (I unashamedly visit her blog regularly for the knitting and yarn pr0n, and maybe one day when I have more knitting confidence, I'll attempt one of her shawls. I do have two skeins of some deep dark green fingering weight yarn from Fearless Fibers...)

ghostly book review

2010-06-30T22:01:00.009-05:00

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

This novel is by the same author who wrote The Time Traveler's Wife (the book is SO much better than the film!). I had high hopes.

The story is about two sets of twins - Edie and Elspeth, and Julia and Valentina. The latter set are Edie's daughters. Now didn't I read somewhere that twins skip generations in families? Or am I making that up?

Anyway. Edie and Elspeth haven't spoken for many years. Edie lives in the US with her husband and daughters, and Elspeth lives in London, next to Highgate Cemetery. Her companion, Robert, lives downstairs. He is a volunteer tour guide at the cemetery, and he's writing his thesis about its history and inhabitants. Elspeth's neighbor, Martin, lives upstairs. He has OCD. He washes things, counts, enters rooms a certain way, and hasn't left his flat for months. His wife leaves him and returns to Amsterdam at the beginning of the story. She can't take living with him and his illness anymore, especially since he doesn't seem to want to get help for it.

A great deal of the story is taken up with Martin dealing with his OCD and his wife walking out on him. His storyline is the most solidly resolved of all of them in the novel. He is also the most believeable character of them all. It's obvious Niffenegger did a great deal of research to convey the OCD in a way that wasn't creepy or mocking in any way. You understand why he has his odd rituals. You sympathize with him. However, his storyline feels distractingly inserted into the main plotline, and I'm not sure how it's supposed to support the main story. Especially when his son makes a swift appearance at the end of the story and is suddenly a new focus for Julia. That came across as thrown in at the last minute.

Robert, in turn, is also dealing with his grief over losing Elspeth and getting to know her nieces. He eventually finds out what drove Edie and Elspeth apart, and it was something I'd anticipated toward the beginning when it was clear something had happened years ago between them. He goes along with things too easily. He's pining. It gets annoying after awhile. It's also not clear where he gets his income.

Elspeth dies of cancer, and leaves her flat and most of its contents to her nieces, with the stipulation that they live in the flat for a year and that their parents never set foot in it. After the year is up, they can do as they please - sell the flat and its contents and use the money for whatever they want. She also asks Robert to remove some papers from her flat before the nieces arrive. (This is how he finds out her Big Secret.)

Julia and Valentina are just out of their teens. They are extraordinarily close. They do everything together. They even dress the same despite how silly it looks given their age. Julia is the stronger and more outgoing of the two. She is Valentina's protector and sometimes caregiver. Valentina has a weak heart and also has asthma. They are mirror twins, so Valentina's organs are not where they normally would be. Instead, they are are opposite to Julia's.

Valentina isn't too keen on going to London, let alone living there for a year, but Julia wants to go, and they do everything together...

I liked Valentina's character better than Julia's. Valentina's nickname is "Mouse." At the beginning of the story, she is timid and weak. A kitten comes into her life (go figure). She changes and starts to gain some independence. You want to cheer her on. Julia is bossy and can't see beyond her and Valentina spending the rest of their lives together. Any other possibility doesn't occur to her. Even at the end, she is left stunned and disbelieving that things did not work out according to her plan. But then, she never really had a plan, other than maybe getting a dog.

You don't get to know Elspeth well, besides the inventory of what is in her flat and what others say about her. In a way, this makes sense. She's dead. But everyone has a point of view in this novel. To keep her in the story, she finds herself back in her flat after she dies. In fact, she can't leave it. There is very little she can do, other than snooze in a desk drawer. She is glad to see the twins when they finally arrive. She tries to make herself known to them. It takes awhile, but she finally gets through. Valentina can sense her, and even see her after awhile, but Julia cannot.

Valentina becomes friendly with Robert, and Julia does the same with Martin. After hanging around the flat and exploring London, Valentina is the first to get bored. She wants to do other things. Things that don't necessarily involve Julia. A rift starts to form between them, and Valentina becomes obsessed with getting away from Julia and gaining some independence.

Elspeth hovers nearby watching the proceedings. Eventually, the twins are able to communicate with Elspeth via ouija board and automatic writing, although this happened too quickly and conveniently for my taste.

This is also the point where the story started getting weird, and where I stopped liking it.

Now, if Valentina had simply taken her share of the inheritance money and gone elsewhere to start her own life, that would have made more sense in the plot. However, it wouldn't have been much of a story at that point, so I can see why Niffenegger went in a different direction to keep the story going.

No one seems to be disturbed by the ghost thing for long. And lots of people find out about it. That aspect didn't sit right. Neither did everyone only showing the barest amount of reluctance to go along with the absurd plan that develops at the end of the novel. Not enough shock. Not enough "Are you crazy?" and trying to stop it. Again, if there had been, the story would have stopped, and the author was determined to get to the end and wrap things up.

Oh, and about the ending. Abrupt and unsatisfying. Leaves you with a feeling of most of the characters' efforts not being worth it after all. In a way, the ending felt like a set-up for another book, but I doubt that's the case.

The descriptions of Highgate Cemetery reminded me of Pere Lachaise, and I think Robert's thesis might have been an interesting read. In fact, next time I'm in London, I will try to go to Highgate and pay my respects to Douglas Adams, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti.

I was really looking forward to this book, especially after reading The Time Traveler's Wife. As I said above, I liked it up to a point. But when it started getting strange and absurd, it was too much of a jolt from the flow of the story that had been established and just didn't fit. I don't know if that was sloppy editing or what. I wanted to like this book, but I can't quite bring myself to do it.

his name is Oscar

2010-06-25T17:44:00.004-05:00

Today is my cello birthday. I had my first lesson a year ago today. It's also the day before my dad's birthday, so it will be easy to remember. (And we're glad Dad's still around to have birthdays thanks to open-heart surgery nearly ten years ago.)

Anyway, I've had this new-to-me cello for about a month now. I definitely picked a winner. I play this one far more than I played my rental cello. It's amazing how the quality of something can make you want to use it more, or conversely, can very nearly make you go off it. Simply put, I make a better sound on this one, which is starting to improve my confidence. In fact, I play it so much lately, that the cats have taken to sitting near it as the time approaches for my evening practice. They are very into routine.

It's certainly a louder cello than the rental I was using. I got a new mute for it - the heaviest and most expensive I've come across. I'm hoping it makes my daily practicing more bearable for the neighbors. I got the mute from cellos2go.com, and I'm impressed with their service. Nice people.

And I think my cello teacher has a bit of cello envy. Every lesson, he says, " that's such a nice cello" or "that's really a beautiful cello." That's saying something considering that his cello is a professional-level one, custom made for him and likely costing at least three or four times what I paid for mine. He also gets a kick out of my minty green cello case. He says it has "personality." I'm not sure what sort of personality minty green reflects, but there it is.

My cello's name is probably not a surprise to people who know me, and know my interest in the writings of Oscar Wilde, which started in 9th grade English class after reading The Importance of Being Earnest. As I recall, there were only a few of us in the class who thought the play was funny. (BTW, I think the Colin Firth/Rupert Everett film version is hilarious. It's one of my go-to films, along with Bringing Up Baby and What's Up, Doc?, when I need cheering up.)

Oscar feels like an appropriate name because the original was always looking for beauty and perfection in art and in life, but he tempered it with a sense of humor. Consistently good intonation and rhythm still eludes me, even after a year, but I expected that - the cello is a damn hard instrument to learn to play, and I accept that it will take me the rest of my life to learn to play it well. However, even as frustration at trying to get better builds up, the process of learning and practice is still satisfying, and there are those moments when bad-sounding cello is funny. I suspect that the longer I play, the more I will need that reminder.

murderous book review

2010-06-21T18:54:00.003-05:00

The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane Robins

Sounds like a fictional murder mystery, doesn’t it?

Actually, it’s a real case, written as creative nonfiction. Instead of boring, dry statements of fact, books like this are written in more of a literary style, so they read a lot like novels while still being factually accurate. This book does a great job of it. One of the better examples I’ve seen in awhile.

The events take place at the beginning of the 20th century, and the case comes to trial in the midst of World War I. There is a lot of detail given about each of the people involved, written in such a way that you see them as characters in a story.

The background:

A man met a woman somewhere in England and quickly began paying his attentions to her. Their courting was extremely short, and the man soon asked the woman to marry him. He assured her that he had steady work and a decent income that would keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Although she saw little evidence of this and really knew nothing about him, she accepted his proposal. At the time, women had little to look forward to other than working for a pittance that would barely keep body and soul together and/or being a financial burden and embarrassment to their families should they end up as spinsters. A financially poor woman getting on or moving up in the world independently was rare. So marriage, even to an unappealing or unsuitable prospect was, unfortunately, the only way out for most women who were not wealthy.

Before, or very soon after, the marriage, the man asked for whatever money the woman had, which in those days was his right. She turned it over to him without question. Also before, or very soon after, the marriage, he took his wife to see a solicitor and they made their wills, leaving all they each have to the other. Finally, at her husband’s encouragement, the wife asked the solicitor for a life insurance policy, the beneficiary of course being her husband. All this done, the husband made promises of a stable and happy life together, and maybe even some travel to Canada to his new bride.

He took her on a honeymoon in a not-very-exotic British town, and they went looking for a respectable but cheap boardinghouse to room in. The man inquired of the landlords or ladies if there was a bathtub in the house, as he thought it more proper that his new wife have use of a private bath, rather than having to go to a public bath house, which was a common practice at the time. If there wasn't a bathtub in the house, they looked elsewhere for lodgings until they found one that did.

I promise it gets more interesting.

One night, the man found his new wife drowned in the boardinghouse bathtub. Shortly before this, he had gone out to buy something for supper. He and whoever had been called for help tried in vain to resuscitate her. The man mentioned that his wife had suffered from headaches in the preceding days and had seen a doctor. As there were no marks of violence on the wife’s body, nor any evidence of poisoning, the cause of death was determined to be drowning as a result of a sudden fit or faint. She was quickly buried in a cheap coffin in a common grave at the man's request. He left the boardinghouse soon after.

And the kicker:

This tragic scenario occurred in 1910, 1913, and 1914 to the wives of Henry Williams, George Smith, and John Lloyd. As it turns out, these three men were in fact one man going by different names. His real name was George Joseph Smith.

To mangle a speech from Lady Bracknell to Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest: To lose one wife in such a manner may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose three looks mighty suspicious.

Enter Detective Inspector Arthur Neil, the first person to make the connection that something is amiss. The trouble is, with no marks of violence on, nor evidence of poisoning in, any of the three victims, how could Neil prove they were murdered? At most, he could charge Smith for false signatures on documents because of the aliases.

That’s where Bernard Spilsbury came in – a doctor specializing in the new science of forensics, which at the time, was not thought of as reliable evidence. He was almost creepily obsessed with his profession – dissecting dead bodies in the morgue, and conducting chemical experiments in his home lab late into the night, keeping careful, detailed notes on what he found. He was called in to perform post-post-mortems on the exhumed bodies of the wives, and his testimony at the trial was the making of him.

What I appreciate most about the book is that Robins doesn’t shy away from pointing out the flaws in the investigation and in the conduct of many people at the trial. In other words, she points out that forensic evidence, let alone the manner in which it was presented in court, was certainly not as reliable at the time as we think it is now. (And even now, it often comes under close scrutiny for possible contamination or tampering.) Therefore, from a 21st-century perspective, the case probably shouldn’t have turned out the way it did.

I’m also impressed with Robins’ characterizations of Bessie, Alice, and Margaret and their families, along with other women in George Smith’s past. You might think they were gullible and desperate women, which naturally is why Smith preyed on them, but they had far fewer options then than women have now, so in the end, I sympathize with them. Smith’s defense lawyer is a master of oratory who could easily sway a jury, and yet, his final opinion of his client isn’t what you expect. The letters Smith wrote, and the ones he made his wives write to their families about how gloriously happy they were with him, reveal an arrogant, bullying, and greedy man (although it's interesting to note that he wasn't getting millions of pounds as a result of their deaths, only a thousand pounds or so from each, but perhaps he thought that would make their deaths seem less remarkable than if he was inheriting gobs of riches, and if he could have gotten away with it on several more occasions, he could have had a very tidy sum eventually). Conversely, on reading Spilsbury’s case cards (which is where things get a bit graphic, just so you know), it’s easy to see why the public thought of him as a real-life Sherlock Holmes.

I admit I don't read much true-crime thriller reading. However, there are two reasons why this book appealed to me when I read a blurb about it in New Scientist.

The first is that, courtesy of my mom, I’ve been watching a series on DVD called Murdoch Mysteries, which takes place in Canada close to the turn of the century. The series is based on books by Maureen Jennings. The main character, Detective Murdoch, is considered an eccentric by his colleagues, not only because as a Catholic, he makes the sign of the cross to himself whenever he encounters a dead body, but also because of his use of the new science of forensics in solving crimes. Since his methods get such good results, the mouthy, temperamental, likes-a-wee-drop Chief Inspector Brackenridge lets Murdoch carry on with his weird experiments, helped along by the good lady doctor working in the morgue and who cracks corny death jokes a lot, and an up-and-coming Watson-like constable who provides a lot of the comic relief. The whole thing is a fascinating look at forensics in its infancy (and Yannick Bisson is some nice eye candy, but they really need to lighten his make-up – he looks overly fake-tanned). The Magnificent Spilsbury is a real-life example of these techniques in use.

The second reason is that the scenario described in the book reminded me of a novel by Gladys Mitchell called Speedy Death, in which one of the characters dies in a similar way with no signs of violence or poisoning. Mrs. Bradley (the detective character) notes the water that splashed on both sides of the bathtub, which helps her figure out how the victim was murdered. The novel was published in 1929, so it’s possible that Mitchell may have heard of the Brides in the Bath case or read about it while doing research. (I make weird connections like this all the time; you get used to it.)

This was absorbing reading – I often extended my lunch breaks at work so I could “read just one more page.”

I got a copy from Waterstone's when I was in London in May. For some reason, Amazon isn't carrying this book, although it was published in April. But bookdepository.com has it.

That reminds me, Mom wants to read it now, so I’m sending my copy to her.

the naming of cellos...

2010-06-03T18:39:00.005-05:00

Meet my new-to-me cello:

A 2003 Y Chen Soloist with Larsen and Spirocore strings. It’s more of a deep honey color than the picture gives it credit for.

I got it from Gailes’ Violin Shop in College Park. I’ve been renting a cello from them for about a year now. When I mentioned to one of the staff that I would like to buy one, she set up an appointment for me to look at their selection.

I’ve never been in a room full of cellos. They were lined up along three walls. It’s amazing how luthiers can take one instrument and vary it so widely – everything from varnish color to subtle changes in the body shape and finishing.

I told the staff person what my price range was, and she pulled out eight cellos. She also pulled out four different bows for me to try. Then she told me to take as long as I liked, shut the door, and left me to it.

A couple of the cellos didn’t even have labels in them, so no way to tell their origins or age, although I’m sure people more experienced than I could make an educated guess. The others were by Doetsch, Chen, Wilhelm, Jay Haide, Forcheim, and Schumacher.

I tried them all – the same pieces with the same bow on each cello. I was surprised at how much my ear has developed in a year because I could actually detect distinct differences in sound, and I have a better sense now of what musicians mean when they say an instrument’s tone sounds warm or bright or focused or dull. Therefore, I was able to eliminate several from the running right away because playing them just left me shrugging with a “meh,” and moving on to another one.

I was especially interested in trying the Jay Haide because I know several cellists who have them, and they all love the sounds they can get from Jay Haides. However, I was disappointed in this particular one. It sounded muffled, like it was talking with its mouth overly full and covered with a napkin and a hand. I tried all four bows on it and got the same result. I realize this was only one cello by this luthier duo, so I make no judgements on the quality of their instruments overall.

After about an hour trying out the eight cellos, I narrowed it down to two – the Doetsch and the Chen. They both had a sound that really caught my attention, even with my extremely limited playing ability.

This shop lets you take an instrument out on loan for a week to try it out and get to know it before buying. I assumed I’d be taking one out and bringing it back in a week and then taking the other one out, but in fact, they let me take both at once, along with two bows. It’s an odd (and paranoic) feeling to be toting around quite a few thousand dollars’ worth of cello and bow, I can tell you.

It’s also rather cumbersome to get two cellos and their respective cases into a car and then out again and hauled up four flights of stairs, not to mention taken back down said stairs and put back into said car to go to my weekly lesson and present them to my teacher.

The extra exercise was worth it, though, because my teacher is head of the music program at the local community college, which has some nice recital halls that he has access to. We carted my prospects into one of the halls, and he made me get on stage and try them out while he sat in the back of the hall and listened. Then we switched places, and he played them while I sat at the back of the hall. It’s one thing to play a cello and hear the sound as it projects away from you. It’s something else to face the cello and hear the sound coming at you.

The Chen sounded wonderfully clear and full, while the Doetsch, which had a nice tone when it was heard from the player’s point of view, sounded very far away from the listener’s point of view, as though the volume had been turned way down. So that got me leaning toward the Chen, especially when my teacher played a bit of the Elgar on it (one of my favorite pieces). The Chen could definitely handle that piece, while the Doetsch just didn’t seem to have enough power and projection to do it justice.

My cello teacher said the Doetsch was a perfectly respectable cello with a sweet tone, but if that tone can’t be heard well, especially when played by a timid beginner such as yours truly, it could make learning and improving all the more difficult, if not downright frustrating, which might make me give it up entirely. “I think the Chen could teach you a lot and build up your playing confidence,” he said, “especially with a better bow. That cello has focus that wants bringing out.”

I spent several more days playing them both before making a final decision. I started to really get a sense that the Chen was for me because I couldn’t stop playing it. My rental cello had developed a sharp and annoying whine lately, especially on the A string. It was so disheartening to hear during practice that I was practicing less so I could avoid having to listen to it, and I was starting to think it was my playing that was annoying and whiny. The Chen doesn’t whine at all, not even on the A string, so I quickly got back up to my usual amount of practice time.

I got to haul them down the stairs and wrestle them into the car yet again to take them back to the shop. I turned in the Doetsch and asked to have the bridge cut down on the Chen. The ganglion cyst on my left wrist was not happy with my renewed enthusiasm for cello practice this week. I’ve found that having strings slightly closer to the fingerboard (via a lower bridge) eliminates quite a bit of left wrist pain. Then I handed over a check and packed up the new-to-me Chen-with-lowered-bridge into my minty green cello case and took it home.

As for the bows, both were an improvement on the one I have, but neither came forward as an OMG, THIS ONE! winner. And my cello teacher suggested holding off on upgrading the bow until I get to know this cello better anyway. In other words, one variable at a time. My current bow sounds all right on it, but I’ll be saving up for a better one – maybe that will be my Christmas present to myself. Anyway, my teacher promised to bring his $4K bow to this week’s lesson so I can try it on my new-to-me cello.

I really thought the cello-buying process would take longer, so I’m a bit dazed that it happened so fast. I’ve heard about professional-level musicians who try out hundreds of instruments before choosing one to buy. Of course, I’m not a professional-level musician and likely never will be (I’ll happily settle for competent amateur), so perhaps being able to pick from eight was good thing. And this is probably the first and last time that I’ll be able to spend my work bonus/tax refund money on something like this rather than making an extra mortgage payment/paying off bills/adding to the savings account.

Jeez! I guess this means I'm a committed (albeit not very good) cellist, huh?

Now, I think this cello needs a name. Any ideas?

homeward

2010-05-22T19:51:00.002-05:00

The French keyboard is a little hard to manage, I must say. You have to do more Alt-ing and Shift-ing, and it's not a qwerty keyboard either.

I found an interesting e-mail in my inbox last night. I’d been following the British Airways cabin crew strikes story in the newspaper and on CNN (the only English-language TV station here). The company had gotten an injunction to postpone the strike, apparently citing that the “proper paperwork” hadn’t been filed to have the strike in the first place.

Visiting a country in which the spirit of revolution still makes itself known from time to time, I was amused by this. Since when do you file papers to have a strike? I always thought the whole point of a strike was to refuse to work without much advance notice to one’s employers. Having to file papers to strike somehow takes the heart out of it, I think.

Anyway, because the strike was postponed, British Airways had started to reinstate some of the canceled flights, and my flight home was one of them. Since they’d not reimbursed me yet for the canceled flight, my dilemma was: do I take that flight home, which is direct from London to Baltimore, or do I take the re-booked United flight that had a 3-hour layover in Chicago, which I’d paid for (because how was I to know the flight would be reinstated?), assuming the reimbursement from the canceled flight would cover the re-booked flight?

I wasn’t going to get reimbursed for the United flight if I canceled my ticket. And since British Airways had reinstated my direct flight home, they weren’t going to reimburse me for that one either if I canceled it.

Eventually, I worked it out so I could get a credit for the United flight to use on another trip and take the British Airways flight home.

My train ride back to London was much better than the one to Paris. I had a seat all to myself near a window with no loud and annoying children crowding me out. They served breakfast in the car I was in, so I didn’t even have to go down to the dining car.

I got to Heathrow plenty early, despite having to get creative with navigating the London tube system since St Pancras station was a zoo and several Tube lines were shut down for repair. However, once at the airport, it only took about 10 minutes to get through security. Since it was lunch time, and my flight didn’t leave for several more hours (the gate hadn’t even been posted on the board yet), I decided to eat.

I hadn’t yet been to a Wagamama Noodle Bar restaurant in London yet, although they’re quite popular. Lo and behold, there’s one at Heathrow. I had the. best. noodle. soup. ever. A huge bowl of coconut milk and lemon grass soup with rice noodles, bean sprouts, onions, and who knows what else. It was hot and spicy and freshly made. I could seriously wax poetic for days about this soup.

I think there are Wagamama restaurants in Boston, but not elsewhere in the states, which is a shame. I’d be a regular customer.

The flight home was interesting. Once I got to the gate, I noticed there weren’t many other passengers. I imagine many who were on the flight I was on originally had re-booked like I did. We were eventually put on a bus and driven all around the tarmac. We were beginning to think the driver didn’t know where he was going, and I was worried we’d be on a puddle jumper for eight hours, and most of that over ocean.

We finally arrived at the plane, which was bigger than a puddle jumper but not as big as a jumbo jet. Since there were so few of us, the cabin crew, who were quite friendly and didn’t seem at all grumbly about the postponed strike, told us we could spread out and take any seat we wanted. So we did. I had three seats to myself in the middle section, and watched Sherlock Holmes and then The Importance of Being Earnest, and then listened to Michael Palin read from his autobiography.

I was glad I took the direct flight home. I was back in the States by 7 pm. It would have been midnight if I’d taken the United flight home.

It’s disorienting to try to adjust back to American living. The Europeans are so much better at it. They get a minimum of five weeks of vacation every year. Fresh healthy food is plentiful and available within a five-minute walk of anywhere. Packaged and processed junkfood is scarce. People lounge in cafes or on the banks of the Seine and have long involved conversations while drinking coffee or wine. They don't rush, and they don't watch much TV. They do a lot of walking and bicycling.

Amazing. Our twisted idea of eating grub out of boxes and working ourselves to death and gorging on reality TV to make ourselves feel better or more successful than others is just wrong and it certainly isn't making us happy, is it?

We have so much to learn. The slow food movement and giving up cable TV and being "green" is just the beginning of how much better our quality of life could be. Makes me want to turn around and go right back across the pond.

I think maybe a two-week ramble around England next year. Or perhaps Ireland. We’ll see.

is the Sun King in?

2010-05-21T19:19:00.002-05:00

I took the train out to Versailles today. It’s a bit of a walk from the train station to the palace, but not bad.

I visited Windsor Castle last October. Versailles Palace is far larger and more ornate.

Louis XIV, the self-proclaimed Sun King, attended chapel services here:

Marie Antoinette’s bedroom - quite pink and girly:

The Hall of Mirrors - mirrors were a great luxury in Louis' day, so to have an entire room of them would have been daunting to any visitor:

Despite all the luxury you can gawk at in the palace, I think people really come here for the gardens:

And the sculptures - they're all over the place in the gardens:

I got a salad at one of the outdoor cafes and strolled through the maze until I found a bench in the shade. Thus fortified, I found my way out of the maze to encounter a but-wait-there’s-more situation - the estate extends as far as your eye can see and then some:

I spent the rest of the hot afternoon walking down paths and getting lost and doing my best to stay in the shade.

There’s a working farm here still. I found a quiet, shady and breezy spot next to a field where sheep and horses were grazing, and took a nap. I wasn’t the only one - a lot of people were lounging in some of the other fields, having picnics, riding bicycles or jogging.

I definitely liked the farm better than the palace. Had I lived a few centuries ago, I probably would have been a farm girl. I would have been better suited to farm life than to court life, and I doubt I would have looked good in those big curly powdered wigs anyway.

I took the train home and had dinner at Nabuchodonosor Restaurant and then walked to the Eiffel Tower and spent the rest of the evening lounging on the lawn in front of it. It was apparently picnic night on the lawn, so no lack of company.

I’ve really enjoyed being in Paris, despite the crowded feeling. I like the old-world and slightly shabby atmosphere. I admire the locals’ pride and respect for the history of their city. French people are polite and helpful, and not rude (they put up with Americans like me mangling their lovely language, which could possibly be grounds for sainthood), and I think they live a far more relaxed and healthy life than we do in the US. They sure do eat better.

I’ll come back someday.

Look up

2010-05-20T19:51:00.013-05:00

I spent my birthday in the Louvre today. There’s a metro stop right under it, in which you can see the original foundation walls from when it was a fortress:

A view from underneath the big glass pyramid:

Just like the British Museum, the Louvre is not to be seen in a day. I reckon it would take at least a week to see everything. Hell, its collection comprises the ancient world through about 1850! Therefore, I followed the self-guided tour in the Rick Steves’ Paris guidebook and went for the highlights.

Here’s Venus de Milo - a perfect study of opposites and balance:

The Winged Victory of Samothrace:

The little dark square in the middle is the Mona Lisa - notice how she gets her own wall:

The closer you get to the room in which the Mona Lisa is displayed, the more crowded it gets.

I managed to get up to the roped area, which keeps the public about twenty or so feet away from The Painting. I took a good long look at it. Even under glass, it’s a magnificent painting. I remember studying this painting in art history classes in college – the triangular solidity of the figure, the depth of the background landscape, the way the eyes follow you no matter where you are in the room, the hint of a smile. The significance of these elements doesn’t quite come through in a photograph. You get it when you see it with your own eyes.

I saw several people making copies of paintings:

As long as the copy isn’t the same size as the original, you can make as exact a reproduction as you like.

Nothing in the museum cafés interested me, so I wandered down to the food court for lunch instead. It’s organized by region – Asian, Greek, Italian, Mediterranean, etc. I went for the latter and had salmon, rice, hummus, and grilled zucchini.

There’s a post office in the Louvre, which seemed logical, not to mention handy. Imagine how many postcards are sent from there!

I was dismayed to find an Apple store and a Virgin megastore in the museum. No getting away from them, I guess.

The Opéra Garnier is about a 15-minute walk from the Louvre. Along the way, I stopped in at a sheet music shop. It was dim and musty-smelling inside. Flipping through wooden bin after wooden bin of cello sheet music, most of which was notated in French or German, felt like being in a record store in the 80s. Nothing really caught my eye, so I didn’t buy any sheet music, but I was glad to know that a shop like that could still exist in the modern day. At least in Paris, it can. It probably couldn’t in the US.

In its day, the Opéra Garnier was the rich people’s opera house:

The theater inside isn’t all that big, but the halls and stairways surrounding it are quite spacious and ornately decorated:

It was more important to see and be seen than it was to hear and see the performance on stage.

Unless you’re with a tour group, you can’t get into the lower level of the theater. However, a few of the upper boxes are open, so I went into one, leaned a little over the balcony of it and looked up to see this:

Seriously, click for big on this one.

Marc Chagall painted the panels for the ceiling in 1964. Beautiful, isn’t it? Chagall lived in Paris for awhile. He moved there in 1910 and studied the work of other artists. He went back to Russia in 1914, and then returned to France in 1923. He only just made it out of France again in 1941 when Germany took control of it. The more I see of Chagall's paintings, the more they grow on me.

I had some trouble finding the nearby metro station. I had a couple of maps with me, and they both indicated that the metro station was just to the left of the opera house. In fact, it’s directly in front of it, and not marked with any sort of sign. I only managed to find it because I sat on the steps of the opera house and just observed people for about 10 minutes. I noticed people disappearing down steps in the cul-de-sac in front of the opera house and so went to investigate. Had I still not found it, I would have resorted to asking the nearest friendly-looking Parisian, “Ou est le metro?”

"...when good Americans die, they go to Paris."

2010-05-19T20:22:00.005-05:00

(I really must re-read A Woman of No Importance one of these days.)

I stopped at a flower shop near Père Lachaise Cemetery to get some roses. The proprietress asked me, “C’est un offre pour la cimetière?”

When I said, “Oui,” she prepared the flowers for me – took the ties off, snipped off the ends of the stems, got the majority of the thorns off, and re-wrapped the roses in paper. Not bad for 8 euros.

I really enjoyed spending a sunny afternoon in this cemetery, which sounds like an odd thing to say, I know. High stone walls surround the more than 100 acres of tombs and block out pretty much all the street noise, so it’s very quiet and peaceful inside. There are trees everywhere, and benches to sit on.

The cemetery was named after Père François de la Chaise, who was Louis XIV’s confessor. It was established by Napoleon I in 1804, although it wasn’t a popular place to be buried in at first, being rather far from the city at the time. So the People in Charge organized a big to-do to re-bury the remains of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière. Later on, the idea was repeated with the supposed remains of Héloïse and Abélard, who have quite a nice monument. (I didn’t take a picture of it because there was scaffolding all over it since it was undergoing repairs.) After these fanfare events, everyone wanted to be buried with the famous people. Today there are more than 300,000 bodies buried there, as well as the cremated remains of even more people in the columbarium.

If you take bus 69 to its last stop, you end up at Porte Gambetta, which is one of the entrances. Then, if you cross straight through (more or less), you can take bus 69 back the other way.

I left roses at Oscar Wilde’s and Chopin’s graves. Wilde’s grave was just what I would expect of him – large, art nouveau, and covered in kisses and flowers. Although there’s a notice about not defacing his grave, few seem to comply. Somehow, I think he’d like all the lipstick marks, though.

Chopin’s grave had a veritable blanket of flowers around it. An older couple was there ahead of me, and they seemed quite pleased that someone my age would appreciate Chopin. The elderly gentleman kept nodding and smiling at me while I was arranging the roses I’d brought.

I also found the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Colette, and Rossini, among (many many many) others. There are quite a few Holocaust memorials as well.

I highly recommend Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson, if you want to read an imaginative book set in Père Lachaise Cemetery. It features the feral cats that roam the cemetery and take on the personalities of many of the famous inhabitants.

I was following the self-guided tour in the Rick Steves Paris Guidebook, when a couple approached me and asked, in French, if I knew where Edith Piaf’s grave was. The man then launched into a detailed explanation, in ever-more-rapid French, of everywhere they’d looked trying to find her grave, complete with almost stereotypical hand gestures to emphasize the effort of their quest. Since I could only catch a word here and there of what he was saying, and since I didn’t think offering “a droite” and “a gauche” and pointing up the path would do much good, and since Piaf’s grave was my next stop anyway, I just said “On y va,” and motioned to them to follow me. I’ve got to hand it to Rick Steves and his researchers. Their directions were very precise, so I was able to find it pretty easily and offer a “C’est ca!” with what was hopefully an appropriate fingerpointing flourish at the tomb to my new friends.

I'm not into photographing headstones, but I thought the sculptures on the graves were fascinating, so here’s a little photo essay of some of them:

This is above Chopin's grave:

"my wars are laid away..."

2010-05-19T19:38:00.014-05:00

I went to the Marais district today. It's definitely a less touristy area as evidenced by the lack of people. It was downright silent in this neighborhood, and is equal parts pre-Revolution, medieval, and bohemian.

The Place de la Bastille is one of its markers:

Remember Nicholas Flamel from the first Harry Potter book? The real Nicholas Flamel lived in this area. As did Victor Hugo.

I got a bit lost, but ended up in this picturesque square with a bit of Place de Vosges (built by Henry IV) in the background:

A 14th-century building (it's got some reinforcements on the right side to keep it standing up):

A few places in the Jewish Quarter:

One hundred sixty-five Jewish children from this school were taken to concentration camps.

The head of the school, who was not Jewish, accompanied them, so he could look after and comfort them. Neither he nor the children survived the camps.

I saw two really neat rooms at the Musee Carnavalet, which contains a lot of pre-Revolution and Revolution-era art:

I thought I should have at least one fancy dinner while I was in Paris, so I went to Le Bosquet, which is near my hotel. I had a goat cheese salad, salmon and basmati rice, and three-fruit sorbet. I think it was more a matter of the food being served all dressed up, rather than the food itself being fancy. It was all yummy nonetheless.

I walked down to the Eiffel Tower after dinner. There are lawns in front of it where people like to lounge and hang out and drink wine. As it gets darker, the Tower lights up:

And at 10, 11, and 12, it sparkles:

This shot, although out of focus, really shows all the lights flashing on the Tower:

hills and agile rabbits

2010-05-18T17:58:00.016-05:00

I thought the London Tube was crowded during rush hour! The Paris version is worse. It was a morning of the “how many people can you stuff into a train car?”game. I’m really starting to get claustrophobic in this city. No wonder it’s a prime place for pickpocketing. Paris doesn’t really have much in the way of violent crime, but theft is a huge issue. Best thing to do on a crowded metro car is to keep your purse or backpack in front of you with your arm across it.

I was finally able to squeeze out at Montmartre – the hill of martyrs. Or perhaps, a martyr. This is the spot where St Denis was beheaded:

The story goes that after he got the chop, he picked up his head, brushed it off, and walked about four kilometers (uphill, no less!) before collapsing and actually dying.

Montmartre is my kind of suburb – quiet, not nearly as crowded, and a little more elbow room all around. Combine the hills of San Francisco with an historic district of your choosing, add artistically minded people, and you have Montmartre. Technically, it’s considered part of Paris, but the people who live there will always say they’re “going down to Paris.” I can see why they’d do that. Montmartre has a different feel than the rest of the city. If I were to live in Paris, this is where I’d choose to be.

Van Gogh lived here for awhile (the floor with the shuttered windows):

And so did Renoir (the top left windows):

I shook the hand of this man for good luck:

It’s a sculpture inspired by a story called Le Passe-Muraille by Marcel Aymé.

This is the Lapin Agile Cabaret:

Andre Gill painted a sign for this place that shows a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan. Locals then began calling it "Le Lapin à Gill" ("Gill's rabbit"), which then morphed into Lapin Agile. At the beginning of the last century, the Lapin Agile was a favorite spot for people like Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire, and Utrillo. Pablo Picasso's painting "At the Lapin Agile" made the place world famous. Anyone remember the play Steve Martin wrote - Picasso at the Lapin Agile? It's about an imagined meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at the Lapin Agile.

Just across from the cabaret is a vineyard:

A singer named Davila also lived in Montmartre for awhile. I'd never heard of her, but she was apparently more popular than Madonna in her day. The locals quite liked her. Sadly, she commited suicide.

The Sacre Coeur Basilica is at the highest point of this area:

I walked around the inside perimeter while Mass was in progress (no indoor picture-taking allowed). The Lord’s Prayer recited in French is quite beautiful, especially with the echo and the faint smell of incense.

I saw a huge statue of St Therese of Lisieux (she is the patron saint of France, along with Joan of Arc). I bought a wooden mini version of the statue in the little shop. I consider her a sort of personal patron saint because when I was little, I used to stare at the statue of her in the church that my grandmother attended. There’s something about the tan and brown earth tones of her habit and the red roses she held in her arms that could easily occupy a little girl’s attention for a half-hour service.

The ceiling mosaic depiction of Christ is impressive. His heart is rendered in gold, as is the halo and rays of light behind him. The woman next to him also has a golden heart. I can’t tell if it’s the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene. Generally, the Virgin Mary is dressed in blue and white, and this woman is dressed in blue and red, which is often how Mary Magdalene is depicted, and since she was present at Christ’s resurrection, I’m leaning toward it being her. Anyone know for sure? I can’t find any information about it.

There are amazing views of the city from up here:

I’m told that the mayor of Montmartre is a more serious fellow than the mayor of Paris. One of the unique services he performs is a solemn “un-marriage” ceremony. Many couples with children here are not married, but they want their relationship recognized, hence the ceremony. And only a civil ceremony makes a marriage legal in Paris. Getting married in a church does not.

There’s a bohemian-tinged district just around the corner from Sacre Coeur. The portrait artists are pretty pushy, I must say. I wanted lunch more than I wanted my portrait drawn. Parisians take their time with lunch – a lot of places close for two hours in the middle of the day so everyone can eat. However, brasseries are generally open, so that’s a good place to hunt down a meal.

I decided on another museum visit in the afternoon and ended up at the Musee d’Orsay, which used to be a train station:

It’s only been open as a museum since the 1980s. Inside, you find lots of romantic, idealized figure sculptures and more Impressionist art than you can shake a baguette at. There’s a nice art nouveau furniture exhibit tucked in a back corner on the upper floor.

I took a bus back to the hotel and watched an episode of the Simpsons in French. The voice actors try to imitate the vocal styles of the American actors who voice the characters. And they don’t quite make it work. It comes across as sounding almost like a parody.

I walked down to Rue Cler again for dinner. I found a not-too-crowded café and had salmon and curried rice for dinner. Then I bought a pint of fresh strawberries for dessert from one of the produce markets and ate them while window shopping on Rue St Dominique.

medieval Paris

2010-05-17T18:24:00.001-05:00

The breakfast staff at this hotel are hilarious – two ladies who wear maroon pinafores and talk in animated and rapid French. They make a point to say “bonjour” to each guest, and they expect to be bonjour’d in return, otherwise, you might not get any service. In fact, it’s good manners to say “bonjour” (or “bon soir” if it’s dinnertime or later) to the proprietor or whoever is on duty whenever you go into a shop or café or restaurant.

A typical French breakfast is usually carbs (bread or croissant) and coffee. However, this hotel caters to American and British guests, so they also provide cheese, cold cuts, cereal, and fruit.

Speaking of carbs, there was a bread festival going on just outside of Notre Dame. It smelled heavenly (no pun intended) and made me curse my gluten allergy many times over:

Notre Dame reminded me of Westminster Abbey – imposing architecture and very dark inside.

Notre Dame:

Westminster Abbey:

Unlike Westminster Abbey, however, it’s free to walk through Notre Dame, and you can take pictures, provided you don’t use a flash. Although I did see the occasional flash go off anyway.

It took a few centuries to build Notre Dame. It was begun in 1163 and finished in 1345.

By the way, on the left side of the main doors, the man holding his head is often mistaken for John the Baptist:

It’s actually St Denis. More about him later.

Because the public was largely illiterate, the carvings on the outside of the building were an effective means of storytelling and getting the point across about religion and your place in it. However, sometimes, people got the story wrong. For instance, during the revolution in the late 1700s, the rebelling citizens chopped off the heads of the statues that are lined up above the three archways because the statues were thought to be representations of French kings. In fact, they are representations of the kings of Judah. The stone heads were left to lie where they’d fallen. A schoolteacher collected them and buried them in his back yard. They were discovered 200 years later in 1977 and are now on display in the Cluny Museum. (The heads on the statues now are replicas.)

Looking down the center of the cathedral:

There are little mini chapels along the perimeter of the cathedral:

I saw several people sitting in a corner, waiting to go into confession. There’s no wooden confessional box thingy – you sit face-to-face.

I was intrigued by this man on his knees on the marble floor, praying:

I went down into the Latin Quarter this afternoon. It’s full of booksellers and shops and cafes and lots of winding, narrow streets. The whole area has a bohemian atmosphere. It’s called the Latin Quarter because it was once a well-known student hangout where Latin was the academic language they studied in with their professors.

I found the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop:

Sylvia Beach opened the original bookshop in 1919. It was moved to a different location in 1921, and moved again in 1951 to its present location. Incidentally, Beach published Ulysses by James Joyce. Hemingway used to get books from here. George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, among others, were frequent patrons as well.

Just in front of the bookshop is a Wallace fountain:

These are public drinking fountains that draw water from a spring. You can find them all over Paris, and they are available for the public all year long except in winter (since the water would freeze). You just stick your water bottle in there and fill it up. It’s quite good-tasting water.

I had lunch at La Lutece, which was the name the Romans gave to Paris after they conquered the Parisi, the Celtic tribe that had settled there. I sat outside in a tan wicker chair at one of the tiny round tables and munched on a salade nordique (smoked salmon and shrimp over lettuce with tomatoes).

Unlike the centuries it took to build Notre Dame, it only took six years to build Sainte Chapelle:

Louis IX commissioned it and personally paid for it. It was essentially a giant jewel box built to house the Crown of Thorns, which he’d purchased while on the Crusades. The Crown has been dated to around 2000 years ago. Whether Christ wore it or not is another matter. It is put on display for an hour each month, and for additional hours during Lent.

Here’s Louis IX:

There are 6500 square feet of stained glass in this chapel, about two-thirds of which is original:

Interestingly, it’s right next door to the Palais du Justice, so there’s a pretty thorough security check to get in, and you see lawyers in black robes coming and going in the courtyard.

Since I was in a medieval mood, I stopped in at the Cluny Museum, which is one of the lesser-known museums, but still worth a visit to see art from the Middle Ages:

Part of the building are walls from the original Roman baths:

Here are the original heads of the kings of Judah that I mentioned earlier:

My favorite exhibit in this museum was the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries:

There are many theories as to what the scenes in the tapestries represent – the most basic one being depictions of the five senses.

I went to Rue Cler for dinner. All the restaurants and cafes have their menus posted outside, so you can just walk up and down the street, and if aromas from a particular establishment entice you, then you can check out the menu and plonk yourself down at an outdoor table.

I need to remember to get here earlier so I can make use of the produce shops and get a picnic meal one day this week.

a scarf is required

2010-05-16T21:45:00.001-05:00

The Eurostar train ride to Paris was Not Fun. I was squashed in with a family of four. The father spoke English mainly. His significant other spoke French mainly. Their children spoke a sort of Frenglish, when they weren’t screaming, crying, fidgeting, or otherwise irritating the entire train car of passengers. Seats were assigned, so I couldn't sit anywhere else.

I kept my eyes shut and tried to sleep for most of the train ride. Going through the various tunnels kept changing the air pressure, so it constantly felt like someone was pressing on my ears.

I didn’t mind missing the scenery. I’ll see it on the way back.

Two-and-a-half hours later, around noon, I was at Gare du Nord in Paris and about to experience the Parisian metro system. Other than being shabby, graffitied, and dirty and smelly in some places, it’s quite a good system and easy to use. The key is to know the end stop of the line you need to be on for your destination, depending on which direction you’re going in. Then you just follow the signs for that end stop to get to the right platform.

I emerged from the metro at Ecole Militaire, and after a couple of slight wrong turns, ended up on Rue Augereau. My hotel was at the end of the street. At first glance, you wouldn’t even know there was a hotel on this street since it’s surrounded by shops, cafes, restaurants, apartments, and even a laundromat.

I’m staying at the Hotel Londres Eiffel, which is recommended in the Rick Steves Paris Guidebook. (Incidentally, I discovered that his Paris guidebook is the bestselling English-language guidebook on the city. Good on him.)

This hotel has the tiniest elevator I’ve ever seen. Supposedly, it can hold a maximum of four people. Really, I think only three can fit in it comfortably, and if you have a suitcase, I’d only recommend two.

Once again, I’m in a small room:

...with the strangest-looking hair dryer I've ever seen:

I’ve quickly discovered that space is at a premium here. The streets are narrow, and the sidewalks are even narrower.

There are more cars and motorcycles than there are available parking spaces in this city. Many people have opted for SMART cars, since they’re compact enough to park perpendicularly to the sidewalk, which means they can fit into any smaller space that might be available. And when I say “any space,” I mean Any. Space. Parisians get creative with what they consider suitable parking spaces. Nothing but some sort of physical barrier will keep them from parking somewhere. It’s typical to see motorcycles and scooters and whatnot parked on sidewalks, and even being ridden on sidewalks.

Living space is also abominably small. Cedric, one of the front desk people at the hotel, told me that a 400 to 500 square foot apartment can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of euros. It’s not just a cultural thing that Parisians food shop in the outdoor markets on a near-daily basis, it’s a practical thing. They don’t have the room for huge refrigerators and lots of cupboards. Kitchen space is often the size of an office desk. You only keep it stocked with what you need in the immediate future.

My hotel is about 10 minutes’ walk from Rue Cler, a well-known place for shopping and eating, and about five minutes further on is the Eiffel Tower:

Now, forget the black and white striped shirts and the berets. What the Parisians really wear is scarves. Both men and women wear them, and lots of shops here sell them. They are also practical because the spring mornings here are chilly. So that was my first purchase in Paris.

Thus properly attired, I went wandering around looking for a place to have dinner. Most of the shops close just as the restaurants are opening. I ended up at Le Petite Nicoise, which translates, more or less, to the Little Man from Nice. The waitstaff were gracious, and I didn’t mangle my spoken French too badly. I had a three-course meal of salad, fish and grilled vegetables, and sorbet.

You don’t have to tip as much here as you do in the states. Waitstaff make at least a living wage, so they don’t have to rely as much on tips. A five to ten percent tip is considered generous, so basically you just round up to the nearest euro or two. Also, because the waitstaff aren’t angling as much for tips as they would in the states, they don’t fawn all over you. In fact, they leave you alone quite a bit and prefer that you not rush through your meal. A nice, laid back attitude, I think.

After dinner, I found one of the “tour the city” buses and got a lay of the land, so I’d know what things were near what other things and how far away they all were from my hotel. I’ll be using the metro and the buses a lot this week, I can tell.

Art Nouveau Metro stop:

Obelisk of Luxor in the Place de La Concorde:

Changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe:

"I called in at the British Museum..."

2010-05-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

This trip didn’t start off well. On Thursday, I checked my flight to make sure it was leaving when I thought it was leaving. There was an alert on the main page of the British Airways Web site about a cabin crew strike, which was to start on the 18th and go for at least a week. My flight out to London on the 14th was still on, but my flight home on the 22nd had been canceled. I’d not received any notice about it, by e-mail or by phone, and I know I’d provided both pieces of contact information when I’d booked the flights. Still, it could have been worse – I could have found out about the cancelation on the 22nd. I at least had time to make other arrangements. So I booked my flight home on another airline, although it means I have a layover in Chicago, which I’m not pleased about. The sole reason I booked through British Airways was because I could get direct flights to and from London via BWI. So I’m not looking forward to the homeward journey.

Anyway, I arrived in London this morning. I’m staying overnight at an IBIS hotel near St Pancras station, since the Eurostar to France leaves from there. I have a tiny room with an overly firm bed.

To keep myself awake, I walked down to the British Museum, which is a bit further away than I thought it would be.

Along the way, I stopped in at a Waterstone’s bookstore and bought a copy of The Magnificent Spilsbury by Jane Robins. It’s not available in the states yet. Victorian-era forensics has lately been of interest to me because my mom got me hooked on the Murdoch Mysteries – sort of a Canadian Sherlock Holmes/CSI series.

Once at the museum, I went to the King’s Library, the oldest room in the museum, which is set up to look like an old-world era library with creaking wood floors, books neatly stacked on shelves along all the walls, and display cases featuring all kinds of curiosities in the middle of the room:

The books belonged to King George III and were donated to the nation. His collection comprises 60,000 books, most of which are now in the British Library. The ones in the museum are on loan.

The display cases in the room are arranged to show various stages of enlightenment: the natural world, the birth of archeology, art and civilization, classifying the world, ancient scripts, religion and ritual, trade and discovery.

There’s also a touchable copy of the Rosetta Stone in this room:

From there, I went up to the Clock Room, which traces the development of timekeeping from early examples up through to more modern and recognizable examples:

My stringed instrument friends might find this interesting:

I had a fish and chips dinner at the restaurant in the hotel. I hope the bed won’t be too uncomfortable to sleep on.

the prodigal returns to practice

2010-05-03T17:45:00.006-05:00

Last Wednesday night's cello practice ended in tears. My Inner Critic was in rare form. My mind was wandering a bit, so the Critic said, "Stop that! Sit up straight and pay attention to what you're doing!" I tried, and then my mind wandered again after a bit. So the critic ripped into me. "Why are you doing this anyway you have no focus you're not sitting right your bow grip is still crap you've been at this a year and you still sound horrible you can't even play a scale well let alone an actual piece of music that has any feeling in it so what is the point?" I tried to remind the Critic I'd taken this up to get my brain working again after Lexapro turned me into a fat, lazy, unemotional insomniac. And besides, I love the sound of the cello. Which is when he sat back, crossed his arms, raised an eyebrow, and smirked at me. Which is when the crying started.

So I avoided my cello until today. Maybe I didn't have enough tea that morning. Maybe we both just needed a little space. I don't know. In a small, one-bedroom, one bathroom condo, space is always an issue - I bet the cats would get along better if we all had a bit more room...

Anyway.

I've only ever had a crying spell during cello practice once before, earlier this year. I'm sure I'm in for many more of them the longer I stick with cello playing.

I know things are REALLY bad when I reach the crying stage. I'm not one for regular sob sessions. A fact which has always worried my mother - the whole bottle-it-up-until-you-explode tendency isn't healthy. I know that. Still, it takes a lot of Accumulated Stuff to make me start blubbering, and for it to happen during a cello practice is especially dangerous because I don't want to start associating practice with perfect timing for an emotional meltdown. Practice is supposed to help me avoid them.

In fact, I prefer practice to be a focused and meditative act, however horrible it may sound. Certainly, there can be struggle in it. Hell, I struggle to get into and out of poses while remembering to breathe during yoga practices, and with getting a scene in a novel to convey action, theme, characterization, and atmosphere in a balanced and interesting way during a writing session. Neither reduces me to a watery mess, though.

It was just as well that my cello teacher royally mangled up his schedule and I ended up not having a lesson last Thursday. I hate to think what I would have put him through if we'd gone through with it as planned.

However, cello practice is a part of my evening routine. Not doing it was starting to feel weird. So I sat down with it again tonight. Half-heartedly, I admit. The cats were nearby for support, as they generally are. I apologized to Damiel and Cassiel for how bad this was going to sound, and just tried a scale. Timid and wobbly-sounding, but what can you expect after four days of nothing? I did it a few more times just to get my fingers comfortable again, and while anything near good intonation still eludes me, I at least didn't want to smash the thing against the wall.

I couldn't quite face my assigned pieces at first, so I went back to trusty Schroeder. As in, page 2, bowing on open strings. Gotta start somewhere. I went through several more Schroeder exercises, swallowed a big glug of tea, and opened Dotzauer. My slurs are improving a drop at a time, as is position change from first into half and back again. Even first into second and back is a hair more accurate. I'll take what I can get.

It wasn't great. It sounded horrible as usual, but for whatever reason, I can bear horrible today when I really couldn't last Wednesday. That may be because the Inner Critic seems to have gone on walkabout temporarily.

A DK day

2010-05-02T16:50:00.037-05:00

Last year, the first weekend in May was rainy and muddy, which made wandering around the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival rather a watery adventure. This year, it was hot and sunny.

I went on Saturday. I got to the fairgrounds at 8 in the morning. I've found this is a good time to arrive because there's not as much traffic, you can get a reasonably close parking space near the main gates, there's less of a crowd, and the morning air is cooler.

(You can click on the photos to embiggerate, BTW.)

My knitting group hosted a hospitality RV just outside the gates of the Howard County Fairgrounds:

Naturally, there were sheep:

And a friendly ram who loved being pet:

Alpacas:

Cute baby goats:

Oh, and yarn, of course:

Look at these huge spools!

Some wonderful fleeces:

Spinning wheels:

Some kind of loom:

And a yurt:

The guy who owns the yurt makes what I can only describe as paintings out of wool:

I saw a demonstration of his technique last year. He works with soaking wet wool to draw the image, and then felts it to get it all to stick together.

This was the line forming outside the Socks That Rock booth:

No lack of food choices:

This group played some great music:

The exhibition hall had some amazing things on display:

Two of the ladies in my knitting group, Denise and Dorothy, won ribbons for their entries!

This year's theme for my festival yarn buying was DK weight. I took four patterns with me, all of which required DK weight yarn, and I found what I wanted for three of them.

A garter stitch cardigan with a lace edging. The yarn is from Brooks Farm in Lancaster, Texas:

A vest. The yarn is from Shelridge Farm in Durham, Ontario. The colorway is called Azure:

A cropped sweater with ribbing that works up into a triangle on the front. This yarn is also from Shelridge Farm. The colorway is called Wine. Rarely do a I make a pattern in same color as shown in the prototype, but I loved the color:

Amazing that these vendors would travel all that way for this festival.

I think next year's yarn-buying theme will be sock yarn. I will definitely have knit down my stash of that by next May.

bookshelf

2010-04-15T20:27:00.004-05:00

Via @henrymort, I came across this ideal bookshelf illustration project by Jane Mount. She's drawn and painted "snapshots" of the books people have on their shelves. It reminds me of this photo essay of what people keep in their refrigerators.

Anyway, one of my bookshelves resembles #25, minus the book at the end on the right side. There are parts of other shelves in this series that could also end up on my ideal shelf.

So I thought, hell, why not put together my ideal shelf as a little creativity prompt? If I only had one shelf of books, which ones would be on it? And that led to the question – would these piles of pages represent what I like to read or would they represent what I turn to depending on what I’m doing to keep myself occupied and out of trouble?

I chose a mix of both. The number of books in Ms Mount’s paintings averages at about 16-ish, depending on if you like to ignore decimal points or round them up. I went with 16.

So here it is, my ideal bookshelf:

(click for big, btw)

(I thought it would be easier to read the titles if they were stacked, rather than lined up.)

I’m curious. What does your ideal bookshelf look like? Feel free to post links to your picture (or your drawing, if you are so inclined to illustrate it) in the comments. And do go look at Ms Mount’s illustrations – really a neat idea.

This would also be a great prompt for music and movies - maybe in another post.

It's Wim Wenders' fault

2010-04-11T20:35:00.013-05:00

When a friend I hadn't seen in awhile asked me what I was up to these days, I mentioned that I was learning to play the cello.

He raised his eyebrows and asked, "The cello? Really? Why the cello?"

"It's Wim Wenders' fault."

(My friend is used to me giving answers that only make sense in my head. He's a patient person, though, which is probably why he's still my friend.)

Back when my panic attacks were far worse than they are now, I'd be up at night pacing, sitting down, standing up, always hoping that somehow, I could get out of my skin and let it panic while I got some badly needed sleep.

Sometimes, I'd put in a DVD in an effort to distract myself. Someone had loaned me a copy of Wings of Desire. I had seen City of Angels a few years earlier and discovered it was partly based on Wings of Desire, so I was interested to see the original version. [Confession: I didn't like City of Angels, particularly after I saw Wings of Desire.]

After Bruno Ganz recites a bit of "Song of Childhood," cello is the first thing you hear in the film as the hand-etched white-on-black credits begin - a long, slow, low note; then another; then a quiet little run, then some pizzicato (plucking), then another long, slow note, and then as the camera pans over Berlin, a little run that sounds like a despairing cry. The angel Damiel stands high up on the edge of a bombed-out part of a clocktower. His head is bowed. His wings are just visible. Only the children below in the street notice him.

The film is mostly black-and-white, which is the angels' point of view, and then it dissolves into color when you see the humans' point of view. There is a montage of the angels observing different people to "assemble, testify, preserve." They listen in on inner monologue. They occasionally comfort people. They smile at children, who can always see them. Damiel eventually encounters Marion, a circus performer, and Cassiel (another angel) starts to observe Damiel. Peter Falk plays himself with a lovely twist. I won't tell you how the rest of it goes. You should watch it.

There is other music in the film - harp, voices, songs by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Crime and the City Solution, Laurie Anderson. Actually, other than the beginning and bits scattered throughout, cello isn't prominently featured, but it's what grabbed my attention. Particularly that despairing sound. When you've panicked for days in a row and are severely sleep-deprived, despair feels exactly like that sound.

I watched it all the way through that first time while pacing the living room at 2 in the morning. Then I started watching it again, finally managing to sit down and not fidget, and eventually, I fell asleep to Bruno Ganz reciting "Song of Childhood" a third time.

After watching that film, I started hearing cello in a lot of music on the radio. I deliberately started seeking it out. I quickly found that there is more cello music out there than just Yo-Yo Ma, although he is one of the finest cellists around, and I do have many of his CDs. Abby Newton recorded in a cave. Zoe Keating makes the cello do avant things. Rasputina goes all steampunk goth singing about Howard Hughes. Charlie Chaplin composed cello music, and left-handed at that. My current favorite is Apocalyptica. Metallica covers on four cellos = awesome!

My doctor advised me that I really needed to work less and find more creative outlets if I didn't want the panic attacks to take over my life. Along with renewing my interest in story writing and watercolor painting and knitting, I remembered that film and started to seriously consider cello lessons. It took a few years before I could afford an instrument and lessons, but I was able to do it finally. I watched the movie again recently while I battled a spring cold. Even now, it still reminds me "why the cello."

In a way, I equate cello with panic, but in the sense that sitting down with the instrument to practice undoes the panic because I can get myself to focus on something outside my head, which somehow calms me down. Dunno how it works, but I'm damn grateful that it does.

Whenever I sit down with the instrument to practice these days, I imagine Damiel and Cassiel are standing behind me, observing. And wincing.

a little bit at a time

2010-04-04T18:07:00.004-05:00

After my last post, several people asked me how in Hades I manage to be patient in the high-speed modern day.

Damned if I know.

However, I think my fiction writing process has something to do with it.

See, I several minor writing frustrations, but only one major one - story ideas never occur to me whole and entire, only needing to be written down. I know writers who have this ability, and oh, how I envy them.

Unfortunately, elements of the idea appear to me in random fashion. I have to keep a constant eye out for the Next Thing that looks as though it relates to the story idea, which often isn't chronogically next in the story or next in any other logical sense. This leads to wading through and examining all the Things and figuring out how they fit together and continually revising my assumptions about them as each new Thing appears. It sounds like a laborious process, and it is.

For awhile, I thought this meant I wasn’t a “real writer." Surely real writers have a more orderly and sane and quicker way of going about writing a story.

I have no idea why it happens like this for me, and oddly, my nonfiction writing process (including blog posts) is far more efficient and structured. It's a weird beast, this fiction writing thing.

And now that I think of it, I had a college art lesson that is very like my story discovery process:

The professor projected an image on the screen. However, the image was deliberately out of focus. We were instructed to “draw what you see.” Hard to do if you’re not sure what you’re looking at. We did our best, and then after a few minutes, the professor focused the image just a hair. It was still blurry and unrecognizable, but a spot here and there started to look like something. We had to draw what we saw, but in a new drawing, referencing the first drawing if we felt anything in it was useful. The professor focused the image a hair more again, and we did a new drawing, over and over, until finally we could see the focused image. Amazing how it looked nothing like what we thought it was in the beginning.

Since we had to focus only what was recognizable and at least guess on what was not as we worked on each drawing, detail and accuracy showed up almost without trying because there was no rush to get it all at once. We simply worked with what we had at each stage. Everyone’s final drawing turned out hyper-accurate and thorough, and we were all so surprised and pleased with them that we collectively decided we didn’t hate the professor for putting us through that after all.

Writing stories is like that drawing lesson (for me, anyway). I start out with a blurry idea, and the more I work on it, the more things reveal themselves and start to fit with other things as I continually rearrange and revise them. Lots of detail and layers come forward - if I rushed through, I'd probably miss a lot of these, and the stories would be the worse, I think.

Once I stopped fighting my haphazard method of story discovery and just got on with writing what I did have clear to me (thank you, outlines and note-taking!), I started to get more writing done. I’ve accepted that my story ideas are lumpy blobs in the beginning and gradually work up to finished pieces that are nothing like I thought they would be when I started writing them. In fact, it’s rather neat to see where they end up, and it keeps me interested enough to keep coming back to the page, which is the most important thing, in the end, isn't it?

Writing frustrations are annoyingly clever that way.

Process and Patience

2010-03-30T19:01:00.004-05:00

In the yarn world, it is said, there are two types of knitters – product knitters and process knitters. Product knitters want to have something to show for all their effort – a finished scarf, a sweater, a pair of mittens or socks. Process knitters are all about the effort itself. For them, having a finished piece is nice, but the act of knitting is where they get the most enjoyment.

I am definitely a process knitter. I do finish pieces. Eventually. But the repetitive motion of right needle in stitch on left needle, wrap yarn around right needle, left needle up and over right needle is some of the best meditation I’ve found. My brain can far more easily wander around, stretch, drain the gludge and solve problems while knitting than it can if I try sitting zazen and focusing on my breath. Whatever works, eh?

And I’m one of those weird knitters that doesn’t mind huge sections of a single stitch pattern. My current project is largely stockinette stitch, and I easily get into the stitching groove while listening to an audiobook or a CD or “watching” a movie (I listen to movies more than I watch them these days, and have you seen Interstate 60? I saw it recently and loved it, and I can’t remember the last time I could say that about a movie.)

I’m also a process writer. Same deal. I finish writing projects, sooner or later, but constructing the plot lines, character sketches, and scene lists, as well as writing the scenes themselves in the layering process I use, and the noodling and nudging and swapping and revising is what keeps me doing it.

No surprise then that I’m fast turning into a process cellist. Even when I first started lessons last June, I had no illusions about being able to play the Elgar Cello Concerto in a week. (Someday, maybe…) I actually looked forward to starting from the beginning and slowly learning bit by bit to see (and hear) what might happen. The fact that I will likely spend the rest of my life learning to play this instrument and never learn it all is not daunting to me.

Learning to play the cello has reminded me, just as knitting and writing remind me, that I have patience. There are a few things with which I am impatient, but for whatever reason, creative endeavors make me think I have all the time in the world, or maybe time slows down for them. I will happily sit with a Schroeder book (which is Emily's fault because she turned me on to them) and play a couple of exercises over and over as the structure and pattern of them comes into focus, and I giggle at how cleverly it was written out to do just that.

Well, at least I think it's clever.

Babette

2010-03-14T11:26:00.006-05:00

I finally finished Angel's Babette Blanket, and now that she has it, I can show the world what the finished project looks like:

There are 126 squares in this blanket, and I grossly underestimated how long it would take to make them all and then sew them all together. However, my sewing skills have definitely improved after working on this. I also added a border of the three colors for that nice finishing touch, so my bordering skills have improved, too.

I'm pleased with how it turned out, and Angel likes it, so all is good.

You can see other examples of the Babette Blanket here.

writing stash

2010-03-02T20:19:00.013-05:00

Knitters, crocheters, spinners, and probably weavers, too, have a yarn stash (or fiber stash, in the case of a spinner). This is like having a stack of books in your to-be-read queue, only it’s yarn.

You got it at a fiber festival (Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival – 59 days, not that I'm counting or anything), or your local yarn shop, or a yarn swap, or on Etsy, or a seller’s Web site. Some of it may be earmarked for a specific project or a specific type of project (ie, you got enough of one color, type, and brand of yarn to make a sweater or a pair of socks). Some you may have bought on impulse because it was pretty, or it was a fiber or brand you hadn’t tried yet or had been looking high and low for and finally found, or it was in the bargain bin and you couldn’t pass it up at that price.

You store it somewhere. It sits there, waiting to be used. Sometimes you look at it and sigh appreciatively. There is comfort in seeing the materials that you can use your hands to work into something beautiful and/or useful. Sometimes you avoid looking at it because there’s so much of it and your tastes have changed and what were you thinking when you picked up that fuchsia mohair?

I’m happy to say that I have a modest yarn stash. Some of it sits on a bookshelf, nicely wound into yarn cakes. And there’s another medium-size box in my clothes closet. That’s it. That’s all I have. I know people who have yarn stashes that take up entire rooms. It possibly borders on hoarding. That kind of stash would make me nervous – there’s more there than a person could possibly knit in a lifetime.

I recently did a bit of de-stashing. I took a large Target bag full of yarn I’m not likely to ever use for various reasons to my knitting group’s yarn swap. And I didn’t come back with any new-to-me yarn, thankyouverymuch.

Recently, it occurred to me that I also have a writing stash. These are to-be-written ideas sitting patiently in a queue. I add to it on a fairly regular basis.

I really like having a writing stash because it solves two problems – what should I write next? and what if I run out of ideas? Without a writing stash, both problems could be paralyzing and lead to Not Writing. At least for me, they could.

The trick with my writing stash is knowing if an idea is still in a to-be-written stage or if it’s gone stale and I’m no longer interested in the idea anyway. If it’s the latter, I de-stash it. None of this “oh, but I might use it someday maybe” nonsense. (I didn’t inherit my father’s and grandfather’s pack rat tendencies, can you tell?)

My one bad habit with my writing stash is that sometimes, unfinished stories go into it, and I try to keep my stash as a place for new ideas to work with, rather than abandoned, half-developed ideas (temporary or otherwise). The same is true for a yarn stash – unfinished objects are still yarn, after all, which is how they find themselves being counted as stash, even though they are in some metamorphosis stage of being turned into a thing.

Right now, I have two unfinished children’s stories and a mostly finished novel in my writing stash. They are sitting alongside two novel ideas and a short story idea, which properly belong in the stash. I don’t want the latter crowded out by the former. I don’t want the new ideas to go stale either, because I like them a lot.

I got stuck on one of the children’s stories. A big hole that I couldn’t fill, let alone get around, and struggling with it was steering me toward Not Writing. I’m starting to get an inkling of way to fix that. The other story was originally written as a screenplay, but I think it will work better as a novel. Technically, the entire story is written, just in the wrong format, and therefore, has to be re-written and added to. The novel is The Phoenix Sonata, which I wrote most of for National Novel Writing Month last year. I kept working on it even after NaNoWriMo was over because there was more story to tell, but then I finally reached the conclusion I’d been avoiding for awhile. It’s a boring story. It’s a bit of a sob story, and it’s still boring. So that got stopped until I could figure out if there was a way to make it interesting and make a reader not want to slap the main character and give her a cheer-up-it-may-never-happen lecture.

And lo and behold, there is a way! I’ve got an idea. (I’ve seen people go pale when I say that.) There’s something I can add to it and some things that can be re-worked to make it interesting. There is relief in this. It was worrying me that I’d put all that work into a boring story.

And when that here’s-how-I-can-fix-it idea hit me, I was already outlining another novel idea.

So there is my dilemma – re-work the Sonata novel or start the new novel? Either way has its merits. Re-working Sonata would mean I’d be able to finish it. I like finishing things, hard as it is for me to do sometimes. However, starting the new novel means something fresh to work on. I’m protective of new ideas. It’s painful when they go stale because you were working on other things. One of them is going back into the stash, though, but which? I've been rolling this around in Morning Pages, but nothing's come forward yet. (Yes, I'm still doing Morning Pages regularly.)

Obvious answers are “work on both” or “alternate each day.” Tried that. I tend to get going with one and all the focus goes there, and the other falls off the radar. I’m the same way with knitting – I can’t have lots of projects going at once. Gives me hives.

So what would you do? What do you do if you’ve had a similar situation? Is a writing stash a bad idea?

Maybe I should have given up overthinking for Lent instead of chocolate.

oh right, there are other places to buy books

2010-02-11T17:07:00.005-05:00

Although the Amazon/Macmillan scuffle has died down a bit, I got curious. I browsed my bookshelves last night to see how many books I had that were published by Macmillan or any of its subsidiaries. Turns out I have more than I thought I did, which shouldn’t be surprising I suppose, given that it’s one of the big six publishing houses.

While I’ve read the occasional e-book, I’m not impressed enough with the technology yet to switch over entirely, so I’m still mainly a print-on-paper book reader. Paper copies don’t mysteriously disappear from my bookshelves because the seller suddenly decided I couldn’t have them any more, even though I legitimately paid for them. Paper copies don’t need batteries or recharging. Paper copies don’t do weird things where I can’t advance the page or read the text. I can write and underline and dog-ear pages in paper copies.

Should Amazon or any other big online bookseller get into a similar skirmish over e-books, or even other aspects of publishing, the sudden-removal-of-merchandise-that-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-issue tactic could happen again. To continue with the example of the Macmillan authors, if I choose to see what the latest offerings are from these authors I’ve an obvious history of reading, and possibly buy them, I may have to get them someplace else, should my usual book sources hoist up their drawbridges suddenly. Given my low resistance level to buying books, this is actually a plausible scenario.

And it is a bloody obvious point that John Scalzi made – I don’t HAVE to buy books from Amazon. No one does. It was just an automatic habit to do so. They made it too easy, which possibly was their goal, and up to now, didn't give consumers pause. But when they eliminated, albeit temporarily, roughly one-sixth of their bookstore catalog, both e-book and print, that made things mighty inconvenient for the consumer. Not to mention all the lost sales for the authors, but that's for another post.

If you have a guilty book-buying habit like I do, and can’t buy the books you want from the usual places, there are alternative sources to feed it:

Your local library – Your tax dollars pay for it, and many libraries’ budgets are being slashed (which has led to some having to close), so may as well use them before they become extinct.

Your local bookstore – There are more independent, used, remainders, and chain bookstores than you might think.

paperbackswap.com - swap, exchange, and trade books

bookdepository.com – I have to admit, this one is becoming my new favorite source. The prices are comparable to Amazon prices, and I especially like the free shipping no matter how much you buy or where you live bit.

indiebound.org - helps you find independent bookstores all over the country

indiependentbooks.com

dreamhavenbooks.com

borderlands-books.com

betterworldbooks.com - another one that offers free shipping and funds world literacy projects

I’m sure there are many others to add to this list. Feel free to do so.