Purl Soho

Oh dear....I have to be in NYC the second week in April and I think this will require a trip to Purl SoHo...Oh the things I will buy. I've already decided: good food and yarn instead of bad men and alcohol....well, maybe some alcohol. I finished my Jared Flood Beaumont Tam. I'll post photos when it's nice and blocked. I need project suggestions and a reason to buy the yarn I already know I'm going to pick up.

Beaumont Tam by Jared Flood

Just a picture so you can see where I am with this project. I am LOVING the results. The photo was taken by my good friend, Manal Abu Shaheen who is a brilliant photographer.

New Hat!

Every couple of months, I get tired of my hair and I march myself down to the local beauty school and pray they have a Black girl on staff who can blow my hair out. Currently, I'm sporting a curly afro. But this is not hair that goes well with all the cute little berets that I've knit. On Saturday I started Jared Flood's Beaumont Tam.  I'm about 25 rows away from finishing. It's my first adventure with Fair Isle knitting (where you knit with both hands) and I'm excited about in the way knitters are excited about these things. I took a picture of the project! And because I haven't written in a couple of days, I took a picture of the tam in progress. It's sitting on some of the books from my binge last week. 

Today I....

bought books. I mean, I went on a book binge. Mostly to celebrate the fact that my tax return (completely by two 20 years olds at the Uni) was done incorrectly and when corrected it almost doubled!

Here's what I got:

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li (I saw her read from this book last year and she was awesome and the books sounded awesome)

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (this one has been on my list for a while)

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese (been looking at this for a long time)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Larsson Stieg (I read a long article about him and this trilogy in the NY Times, sounded interesting enough and it was the first time I saw three paperbacks on the buy two get one table)

The Gin Closet by Leslie Jamison (Went to her reading last week and it was great. I'm really looking forward to this read)

Irreplaceable by Stephen Lovely (Impulse buy but he's a local guy and I like to show my support)

The Seamstress by Frances des Pontes Peebles (okay, I already bought one in paperback but I gave it to my friend's mom. Clearly I liked it enough to want to own a copy. It's really, really, good.)

And, I got hair products!! Lot's of Pantene for curly-headed girls and some fancy organic stuff that I thought I'd try out (and it was buy one get one)

Okay. Now I need to go clean my house and maybe fine places to put these books. Its not like there's room on my shelf...

Reading Like a Writer or some Bullshit Like That (and then some)

Forgive me, I'm going to be all over the place in this post. This has been an interesting writing week. Too many thoughts and no interest in writing several posts.

1. I'm beginning to think this going to an MFA program and spending a significant time thinking about story structure, has ruined reading for me. Or maybe it's just that I am becoming a more discerning reader? My friend M. and I had this conversation in the parking lot of a corporate bookstore after we went to Red Lobster (In Iowa, this passes as seafood. And who am I kidding, cheddar bay biscuits rock).  M said (I'm paraphrasing, she'll correct me if I'm wrong) that if a story is good enough, she doesn't think about craft issues. Happy All the Time is the last book I read that made me feel that way. I'm always thinking things like "Would Ethan say the POV was deep enough?" "Did the author take a real risk here? Or is this ending a bit of a cop out?"

These are the questions I ask myself when I edit and maybe I should train myself to stop applying them to the books I read. Or maybe I should just read better books. Maybe I should just finish my book...

2. I just finished an edit of a old story. Finally. I've been working on it for three weeks and while I am certain I still have more to do to it, I'm going to send it out into the world anyway.

3. I've been thinking about books on craft. Are they useful or not? I've found that every time I sit down to read one of the many I have (Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott, This Is The Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley, The Art of Fiction, John Gardner) I usually just want to write instead of reading about writing. Bret Anthony Johnston's "Naming the World" is very useful and always with me when I write.

4. I went to the gym last night and went to town on the cardio machines. 55 minutes I was a sweaty, gross mess. But I felt so good!!!

And finally...

5. Yesterday I wanted to kill off the main character in my novel. I mean kill him before he even  hit the page kill him.  I woke up yesterday thinking about the dream I had in which my main character, a 17 year old boy, was reading his opening chapter out loud....I shouldn't really call him the main character. I'm not writing a novel, novel. It a novel in stories. I guess. Anyway, as a character he can, at time, dominate.  This time, he was trying to dominate me.  What he wanted was for me to somehow turn all those pages I have into a first person narrative that was all about him, him, him.

My initial reaction was to tell him to fuck off. But now I can't get that idea out of my head. I have a writing date today, and because my writing dates are mostly about coffee, vegan cupcakes*, and gossip, I don't mind turning this one over to him I'll give him 1,000 words.

*I do not condone vegan treats on a regular basis, I like butter and eggs (perhaps too much). However, there happens to be a lovely cafe in Iowa City that is perfect for writing and they just so happen to cater to the non-dairy sorts.

Okay, one more.

6. I'm going to have a homemade latte to go along with my German breakfast (salami, cheese and crusty wheat bread) while I listen to the Milli Vanilli channel on Pandora and edit my Statement of Educational Philosophy.

An Editing Break

So, I'm taking a little break to show off some projects that I'm working on/finished.
Here are Patrick's completed socks!

And here is the Clapotis scarf I'm working on for me!

 

The clapotis is a drop stitch scarf (I'm only half done) the pattern can be found for free at Knitty. The yarn is Ella Rae lace merino purchased at one of my LYSs. It's kind of a dream to knit with.

Editing: Mind, Body (okay, and Page)

And by mind, I mean my stupid, fucking, novel. Okay. It's (I hope) not stupid, but it's stressing me the fuck out. I'm just frustrated, mostly because I want to write it but also because I realized that editing is not just something I do on the page.

My rough drafts (like many of my life attempts: love, education, career) are a total mess. Yes, there are are lines that I absolutely adore. But sometimes, you just have to hit the delete button. Kill your babies (maybe not the most politically correct phrase but that is what it feels like when the only thing you parent are words on the page).

In addition to editing my disastrous and insanely incomplete novel, I'm editing my life. I'm making necessary changes. The biggest is getting healthy. I think it's going to happen. Slowly, but surely. The good thing is, I'm more excited by this than I am to write. Wait. That's no really that great, but I'll take what I can get.

Here's my big problem: Performance anxiety. The minute anyone asks me to do anything related to writing, health, etc, I get really excited (see beginning of NYE Challenge) and then I get really paranoid about failure/rejection (see inability to finish NYE challenge). Someone out there wants to read my work and maybe represent me. I told this person I would send them a sample of my work and that I only needed 2 weeks to give them a solid sampling of my work. What happened? Paralyzed. Can't write. Don't want to write. Hate writing. The same applies to the gym. I'm on a roll, people are beginning to expect things on me (at least I think they do) and then, what do I do? Fuck. It. Up. (not quite, I mean a total of 17 workouts and 6 feats, not a win but not a total FAIL either).

Things I'm going to edit from daily life: Booze (not including the wine I'm drinking now), Restaurants (left over from the DIY feat and going strong!), laziness (yes, you), and most importantly, fear. I'm going to root out that thing that keeps me from accomplishing the goals I set for myself, and bury it where I can't see it.

What am I talking about? Oh yeah, editing down my life to make it better. Much like Gordon Lish did to Ray Carver's stories.