Dyepot, Teapot

I’ve been trying to do some kind of weekly update on this blog, but this week I don’t feel like I have much to report. My daily log has been “still sick. nanowrimo: X words.” for about a week.

I could tell you something I didn’t manage to work into last Monday’s post, that the weekend before this we went over to a friend’s house with a bunch of other people and had food and watched a boxing match. I knit, not so much for the weird contrast as because I was afraid of being antsy—I’m not really a boxing fan. Group consensus was that HD makes everything much more gruesome. In the slow-mo replays of punches, we could see the fighters’ faces ripple from their chin up to the ear. So: I learned that boxing is kind of interesting when there are people around to tell you about technique, but also, pretty gross. I finished the second sleeve of the sweater I’m (occasionally) working on, while we watched the fight.

My NaNoWriMo word count is now over 37,000. I need another 800 words for today, and instead I’m writing this, which doesn’t help. The process continues to be hard, but (mostly) fun.

So yeah. Writing, work, coughing. A little reading. Playing with this neat synthesizer cartridge for the DS. It’s a week.

According to my notes, in the last week I’ve read Heart-Shaped Box, seen District 9, and knit the sleeve of a sweater. I’m also up to 17,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project, which has been eating my brain when I’m not working on something else.

Part of the fun of this is that by writing every day, at a pretty steady pace, I’m giving myself permission to daydream that I too could be a Real Professional Writer, with books on shelves at Powell’s and fans who give me 5-star ratings on Amazon. I imagine that I will finish this book, and I will revise it and sell it to a publisher, and I will write another one that will be even better. And really, this is an easy dream to indulge. I’ve been writing stories on and off since I first learned to read and write.

This fits in nicely with Russell Davies’ notes from his Playful talk, about things that are barely games, exercises that tend to be open-ended and have a minimum of rules. He says,

When I walk through the crowds on Oxford Street a tiny part of me is pretending I’m an assassin slipping steely-eyed through the crowds in order to shake the agents on my tail. And I bet it’s not just me. I’m not saying I’m massively deluded, just that, very often, some bit of us is always trying to play those games, to make mundane things more exciting. … I think that’s why we find Jason Bourne so resonant. It’s easy pretending to be him. Because most of the time he’s just commuting.

Click the link for the full thing with some fun pictures, graphs, and interesting ideas. The comparison of time spent in “moody commuting” vs. “fighting & killing” cracks me up.

Pretending to be a writer is enough fun that a lot of people do it, though most remain at the stage where they haven’t gotten around to putting words on paper (or screen, as the case may be) just yet. Right now I have a third of a novel, which may or may not massively suck (probably does, since it’s an unedited first draft), and I don’t have to have a real plan. But the possibilities seem endless, especially if I just continue to write. I like this feeling; it’s a good place to be.

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A quick “things for sale” reminder: I have yarn and felt things in my Etsy shop. They make lovely gifts. I’m also thinking about setting up some sort of photo print shop, and putting last year’s family cookbook Christmas project up for sale as a food bank fundraiser. It has a jello salad recipe in honor of my aunt, who died last spring, as well as a number of other tasty things.

Back in September I started keeping a daily log of everything I make, read, and watch, along with excursions like meetings or trips to the farmers market. It’s on paper to discourage over-analyzing, and excludes my “day job” work (I try to keep that in its own area).

Anyhow, this lets me go back and see how I’m spending my free time a bit more clearly, which is nice when you’re juggling a bunch of different side projects.

Open Source Bridge is winding up again, starting with an initial fundraising push. If you’d like to get involved, we started a new mailing list (we weren’t very happy with how we split things up before). Sign up and see where you can help.

I haven’t forgotten about I <3 Food Carts, but I also don’t have any new news other than plans to start the layout this week. The cart owners survey has received some neat responses, but there’s definitely room for more.

There’s some neat stuff going on around the City of Portland and open source, but not much that’s ready to point to yet. My part mostly involves going to meetings, and later asking people I know “so if there was going to be [a regional data apps contest|a professional association for open source developers|a bouncy castle with kittens and rainbows], what would you want it to do?”

I’ve been doing some more drawing. Right now I’m inking the sketch from the Lovecraftiana post (I finally learned out how to use the pen tool in Photoshop, and to make better use of layers for lighting and coloring, and now it’s up there with photo editing for “most relaxing computer activity”). The picture above is my first attempt to put some of these new skills to work.

My Etsy shop has been barren a while, but after a fair amount of waffling, I relisted some of my favorite unsold items. There’s still several skeins of handspun yarn, hand-dyed sock yarn, scarves, and bags available, and I have more I may list if these sell.

All of the knitting projects have stalled again, possibly because I’m reading instead. I started Planetary, which is interesting timing because the last issue just came out, and now I’m in the middle of Unseen Academicals, which is succeeding in cramming in all the football [soccer] culture jokes possible (I’m not even convinced I’m catching them all, myself).

And you know, other stuff. Like noticings and Freakangels and thinking up ideas for when Newspaper Club is open for business and enjoying the pre-Halloween surge of Lovecraftian crafts being linked everywhere. But not very many events because I seem to want to hole up at home and think, more than anything else right now. It’s a good change from the first half of the year.