Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!
The weather has turned from glorious sunny autumn to
rainy, semi-chilly autumn – the trees are still showing their fabulous colours,
though they are shedding leaves at an alarming rate. Or a rate, at least, that
increases on windy days. No surprises, there, really: it is late October, so
what can you expect other than rain and wind? And days growing shorter (if that
makes sense).
I am busy knitting socks and more, writing, teaching,
getting ready for November – all the usual, in short.
Among other activities, I’ve joined a sci-fi group on
LinkedIn – and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a microstory competition running
over there as well as on FWG!
The monthly deadline is on the 22nd – so this
Monday, I had to decide whether I was going to participate straight away or
lurk for a while before trying to answer the question:
Can I write sci-fi?
The required elements for this month’s stories were deception and fire, the word count 600. I sat down at my laptop without a clue:
no story, no idea. I typed in
sci-fi
deception
fire
An image came to me, I wrote it down; and from there,
a story emerged. So a couple of hours after having nothing but the keywords, I
had posted a story.
There is to be an anthology – or several, actually –
of these stories; for this, one is allowed to edit the story to a maximum of
725 words. My ending could certainly use some clarification, so those extra
words will come in handy.
And then, of course, I had to edit my October
Skeletons story for the FWG contest to post it before the deadline on the 25th.
I ended up rewriting half of it, as it was too long – 1,189 against a maximum
of 1,000. It came out at exactly 1,000 words. Phew.
This microstory writing is fun. It reminds me of
school assignments, except of course with a lot more freedom; but I enjoy
working from prompts.
This is one reason why I have a set of Rory’s Story Cubes, the Voyages version.
The set contains 9 cubes, each with 6 different images. So, you can grab three
random cubes, roll the dice, and get 3 images to write from. Like this:
An elephant, a ladder, and a mushroom or toadstool.
A map, a circus tent, and two people of very different
sizes.
A sunrise or sunset, a bowl of something hot
(porridge? popcorn?), and a doorway.
Sometimes, the images go suspiciously well together:
Waves, a crab, and a submarine.
So far, I have only played around with these cubes –
one day (ha!), I will challenge myself to write a microstory from such a roll
of three dice and see what comes out of it.
We are all back at school and work, now that the
autumn break is over; the count-down for the Christmas holidays hasn’t quite
started yet, but it will.
I gave my students another little test this week, and
thus gave myself a pile of tests to grade. That was ... interesting. Most of
them still have quite some work to do, before they are ready for the exam in
December; these mid-term tests are intended to help them focus on their weak
points – to strengthen them, of course – and to show them the layout of the
exam, so they know what to expect.
I’ll give them another one sometime during November.
Mwahahahahaha ...
It’s been a long time since I last commented on
podcasts; I follow quite a few, both radio produced and indie, on a number of
subjects.
Recently, I was told of a new podcast called Ewe University. This is hosted by
Kristine, a.k.a. halcyarn on Ravelry, a psychology professor from Illinois; she
talks of knitting, sewing, and psychology at an introductory level. She does
speak a bit slowly at times, but it makes for comfortable and cosy listening.
In the short story arena, I have taken up The Moth podcast again, which features
real life stories told onstage. Selected
Shorts pretty much speaks for itself; and I’m trying out Snap Judgment from NPR.
The complete list of my current listening choices can
be found in the sidebar, and all these podcasts are available for free on
iTunes.
The
Knitting
I’m done with the first of the Coalminer socks for Thomas
and onto the second – yay! The plan is to finish them before I’m off to England
on Friday, so I am knitting along.
And the pattern is done and done, revised, edited, beta
knitted by my sister, and up on Ravelry as Foot Hugger Socks. Yay again!
My Mermaid dress hasn’t seen much action; I knitted
about 15 cm of it, realised I had the wrong stitch count, and frogged it. And
this week I have mostly been knitting socks, so I haven’t even re-knitted the
frogged part yet.
Maybe this afternoon will see some progress: it is the
last Sunday of the month and thus time for my local knitting group.
My sister invited me to join a group for the knitting
of hexipuffs for a Beekeeper’s Quilt for the Great Ormond Street Hospital. I
have seen and heard about the Beekeeper, as has probably everybody on Ravelry,
but never felt inclined to make one. It’s the same with any blanket made from
many smaller parts, be it squares or hexagons or what-have-you: the barrier for
me is the sewing up of the darn thing – so contributing individual hexipuffs to
a joint project is a lot easier.
The required yarn is hand-dyed sock yarn. I have a
bunch of half-skeins from plant dye experiments; they are too small to be
useful for much and thus obvious for hexipuffs. I believe this is exactly what
people do: use leftovers and scraps.
The
Books
I am reading Selected
Stories by Nadine Gordimer, a selection (well, obviously) of stories from
five different shot story collections published over a span of several decades.
These are South African stories, dealing with questions of race and apartheid –
the introduction notes how the stories are dated by, among other things, the
appellations for black people: are they natives, Africans, or black? – of love
and loss, life and death, money and the lack thereof, identity and roles – and all
of it set in the nature of the land, the veld and the city.
The stories, though separate entities each with a
value of their own, blend into a picture of life in South Africa in the
twentieth century, seen from a white perspective; but seeing through
inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
A clear example of this is the story Happy Event, in which two women find
themselves unwantedly pregnant. The white woman goes to a nursing home for a
couple of days and afterwards rests to get over ‘that business’, before she
resumes planning her and her husband’s trip to Europe. Her black servant gives
birth alone, in secret, in the middle of the night; she is grudgingly allowed a
day’s sick leave when she cannot handle the week’s laundry the next morning.
She is later found out to have smothered the child and is sentenced to six
months’ hard labour.
My audio book of the week has been The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt,
read by William Hope.
This is a Western set in 1851; Charlie and Eli Sisters
– Eli is the narrator – are gunmen, killers in the employ of a shadowy figure
known as the Commodore. The central job in the book is finding and killing a
man who is said to have stolen something from the Commodore and is currently
located in San Francisco; so the brothers travel from Oregon, where they live,
towards California. On the way there, they encounter a number of more or less
savoury characters, who all have an impact on the journey. And once in San
Francisco, they find events turning out rather differently from what they have
been led to expect.
The tone of the narrative is down-played,
matter-of-fact, but thoughtful. Eli tends to ponder deeply on the nature of
things; his life, his relationship with his older brother, and horses. The
outdoor life of the travellers is described convincingly: nature, weather, the
frailties of the human and equine body.
One thing I missed was a clue to the ages of the two
brothers: they are obviously experienced in their work, and Eli in particular
thinks of retiring. The reader gives Charlie a slightly wheezy voice that
sounds aged to me, or worn. They are not old, though, not even middle-aged;
they could be in their early thirties.
All in all, I enjoyed this book; recommended for anyone
who likes a classic Western.
That’s it for this week; next week I will be posting
early, on Thursday, before Andreas and I are off to Nottingham, UK, for the
Black Library Weekender.
Until then: have a great week, be happy, be healthy,
take care!
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