Resolutions?

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

I have been quiet here for a while; at first because of frantic pre-Christmas knitting, and later due to pondering how to proceed with this blog.

I started blogging about a year and a half ago, mainly to get my brain into gear again after a stress-induced depression. Thinking about and writing essays kept me going and gave me an outlet for, well, scholarly urges.

Since then, though, I have started working again, giving me plenty of opportunity to be scholarly, and I have joined several writing groups on LinkedIn, including two monthly microstory competitions. All this gave me the courage to enter NaNoWriMo – and write 50,000 words on the sci-fi novel I had been planning for years.

During November, then, I ignored the blog – guiltily at first – in favour of novel writing. Over time I realised I have come to prefer writing fiction to rambling on about my life. Fiction is much more interesting, anyway.

So, all in all, the premises for the blog have changed, and so the blog itself has to change. I may continue posting once a week, skipping weeks when too much else is going on, and perhaps mainly writing about knitting. And writing. I am even considering splitting the blog, keeping this page for knitting-related chat, and making a new one for writing-related chat.

If I do, there will be a post and a link.

And as you can see in the sidebar, I now have a Twitter account: a new way to practice formulating concise statements.

But let's get on to the important matters: 

The Knitting

First, the Christmas presents:

For my mum: Armada by MMario

Laura in Primrose

For my dad: Foot Hugger Socks

For Emil: Mini Me (a smaller version of V for Victor)

For Emil: Sea Star by Hansi Singh in orange (favourite colour)

My sister's Hands of Blue; I also made myself a pair, so we can be Two by two

Laura and her doll wearing Comfort shawls by Laura Ricketts

On 24^th December, a knit-along began in the aplayfulday group on Ravelry, making projects designed by Carol Feller. I cast on for an Iced cardigan in Aran weight cotton.

Inspired by the hexipuffs I made in November for the Great Ormond Street beekeeper project, I decided to challenge myself to making a hexiflat (non-stuffed) a day in 2014. So far, I’m doing fine – I have made 5 and am not bored yet.

It’s a way, of course, to use up scraps and leftovers of sock yarn, all those little bits that could be made into stripy socks, if it didn’t mean having to weave in a million ends. With the hexiflats, the ends are just pulled inside and left there.

And next month, in February, the Winter Ravellenic Games 2014 take place, concurrently with some sports event or other somewhere in Russia.

I joined Team Sherlocked as well as Team TARDIS, intending to knit a blue cardigan for the other and something for the one.

This ‘something’ is going to be rainbow-coloured due to the well-known controversy over Russia’s attitude towards gay rights.

Just as a f*** you to Putin and his gang.

In the whole context of gender queerness, I am fairly boring: a female in a woman’s body, formerly married to a man – won’t be doing that again, though – and personally not very interested.

In principle, though, I believe everybody is entitled to their preferences and to do whatever they want with whomever they want, as long as everybody involved wants to be involved and nobody gets hurt. And it’s nobody else’s business.

And I am perfectly aware that knitting something rainbow-coloured, and even wearing it in public, is not particularly brave, as it involves no risk to me.

But I can knit rainbows in February and make it a statement of support for everybody’s right to be themselves.

And with this, I wish you all a happy and fruitful 2014.

Still Here!

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

Yes, I’m still here, though I have been away from this space for a while. I apologise.

Undertaking a challenge like NaNoWriMo, of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, teaches you a lot. I learned – well, that I could do it, and that it was both more and less difficult than I would have imagined. I also learned that other activities, particularly writing, are pushed aside for the time being; I couldn’t face spending writing time on something that didn’t add to my word count.

Writing a 1,000 or 600 word microstory will take me at least a whole day: I have to come up with the world, the characters, the plot; and the language needs to be polished in order to get as much information as possible into a limited number of words.

So, on that background, writing 1,667 words on average EVERY DAY seemed a tall order. But then, writing a novel is completely different. I know, I was surprised, too. Who would have thought it?

For one thing, the word count is not limited – on the contrary, the task is to put many words down; and the NaNoWriMo fora (I will not write forums) have, of course, a thread for exchanging dirty tricks to swell your word count. I only read it last night AFTER validating my text, I promise.

Writing 1,667 words in a context you know already, describing the background, developing characters through action and/or dialogue, giving a bit of back story or moving the plot forward is very much easier than creating a whole new world. And you can ‘laugh in the face of linearity’, as one of the pep talks put it: write a later scene, an earlier scene, put in some dialogue, describe a place where your characters will be next month or next year.

On the other hand, it has to be done every day. Before November, I had for a few months written one and then two microstories for ‘my’ LinkedIn writing groups, and really felt that my writing time was quite taken up with those. How, then, could I write all those words in a month? But that feeling of my time being filled with writing only came about because I could ignore the story for days, not writing, but maybe thinking about it, and then return to it when the deadline loomed. In November, the two microstories were back stories to the projected novel and so belong to the same universe, and they were written rather quickly compared to earlier months.

I have, of course, been thinking about this particular story for months, if not years. It is a sci-fi adaptation of the Argonautika, the ancient Greek legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece aboard the ship Argo. I have worked with the Argonautika for many years: my MA thesis, written back in 1998, described the types of heroism found in Apollonius Rhodius’ Hellenistic version of the legend, and it has stayed with me, in the background, ever since. The sci-fi idea emerged only last year, though.

So, the central story line is there, but of course the ship is a space ship, the islands and lands visited by the crew are planets, gods and magic are replaced by advanced technology. The crew does not consist entirely of young men; some of them are women. Obviously.

I have changed the first names of the characters, keeping the initials: Jason becomes Jack, his cousin Akastos becomes Aiken, Atalante is allowed on board in my version and is called Alasen. The ‘bad guy’, king Pelias who grabbed the power from Jason’s father and sends Jason off on this suicide mission, was renamed sir Percival after the bad guy in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.

The frenzy is over, I made it. So what now?

Well, this coming week is all about work: I have the last few Latin lessons of the semester, and the exams need to be sent in by Friday. The exam date is the 19^th December, and the administration of course wants them well before that. And I need to proofread the Greek exams.

And I have accepted the invitation to write a couple of microstories for upcoming anthologies, among those a pirate story. Not space pirates for this one, though.

NaNoWriMo have, apparently, editing months in January and February; I may take up that offer and get something resembling an actual novel out of the mass of words I have. In that context, I also need to decide where to cut – not cut out parts or chapters, but where to divide one book from the next. This mini epos, a 180-page paperback in the English translation, is swelling to the length of several novels when written as a novel. So, I’m all ready for next November!

The Knitting

As might be expected, I haven’t done a lot of knitting this month: all those evening hours usually spent watching TV, or quiet hours in the mornings with an audio book, have been spent writing, writing, writing.

So, my Midnight cardigan has received scant attention; not because I’m bored with it – far from – but, well, see above. I am looking forward to finishing it, because then I shall wear Midnight (get it? Discworld? No? Go read.).

If you want to try out the hexipuff thing but not necessarily make a whole blanket, you can join the Hand-dyed Beekeeper's Quilt Challenge and donate a couple or a handful towards a blanket for the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London.

I am using half-skeins from previous plant dyeing experiments; they are too small even for socks for my little feet, but a hexipuff uses no more than 3 grams of fingering weight yarn. So, they are great for using up leftovers. And there are two added bonuses: the ends are pulled inside the hexipuff, and the hexipuffs, apparently, aren’t sewn together at the end, but tied. All this pretty much removes the reasons why I normally cringe at the thought of making a scrap blanket: sewing and weaving in ends.

As you have probably gathered, I am seriously considering this whole hexipuff craze. There are, of course, groups on Ravelry for knitting 365 hexipuffs in a year, a puff a day, and I am a sucker for silly challenges. First, though, I am trying the concept out for a week or ten days for the hospital blanket; if I can’t make it through those, or get fed up, I won’t take on a whole year of it. We’ll see.

The Christmas knitting is underway; more on that after the big evening.

Today, of course, is the 1^st December, the day for beginning the whole advent calendar thing.

I literally did nothing about it until yesterday evening, when I had sent my text to the NaNoWriMo word counting robot, had my text validated and been declared a ‘winner’ – a.k.a. made it through the 50,000 words. Only then did I go out to buy the requisite candles, and Victor pulled out the Christmas boxes to find ornaments.

The Books

I haven’t been reading much, either, this month – so little, in fact, that I am falling behind on my Goodreads challenge. Never mind, though, there are four weeks left in which to catch up.

So, I am still reading Blood Pact by Dan Abnett, one of his Gaunt’s Ghosts novels, that I started reading in Nottingham (gasp) three weeks ago.

Audio books are a bit easier to get through – not that I mind reading, obviously, I’ve just been spending my time writing instead (did I mention that already?).

I found The Constant Gardener by John le Carré on CDs at the library, so that has been playing in the car. It’s a classic le Carré post-Cold War story, in which the secretive bad guys aren’t the Soviets, but the giant pharmaceutical companies using poor Africans as guinea pigs for their drugs and giving not a fig when they are maimed or die from the side effects.

The title character, a British diplomat investigating the murder of his wife, has ample cause to reflect on the appropriate behaviour of real spies while travelling the world in search of information and at the same time trying to avoid being killed himself.

After the thriller, I turned to evolutionary biology, in this case The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman, a thorough – and sometimes repetitive – account of the changes in the human body over millions of years effected by the environment, in both natural and cultural evolution.

It is somewhat scary to be reminded of how unhealthy the agriculturally based diet is compared to a hunter-gatherer diet, and how harmful a sedentary lifestyle is. Not that Lieberman is a proponent of the trendy paleo diet: there is too little evidence and too much variation in the lifestyles of actual hunter-gatherers across the globe to ascertain exactly what one ‘should’ or should not eat. The overall picture is clear, though: a farmer’s diet, rich in sugars and starches and poor in fibre, minerals and vitamins – in other words, a cereal-based diet – is bad for your teeth, digestion, weight, metabolism, &c.

I haven’t yet gotten to the chapter about how bad chairs are for you, but I’m sure it’ll be fun ...

That’s about it for this time; I will end on a musical note, with Victor (in the ponytail) and his friend and co-conspirator at the closing concert of a talent weekend at the Aalborg International Guitar Festival last week. They performed the same duo, ‘Rondo in G’ by Ferdinand Carulli, at a local café in Viborg only this Friday. My pictures from that are crap, though, as I forgot my camera and had to use the one in my phone.

Have a lovely week – I will be back next Sunday!

NaNovember

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

This week, the format will be slightly different: fewer words, more pictures. I am writing on my NaNoWriMo project, and although the number of words in the universe is infinite, the number of hours in a day is not.

So this week’s post is more of a picture gallery with comments.

Last weekend, Andreas and I went to Nottingham, UK, for the Black Library Weekender II.

We rented a car this time instead of taking the train between Birmingham (the airport) and Nottingham, so I got to drive on the left side.

Interesting.

The car rental wanted to give us a Peugeot 308 which was ... okay ... I guess, but then they couldn’t find it at the car park and gave us an Opel Astra instead. Happy times!

During the weekend, I read this:

and knitted these – watchman caps in Peruvian Highland wool for Andreas (black) and Victor (green):

and bought these, co-authored by Dan Abnett and his wife Nik Vincent:

We went to Dan’s book signing on Sunday, and Nik showed up at the right moment, so I not only had my books signed by both of them, but was able to give Nik the Bequin shawl prototype. And Nik, of course, IS Alizebeth Bequin, so that was just perfect.

We went to all the best seminars, obviously, several of them on the Horus Heresy series which I haven’t read yet (hangs head in shame).

This is from the final megapanel on Sunday afternoon, featuring seven authors and an artist – a big hit this year was the release of a 100-page Horus Heresy graphic novel, Macragge’s Honour, written by Dan Abnett (third from the right) and drawn/painted by Neil Roberts (far right).

Andreas bought this, of course, and had it signed by both of them.

What else?

I started a pair of socks, my Storm socks in the Foot Hugger pattern and Arwetta Classic in the colourway Perfect Storm.

During this week, apart from desperately trying to catch up on sleep and NaNo word count and laundry and not saying stupid things in front of the students – Latin sometimes doesn’t make sense, when you’re tired – I felt cold and cast on for a cardigan.

This is the Same Same, a top-down cardigan featuring the contiguous sleeve construction and pleats at the fronts of the saddle shoulder.

I’m using Kauni ELC, a blue-black combination, which is why my cardigan is called Night Skies:

‘Tis the season and all that, and although I am NOT knitting for everybody this year (see above re hours in the day), there will be a few knitted Christmas presents. So, until after Christmas, I have knitting that I’m not showing. I have started one project, that much I’ll reveal for now :o)

That’s it for this time, then. I am going back to my novel writing – I will be back next week, possibly in picture mode again, we’ll see – and until then:

Have a great week, take care, have fun, happy crafting, and happy writing if you’re into that sort of thing!

Halloween? Where?

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!

This week, I am posting early and not much. Next time will be better, I promise – this weekend, Andreas and I are going to Nottingham, UK, for the Black Library Weekender II.

Very exciting; I have been looking forward to it for a long time, much more, of course, than last year, when I didn’t really know what it was all about. Andreas didn’t either, exactly, but at least he knew a lot more about the whole world of Warhammer (and still does).

I have planned and am packing my knitting and all the inconsequential stuff (clothes, passport, all that); also getting the house in order for the ones left behind: tidying, baking, grocery shopping.

The Knitting

This week, I am concentrating on the Coalminer socks for Thomas; I’m trying to get them done by end of play today, so he can get to wear them. I’m on the leg of the second one, toe-up, as you may recall, so there is a chance.

And now for the Travel Knitting:

The Black Library Weekender events are mostly panel talks, Q&A sessions and the like; so for listening in dimly lit audience rows, a simple, ribbed hat in aran weight wool on 4.5 mm needles seem like the perfect project.

Andreas decided he needs a hat soon, and Victor concurred on his own behalf. They both prefer something simple, masculine, and non-fussy, so I found the simplest hat possible, a ribbed beanie that doesn’t really require a pattern, but the photos of soldiers in the snow sold the concept.

I ordered some Filcolana Peruvian Highland, 2 skeins for each hat, in black for Andreas and hunter green for Victor. So that’s that taken care of. Yarn and needles packed.

For variation, I will be knitting socks (for me, this time) on bamboo needles that won’t be taken away at the airport. I’m using my own Foot Hugger pattern and the Filcolana Arwetta in the colourway Perfect Storm that I bought a bunch of last year for my BOTI scarf and then used less than half of, because I decided to do the TARDIS section in solid blue. So, lots of lovely sock yarn – and it’s in a skein, so I get to try out my nøstepinn to make a centre-pull ball.

The Books

I’ve finished a couple of books this week, somehow:

Dead Beat by Jim Butcher, book 7 of the Dresden Files. In which our hero stands up to fight against the disciples of a notorious necromancer, rescues a polka-playing mortician, and is required to consider the attentions of a fallen angel. Also, there’s a dinosaur.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse, another story set in the Pyrenees in southern France, where in the 14^th century, the Cathars hid in mountain caves in an attempt to avoid being slaughtered. I have previously read The Labyrinth and The Cave by the same author. While reading this one, I had a feeling that this author writes the same story in different variations – some authors do that, and it gets old pretty quickly. Part of the reason for this turned out to be that the novella The Cave, which I have read a few years ago, is in fact the same story as the one in Winter Ghosts.

The October group read in the Ravelry group on Goodreads has been The Yarn Whisperer by Clara Parkes – apparently a wise and witty book of a life in knitting. I say apparently, because my copy arrived from Amazon this Monday. Still in October, still, theoretically at least, with enough time to read it before the end of the month. This week, though, is one of those weeks from Hell in which everything wants to happen at once.

As I have mentioned, Andreas and I are leaving for England on Friday morning – very early. So everything that needs to be done around the house this week needs to be done by Thursday. Which is today.

And this week, Victor and a friend of his from school have been trying out university life in a 4-day training programme at Aarhus University, meaning that I on Tuesday and Wednesday was the one to drive them. No problem in the mornings – except maybe for the poor kids who had to be ready at 6:30 AM to go with me – but in the afternoons, I had to stay at uni until they finished at nearly 4. Long days for everybody. Luckily, the father of the other boy works in Aarhus, too, so he was able to drive them on Monday and Thursday.

And happily, they are having great fun with geology, physics, maths, data science and all that. So it’s all good.

Oh, and we had a storm on Monday, in the late afternoon and evening. Our area wasn’t one of those most affected, though we did have fierce winds and bits of trees lying around everywhere.

Victor and his geology group for the day were supposed to have been out digging in the University park, but that was deemed too dangerous, so they got to play with sand and clay indoors instead.

Thomas was out having a driving lesson that was cut short when the warning announcements on the radio included Viborg: the police advised against all unnecessary driving. So now, he has tried driving in a storm – quite useful, though he was glad to have an experienced driver by his side.

So, what would be a sane reaction to a very busy week inaugurating a rather busy month? Well, to sign up for NaNoWriMo, of course! If you are not familiar with it, this is National Novel Writing Month – the ‘national’ part ought maybe to be replaced by ‘global’, as this is the nature of online activities. So, we could call it GloBoWriMo instead.

The idea is to write 50,000 words on a new novel during November; on the first draft of it, anyway, as editing and rewriting will have to be done later. And probably finishing this first draft.

I have no idea whether I will be able to write an average of 1,667 words a day for a month, but I’ll give it a go, in between everything else going on.

So, wish me luck!

And that’s that for now – I have to go and get the cake out of the oven, review my shopping list, and try to write a short novel synopsis.

I will be back next week, so until then: have a great week-and-a-half!

A chalice, a compass, a shield

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 22^nd – 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 25^th. 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!