When in doubt, write.

When I started out the day, I had big plans.  Well, maybe not big plans, but I had at least three blog entry ideas in my head, and even a few vague aspirations toward working on the screenplay.  Once I sat down and logged in, however, I ended up wandering.

I read my morning comic strips and checked my e-mail.  I responded to a few messages, and followed enticing links in one which led to the downloading of free ebooks.  The further I wandered, the less inclined I became to write, despite an attempt at an entry about Dreaming of Dior and being an aspiring but somewhat reluctant fashionista.

In the midst of the wandering, there has been reading.  Of an actual paper and ink book.  Having started last night, I am thirteen chapters and eighty-seven pages into WWW:Wake by Robert J. Sawyer.

The story begins with a fifteen year-old American girl living in Canada who has been blind since birth traveling with her mother to Japan to receive a high tech implant behind her left eye.  The implant is supposed to essentially unscramble the mixed signals her brain is getting from her retina.  There is a much more comprehensive and surprisingly not confusing explanation in the book.  Or maybe it makes sense to me because I know a thing or two about dysfunctional eyes.

Meanwhile, a Chinese doctor is faced with the horrifying decisions involved in containing an outbreak of a new strain of bird flu easily transmitted between people so that it does not become a pandemic.

The action taken, while necessary, is potentially an international public relations nightmare, so the Chinese government blocks all communication to and from the outside world ... inspiring a few determined hackers to try to find the reasons and a way through the firewall.  (We're up to three storylines if anyone is counting.)

In chapter thirteen, the author hops the reader across the globe again to California to witness a web cam chat between a chimpanzee in San Diego and an orangutan in Miami.

Laced through these seemingly unconnected narratives is the not quite story of some sort of entity, some sort of being, struggling toward consciousness for the very first time.

While I am certainly intrigued, I am becoming concerned that if there are any more threads to follow, I will end up with a knot rather than finely woven fabric.

Gadgetry

There is no television reception in my house.  There used to be one of those big antennas (antennae?) on the roof, but while it seemed to work okay during the winter, once spring came and the trees leafed out, there was a noticeable decline in clarity.  So when the new roof was put on, the roofers were kind enough to take down the antenna.

I had a pair of not terribly old rabbit ears and even gamely bought one of those digital converter boxes, which was not so much helpful.

While I realize that you are paying for the service and the equipment more than the programming, I cannot bring myself to pay -- what is it these days?  fifty?  seventy-five?  a hundred dollars? a month to have advertising piped into my house.

Besides, the longer I am away from it, the less I miss it.  What am I really missing anyway?  Depressing news?  Celebrity gossip?  Reality television shows about teen pregnancy?  (Although I have to say, I took myself out to lunch today, and got to watch an episode of Julia Child and Friends on the cooking channel, which I very much enjoyed.)  These days, even when I sit down to watch a movie or a television show on dvd, about all I can think about is all of the other things I probably could and should be doing.

Some of those things are practical -- cleaning the house, doing the laundry, cooking a real meal and making sure that I have leftovers to take to work for lunch -- but many of the things are alternative recreational activities which make me happy and which even make my brain work from time to time -- reading, writing, knitting.

Even though I might not get much use out of the television and about the only time I listen to the radio is when it wakes me up in the morning, I do have a host of other technological gadgets of which I am rather fond ... so fond, in fact, that they all have names.

Kristos (because a young Greek man named Kristos does not count as Greek homework) the netbook travels with me most everywhere I go.  Scheherezade the iPod (so named because she was originally acquired for the purpose of listening to audio books -- a pastime which never really panned out) provides an extensive and varied soundtrack for my commute and when I feel the need to drown out ambient noise.

Someone was even generous enough to give me one of those snazzy pens that records sound as you write as well as an image of your handwriting.  Amat-Mamu now comes with me to meetings on a regular basis.  The software which converts the image of writing into text is a bit dodgy (or else I need better and more consistent penmanship), but overall, she is an extremely handy contraption.

There is a bright red wireless mouse who travels with Kristos but does not have a name -- Templeton, perhaps, even though he was a rat -- but there are tiny 4Gb flash drives -- Ceridwen and Belisama -- who do.

Saraswati the Droid is probably my favorite electronic friend (but shhh ... don't tell the others).  She keeps me in touch with the world via phone, text, instant message and e-mail -- the internet in the palm of my hand.  Amazingly, her presence in my life means that I spend a little less time in front of a computer screen.  She can play games, do any number and variety of calculations, tell me which movies are playing where (and show me previews), show me the stars and provide a weather report.  I recently figured out how to employ her as a modem when local WiFi is on the fritz.  I have even heard tell that I could use her to read books, but while sharp, her screen is just not quite big enough to be conducive to reading for long periods of time, and her stature is just a bit too diminutive to hold comfortably in a reading position.

Besides, I still can't quite bring myself to need electricity in some form to read a book.  Or not be able to loan or give a book to a friend once I have read it.

But I might be getting closer.

I have seen a few Kindles from afar, but have never played with one.  The nook almost had me with fancy advertising prior to its release, and the promise of a fifty-dollar gift card with purchase makes my ears perk up every time I hear it.  Still I resist because I stare at a computer screen for a living, and no matter how closely it might imitate ink and paper, an electronic screen is still an electronic screen.

There is the appeal of being able to carry a pile of books -- it is not uncommon that I carry three or four for various reasons -- in a slim device.  I am also trying to teach myself more about various computer programs, and I tend to prefer to do it the old fashioned way -- by reading a manual or using it as a reference.  A lot of these manuals are available at a discount or even free in electronic form, but it is difficult to read a manual on the same screen that I am running the program I am trying to learn.

There was also the nice gentleman I chatted with about the nook he was using who told me that it was easy to use and handy to have.

Then today I discovered that one of my Goodreads friends is actually an author.  Research told me that neither of his books was available in any of the local purveyors of printed words, but that I could download the Kindle version to my PC almost instantly for ninety-nine cents.

Wow.  Ninety-nine cents.  For a fifteen dollar book.  It's not even too much of an investment to keep me from purchasing a paper copy should I get far enough into the electronic version to decide that I want to read the whole thing but not on a computer screen.  There were plenty of other offerings at the same price point or a bit higher, but I dared not browse too far lest I get carried away and end up with a whole library.

The thing is that the ebook is only available for the Kindle (or for Kindle software downloaded to a PC or other compatible device).  So if I had a nook, I would have been out of luck.  I would be willing to guess that there are nook friendly ebooks not available for the Kindle.  I can, however, download both Kindle ereader software and Barnes & Noble ereader software to my PC for free, so both formats are readily accessible.

As a result, I am starting to dream of a tablet PC ... specifically a tablet PC which runs the Android operating system.  No Microsquash (I wonder if that name can get me sued for slander) and even no Mac.  (Although I did have a brief opportunity to play with an iPad not long ago and wouldn't turn my nose up at it if someone gave me one.)  The success of the Droid phones makes me think that the Android operating system is on its way to widespread, mainstream acceptance.

I don't need it to have all of the talents of Kristos, or even Saraswati for that matter.  It probably doesn't even need an internet connection, WiFi or 3G, although if it did, I would probably be more inspired to read blogs and online magazines.  (Okay, okay, I don't need it at all, but this is my daydream, so keep quiet.)  I'm thinking more along the lines of a handheld digital document reader for ebooks, pdfs and the like.

I can see it now -- relaxing on the patio or lounging by the pool, dozens, if not hundreds, of books at my fingertips to satisfy every literary (or not so literary) whim.  And the more I think about it, the more appealing access to online reading on such a device is becoming.  Reading in the bathtub is probably out though, wouldn't you say?

Margarita Chemistry

Last year, a family friend sent a marvelous pitcher from Estes Park Glass Works, and it was almost immediately dubbed the margarita pitcher.

As a result, I started making margaritas.

The first batch was basic and according to a recipe in a book called High Spirits: 1 1/2 ounces tequila, 1/2 an ounce of triple sec, juice from half of a lime and salt for the glass.  I put the liquor, lime juice and a bunch of ice in the blender and hit the button labeled "liquify."

Yum.

A bit strong, and someone decided to add sugar, but I thought it was just the thing for a Memorial Day barbecue.

One of the leftovers from said barbecue was most of a twelve pack of Minute Maid pink lemonade, so the first experiment was the above recipe, doubled and with a can of pink lemonade.

Even more yum.  And a bit more dangerous as the pink lemonade disguised the taste of the liquor quite effectively.

As spring has been masquerading as summer from time to time this year, the margarita experimentation began a bit earlier.

The first variation attempted this year was substituting the can of lemonade for close to a pound of fresh, rinsed strawberries and a bit of sugar.  (I didn't measure, but it couldn't have been more than about a tablespoon.)  The yum continued.

Next up were peaches.  Not as much of a success, but I think that the real problem was a lack of lime juice.  I think that lime juice is the key to this particular concoction.

Today I tried a can of green tea ginger ale.  This time I had lime juice, and I was back to yum, although I think that it would have turned out better had the ginger ale been thoroughly chilled.  I will have to note that for next time.

Well, the next time I make green tea ginger ale margaritas.

The next experiment is going to involve the sorbet in the freezer.  I have lemon, and I have mango tangerine (I think -- some kind of citrus at any rate).  Sorbet really could do with a bit of liquor to spice things up, wouldn't you agree?

(You'll notice that none of these drinks contain "margarita mix." Do I even want to know what is in "margarita mix"? Other than sugar or high fructose corn syrup or some other close relative, probably not.)

I recommend that margaritas be consumed from a chilled glass and through a bendy straw.

7-3-10 Edit to add: The mango tangerine sorbet margarita experiment was conducted yesterday with great success.

Sight to see

There is the cutest little blonde girl in a pink checked sundress sitting a few tables away.

Actually, she is kneeling on the chair, so that she can reach the tabletop where a gentleman I am going to assume is her grandfather  has sliced up a small, decadent chocolate Bundt cake, which she happily began eating with her fingers until a woman I am going to assume is grandmother insisted on a fork.

Now there is a whipped cream topped chocolately looking beverage to accompany the cake.

I just hope that there are big plans for running between the days rain drops and jumping in puddles to burn off all the inevitable, impending sugar rush.

Frenzied scripting

Much as November was spent writing fifty thousand words of a novel, so April was spent writing one hundred pages of a script -- in my case a screenplay adaptation of a novel.

When I officially crossed the goal line, a much more cinematically inclined and educated friend of mine asked me what I took from the overall experience, and after he and I had nattered back and forth at each other online for a while, I decided that I should natter a bit more comprehensively and coherently on the subject.

First and foremost, much like November's novel, the script is not finished.  Not even close.  Not even the first draft.  I've got the beginning and the middle, and the climax and ending are fast approaching, but they only exist in my head at this point, and even there they are vague.  So that means I need to keep working, and if possible, keep up the momentum.

Second, the screenplay writing process was not nearly as exhausting as the novel writing process.  I'm not quite sure why.  The time span was still thirty days, but according to my stats chart, I only actually worked on the screenplay on fourteen of those days.

It could be that after fifteen hundred to two thousand words a day, three or four pages which are more white space than text thanks to screenplay formatting requirements were not nearly as intimidating.  It could be that since I was doing an adaptation, I had source material right in front of me, so it was a matter of deciding which parts to use as opposed to having to come up with all of the parts on my own.  In fact, there were times it almost felt like cheating.  I picked a novel which is not terribly long (just over two hundred and fifty pages) and not terribly complicated.  The main characters each have their own stories, but they are extremely closely connected.

Now what I really need to do is finish roughing out the rest of the scenes and then go back and really look at the whole thing, almost to the point of starting over.  I'll kill a tree or two and print the entire document so that I can scribble all over it -- my preferred method of revision.

One of the major challenges for me was to try to write and visualize in movie terms.framework at the same time.  It's not enough to just see the scene in my head.  I have to think about the mechanics -- what the set needs to look like, what the characters are wearing and doing, and how the shot is achieved.  I have no yet spent nearly enough time describing the settings, or at least specific salient details, or telling my characters what they should be doing while they are speaking.

Transitions are also difficult.  I need to watch movies and pay attention to the transitions while I watch.  In a novel or a short story, you can often just start a new paragraph or chapter.

I also need to watch more films which weave two stories together.  For a while, I thought about The Lake House because the otherworldly romantic component figured prominently in the story I am telling, but that film has an ongoing correspondence which ties the characters and their stories closely together, so I am not sure that it quite fits my criteria.

Gladiator is another contender.  All of the primary characters are together at the beginning, and relationships and even mutual histories are established early on.  Then they follow separate paths for a while, and then those paths collide again.  They are parallel stories rather than a main plot and a subplot.

The most important thing I take from the experience is the reminder/realization that the best way to learn to write is to write.  And after you have learned to write by writing for a while, you learn more about writing by revising.  You can read books and take classes if you want, and I am sure that they help, but they don't actually do the writing for you, and they can't give you your voice.  That is something which you have to find on your own.

Script writing was a foreign concept, a foreign language even, on April 1.  While I don't have any plans to relocate to Hollywood or New York City just yet, I know for certain that I learned more about writing a screenplay by wading right in and writing it (with the considerable aid of a fabulous script writing program which eliminated all of my formatting worries) than I ever would have by just reading a book or even taking a class.

I still have plenty to learn -- more than can be covered in a single lifetime, I am sure -- but I plan to learn it by finishing the first draft of this project and then going back to the beginning, taking it apart, and putting it back together again.  My next goal is to get it to the point that I am willing to let somebody read it.  After the second or third round, perhaps.

The morning's writing dilemma

Somewhere along the line, I need to figure out where the exposition about the parallel world fits into the screenplay I am writing.

I can't think like a novelist.  I can't even think like a short story writer, even though some of the same rules of economy apply.  I have to think like a screenwriter.

I love novels because they can provide so much detail about characters and places.  You really get to know them as their reader.  When watching a film, you are barely introduced before you get swept up into the storm of activity.  It's the story, the plot and the action which captivate you (possibly aided by a pretty face or two and even majestic, beautiful or intricate scenery, because eye candy never hurts).  You might care about what happens to the characters, but you don't really know them.

With those thoughts in mind, how do I go about turning thirty-five pages of essentially conversational exposition into a scene or two of informative backstory so that I don't lose my viewers in lengthy conversations?

Do I write scenes that I know I am not going to use?  Will it help me write other scenes, especially those I have to create from scratch?  Will it be helpful just to get them down on paper (or up on the screen) and therefore out of my head?  Or is it a frivolous use of valuable writing time?

It would be practice if nothing else, and practice is almost never a frivolous use of valuable writing time.

With the novel writing exercise of last November, the keys to the kingdom were most certainly found in quantity over quality.  In comparison to fifty thousand words, one hundred pages formatted to favor white space on the page seems like a molehill, and quality and quantity might just be able to switch places on the priority list ... or at least sit a bit closer together.

One hundred pages I can do.  It's having a distinct beginning, middle and end happening to interesting characters in an interesting setting crammed into those hundred pages which is the real challenge.

Reading that inspires research

[Author's note: This partially written blog post has been sitting in the Drafts folder of my e-mail program for ages.  I am hoping that sending it out into the world as an unprotected draft will be more encouragement to finish it.  So, as usual, my readers, you are in on the ground floor of an experiment.  Take careful notes.]

The Swan Thieves sent me in search of my copies of The Story of Art and The Impressionists: A Survey so that I could read about Impresionism, but my recently recovered mythology books are coming in handy as well as because there is a reference to Leda, mother of Castor and Pollux and Helen and Clytemnestra.   For some reason it comes as a surprise to me that Helen is immortal.

I also came across the reference to Eris which my brain has been trying to unearth since I heard the name.  Eris is the goddess of discord.  Not sure if that is the reference intended by the Google Olympians (Googlenauts?) at HTC -- manufacturers of my beloved Droid Eris, Saraswati -- or not.  They do like to be upstarts, after all.

References and research aside, The Swan Thieves is an absorbing story of art, unconventional love, and the madness which so often shadows them both.

Perhaps it is simply that in all of my reading of science fiction and fantasy and food memoirs, I haven't read a "real" novel in quite some time, but Elizabeth Kostova's use of language is enchanting.  So much so that I finally understand the hype which surrounded her first novel The Historian.  Well, I potentially understand it since I only have a copy which I have not yet read, but if the style and the language are similar, I expect equal absorption and enchantment.

Coffee, cheese and the dangers of grocery shopping without a list

About a week ago, I received a small cash bonus at work.  Not enough to radically change my life, send me on vacation or buy a new car, but enough to make me want to do something specific with it rather than simply tossing it into the bank account with the rest.  I debated responsible versus frivolous and consumable versus collectible.

In the end, it came down to a wish to experiment with coffee and ended up with breaking the rules of pragmatic grocery shopping and a rather expensive piece of cheese.

First the coffee.

I have never been much of a coffee drinker.  My caffeine fix has always come from Coca Cola (affectionately known as the Red Can of Death in my world).  Somewhat amazingly, I gave it up about three weeks ago.  It might even be three weeks ago today now that I think about it.

I have known for quite a while that this particular bad habit had to go, especially since I now sit for a living and three hundred or so extra empty calories just can't be good for a person, no matter how good they taste or what sort of energy boost they offer.  Even though I strongly suspected that I was at least as addicted to the sugar as the caffeine, if not more so, I have read enough about the horrible things that caffeine can do to a person's bones to realize that it had to go as well.

The key was always going to be finding a reasonable alternative, and no, caffeine free diet Coke is not a reasonable alternative.  It's just trading one set of bad chemicals for another, and I can't stand the taste of artificial sweeteners.  Plain water was also not a reasonable alternative.  It might be good for me, but it's just not satisfying.

When someone introduced me to sparkling water with fruit essence, I was suspicious at first, but it has turned out to be a fairly convincing decoy.  Water, CO2 and fruit essence.  No calories and no artificial sweeteners.  When chilled, it almost tastes like soda, and if it goes flat, it's just slightly flavored water, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Other caffeinated and sugar-laden vices lurk in the shadows, however.  The grande mocha frappuccino with whipped cream is a not uncommon indulgence, and I have developed something of a taste for hazelnut coffee with a dash of Jameson's and a swirl of whipped cream.  Between those two items and driving past what looks to be a lovely new little coffee house in town yesterday morning I got to thinking about the possibilities of decaffeinated coffee.  After doing some research into taste and method, I decided that part of my small financial windfall would fund an experiment in decaffeinated hazelnut coffee (giving me the opportunity to use the long neglected French press coffee pot in my possession).

Off I went to the grocery store with thoughts of coming home with coffee and a gallon of milk (and possibly a dvd or two from the rental shop next to the grocery store).

At this point, the trouble started.  I was hungry, and I had no shopping list to stick to.  I definitely came home with coffee (three different kinds even though only two were decaffeinated) and a gallon of milk, but it seemed that everywhere I looked, there were tempting things which made my stomach grumble, so I soon had a shopping basket laden with two everything bagels, crusty Italian bread, a medley of olives (why just Kalamata, I thought, when I could try all of these others), a few mozzarella balls, a bag of Sun chips, raw almonds, frozen chicken strips and crinkly fries, toasted ravioli (which turned out to be quite tasty despite coming from the freezer section, a small jar of black olive tapenade (which I have wanted to try but never got around to), and a rather expensive wedge of cheese.

This wedge of cheese can be blamed for the purchase of the olive medley and the tapenade because the sign claimed that the cheese flavor would be complemented with olives.  (The sign turned out to be quite right.  A bit of cheese on a dab of tapenade on a hunk of crusty Italian bread is a grand and glorious thing indeed.)

I'm usually a mild or medium cheddar sort of a girl, with mozzarella (especially if fresh), occasionally Swiss, muenster, Havarti and Brie, and a nice blend of the harder cheeses like Parmesan, Asiago and Romano thrown in for good measure.  (Please excuse the seemingly random capitalization if it is incorrect.  I decided to trust this program's spell checker.)  Lately, however, what with the more cooking and reading about food -- especially food in France where they make all sorts of wonderful cheese and even have shops devoted entirely to the sale of cheese, which I imagine to be expanded versions of the cheese counter at the small Italian I remember frequently as a child with my mother -- I have felt the inclination to broaden my horizons, and decided that this was the opportunity to do so.  As a result, I decided to try Manchego, a Spanish cheese which is somewhat crumbly and has a tang similar to Asiago, though perhaps a bit sharper.  Delicious!

Meanwhile, I am so taken with the black olive tapenade that I am inclined to try to make my own.  But not today.  Today I am making creamy leek potato soup with crispy leek rings to ward off the spring chill.

As a somewhat related aside, while I do love to cook, one distinct challenge I have found is dealing with the cravings.  I don't just get hungry; I crave.  Sometimes it is a particular taste -- salty, sweet, chocolatey -- and sometimes it is a particular food or dish -- lasagna, hummus, potato chips, fried rice, potato leek soup.  When a craving for ravioli kicks in, I certainly could make them myself, but it is so tantalizingly easy to just pick up a package at the grocery store which is two minutes away from the house, especially now that more gourmet fresh varieties are as easy to come by as frozen standards and taste so much better.

Since I know that what I make usually tastes better than what I buy in the store (and I am a lot more aware of what is in it), the trick becomes finding those extra hours in the day for cooking and sensible grocery shopping.

Wendy Werris' Alphabetical Life

An Alphabetical Life: Living It Up in the World of Books by Wendy Werris was interesting enough to hold my attention because it is fun to read about the book business -- and a part of the book business beyond the retail world with which I am familiar -- but more than once, the author's style was off putting enough to make me want to put the book down and not pick it up again.  She is a bit of a drama queen and comes across as rather self absorbed and narcissistic even for a memoir, which is by nature pretty much I, I, I from beginning to end.

Once I reached chapter five in which the author chronicles the heartbreaking story of her friend and colleague's battle with kidney failure, however, I felt better about devoting time to reading this woman's story.

Chapter five is brilliant, but until that point the rest read like a gossipy, name dropping, guilty confession in which the author doesn't get around to confessing her most egregious sins, even though she is clearly dying to talk about them -- most notably her substance abuse, which gets mentioned and referred to but not detailed because -- as her editor or agent probably told her, or as she told herself, this is a memoir about the book business rather than dependence on one or more psychotropic substances.

There are moments when she sounds like an egomaniacal loon (to the point that it makes me wonder if she might have been high or stoned while she was writing the book).

She makes all sorts of references which I don't understand, so I am not sure if they are literary or cultural or both.  Some of them don't even register as references until I am well into the next paragraph, or at all.  Is it just another form of name dropping or trying to prove her depth of knowledge of ... I'm not sure what since I don't understand the references in the first place and don't don't find them intriguing enough to research.  It's tempting to have somone else or even several someone elses read the book for me and tell me what I am missing and whether or not it adds anything to the story she is telling or the picture she is trying to paint.

Perhaps because of these references, I found myself wishing for clearer cultural, social and historical context, but instead she assumes that her readers were there too and have a lot of the same shared context that she does.  The problem with that situation is that if I lived her life in her time, I might not have any interest in reading her story.

She mentions smoking pot several times, and maybe I am naive in letting myself think that meant that the smoking was also occasional, rather than an ingrained and regular habit -- like the smoking of tobacco cigaretts as everyone in the book seems to do.  When she finds the Book of Mormon in the drawer of her night stand in search of a place to stash her pot, I found the drug reference almost superfluous, as if she felt the need to work it in somewhere, when I didn't think that she needed to mention it at all in the midst of her discussion of religious ambivalence in a Salt Lake City hotel.

Her mention of a "fondness" for cocaine was surprising, almost startling, but again it's at most a passing reference used to explain why she was able to bond with a co-worker who had participated in an addiction recovery program.  She doens't go anywhere with it or do anything with it.  It doesn't provide context or add to the story.  She just brings up this major issue in her life and then drops it.  She would have been better off to say something along the lines of "We bonded over mutual addiction recovery stories."

She has a reverence for books -- don't use dust jackets as book marks, don't put the book face down -- and a flagrant disregard for the treatment of her own body.

All that is missing is for her to tell me what books she read and what literary luminaries she met at Betty Ford or whatever rehab center or program she chose.

By contrast, the story about her friend and colleague's battle with kidney failure didn't have any more to do with her career or the book business, but it was treated in depth and added to the overall story.  She's brilliant when she isn't talking about herself.

She doesn't seem interested in telling a whole lot of success stories about herself.  The embarrassments and humiliations and self doubts, meanwhile, are chronicled in excruciating detail.  She barely gives herself any credit for being a success in a male dominated industry when they were all male dominated.

"I didn't see the sense in hating men and never would. ... I could deal with the 'chauvinism' of those early days in my career, perhaps because I had the good fortune to not take it personally. ...  So I acquiesced to all of these gender-specific regulations, be they innuendos or direct instructions, and rarely felt that by doing so I was chipping away at my own soul.  It was fairly easy for me to distinguish between what was business and what wasn't."  (Page 99)

On the one hand, I love her self assurance, but on the other, I wanted her to recognize more clearly that she was helping shatter glass ceilings in her own way.

She has so many potentially fascinating things to say and stories to tell, and she keeps talking about drugs and alcohol (and cigarettes).  I know.  First I complained that she didn't talk about the drugs and alcohol enough, and now I am saying that it is too much.  That's my point -- all or nothing.  Pick what you really want to talk about, what story you really want to tell, and write it.  Don't keep jumping around and telling parts and pieces of different stories.

The book lacks a central theme or cohesive timeline.  If it had one or the other, I could forgive or understand the otherwise fractured nature of the memoir.  Realizing that it is a story built on memory, however, I wonder how realistic an expectation is cohesion.  Life, after all, tends to not happen in an orderly fashion, no matter how organized the participants, and recalling events from memory only encourages the chaos.

If the book becomes a bit less coherent towards the end as far as choice of material, it becomes better as far as the quality of writing and story telling.  She writes about her parents, her move toward representing (I can't bring myself to take seriously a word like "repping" which she insists on using as her job description.) university presses rather than more mainstream publishing houses.  Her story about the publication and promotion of The World According to Garp makes me want to read it.  Her profiles of the booksellers she worked with and got to know personally over the years make me want to meet these people.

"We never know what may happen when we pick up a book to read.  The turning of a page might actually change the course of our existence.  There is something miraculous about this.  Truth strikes at the very heart of books and the readers who turn themselves over with great trust to finding the essence of themselves." (Page 237-238)

Amen, sister.

Schizophrenic Knitting

My knitting is in danger of becoming as schizophrenic as my reading.

Although I have tried to become a bit more disciplined in recent years, I have a tendency to start reading a book only to be distracted by the possibilities offered by another book, and I simply can't wait to finish one before starting another.  I might repeat the process several times before settling down and making it all the way through a book.  I also have a tendency to decide that I need something new to read long before I have finished reading the titles on my To Read and my To Read Soon lists and shelves.

Unless I am doing research on a specific subject, my reading is far more emotionally and circumstantially motivated than methodical and organized.

So it seems to be with my knitting projects these days.

Several months ago, I fell in love with the fabulous sweater coat on the cover of the fall issue of Interweave Knits.  Purchasing the fabulous yarn practically put me in the poor house, but I was so excited about the project that I didn't care.  After I worked on it for a while, I decided that I needed a smaller project for those times when I didn't want to knit lengthy rows of stitches.

I became obsessed with lace patterns for scarves for a while, but none of them really took, so for a while the only project I had on needles was the sweater.  I have knitted some simple scarves with funky yarn, but those are done and were given away as Christmas gifts.

Projects get started and the yarn doesn't behave the way I expected, or I don't have enough, or I have too much, or the needles aren't the right size, and I end up ripping it out and rolling the yarn back up and putting it away.

The other day I decided that legwarmers were just the thing to make, so I found a free pattern that I liked online, and on my way home from work, I stopped at a local yarn shop and selected yarn and needles.  Given that the project calls for fine gauge yarn and is knitted on fairly small needles, getting the project started was a bit frustrating.  My hope that a small project wouldn't require quite so much concentration as the larger project dissipated quickly.  It's also slightly discouraging because one of the reasons I wanted to learn to knit in the first place was so that I could make my own socks, and the process is similar to that of making leg warmers.

It is quite possible that all I really need is practice to get the hang of working with fine yarn on small needles, but in the meantime, I am in danger of being distracted by the Jellyfish Bag.  Doesn't that look like fun?

I know.  I know.  I need to stick with the legwarmers.  And I will.  Perhaps the bag project can be my reward for completing the snuggly legwarmers.  That sounds like a reasonable plan, don't you think?

*****

Author's Note: In case there is anyone out there reading who might take issue with my capricious use of "schizophrenic," while it may be unfortunate for you, these scribblings are my own which you may choose to read or not in an equally capricious manner as you see fit.  The workings of my mind are certainly not for everyone.