Return of the story generator

This weekend my story generator, which has been pretty much dormant since I was an undergraduate creative writing major in the mid-1980s, came back to life. Back in the day, I was in a writing workshop pretty much every semester, and I was also taking quite a few literature courses (I wound up with a second major in literature). So I was reading, writing, and talking about reading and writing almost all the time. It got to a point where I would dream up little movies that patiently stayed in my head until I wrote them down and turned them into short stories for class.

After I graduated the story generator fizzled out from lack of use, though I did have small creative sprees every so often in which I would write a batch of stories, try to start a novel, or compose lyrics for a dozen or two country songs. For many years I was writing, editing, and proofreading for a living, and eventually I was spending all my time trying to raise four children. That calls for a different kind of creativity.

This morning I woke up and realized that I was mentally writing lines for the biography I’m currently researching, and I was also visualizing two different cover concepts (and titles) for the book. The work I have been putting in to do something, or at least think of doing something, every day on the project must have finally primed that pump again.

This week is spring break on my campus, so all the instructional staff are likely to be away. Over lunch and after work I will be trying to do a lot of project-related reading about the history and development of science fiction. It should help me get into my subject’s head, and maybe it will help me start to get some words down “on paper” as I figure out the structure of the biography.

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This week, after last week’s prediction of what I would do each day for the Impossible Read, I made absolutely no progress on the Impossible Read. Maybe I would be better off to predict that I won’t read a single page. That way I can be defiant and productive. I’ll show me I can’t boss me around! I might be able to see through my own reverse psychology, though. We’ll see what happens.

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Knitwise, last week I started knitting the second half of my KAL scarf after agonizingly picking up those 45 stitches from the cast-on row. After knitting four rows, I saw what looked like a mistake on the first couple of stitches in the first row, and I decided that night that I was okay with that and would not correct the mistake. The next morning I woke up and knew that I was not okay with the mistake, and I would un-knit every stitch and make it right. After I started again, I saw the area and realized that the mistake was either in the first row of the first half of the scarf, or someplace related to the cast-on row. At that point I realized that I was okay with that and would just keep moving forward again.

This is the “wrong” side of the scarf, where the pick-up from the cast-on edge will be hidden from view.

On the “right” side, the transition between the halves of the scarf is more subtle.

Now I just have to continue in this pattern until I have 12g remaining of my ball of yarn. Then I’ll work the border pattern and bind off.

After the body of the scarf has been knitted, it will be time to choose a complementary or contrasting color and do a bit of crochet on each and, covering the bind-off. Franklin has created a video demonstration of the crochet, and I won’t watch it until I get to that point in the project.

In an attempt to learn from my failure to proceed on the Impossible Read, I’m aiming for a minimum of two rows on this project every day. There will be no penalty for exceeding this amount (except for any pain in my hands).

After this project is done, I will look forward to knitting something with bright colors. I’m not sure what it should be. If you have suggestions — or if you want to remind me about an unfinished project that I really should finish — please leave a comment.

To Read the Impossible Read

Over the past few days I’ve taken a look at my overflowing bookshelves and devised an utterly ridiculous plan for doing something about it. In honor of Miguel de Cervantes’s hero I have dubbed this plan “The Impossible Read.”

The idea is to start reading the greatest works of literature, almost all of which I have not read before. (I was an English major, but I had a lazy habit of re-reading what I liked — Jane Eyre, anyone? — rather than excessively broadening my horizons.)

I posted my initial list on Facebook on Saturday morning and my revised (i.e., more chronological) list on Sunday, and I’m currently in conversation with everyone from high school classmates and fellow knitters to English professors about which books should be on the list and in what order. At this time, four more books have been proposed: Voltaire’s Candide paired with George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey paired with The Martian by Andy Weir. (Maybe it should have been paired with Homer’s Odyssey.)

The stories will start with the legend of King Arthur and end, eventually, with contemporary science fiction. The book list itself is so extensive that my attitude towards adding more books can be described as, “Sure! Why not?” I’m making a deal with myself not to count any pages until I’ve finished a book, and I’m planning to end each book-grouping (since most of them paired off with another book) with the film of the story. In most cases, it should be easy to decide on the film.

Group One: The Once and Future King by T. H. White and The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Feature film: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975).

And so on.

This May I finished reading a book about (and by) a fellow who challenged himself to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. Another book on my shelves is about (and by) someone who read the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a year. Perhaps these accounts were in the back of my mind as I started to develop my colossal reading plan. The purpose of my reading project isn’t to show off; it’s to finally read those “must read” books that have influenced or changed the course of literature. The main idea is to get started.

I’m still trying to figure out the best way for me to take notes and keep track of my progress through the reading list. My Facebook friends have voted for me to just make postings on my personal Facebook account rather than create a special Facebook group. But I could just as easily create a Facebook group or a new blog on WordPress; I’ve certainly created many other groups and blogs over the years, and I enjoy the process.

What do you think? Would you want to see those posts collected in a separate blog, or is this the place for them? Would you be willing to travel to Facebook to read those posts or would you rather not? Let me know. And what books do you think I should read? I can post my Impossible Reading List next week.

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This weekend we rescued another typewriter, from the surviving nephew of the original owner. It’s a 1952 Smith-Corona Clipper and it will need — and receive — a lot of TLC. I made arrangements early in the week to pick it up on Saturday afternoon; by the time we arrived to pick it up, the nephew had also found the original manual. Its front cover humbly states, “Congratulations! YOU NOW OWN THE WORLD’S FINEST PORTABLE TYPEWRITER.”

I will clean this up.

For some reason, out of all of the typewriters I now own this is the one that I want to get started on cleaning up and using. I do have another Smith-Corona Clipper, one from 1956, that I can either use to compare parts or to work on at the same time. Typewriter repair manuals won’t be included in the Impossible Read, but I’ll be working my way through those as well.

I have already cleaned this up.

Fortunately, this particular typewriter seems not to need more than a thorough cleaning and a fresh ribbon. I hope to be writing on it soon; I promised the seller that if I sold it, it would only be to another writer.

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Knitwise, this week I’ve added a few more repeats to the Thrift Stripe Scarf. (How many different names have I given this project?) I have now done 33 repeats of the color pattern, and I’ll measure it again at 45 repeats. I’ll probably stop there, since that will give me more yarn left over to turn into a cowl, a hat, a brooch, or a pterodactyl.

Oh, I can make a lot of things!

I haven’t been able to locate any more Plymouth Encore yet; if you know a source, I’d love to find out soon. I did sew in most of the remaining ends on Stripe Scarf project, so after I add a few more stripes I’ll be nearly done with it and it will be a quick finish to give as a Christmas gift.

There has been no further progress on the Skinny Shawl — alas.

Digging deeper

While you were looking the other way roots have been growing, wings have been stretched, and new connections have been made. Don’t worry, though; I wasn’t looking, either.

Let’s begin with the roots and work our way up. Last week I had a rooting peach seed that was almost large enough to plant in a pot. Other tasks and deadlines intervened and I put off the task until, look at the time, here we are on Sunday afternoon and I should take another look at that seed. I was delighted to discover that the tiny roots had grown through the damp paper towel, just as they had on the video I had watched all those weeks ago to learn about this process.

I gently pulled away the paper towel, but not gently enough to keep from breaking off one of the tiny roots. Oops.

The other five seeds still had a bit of slow action going on, so I tucked them back in for another week.

Now it was time to finally get out the pot and the potting soil and plant the seed. After I rewatched the first video in the peach-seed-germinating series, I watched the second video for the first time. In that video, the gardener re-potted his peach sprout in more soil so it would sit higher up in the pot and get more sun. So I put in a lot of potting soil for such a tiny sprout.

We’ll see what progress it can make in that window by this time next week. If it needs more sun I can take it to work and rest the pot on a sunny windowsill.

This week I added another typewriter to my collection, which totals seven unless we find my Smith-Corona electronic typewriter (“K9”) from the mid-80s. I took it to college with me in the fall of 1985, and it saved me (despite some professorial grumbling over the aesthetics) when my manual typewriter broke a spring halfway through a 20-page English paper in the spring of 1986. A few years later I acquired a Macintosh SE and a DeskJet printer, and now I’m not sure what happened to the electronic typewriter.

Editing with K9 in 1987.

Anyway, I found this Smith-Corona Sterling advertised on Facebook Marketplace marked down from $40 to $35. I made arrangements to pick up the typewriter at the seller’s house after work, but when I arrived she wasn’t there and neither was the typewriter. After some hasty communications between me, the seller, and the seller’s husband, she offered to bring it to my house that night and drop the price a bit more. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry, but I agreed. When she got there the price became $30 until she pulled the typewriter out of its case and a piece of tape fell off with $25 written on it (the price she’d put on it, and forgotten about, at a rummage sale).

It’s a wonderful little typewriter, especially at that price, and after I fiddled with the ribbon a bit I saw that it types smoothly. Its serial number places the date of manufacture sometime in 1947. Since it’s very clean, it will be a good typewriter to start with as I learn how to do basic typewriter maintenance and repair. I now have three Smith-Coronas, so that will be a good make to focus on for now.

I also joined two sister Facebook groups: one for collectors of antique typewriters and another for maintenance and repair of antique typewriters. This isn’t a change of career, but since many other folks have gone before me to preserve and digitize so many typewriter manuals, I’ll have something I can read and learn from if I get snowed in this winter. (Because, you know, I don’t have enough books.)

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Knitwise, I frogged the striped scarf that was too wide and cast on again with US7 straight needles. After about 4-5 rows it became rather crowded. I was at a craft store this morning to look for a few other items, so I picked up a set of US7 circular needles while I was there and moved the work over to it when knitting the next row.

This looks more reasonable for a “not too narrow” scarf, and I’ll aim for each stripe to be two or three inches deep.

If I finish the scarf too soon (what does that mean?), I can switch to this book’s patterns to use up some of the scrappier parts of my stash.

A grand day out

A long, long time ago, in a cold and gloomy season, I made a plan for myself to get out a little more and visit the places in my community — museums, farmer’s markets, art galleries, et cetera. Yes, this was a plan I made before the second semester of graduate school started. How could you guess? I think that in January I did manage to go out to one place that was on my list. (I would check my memory against my list, but my list is in a Very Safe Place right now and we’ll have to look for it check it later.)

Of course, as winter grudgingly gave way to spring and incrementally warmed up to prepare for summer, it’s been getting easier to go out and Do Things. Saturday was a perfect day to go to Madison and get a personal tour of some of Madison’s most-loved spaces that are still new to me.

The framework of the journey was the opportunity to drive SonThree to a friend’s house so he could hang out (and sell him a piece of gaming equipment). We originally planned to meet up at a record store after a couple of hours, and I assumed that we would then go on to make our usual raids of every Half Price Books location, stop by the Goodwill store to look for old electronics for Youngest, and maybe pick up one of the new fancy freezes from Taco Bell.

When I was on my own, my first stop was Wisconsin Cutlery to drop off a couple of knives to be sharpened. These knives were purchased in the early 1990s, and I’m sorry to say that they had never been professionally sharpened. I did my due diligence with a sharpening steel before each use, but recently I read that sharpening steels don’t actually sharpen the blade. Uh-oh. Fortunately my friend Elizabeth had just posted favorably about Wisconsin Cutlery, so I had that on my task list. I dropped off the knives, met up with my friend Marj at the coffee shop at the other end of the strip mall plaza to pick up iced coffees, then I picked up my newly-sharp knives and a new pair of kitchen tongs before Marj and I headed out to explore a bit of Madison.

Marj showed me the route that she uses to bicycle to her work teaching English classes at UW-Madison. She’s been teaching there for one year after many years of teaching in my department at UW-Whitewater, but the job is very much a homecoming for her because she did her graduate work in Madison. She seemed to know the history of every old building we passed as well as every new building that was under construction.

And she took me to the zoo! Over the years each of my kids had gone to the Henry Vilas Zoo for a school field trip, but I had never gone. Well, ta da, now I have. It looked a bit like the way the Columbus Zoo was organized in the 1970s before the enclosures were redone and expanded (I wonder if there was some sort of shared plan used for the construction of city zoos back in the day), but the animals seemed pretty chill. Except for the flamingos, actually — some of them were fussing at each other, perhaps over access to the few small puddle-ponds that some of them were sitting in. Flamingos attack each other by weaponizing their own beaks and necks. It was like watching two children fight using only paddleballs. You have to see this to believe it.

The flamingo enclosure was near the children’s zoo, where I saw this sign:

It was only warning us about one goat, but we kept our distance anyway. Just to be safe.

Then we were off to the Arboretum, which Marj described as “right next” to the zoo but seemed to be just a bit further away. Of course she knew the history of this place, too, and you can go here to learn all about it for yourself. It was incredible. We hiked and hiked through groups of different species of tree plantings, careful to avoid what looked like at least two groups gathered there for weddings, before we turned back to hike through everything all over again and check out the gift shop. (Marj, shoot me your Venmo so I can pay you back for the Mary Oliver book I bought, and the owl notecards.)

That was a lot of walking, and by the time we were done I wasn’t sure how much more I would be able to do in the rest of the afternoon. Fortunately, SonThree and his friend had already visited the record store and we didn’t need to meet there. I picked him up, we visited one Half Price Books location (and the Penzeys next door), and then we were on our way home — with a small detour to pick up a couple of those new Taco Bell summer freezes. Yum. Thanks, Marj!

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Knitwise, what is knitting? Do I still know how to knit? What I do know is how to get back on a bicycle. This afternoon I went on a six-mile ride, the first ride I’ve taken in about two years. It felt great. We’ll see if I am able to move at all tomorrow. At least I will have an extra day to recover before going back to work.

Stay safe out there, my friends, and go easy on the fireworks. They hurt my dog’s ears and reduce his brave soul to a quivering mess.

Edit, pursued by a dragon

When I was an undergraduate student in a creative writing program, oh so many years ago, I used to have vivid dreams that were like movies. I’d watch a story play out in front of me, then wake and hurry to convert the story into words. As soon as the words were finally on the paper, the vision and its insistency would disappear — and I would wait for the next dream.

The stories felt particularly vivid because I had not sat myself down and tried to think them up. They just showed up, as if they were given to me and it was my job to write them down. Not all of my workshopped stories came from dreams, but enough of them did that I still associate the two events in my mind.

Most of the time, though, I have to sit in front of the notebook typewriter computer and think, What if…? And then what next? and what then?

Last week I was thinking about my drawing, and how blocked I am, and how I want to draw but don’t know what to draw, and how perfectionism and fear of failure have conspired to keep me working with words instead of pictures, and how unfair the whole situation is, and then I thought about some of the things I like to draw.

Birds. I do like to draw little birds, songbirds, ducks, owls…. My mind then set a scene in which all of these little critters could hang out. Maybe a cabin in the woods. No, wait, a hut in the forest! And then an old woman came out of the hut and communicated with the animals. And there were mice, and squirrels, and foxes. Crows and ravens. Perhaps a surly, self-important badger, if we have badgers in this part of the forest.

And then a little dragon fell out of the sky and into the old woman’s strawberry patch, breaking its wings in the process and setting half the garden on fire.

For the last four days I have been thinking about this broken baby dragon, where it came from and where it had been going and why, and what happens next? and I’ve been collecting books about fairy tales and mythology and dragon-lore and medieval climatology. (I did reserve some of the books from the library. But if they are critically necessary to telling the story, I’ll eventually buy them.)

from the One Last Sketch blog by Michal Wojcik

Clearly, this is a story that will take me a while to be able to tell. I have so many questions (mostly about dragons). Do dragons migrate? How long do they live? What’s their family structure? Where can they live? What do they eat?

I have questions about the old woman, too. Is she a witch, or do people just think that she is? Is she immortal or just very old? How does she communicate with the animals? What’s in it for them? And how is their world changing and their life becoming threatened?

I’m delighted that this mysterious little dragon has dropped into my life, though I’m sorry that its wings are broken and they will take such a long time to heal. But I’m overjoyed that the dragon and its larger story have decided to stay for a while.

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Knitwise, I’m not sure that I made any progress at all last week. I was going to take my project bag containing the Blue Blanket to work on Tuesday, but I left it at home by mistake. I took it to work on Wednesday and then didn’t touch it again until Friday, when I brought it home for the weekend. Right now it’s still sitting wherever it was that I put it down, since I have been busy writing and driving and buying books and doing laundry and baking banana bread and reading for my graduate course, and thinking about dragons.

The vote is in, and the next project in the queue after I finish anything something will be the yoga socks.

Talking of Michelangelo

It’s been a summer of change, with several work-friends in the process of coming and going. Not all of the changes were expected, but of course I hope that all the arrivals and departures have put each person in a better place to live the next stage of their life. Onward and onward, further up and further in! It’s all good. We’ll catch up on Facebook or LinkedIn or Academia.edu someday.

One of the new members of my department noticed a sonic screwdriver in my office, and another one spotted the TARDIS magnet on my car. I’ve been fielding questions ever since about my various geeky interests, which is a different experience for me. (My current acquaintances already know all about my geekery.) I suspect that I will become much less interesting when the semester begins and there are 100-125 students for each of them to get to know.

One of the people who left the campus last year has returned this year. Welcome back, Lori! (When do you want to get together to knit?)

And of course there will be hundreds of new students on campus soon, trying to find their classrooms and their professors and the department offices. May each of them be on their way to a better place.

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Knitwise, I used my Formula One viewing time to regain the momentum on the pink project. During August the series takes three weeks off and calls it the “summer break.” Everyone has to take a vacation and the teams aren’t allowed to develop the technology on the cars. For my part, I tried to use some of the summer break to view (and delete from my DVR) the early practice sessions that I hadn’t been able to watch on the race weekends.

The pink project is great for TV knitting since it’s a one-row wonder. It is getting a bit long, however, and when I have to turn the work it becomes a major effort.

Going into this weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix I thought that if I knitted on it during every session I would surely get it to the decrease point. I did try. After the end of the race I folded the work at my halfway marker, and counted. I should have about 34 more rows (17 ridges) to knit before I start the decreases.

Maybe I shouldn’t have counted. Now I know that if I knitted one row a day for a whole month, I still wouldn’t be at the decrease point.

That shouldn’t matter because my goal is to finish the whole project before Thanksgiving. On the other hand that will entail knitting 34 more rows, knitting the second decrease section, binding off, weaving in all of the ends, washing the work, and drying the work. (Because it’s acrylic, I won’t be blocking it.) So all that is going to take a while.

One row a day, and everything will be okay….

Tired out

School is starting a bit sooner than usual this year, and this past weekend had to double up and be both the last relaxing weekend of summer and the last chance to get everything done before school starts.

I planned for it in the usual way — by making a list so I could check off my tasks if I ever when I actually got them done. What made the weekend a bit unusual is that I had several things I wanted to sit down and watch: the race, the qualifying session, and the free practice sessions for the Belgian Grand Prix; the rebroadcast of the Hungarian Grand Prix, which I missed while I was travelling; the last two “What If…?” episodes, and the Netflix series “The Chair.”

Of course, this was just the list of what I wanted to sit down and watch. I wasn’t even planning to knit along — this was just dead time, purely focused video time, which isn’t what I normally do with my weekends. You can also add: laundry, dishes, cleaning, daily reading and journal entries, prepping two packages for shipping, shopping for school supplies, shopping for any needed school clothes, and clearing out SecondBorn’s bedroom, now to be used even less frequently now that they are moving into a dorm this week for their first year of college. (Does anyone want to buy a very sturdy loft bed, 2 years old, maybe used a dozen times?) Allow for a fishing trip for Lastborn on Saturday afternoon, and add to this list anything that came up in the course of the weekend.

Laundry and dishes went on in the background, proceeding without a hitch. I was able to watch the free practices for the Belgian Grand Prix when nobody else was up, so those were removed from the DVR right away.

Nothing really went sideways (for my British readers, please substitute ‘pear-shaped’) until Saturday afternoon, when MiddleSon and I were preparing a UPS shipment that he’d been nagging me about for several weeks. Today was the day, and we confirmed that the UPS Store would be open until 5 pm. We had purchased the right-sized shipping box last weekend, and he had packed the goods halfway up. I found more packing materials to add to the top of the box. He taped everything shut and contacted the recipient to obtain their mailing address and phone number…only to find that they didn’t want the items until later in the year. We took a moment, then he asked if he could just store the box in the attic until we really needed to ship it. Bingo! One less task on the list for Saturday.

That was a Good Thing™ because we had previously determined that it was better to focus on in-house priorities on Saturday so we could do any travel on Sunday. So the dishes continued and the laundry continued, until Lastborn was picked up for his fishing trip and we could concentrate on some specialty vacuuming (cobwebs! ick!) of the TV room. Unfortunately, I had promised Lastborn that I would get a fish fry dinner for him on Saturday, and I was planning to do this while returning from the trip to the UPS Store that had just been cancelled.

Stay flexible! After Lastborn was home again I realized that I needed to make a trip to the grocery store and I could combine that with a trip to [REDACTED], which on occasion makes a pretty good fish fry dinner. Off we went to get some cartons of Classic Coke and just a few other things. Then we stopped at [REDACTED] and went inside to place our carry-out order. We didn’t pick up on the store’s vibe right away, but after a while it became apparent that while the location was quick to take orders, they were for some reason slow to deliver them. After I had been waiting for about ten minutes, parked drive-through customers started coming into the store to find out when they would get their dinners, having placed their orders twenty minutes ago. The customers themselves were quite patient and reasonable, but the manager had completely lost the narrative. By the time he realized I was waiting for a to-go order he was apologizing and saying that he didn’t know where it was. He was getting ready to throw a stack of coupons at me, when he suddenly realized that the order was up and I could take it. We were in the car (after advising a family, complete with dog, that had just parked their car in the lot that perhaps this was not where they could receive their dinner anytime soon on this particular evening) when Lastborn looked at his order and sighed upon sight of a slice of unanticipated American cheese. We were able to get him a whopper of a substitution at another fast food establishment that was on our way home. I ate his order and saved my salad for another day, and culinary harmony was restored.

I’ll have to admit that that was pretty much it for Saturday. Daily reading, one glass of wine, journal entry, time for bed. But I did watch two free practice sessions for the Grand Prix, plus the first episode of “The Chair,” sometime during the morning, afternoon, and evening. Check, check, check.

Sunday Sunday Sunday! I woke before the boys did, and I was able to Netflix-binge the rest of “The Chair” (or almost the rest of it) before anybody else needed me for anything else. I have a lot of thoughts about “The Chair.” If you work for a university or, particularly, an English department, you will see a lot of resonance. I suspect that legal concerns ought to prevent me from making further comment on the content.

The next task was to serve as sous chef for prepping a slow-cooker beef stew before Firstborn and I sat down to watch a recording of the Belgian Grand Prix (race time plus two extra hours of recording, just in case it rained). As it happened, it rained quite a lot in Belgium this weekend. We were determined not to be spoiled on the race results via social media, so it was about 5:30 pm before our recording ended and we were aware of all the outcomes (no spoilers here!).

On Sunday afternoon, the rest of the task list went kaflooie (British friends, what comes after ‘pear-shaped’?) when MiddleSon and I loaded the car to go make Goodwill donations and pick up school supplies. I started the car and turned on the air conditioning. Then we brought forth our cell phones to check the hours of OfficeMax and Goodwill. Both were already closed. Hmm.

We thought it over, and we decided to go to the nearest gas station since I was down to 1/4 of a tank. While I was filling up, another motorist spoke the fateful words: “Hey, you have a flat tire.” I checked, and he was right; in the past few days I had driven over a screw or a bolt that was firmly embedded in my left rear tire. That explained the squirrely handling I had noticed in the last few days. MiddleSon and I put air in the punctured tire and limped home, where Firstborn was prepared to change the tire to the full-sized spare. (I supervised.) We tested the spare by driving to the same gas station and putting in a bit more air.

No school supplies. No new clothes for school. One call to the mechanic to check prices on a new set of tires.

Recalculating….

The other kid

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of reading about math and mathematicians, and a lot of thinking about my young, quasi-mathematical self. (Please pardon me if I go over some of the same ground I have travelled before. That’s kind of how my thoughts are these days — wandering, returning, and rethinking. I’ll follow the thoughts and we’ll see if they take me somewhere worth visiting.)

If you knew me from any part of my life before my high school graduation, you’d probably agree that I was a kind of geeky kid and teenager. I liked mostly books and solitary activities, cycled over 1000 miles before college, wrote stories, wandered through the woods, and played nerdy games like Mastermind and Scrabble. I frequently read books that were too old for me. When I was little I had a Spirograph set and I probably played with it until I ran out of paper. As a teenager I had trouble falling asleep and would get out of bed and play hand after hand after hand of Solitaire on the hardwood floor. After a while I established some sort of point system for the finished games, and I kept a running tally. (Somewhere there’s a tiny, meaningless notebook slowly degrading in a landfill. It’s okay, little one; you served your purpose.)

This was a kid who thought maybe they’d be a research scientist working deep in a lab. Or maybe an inventor: I stood at my basement “workshop” for quite a while wondering what to invent, and how inventors got started. Or maybe a world famous author, I thought as I banged away on my manual typewriter in the private office I had constructed inside my closet. Or maybe a meteorologist. Or maybe….

This was a kid who went to science camp, and learned to program computers (and convert Microsoft BASIC into Apple BASIC so the Eliza program would run on a //e). They went to math contests and snuck out to another school to take the SAT. This kid read Irving Wallace novels and Stephen King novels and wrote stories about zombie cats (perhaps Mr. King was slightly more influential) and won ribbons at the county fair for their short stories. And, shamefully, this kid read James Clavell novels in Algebra I class, wrote poetry in Geometry class, re-read Jane Eyre in Life Science, and tried to read Wuthering Heights in Biology.

This kid was torn. By the time I graduated from high school I had been told that I could do anything I wanted to do. I just had no idea what that was. Should I write? Should I do math?

About a week and a half ago I was chatting with a math professor (okay, technically an Associate Professor of Mathematics) and I mentioned some of they math-y things I had done and liked in high school. Leon asked me, “So, why didn’t you do math?”

And I had to think about it. It really boiled down to the fact that…nobody asked me to. Despite the fact that I had done well in all of my math classes, despite my performances in math competitions, despite my attendance at math camp, despite my SAT scores, despite my love of coding, despite my curiosity and creativity – nobody asked me to. When I got to my college registration session and signed up for classes, English was there and recommended a path for me. The Honors program was there and invited me in. The Math department didn’t show up.

I really can’t blame the Math Department. They had plenty of better students to pick from, and I didn’t seek them out. But if they had asked me, I think I would have tried to be a good math student. I might have found people who could have appreciated what I had to offer, and pushed me to excel in ways I still cannot imagine.

There is a huge focus on STEM classes and careers right now, and STEAM classes and careers (LET STEM = STEM + A [arts]). That’s great; I think everyone should be encouraged to do what they do best. Some people are not going to work in those fields. I think we’re happiest when we are aligned with what we are good at and what interests us. And most times, that’s kind of easy to figure out. You probably know someone who was born to fix engines, or be a veterinarian or a pediatric nurse or a farmer or a cop. They see their future ahead of them like a route in Google Maps, and they never need to recalculate.

But what if you don’t know?

One kid picked an English major specializing in creative writing. Later they added a second major in English Literature. But along the way, they added and dropped a minor in Systems Analysis because they were tired of reading books and short stories and not doing anything tangible, active, real. The secretaries who added the minor didn’t understand why they were adding it. When the minor was dropped they said, “That’s okay, honey.” They didn’t think it would stick anyway.

But, just as I met my people when I went to math camp after 8th grade, I met my people in the SAN program and MUBBS (the Miami University Bulletin Board System). Oh, children, this was in the days before campus email addresses. I hung out with the geeky boys who excelled at COBOL and cruised through Assembler. They coded their own freaking discussion board and I was a part of it. I moderated the Religion forum (of all things) and kept an eye on people like Aaron who needed my support. I combined calculation and expression, but didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t ask for help. Didn’t ask for guidance.

“You know what you were trying to do,” Peter stated in the late 80s or early 90s. “You were trying to be a MTSC.” He was referring to Miami’s new graduate program, the Master’s in Technical and Scientific Communication, and he was right. I was trying to combine written expression and computer language at the undergraduate level. I thought that the only way to do that was by way of technical documentation. But what I wasn’t able to do through my coursework I found another way to do.

I have some more options now, more ways to combine the two sides of my brain, but I wonder what would have happened to the kid who had continued on the math path. Would she have found a different set of “her people” in the Math department instead of the English department? Would she have found someone to encourage and inspire her, to show her that there could be a place for her in mathematics without being a math teacher?

What happened to the other kid? Where would she be now, and what would she be doing? What would she have achieved? Who would she be?

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Knitwise, I did some work on the one-row scarf last week while attending a Webex meeting. I added a couple of inches to the work. Some of the yarn was so compressed that it looked like an entirely different type of fiber, but I think it might fluff up in the wash. I have a long way to go before I get there, but I’ll get there. Maybe the other kid will, too.

Everything in its place

We finally got everything cleaned and organized — as much as possible — before our guest arrived on Saturday morning and stayed for about three hours. We did hide many things in rooms that were not open to the public, but we got things spiffed up enough to make a good impression. I even found a minute on Saturday morning to donate several bags of boy-clothes that were now too small for any of my boys to wear, and we tossed more bags of items that weren’t suited for donation.

It would have been more fun with animal helpers.

Now, the pressure is on to keep things more open and clean in the house. We’ve been able to spend more time playing two-player Wii games this week just because we now have more space in which to do it. (Sadly, that doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally bump into each other; sorry about what happened during Wii Sports Resort Table Tennis, Youngest, when I was trying to switch to my backhand.)

For me, cleaning and organizing is something that makes me focus on — and usually question — my priorities. Do I tuck away something I’ve been meaning to use but have never “gotten around” to? If I haven’t “gotten around” to something after a few years, will I ever? In some cases, I have been making steady progress towards a goal and I would be undercutting myself to put the materials where I can’t see them every day. In other cases, the thickness of the dust on the object may be a good indicator that it’s time to pass it along to someone else (or at least transfer it to the garage).

After the guest departed, I realized that I didn’t know what to do with my time. I didn’t have much more motivation (or energy!) to continue cleaning, and I certainly didn’t want to bring things back from the garage if it was only going to clutter up the house again. I ended up reading a novel written by a Facebook friend. Dave self-published it and I wanted to support him as a writer, so I purchased the book in paperback the day it was released on Amazon; it arrived on Friday and I finished reading it earlier this evening.

I know a few people who have self-published on Amazon, and while I have supported them by buying their books I have not always read the books promptly or at all. (I seem to recall that this was an unfulfilled New Year’s resolution of mine from a couple of years ago. Oops.) I hope they’re not offended to hear this; after all, there are hundreds if not thousands of traditionally published books also languishing on my shelves waiting to be read. But being read means more to a new and self-published author so I suppose that, in a small way, I was trying to make amends starting with this book.

I’m still composing an Amazon review in my head, and when I do write one I’ll give you a link to it. In the meantime, I would like to explore what the book made me think about.

I’m proud of anyone who writes a book!

I used to get upset when I saw bookstores filled with brand new books, particularly from authors who seemed to be more like brand names than real, living people who wrote books. This was usually because I was jealous because they were cranking out books and I was not. Sometimes it was because I felt that the books were low-quality items (cf. previously, ‘cranking out’) and not literary works with sufficient profundity and gravitas. This was also because I was jealous that other people were writing (and publishing) books while I was not. Eventually I took some responsibility for the lack of manuscript production on my parts, and the jealousy faded. I’m not writing books right now, but I am doing other work that I feel is important. If I write books, I’d hope that they would be published. But success in publishing is often about how well connected you are to the industry, and I don’t have those connections.

There are many paths to publication

The path to publication that I grew to expect looked something like this:

1. Go to college and take writing classes.
2. Go to Iowa State University for your MFA in creative writing.
3. Become well connected with writers, editors, and agents and publish your first (blockbuster) novel at age 22.
4. Sell the movie rights.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until fabulously wealthy.

Alternatively, there was this path:

1. Work your day job, but write in every spare minute.
2. Submit manuscripts constantly until you get the attention of a literary agent or publisher.
3. Get a contract with a huge advance.
4. Sell the movie rights.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4….

Now that I’m older I can certainly see more paths. Self-publishing is a valid route to finishing the story and getting the work distributed so that you can turn to new work. It is not a lesser route unless you make it lesser in your mind. At the end of the manuscript, though, the work still gets published and you are still an author.

Being a self-taught writer is fine

While I will continue to argue that the writing workshop is the most important part of an undergraduate creative writing program — and is an experience that is hard to find anywhere else — you can certainly teach yourself to be a good writer. At the core is the writer’s desire or need to tell a story. Whether or not you have had any professional instruction, you should get better at storytelling the more often you write stories. If you write one story and give up, writing probably isn’t even a hobby for you. But if you write one story and then feel compelled to rewrite it, or to write more stories, and the drive doesn’t go away, then I think you should probably arrange your life so that writing will be easier for you to do. You’ll find fulfillment and satisfaction in it, particularly as you improve at wordsmithing and plotting.

I’m glad that I took the time to read Dave’s book this weekend, and it made me want to get back to my own writing.

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Knitwise, I worked on an idle project while watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier and this weekend’s Formula One race in Imola. It’s a shawl project handed off to me by a friend who was downsizing before a move; it was a triangle when I got it but I decided to start decreases at some point and turn it into a square blanket. Unfortunately, I really had no way to gauge the amount of yarn that she had already used and how much was left. This afternoon I realized that I had gotten to the point where I only had enough yarn to bind off, and it was a long way from being a square. I don’t think I have any more of the yarn she used. After I take a quick look around I will probably have to bind off the item as an irregular pentagon, weave in the ends, and call it done. I have also put in a couple of hours on a simple scarf project I keep at the office. I only work on it when I’m in meetings or listening to high-profile campus open forum, but it’s good to be knitting again. It helps me focus.

I’ll try to finish, wash, and block the shawl by next weekend, if anyone would like to see it. In the meantime, I’ll get back to my research and my plans for my book.

1989: The First of Four Elephants

Several life-changing events happened to me in 1989, but in order to choose a story to tell I will have to ignore a very large elephant that happens to be crowding out almost everything else from the room. One of the rules I set for myself in this storytelling series is that I would try not to tell anyone else’s story, and writing about my first marriage definitely qualifies as telling someone else’s story — even if the someone else isn’t likely to read it or to care about what I might have to say. This rule is self-imposed, and it’s about respect. It’s my rule and I’m sticking to it.

In the spring of 1989 I took the GRE and applied (and was accepted) to graduate school at Miami; in May I graduated with honors from Miami University with a double major in Creative Writing and English Literature. In July I got married, took a brief honeymoon in Denver, and returned to Oxford just in time to take an intensive pedagogy class for graduate assistants who would be teaching freshman English in August. In that class I met someone who would become a fast friend; in fact, you could say he owns the second elephant.

The summer of 1989 kicked off a complicated and stressful time in my life that persisted for entirely too long, and I didn’t often make the best decisions. Thus, we witness the generation of a series of elephants which shall not be discussed. (Special note for those who are 22 years old and think they know everything about the world: You don’t. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you. But it’s all right; I know you’re not listening anyway.) I’ll let you know when one of my elephants has wandered into the room, and we can talk about something else while it has a bit of hay and water.

To avoid talking about my elephants or anyone else’s, let’s go back in time a bit to the spring of 1989, when my capstone project for the Honors program was due. Because my degree was in creative writing, I didn’t have a research project to present. My requirement would be fulfilled when I read from my work, to an audience in Hall Auditorium. I repeat, my degree was in creative writing. Not speech, communication, theatre, drama, broadcast journalism, or performance art. In silence and solitude I had written my words, considered them, revised them, and offered a portfolio of short fiction to be evaluated by my “thesis” committee in the creative writing program. Now, for the sake of the Honors program, I had to make the transition from the page to the stage.

Hall Auditorium, located on the other side of the campus library from Bishop Hall, was originally constructed in 1908 and named after Miami’s fifth president, John Hall. Over the years I had attended several events there, including a reading by Tom Wolfe and a performance by the Second City Touring Company. It has a seating capacity of 750, and in my day it was sometimes the site of huge lecture sections of Western Civilization classes.

After a $6.5 million rehab in 1992….

It looks pretty big when you’re in the audience, and it has the curious property of looking even larger when you’re all alone on the stage, looking outward.

Mine wasn’t the only “act” on the agenda for that afternoon. I waited backstage for my turn to approach the microphone and read my work to whoever was in the audience — other members of the Honors program, I assumed. The student before me concluded their talk, received a round of applause, and walked off stage left. Everything was going just fine as I walked on from stage right. I placed my pages of text on the podium, took a deep breath, and began to read.

I heard my voice, small and soft in the large space. When I was a few sentences into my story, I noticed strange looks on the faces of the audience. When I was a few paragraphs in, I realized that they could not hear me well and it was possible that the microphone, which had worked perfectly for the previous speaker, was now not working at all.

As I continued to read, I brainstormed. Had the person before me turned off the mic before walking away, and had I been expected to turn it back on? No. Had the mic really just broken without warning? I wasn’t sure, but something did seem to be broken. Was it going to come back on? Perhaps. Should I keep reading, trusting that the mic would turn itself back on? Maybe. Should I stop reading, apologize, and start over?

The repercussions of my last question to myself were what made me decide to just keep reading and pretend that all was well. I was keyed up enough as it was; if I stopped now there was no guarantee that I would be able to calm down enough to start the reading all over again. I also couldn’t fix the mic, so there was no guarantee that it would be able to start all over again with me. There was a tech person on the stage, just behind the front curtain. Presumably they would be able to fix the mic if it were broken. (If I broke down, I wasn’t sure that I could be fixed.)

If that’s true, I asked myself, why haven’t they come over, stopped me, and fixed the mic? Maybe it’s not broken after all and I just THINK it’s broken.

So I kept reading, paragraph after paragraph, maintaining the gentle momentum of the text, staying as calm as I could. The short story itself was more of a tone poem with plenty of onomatopeia and internal rhyme, with a rhythm like a rocking chair, and it propelled me forward.

Two sentences before the end of the story, the microphone came back to life. My voice boomed through the auditorium as I read the last few words.

“Thank you,” I said, and exited stage left to a round of tepid, confused applause as my legs tried to turn to jelly.

I had done my reading, even if nobody heard a word of it, and there was no way they would get me back out onto that stage again.

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Knitwise, I have completed the Grey Shawl of Eternity. Have I the proof of this accomplishment? Nay! I cast off last Tuesday night, displayed the shawl to my Jefferson knitting group, and folded it up and tucked it into my knitting bag. I then started a project with the only pattern I had on hand – for loafers, of all things – with the closest yarn to what it required, an orphan skein of brown-and-white marled bulky wool that ranged from extremely thin to extremely thick. It wasn’t fun or satisfying, but it was knitting. Two days later I took the shawl to my Whitewater group, unfurled it, and handed it over to the woman who had given me the donated yarn in the first place. While she wrapped herself in the Shawl of Eternity I knitted two more rows on the unsatisfying loafer pattern, paused, and then pulled out the needles and frogged the project.

What would Katherine Hepburn knit?

I am open for suggestions.