What gets in the way

Mya, soaking up the sun

There was a time when I was able to write 1000 words a day/5000 words a week on whatever project I was working on. I did this for years, writing a novel a year from 2004 until 2016 or thereabouts.  

Somewhere, after writing and publishing A STAR IN THE VOID, the 5th and final of the Halcyone Space novels, I hit a wall. I started projects, ground to a halt, abandoned them. Every day, I would dutifully sit at my laptop, stare at a blank page, and then click away to facebook or twitter and fritter away hours. When I look back at that time, I can see that there were a number of things at play. The political landscape was such that I felt I had to be hyper-vigilant at all times just to feel any sort of control over my life. I know it doesn't make sense - immersing myself in the constant churn of news only increased my anxiety, which is not conducive to creativity. 

And then covid hit. My physician spouse sent me away to our farm in Central Massachusetts while he stayed in Boston on the front lines of treating ICU patients. I was isolated and depressed. Desperately worried about my spouse's health, physical and mental. Also not conducive to creativity.

 I know a lot of my writer friends were able to channel their anxiety into their work. I was not one of them. 

What I did instead was a lot of yarn work - knitting and crocheting baby blankets to donate to a hospital - while watching a lot of television. When I did  write, it was mainly poetry. I had an idea for a novel, but it seemed I was only able to write myself into dead ends. Several years worth of them. I think I discarded at least as many words as I kept for what became LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.  

Ultimately, with the help of my writing community and several zoom sessions a week of co-writing, I was able to finish the draft of LITANY after more than 5 years of struggling. That manuscript is in the hands of my editor now and I'm working on the sequel. 

I'm almost ashamed to say that I'm only working on it once a week. I have a scheduled zoom write-in with Broad Universe on Tuesday mornings.  When I write, the writing is going well - I have a solid sense of the conflicts in the story and a hazy view of the ending. But writing 500-1000 words a week is less than optimal. Not only because drafting the novel is going to take a long time, but also because I lose momentum and have to backtrack every time I sit down to write. 

I realize my hyperfocus on wordcount in the past may have generated a lot of writing, but it wasn't great for my mental health and life balance. Writing only once a week isn't great for my sense of identity as a writer or my goals. So I need to find a middle ground.

Part of finding that balance was getting away from social media and returning to somewhat regular blogging. Sitting down to create a blogpost is the equivalent of morning pages - it primes the pump for my other writing. I've also tentatively scheduled two additional writing times in my week. I'm hoping that as I find my discipline again, it will be self reinforcing. 

But life does keep intruding. The political scene is still fraught. And on a personal note, one of my dogs has a developing and as yet undiagnosed medical problem. I'm a person with very porous emotional filters. It's part of who I am and if I could change it, I'm not sure I would. But it does make it difficult to set all the external worries aside and focus. (Which is what I did for years. Until I experienced burn-out.)

So now, I'm trying another path. Where I acknowledge the outside concerns instead of cutting myself off from them, using them as fuel/energy to do creative work. 

Life and art are messy. I'm not sure there's any way around that.

 

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When Fandom meets Craft

Finished and blocked!

While I learned to knit as a child, I didn't do much with it until I rediscovered the craft in my adult life. And thanks to youtube videos and the folks who run the Handknitting Association of Iceland, I learned how to make stranded colorwork yoke sweaters in the past year or so. 

The first few sweaters I made, I followed specific patterns, but then found a wonderful book about the process of creating a stranded colorwork sweater by Tin Can Knits called Strange Brew. 

I decided that I was going to make a bespoke sweater for myself with motifs from my favorite fandom: Doctor Who. 

A trip to Webs Yarn and I found Debby Bliss Fine Donegal - the perfect fingering weight wool and cashmere blend in the exact color I wanted: TARDIS blue. (It wasn't called that, but it should have been!)

Then it was time to design the sweater and plan the motifs. First I did a sketch. 

Initial concept sketch

I have a kindle scribe which I use for a lot of purposes. It was purchased primarily so I could edit my manuscripts on it, but it's also amazing for notating/adjusting knitting patterns (you can write on pdf's) and for sketching out concepts. 

Motif design for the TARDIS

 

Motif design for K-9

Then it was time to do some math. (Or maths as my friends across the pond say.) After making a swatch and measuring gauge (yes, it's a pain. I hate doing it. But I did it anyway.), I chose the size M/L in sock yarn as the template in the Strange Brew pattern book. That meant I knew how many stitches I had to work with around the cuffs, the waist, and the yoke, so I could layout the motifs and know how many repeats I needed to do and how many stitches I needed to put between them. 

For example, the question marks were 6 stitches wide by 11 stitches high. 

I had 60 stitches around the wrist to work with. That meant 6 repeats of the motif, with 4 stitches between them. (making the motif 10 stitches wide including the background color stitches.) Sleeves incorporate increases, and the overall pattern called for increasing 2 stitches each 6th round, but there's definitely wiggle room, so I did the increases before and after the question mark motif rounds without any issue. 

A tip for motifs: put in stitch markers all around to mark each repeat. For the question marks, that meant every 10th stitch. That way if you make a mistake, you catch it after a single motif instead of at the end of the round.

A second tip for motifs - set the 'beginning of round' to be at the back of a shoulder to hide any jog of the pattern. You may need to use some math to figure out where the first repeat starts so your design is centered the way you want it.

The entire project took me from initial design and starting on the sleeves in January of 2024 (if you saw me at Arisia or Boskone in Boston, you might have seen me working on it) to blocking the finished sweater in September of 2024. I did a few other smaller projects in between, so maybe 6 months of actual knitting time. That's actually not bad for a sock weight yarn and size 4 needles. 

I may turn this into a cardigan at some point, so I laid out the motifs so there would be a clear line down the middle to steek, but for now, I'm happy with it and will be wearing it at Arisia. 

I highly recommend getting the Strange Brew book if you have any interest at all in creating your own yoked stranded colorwork sweaters. The geek in me loves to know how things work, so it was definitely something I knew I wanted in my library. Or if you have a sweater pattern that you like the fit of, you can always just use it as the template and create your own fandom designs with a little math and patience. 

Closeup of the motifs during blocking

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Harvest what you plant

Some of what our garden has gifted us

There's a common expression 'you reap what you sow'. While technically, it's the same as the title of this post - Harvest what you plant - it's connotation is much darker. Almost threateningly so. 

I've had enough of cautionary tales. 

What I'm looking for now is something to reach for, not something to run away from. 

I want more possibilities, not fewer. 

We have a large garden here at StarField Farm. Multiple gardens, actually. We have the large plot at the bottom of the driveway, the recently established miniature orchard, a side garden, a terraced garden, and the kitchen garden. We grow all kinds of fruit and vegetables - I like to say from asparagus to zucchini (though we didn't plant any summer squash this year. We get enough from neighbors. And yes, folks here do leave bags of zucchini on front porches). Yesterday, I harvested about half of the 60+ potatoes we planted in early spring. 

pinto potatoes from a freshly pulled vine

Yes, that's a lot of potatoes. And tomatoes. And beans. And kale. And peppers. And...

We planted all of this food during still chilly days last spring. You could say gardening is an act of faith and you wouldn't be wrong. So many things need to go exactly right to harvest a crop. The correct amount of sunshine, rain, warmth, nutrient rich soil. And even then, there are pests and animals who can decimate a garden before you get a single floret of broccoli. 

This year, squirrels ate every last peach from three carefully tended trees. Hundreds and hundreds of peaches gone. 

Here's the thing: when you plant something - a seed, a sapling, an idea - you don't know what will come of it. You hope that there will be juicy peaches in late August, but it's a long time between February pruning and peach pies. So much can happen, mostly out of our control. 

But every year, we tend the garden. Feed the soil. Nurture the seedlings. Prune the trees.

Writing stories isn't all that different. It starts underground in the fertile subconscious. The words need to be tended, weeded, protected. Sometimes the garden of ideas is orderly, other times it grows wild like a pumpkin patch. Not every story makes it to harvest and some offer amazing bounty. If gardening is an act of faith, so is creativity. 

My garden feeds and sustains my body.

My writing feeds and sustains my soul.

And that is a harvest worth working toward.

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What are we?

 

 

In a series of conversations with a friend staying with me at the farm, I had this realization about what it means to be human. 

We are connection seekers. We spend our lives sending out these pings into the universe, fearing and hoping for an answer. Like little satellites trapped in orbit around our own loneliness. And because we are  terrified of asking for what we need and not getting it, our signals are full of static.

We are meaning makers. Desperate for it all to have a purpose, to make some kind of sense. So every interaction gets re-litigated and scrutinized for hidden clues and subtext. We obsess over what we said, how we said it, how it was received. How exhausting it all feels. But it gives us a sense of control because otherwise, isn't everything random? Chaotic?

We are story tellers. We want there to be a narrative that gives us a sense of where we are on the journey. Beginning, middle, end. There's predictability to this kind of arc. So we superimpose it over what is otherwise just a muddle of days and events. 

These three essential human needs: connection, meaning, and story are what drive us to create. What is a piece of art, a song, a poem, a novel if not a way to transmit the core of who we are to someone else. It is a way to say I am here. This is what I believe. This is who I am. 

I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this, but it's what bubbled up to the surface of my mind this evening. 

 

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Blue Musings is a low volume e-newsletter containing notifications about book releases, sales, recommendations, and free original short fiction. Please click the box, then "subscribe" to allow us to send it to you via email.