In The Garden Living an RPG Life

Yes, I said 33 days.  I started in earnest today doing the prep work.  The next few days will be dedicated to collecting notes from wherever and making sure I know where they are.  Today, I collected all my “how to write” notes into a Freemind file on my laptop.  Tomorrow, I’ll be putting them all on a second drive: backing up the novel early!

I’ve started wondering what the actual structure of this year’s story will be.  I know what story I want to tell.  I just don’t know all the twists and turns.  One trick I play on myself got formalized today.  It’s the word count building strategy.  Generally, we have strategies to build our word count when we run out of steam.  For example, instructions from one character to another is a good way to build word count.  In one of my novels, I used my need to research geography by sumarizing the research as a presentation of several arguments in the field.  Another time, I used my need to study for the FCC exam to fill out word count.  I just put a lot of the elements I had to learn into a context.  Which leads to how I formalized my strategy.

In a file called “word count” I made a list of things I will need to pay attention to in my story.  There is a wonderful short story called “The Things They Carried”.  When in need of word count, show don’t tell, what is being carried in a ladies’ purse, for example.  Far from being filler, it can become a way to show character, setting, culture.  It happens that the world I’m building is based on the fabric trade so what is carried as a purse can be important to the story.  Again, it’s also a way to fill the word count well when the story stream runs low.

I found a great book on drawing costumes and that helped me think about how to organize what they are wearing.  What I like about doing these kinds of lists, the preparatory ones, is that I find myself asking when or why a list might be used in the story.  It gives me material for a scene that builds character and culture.  I now have a scene planned that has a young girl seeing a town in the throes of a market convention for the first time.   I knew what her role in the story would be and it’s important. She is after all the title character. What I didn’t have was the lead up and revealing kind of story bits.

That’s what I use word count padding for: to help me fill in the necessary parts of the story.

In all the advice about worldbuilding, having a sketch of the important bits is more important than knowing all the details.  My online writing “mentor” Holly Lisle has a method that she’s come up with after creating a couple of world bibles before writing the novel.  I like my lists of things the story needs.  Like weather, landscape, economics. Why? Because in this novel these things are important.  That was the lesson Lisle learned: create only as much world as you need to tell the story effectively.

Remember, I said I wrote this out in Freemind.  That means that there are lots of sublists.  One of those sublists is from a special episode of the Shakespeare and Dragons podcast, Monsters.  That episode, which was created to help raise support funds for the podcast, gave me an important concept for not just this novel but for the whole series.  So, I used the monsters character sheet to make a list in my lists.  In the process I discovered that role playing character sheets can be useful in making characters for novels.

I don’t take the categories literally sometimes.  There is a category called “reach/space”.  When my characters encounter the “monsters” how will I express “reach/space” for them.  They are a couple of women who know little about the world.  At this point I don’t really know.  This is what makes it fun: the intrigue and the puzzle.  Oh, and “saving throw”… How is that going to be expressed in the novel.  While this kind of thing might not generate a lot of word count, it is such an intriguing question that I am sure it will keep me writing.  It might turn out that I write it and don’t use it in the final novel.  That’s what revision is for after all, isn’t it.

I’m yawning. Time for bed.  Early start tomorrow.

Oh! Almost forgot.  Got my Catrina fabric in the mail today.  Slightly disappointed with it.  Why? I didn’t get the measurements right.  Didn’t notice that until last night when I was redoing it. I posted the pattern as 18″x24″ rather than 18″x21″, a proper “fat quarter” yard of fabric.  It’s my first doll panel.  My first contest.  My first fat quarter.

There are a lot of good things though.  I absolutely love the sound and feel of the fabric itself.  I love the scale of the image. I bought a yard of the fabric: one panel for myself and one for Gretchen.  I will figure out what to do with the leftovers another time.  Did I say how much I love the fabric itself?  The sound of the scissors cutting through it, the sound of it as I flap it to straighten it out, the texture.  I didn’t get the same feeling with the samples.  Too small to make that big sound.  I think I’ll like the fat quarters though.  Could really get to like them a lot.  Enough to run my hand over.

Hmm… I know what I’ll do with the misprinted parts of the yard I bought.  Will share later.  Bed time now.

With One Thread is the name of my Etsy shop.  There’s nothing there at the moment. The name is all there is of an idea that came from the devastation of 9/11.  I wanted to know, for myself, what it was that I could do to heal the world.  It came to me that the women of the world at risk might be empowered through their ability to process cloth. The idea of the fabric trade comes from the ancient Silk Road. It also comes from hearing an article about someone I like a lot–Kaffe Fasset–who was commissioned by an organization to license his designs to a Third World women’s community.  His designs were to be used in their work and sold to create a viable economic practice.
I wanted to be him, to be someone whose work of the mind would be such that others might find empowerment.

This is the source of my novels’ world. Yes, my novels’ world is also the world I created for playing my Dungeons and Dragons characters. The nature of the breach that 9/11 created in my heart needed more than just a game.  It needed some kind of personal commitment.  I didn’t then and don’t think now that I can serve with my best as I am now.  While I could teach English with the best of the others who volunteer for the Peace Corps (my model for world service), I don’t think that is what I am best suited for.  No, I don’t know what else I can do better.  However, it came to me that the world I want to create as my own reality, the world of fiber, is the world serves the women of the world best.

Writing this now seems to have lost it’s power, somehow.  I don’t think that I have failed my intention, or that I have failed in my intention to serve.  I firmly believe that, given some other impressions and coincidences, that I have only begun the true Adventure of Service.  This last novel presents definitions and suggestions that, without the direction of a world service of fiber, would not feel so powerful.  There is something deeper that wants to speak through my intent, my focus.  I am willing to let it come out; I am willing to be dissatisfied with the appearance of my ordinary life in order for the extraordinary to seep through.

I don’t know what the outcome of The Falyns and its inspirations will be.  I am willing to risk certainty in order to discover the power of the bigger picture, the design that creates opportunities for all.

I am listening to the latest season of Cast-On, the knitting podcast.  It’s referring to the post WWII world of Make Do and Mend .  It’s the closest we have–we of the post 9/11 century–to understanding what to do with what happened.  What do we do now?  How do we go on?

By “we” I don’t really know who I mean.  I identify with creative people.  With knitters and makers and hackers of all descriptions.  I identify with the Rogue archetype, the persona that believes the rules of ordinary life do not apply.  I am the one who steals your ideas and transforms them to serve The Greater Good.

So, With One Thread,  what mischief might I achieve? What might be achieved at all?

So writing poems is not the same as posting poems.  I ‘ve got the whole month done.

They are in my journal.

OH.  And I was wrong about American Sentences being 27 syllables. They are 17, just like Haiku.  I’ve had the priviledge of trying to explain the concept to a couple of people lately.  Need to brush up on what I know for sure and what I think I know.  Having certainty in both would be helpful and build confidence.

Meanwhile, I’m back on Second Life on Saturdays leading the Global Healing Circle. That means creating more Heart Meditations.  I am thinking of publishing them in one form or another.  I like the sound of my own voice (in a non-ego kinda way) and doing a set of recordings might be nice.

Writing down my ideas for a set of stories about shamanic kids.  Thought of the idea a long time ago when I was reading more about Navajo and Hopi legends.  It was meeting Kahu and Brun in Second Life and Kuel on Huna Trainer that inspired me to finally put the idea into words.  I could see them in their adult struggles to be like children still.  Struggles with the shamanic things, anyway.  I’m having fun thinking of how to bring the world to life.  I don’t think of them as children’s stories, by the way.  Just stories about children.  I’m looking forward to seeing how they all come out.  I did a recording of the draft of the first one and like what I’ve heard.  Too much information in it, though.

I’m taking an online writing course–Holly Lisle’s “How to Think Sideways” and the lessons I’ve got through so far are really cool!  I like how she thinks and what she’s focusing on.  Since I am coaching a couple of other people in their writing endeavors, it’s nice to have someone coaching me.

Well, this is family weekend and it’s time to pay attention and visit!

Stripes of rain

make empty

streets cozy;

drench trees so

they bow and

tickle snails;

make puddles

and me a

rain dancer.

When I was writing on Huna Trainer regularly, a few of us started writing three-word comments.  It was so much fun that I decided (as a good logarrheatician would) that the three words could be cubed into three lines of three words each.  Well, today I thought I was doing the original “cubes” but realized I was focused on syllables instead.  And then I realized that three sets of nine syllables made an American Sentence.  So, you can read it either way:  As three cubes or as one American Sentence.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the top of my head expands under

the hedge of my hair

the soles of my feet tingle.

Breathing in

breathing out…

chest expands

thoughts contract

into breathing alone.

Breathing in

breathing out…

looming clouds enter

leaves dripping rain move through

wet streets emerge.

Breathing in

breathing out….

stars on one horizon

stars on the other horizon

bones in between.

Breathing in

breathing out…

stars inhaled into bones

bone songs vibrate being

stars exhaled into bones.

Breathing in

breathing out…

stars inhaled into bones

bone songs vibrate being

stars exhaled into bones.

Breathing in

breathing out….

stars inhaled

bones vibrate

stars exhaled.

Breathing in

breathing out….

being vibrates

bones sing

being vibrates.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the wave expands

the bones sing

the wave vibrates.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the wave

the bones

the song.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the song

the wave

the song.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the wave.

Breathing in

breathing out…

being.

Breathing in

breathing out…

the song.

Breathing

in

breathing

out…

Breathing…

I wrote this after a Huna Healing class in Second Life.  Lots of breathing, of course, and also a huge insight.  It’s the Wave again.  It was the Wave in Aikido that brought me first to take classes in electronics.  I didn’t quite understand what the point was.  As it turned out, I got to finish some things I didn’t believe I could even start: my FCC Radiotelephone License and my Amateur Radio License to be specific.  Childhood dreams I didn’t think even belonged to me.

So now that I have them, what next?  That was my question till now.  More wave stuff evidently.  Yes, I used my understanding of communication electronics to build an analogy for interpersonal communication effects, but that seemed really obvious. I was talking to fellow travellers on the Huna Training podcasts, and we mostly knew all that from Serge King’s Urban Shaman.

It was the idea of the breath activating the Wave that was new today.  And from that point, the universe of my novels took a whole and enormous step deeper.  I was so focused on justifying the effects in the world through physics that I didn’t see the truth of things:  It’s the Wave.  Listening to Martha Beck helped me put the few things together.  Again, a confluence of Huna (as shamanism) and Aikido and the Wave of the Dreaming.  That’s all I can say for now since I still haven’t got it all put together myself yet.  Maybe by this year’s NaNoWriMo, it will make sense to me.

I’ve been off the blog attending to other matters, matters that seemed as though they had nothing to do with knitting.  Now that the shift in attention is more or less complete, I’m finding that since everything is connected, I might as well come out.

I’ve been in pursuit of Magic since I first noticed that I looked at the world a little differently.  I remember sitting in my grandmother’s living room watching dust motes and wondering which of them were really fairies.  In junior high, I would stop at the same place on the way to the bus stop and know that fairies lived there and wanted my attention.  No, I was not expecting little flying things to show up.  Even the dust mote leavings were not going to be little winged things.

Over time, atomic occurrences of another behavior collected themselves into proper molecule.  Daydreaming.  I remember my father snapping me out of daydreaming when we rode the subway together on our way to the playground where he worked.  He didn’t like that one of my eyes wandered off.  Apparently this is how I kept my attention on both worlds at the same time.  Where was I?  Still have no idea all these decades later.  I’m getting closer to understanding, though.  I still don’t have a name for it.

I remember an occasion when I was in Elementary school.  What I remember about it is that I was walking down the front stairway and a girl went by going the other way.  “Oh.  That’s what it was”, or something like that was my thought.  I had had a Daydream, reverie or whatever you call it, that showed me something.  This was that something.

I’m not someone who is so fluid as to be always immersed in such seeing.  I don’t know if that’s because I ‘m not wired for it or because the circumstances of my growing up put a resistor on it, keeping me from going there very often.  It wasn’t until I was away at college that the amount of daydreaming I was doing seemed overwhelming.  I had begun to feel that there was much more to what I was doing.  Not just the occaisional, and up to then, passive and just before sleep, stuff.  I began to feel that work could be done.

That was when I began considering myself as a shaman.  No, not in this culture.  I imagined that in another place or another time the attitude of daydreaming would have indicated some kind of spiritual intelligence that would be fostered and put to use for the benefit of a community.  I would have some work tasks that allowed me to be both physically and spiritually productive.  Then I got the Call.

It came in the form of a not very big breakdown.  An anxiety state, is what the doctor called it.  Its effect was to pry me loose from what was safe and familiar and allow me to leave on my first real Adventure.  I’d been away to college, out of state, and as far from the life of the city as I could get.  This was different.  I got on a bus and moved to California with nothing planned.  Ended up in San Francisco where I began to notice that there was, in print anyway, a Neo-shaman movement. At least the word shaman was mentioned and it wasn’t in the context of traditional practice.  I was on the right track thinking that I would have to be a different kind of shaman, if indeed I was to be one.

After a few years of feeling my way around the new neighborhood, and taking the step of following my Shadow into a new career, I met Debora.  She was the first person I’d met that I felt connected to.  And she was an Adventurer.  He is the one through whom I found the first description of Magic that made sense to me.  I just read it a couple of days ago.  It was from Max Freedom Long’s book — .  I’d found my touchstone.  Too bad, I thought, that it was such an old one and that I was quite unlikely to find something more modern.

Wrong.  Thanks to Debora, I met Abraham Kawai’I, and had the dreaming experience of my life!  When I finally agreed to go to hear him speak, I was both elated and disappointed.  I was elated at the amount of information I was saying yes to.  Don’t remember a word of it now, though.  Oh, wait!  I do.  There was the idea that you could “tell fortunes” just looking at pages in a magazine.  (Note to Self:  A good thing to revisit).  Just hold the question in mind and open at random.  Not a new idea now, but at the time, over twenty years ago, it was.  Generally, it was this idea, that things weren’t needed to do the work, that it was the person, who used the world as it was.  The disappointment was that I was told, “You already know this,” and was back on my own.

For the following years, I tried to figure out what the heck that meant.  Exactly what did I know and how do I apply it?  How do I organize my life so that I am not in the way of what has to happen?  Most importantly, whom do I serve?  That last one is still kind of odd to me, that sense that I must serve someone.

Much of the questioning has been answered, finally, by the several years I spent training in Aikido.  Through that practice with its emphasis on Ki and the community’s inclusion of the Pathwork system, I acquired experience and some skill with Being Me.  I learned, for instance, just how sensitive I was to Ki, or The Force, if you will.  Probably, of all that discovery, recognizing how much information was also being communicated to someone sensitive enough to notice it was the most important.  I wasn’t daydreaming in class.  You can’t in that kind of environment.  In moments of meditation though, I could fill my field with roses, say, and Sensei might respond, “The scent of flowers”.  Or, I might have a question, and forming it into a ball, “bounce pass” it to Sensei, who would answer.    I learned that I could prepare myself for teaching a class by visiting with them in my head first.  I would then be prepared for practical issues.

In fact, this being prepared is what I’ve come to believe being moderately psychic is good for.  The attack on the Twin Towers was one of those visits, one of those, Oh, that’s what that was about” moments.  Another purpose, I learned in the dojo, seems to be helpful in creating or soothing relationships.  I’d spent some time imagining I was playing one of our games with someone I was having a hard time getting to know or feeling comfortable working with.  Taking a clue from Sensei, I engaged him in the game with no other intent.  Next day, he comes up to me and sits down and starts talking with me.  We were so engaged that Sensei had to tell us to be quiet!  When it was time to sit on the mat, my newly made friend plopped himself next to me.  We had a great time working together that day.  Absolutely a first for us and a totally different side of him, for me.

All of this is still casual, still not purposeful, not in service.  Even my communication with people on the Huna forum is like this.  Um, Huna is what Long called Hawai’ian Magic.  In between Long and Huna Trainer, I’d found Serge Kahili King’s Urban Shaman.  Exactly the thing I was looking for.  At least the title was.  And some of the stuff inside.  Between King and Huna Trainer, came Aikido.  I thought I had finally found my community of service.  I was a first level black belt, had started working with the children’s class, and had even co-created a couple of workshops for a women’s class.  Evidently, this was not the place, either.  Oh, did I mention I’d met a Cherokee shaman while I was there?  Yep.  More interesting stuff happened.  I learned more about reading the environment .  This time it was cars on the road as messengers.  (Note to Self: There’s a pattern here.  Find it.)

Ok. Now I’m up to Huna Trainer.  It started as a podcast and became an online forum that I became part of as quickly as I could by submitting pieces for the podcasts second incarnation.  The forum is part of the reason I’m writing this.  It’s a group of people who are in similar practice.  But it’s more than that.  It’s also a group of people with experiences similar to mine.   And now that I feel settled in and more connected to the people rather than the group, some old questions are floating to the surface.  What exactly do I know and what do I do with it?  How does it work?

I’m back in pursuit of Magic.  Reading the original words in this changed context is telling me that now’s the time to put things into perspective.  When I started this journey, I was on my own.  I didn’t know how to talk about my experiences or sometimes even form the questions.  Since I’ve heard others’ stories framed in a common language I have a place to start.

Here.  Now.

I’ve been listening to LimeNViolet, finally. I’ve had the podcasts on my computer for a while but, I had to be in the right mood to listen. I’m so glad I did. Listen to it, that is. They are rowdy and bawdy and so much people I’d love to be eavesdropping on. Which is what the podcast sounds like. I totally got off on listening to the duo opening a box from Germany. Or perusing, and squealing well into pin-the-needle zone, over yarn online. Oh, and stash enhancement? I got that from them also. Need. More. Yarn.

I got to be part of Franklin Habit’s 1000 Knitters project in Sacramento today taking photos of local knitters. It took me a long time to get to the site since I don’t follow directions well.

This is my very good excuse for not writing today. I got to talk about my podcast essay with him and share my excitement about a new development. Not directly a result of the podcast, but from my continuing investigation of my grandmother’s appearances on the ‘net. An exciting–maybe overexciting–day.

I decided that I would post the text of the Cast On essay, today, my birthday.

MOOD

Today, I darned a sock and made a bed…

This is a line from a poem, written by my grandmother, Mae V. Cowdery. It is from a slim volume of poems– We Lift Our Voices. — she published in 1936. Whenever I spent time with my mother in Philadelphia, I would search out the volume and leaf through the pages until drawn to one title or another.

I’m an occasional poetry lover, preferring science fiction and fantasy, my mother’s entertainments. And yet, for some reason, this line lingers, still, creating a ghost image of what my grandmother must have felt about the minutiae of keeping house. Looking around at the chaos I call home I wonder what she would really think of it.

Not one bed made. Not only unmade, but covered in unfolded laundry. I don’t even know where I would find the makings even if I chose to make any one of them. As for socks. I’d rather make one than darn one. In fact, when I recite the words in my head it’s usually, “today I made a sock and darned a bed”. Except I don’t make socks. And I like bed too much for even such a mild swearing as “darn”.

All that being said, there is still something that lingers, that calls to me from those words. It came to me while I was working on a piece of lace knitting. Nothing special. Just a collection of thread and holes to find out how this stuff works. Of all the knitting I’ve done, knitting lace is the most satisfying. I only discovered that last month with my first lace knitting project, finished. It satisfies me with its requirement for focus on making each stitch. Even the plain rows require attention lest I miss one of the yarn-overs of the previous row.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reacquainted with my grandmother within the same month, that I’ve come to associate lace knitting with poetry. Over the last five years or so, I’ve found references to her and her poetry on the internet. And last month I made contact with a woman who is writing about her for an anthology of Harlem Renaissance poets. The image I have of her now, wearing a suit and tie, emphasizes my imagined inheritance of housekeeping ennui. And yet…

For all the chaos, I have friends that would rather be here than at home. They say, it looks like me. The walls are painted the color of sunlight through leaves and glow and move with leaf shadow in sunlight. The walls are hung with quilt explorations. The windows are edged with tiny Buddhas among even smaller animal totems: horses, rabbits, rhinos. A small blue glass holds three coccoons. When the fan is on the flat rings with the chimes of an Em7th chord.

Ok. So I’ve decided we don’t like housework. There is more to keeping a home, a home where poetry grows anyway. And I realized, sitting and knitting lace, that this is a home for poetry and other makings. Lingering after all the other voices on proper living have had their say, the poet’s voice prevails.

As for me…today, I leave a sink full of dishes and the eggshells unmulched. I’m rushing to catch the cone of gold cotton, to photograph it glowing in that deep sunlight way it does, nestled there between the bookshelves, against the green wall. And then, I write how knitting lace is making poetry, and how making poetry remakes the world.

Leaving the dishes may not be a kind of home keeping that Mae Cowdery would fully approve of, yet, it could be one that she would recognize as right and good.

The poem:

Mood

I am a strange creature
Of precarious moods
More changeful than the weather…
Today I did a simple task
(I darned a sock and made a bed)
And now my heart is singing…
It will not last—I know too well
How soon some straying thought
Will grow into a sullen cloud
And brood across my sky…
So I will sing the while
This errant sunlight glimmers
Through my day.

I think I spent nearly all of the day on Ravelry. Yes, it was somehow productive. I may have answered one question. I know I wrote a little about Margaret Stove’s Creating Original Hand-knitted Lace.

This was recommended to me in the Lace Tech group. Specifically I was sent to David Reidy’s Sticks and Strings podcast to hear his interview with Margaret herself. I was inspired and nearly willing to send to Australia for the book. Fortunately, Mum, a deft hand at both knitting and the internet, suggested I do a little searching first–past Amazon.

I found a listing for the book in a library catalog in Oregon. The publisher? Lacis. Yes, the same Lacis that I have been to on a couple of occasions and the source of Evelyn Clark’s Knitting Lace Triangles I wrote about earlier. I ordered the book and received it within a couple of days, weekend notwithstanding.

So, as a kind of thank you to the existence of Ravelry, I spent a lot of time there.

I have got some knitting done. Done, not just started and understood. I finished a square that will be a stroller blanket of sorts. I’m trying it out tomorrow to see how I feel about it. Meanwhile, I’m looking to use the same brand of yarn to make scarves for people. Still a good way to practice lace knitting. One good edging will make a nice looking scarf. And because it is a fluffy yarn, it should be cozy without being bulky. Something to tuck inside the collar of a coat. Not good for keeping the rain off.