In The Garden Living an RPG Life

Today, I’ll be finishing up my recording for the Huna Training podcast.  I’ve lost the anxiety of waiting for the final production to be posted.  I’m getting more comfortable with the whole process.  Probably, since I made the step sideways to write and record for Cast-On, Huna Training is more like coming home.  One day I will be creating my own podcast.  I like talking–or at least reading–about myself too much to let this kind of thing go on too long without me.

So, what am I waiting for?  Everything else to be slotted into place.  I still don’t have a strong sense of doing things on a regular basis.  I’m working on that muscle.  I can log on and read and respond daily, but creating for myself and publishing, that’s taking a new muscle for a walk.

Thinking of changing my behavior as learning to use muscles helps a lot.  It helps me take my time and work patiently with myself.  I’m taking a Pilates class with an instructor-in-training.  I’m finding out what muscle training feels like in my body and the physical pain I feel, and the frustration I’m experiencing, is not being mirrored in my writing activities.  I’ve forgiven myself for not being able to perform as I think I should.

Instead of making this place look all filled up and just like everyone else’s, or the way I think it should, I am off making new friends.  And learning new things.  And that activity, like going out dancing instead of to the gym, makes me happier and more willing to tell stories about.  In other words, come here and write.

I got an email today, from Brenda Dayne of Cast On. She wants to use an audio essay I sent her.

The essay was inspired by her Summer Camp series, and wasn’t about summer camp. It was about my grandmother and my approach to housekeeping.

I think of this present as being from both of them. Mostly from my grandmother, though. I never got birthday presents from her, my mother’s mother, Mae. I got birthday cards with crisp five dollar bills in them from my father’s mother, Bertha. All I’ve ever had of Mae, or Roachie as I was tole she’d been called, was her only daughter and through her, part of my life. And the knitting.

Bertha didn’t knit, wasn’t a maker. She was a missionary wife and mother. I knew her as someone who managed on her own, in her own house, on an artificial leg. Yes, she fell from time to time and I was there sometimes to help her up. Mostly, though, she did everything herself. I spent part of the year that my grandfather, Sam, died, living with her. She’d wash my hair in the kitchen sink, first covering the burners on the stove before having me lie down under the tap water.

She gave me my first taste of cake batter. And my love for big, bright, open kitchens as well a longing for a real chest freezer. And rolling down lawns and sunbathing.

(this should have been a Google map of Bertha’s house, now my stepMom’s)

Mae only left me poetry. It was a slim volume of her poems that she had published. I have a photocopy of it. I didn’t take the one my mother had and when my grandfather called and asked if there was anything of my mother’s I wanted, I didn’t think to ask for the book. Or the knitting things. Or her science fiction collection. Or the chairs I sat in while I figured out how to knit, that first sweater.

Today, though, I feel I got that birthday present Roachie never sent me.

This is the Bird’s Eye pattern begun. And about to be frogged!

I don’t mind. It’s taken me this long to get it started and there is very nice progress. That I can see the little circles this time. I’ve been trying to really see the pattern, locked in all those little marks on the chart, and it’s taken me on quite a journey.

First I tried writing it out. This helped a little bit. I at least got to see where the rhythms might be. I could see what the pattern was built from Then I knit just those stitches.

. This doesn’t tell much about the pattern. I knit the pattern with knit rows in between the pattern rows. I almost went with this idea, of adding knit rows between the pattern stitches and making a quite different object.

The pattern, this bird’s eye, as it is to be knit, scared me. When I get scared of something printed, I go on a search. I seem to take the long way round to find myself at the center of my search, but it works. There’s a benefit.

I found more Shetland patterns online. Knitting-and has a group of knitting patterns called “spider” and they have a structure similar to the bird’s eye. In my Knitting Shetland Patterns From Charts I found the pattern again. There’s a Lace Symposium online that told me that for all their apparent complexity, Shetland patterns are relatively simple. The simplicity of the pattern made it easy to memorize, and thus profitable to knit.

I could see that simplicity in the Spider stitch patterns. I saw that and more. I saw a quarternary, if that’s a real word, number system. If binary is base two. These patterns are base four, quarternary. 0=yarn over, k=1, k2t=2, sk2p=3. Spiders and number systems. Mmmm. Story fodder.

When she knits, she knits a particular rhythm. Pod notices it and comes to see that what her husband can’t express to the other musicians, was the idea of phrasing. She has that idea in her fingers. Maybe, she knits the same combination of stitches but with a different phrasing. Does this make a different pattern to her? It could be so. This could be what else Pod notices, another step he can take towards her acquaintance.

So, I will be frogging the rows, I’ve knitted already. My plan is to move the knitting along by only using the Bird’s Eye as the end of the wrap and not the whole thing. Not this time. I don’t have time for that. I’ve figured out where the center of the shawl pattern is and I will echo the shape of the point in the knitted part. The shawl is charted for points at both ends, for a diamond. A very useful arrangement.

Meanwhile, I’ve practiced the combinations of yarn-overs, the rhythms of the stitch combinations. Like practicing scales and other combinations in preparation for playing a more complex work.

I finally listened to the Purl Diving podcast. I had been feelng frustrated with this process. I’ve been designing, or trying to design a gift. The piece has to fit the person, the occasion, and my skill. There is more to the process, but that’s all I’m going to say about it for now. So, hearing the podcast telling about the process as I was experiencing it, and after the fact of my coming to the end of the preparation, hearing it after all that I felt comforted. Soothed. Well accompanied.

Whew! That’s enough for now. Ravelry calls!

Listening to Shakespeare and Dragons again. Stark’s finally not only sorted out what the hell teachers meant when they asked for the theme of a piece, but he’s also helped me see how to describe my story and its world.

When teacher’s asked for the theme of a story or an essay, they seemed happy when the student came up with some kind of statement. Love is Blind. Love Conquers All. Stark starts by defining “thematic subject”, an abstract concept that the story revolves around. “Love” is the thematic subject of the previous statements. It’s the distinction between the theme and the subject of the theme that helps me out enormously.

The Power of the Spirit, or the Power or Dangers of Technology, are the thematic subjects of Star Wars. The characters respond to this subject according to their characters or personalities. The theme is revealed by the reactions and responses of the characters, especially by how the individual characters align themselves with and away from the thematic subject. It’s this alignment through which the story is told. The theme of Star Wars is The Spirit Conquers Technology. Thus the theme is what the author feels or thinks about the thematic subject.

Think of an anthology of essays and stories on a particular topic, say Nature. Within each piece on the inside each author reveals her theme. Some of them may be the same. These we would group together. If we were looking for movies that discussed Technology we would be looking for the author’s, or director’s or even photography director’s response to the topic. These words—discussion, and topic—are useful to maintain the distinction between theme and thematic subject. What is the piece about? This is the thematic subject. What does the creator say through the characters and situations in the story about the subject? This is the theme, the result of the discussion. The deepest, most satisfying stories might be the ones that examine their thematic subjects from a variety of perspectives, that yield a bouquet of themes, complementary and revealing.

So, what does this have to do with my story? What are the thematic subjects of my stories, of my world? I don’t know. I think there is a position, a topic. I just haven’t yet found the statement that defines it. I’m discovering this through the characters… I hope. Maybe there doesn’t have to be one at the start of the piece. Maybe it comes in the revision process. I’m writing to discover the characters and their setting. Hmm. This suggests that one thematic subject is Relationship. Specifically the characters have a relationship with the earth. I am beginning to believe that their relationship with each other depends on that first, primal relationship with the earth. This is what is showing up in this novel. Because of who she is, and she has no name yet, she has one relationship with the earth. Since that relationship has changed, she has changed and that change affects the marriage relationship.

Wow! That’s the most intelligence I’ve applied to this NaNo process. Now, the other characters can be shaped based on the subject, choosing along those lines. Well, I don’t know that I will be shaping them. My characters usually just reveal themselves and I shape their stories to work together. I might also be able to create better opposition to the hero, whoever that is. I don’t seem to have one in my stories. I usually write about victims. I wonder what that’s about. No time to consider. He’s talking about how to build the world and the story through the characters, character design, while keeping things like thematic subject in mind.

Paul Stark’s Shakespeare and Dragons takes a literary view of world building. Preparing for this year’s NaNoWrimo, I am delighted to have found this podcast. I’ve even gone so far as to put it on CD’s so that I can listen while I’m driving. So far, I’ve heard things that have helped me think productively about this year’s story. More importantly, about the characters.

This is the benefit of Stark’s character-centered rather than mechanics-centered approach a la Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, he talks about mechanical world building, considering things like geography and weapons. The difference between his approach and that of the usual RPG talk is that he is an English teacher who merges the terms and concepts we ignored in school with our desire to imagine different worlds for our storytelling.

He insists that we remain character focused. Even when he is talking about the “tone” or atmosphere of the world we are creating, we are asked to see our characters in that atmosphere and how it impacts their behavior. A really useful consideration that I wouldn’t have put together with worldbuilding is Maslov’s triangle of needs. Already the brief image I had of my main characters has been deepened. What is her need? Where is she on the triangle?

She is lonely. (I didn’t know that.) Why is she lonely? She’s married. OK so she’s married to a jerk. Why is he a jerk? Where on the triangle is his Jerkdom born?

She’s lonely because she is cut off from her culture, her people. How did she get cut off. It happened when the Tailor set off his device. ( It did? Wow!) Well, if she has been affected by the Tailor’s actions, her husband cannot be writing the folk opera that recalls the massacre. Oohh. This is not that opera. It is a foreshadowing of that opera.

I know she knits. I’ve figured out that her knitting connects her to her people. I know who her people are. I also know that a minor character in the first novel is being reprised in a more major role. Now I just have to figure out what part of the triangle he’s on.

Stark draws some of his material from Guns, Germs and Steel as well as the Peace Corps. When he looks at how culture forms, or the effect of geography on trade patterns, he ties this larger picture to the movement of individual characters in our stories. We are invited to apply the kinds of questions he asks to our own character building.

Yes, there is homework. In one episode we are asked to sit out characters down in the local tavern and see them kitted out with their usual stuff and fixing a small wound. Then we are asked to trace back to their source all the things the character is wearing. Trace the tools back to the mine or the animal, the medicine to it’s root. Then ask, how easy was it to acquire each element?

Already, I am wondering where she gets her needles and yarn from? I never asked that question? I assumed. Something so simple now has a much greater impact on the story and on the character. Just considering those pieces, I now see how the relationship between Pod and her develops. He’s a thief after all.

I had already been inspired by a story I heard on the news about the recovery of a street in Iraq called “music street”. It’s the area of the market where all the instruments as well as the musicians who played them could be found. One of the characters in the story would be from such a street. Her husband is a composer. What is the source of the materials he uses? How does their acquisition impact the marriage? How does he respond to her need for two sticks and some string?

More listening and thinking to come. And, yes I’m knitting. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.