In The Garden Living an RPG Life

That is the name of the comic book text book.  It is also what I think I’ll be doing this year for NaNoWriMo.  I seem to have let go of everything that keeps me from being happy with a coloring tool in my hand.  Spent a while today coloring in a friend’s coloring book. Working out the shading for the princess’ dress.  Getting the shadows on the faces right.  Choosing the right colors.  Checking out what the mark-making effects of crayons are when I use the drawing signature of DaVinci and Gorey.

What does this have to do with novel writing?  Well, the main characters keep drawing journals as part of their work practice.  A lot of my character creation has been through illustrations in old children’s story books.  I’m just realizing how much keeping a journal figures in my novels.

In the first novel, the journal full of visual ideas, sparks the consequences, literally.  In the second novel, it’s both journals (the ones belonging to the same person as in the first) and children’s books.  In the third, hmmm.  I don’t remember having journals but now that I think of it, why not?  The fields of music and knitting both have journal keeping as their practice, if not exactly as we think of them.  In the fourth book, its those journals again plus another person whose work requires them.

Whew!   I thought the retrospective didn’t occur till after one was dead, and then not for a long time!

I don’t know if I will be making pictures while I’m writing. I will wait and see what happens.   The one thing I’ve learned from my own renewed attraction to drawing is to not push it.  Most of the re-acquaintance came from my conversations with Gretchen about her own relationship with drawing.  I got to feel lonely for drawing.  Mind you, I haven’t let it go completely.  My journals are organized around making some kind of pictorial mark.  I make a rectangle on the top right corner of each new page and put a nice border around it.  Only after I write the date next to the frame do I start my entry for the day.  There are still blank frames on some pages.  I’m not committed to filling them up.  I just acknowledge that there is a place for drawing in my writing life.

Between my Catrina figure and my desire to build a fabric design practice, I’m realizing the perhaps I have really only thought of drawing as a tool and not something to do just for the heck of it.  I am not, even though I might like to be, someone who loves drawing.  Just as I am not a musician.  Or an electronic technician.  I may not even be a writer, for all that I write.  I am a person who can do all of these things toward some other end.  Or because of some other inspiration.  I don’t know how to talk about it any better than that.  I am expecting things to come together though, as I age a little more.

Something about how the spirit moves or can be perceived to move through all my interests and endeavors, seems to bring me peace.   There are people for whom all those activities are roads to spirit.  For many practitioners, art, electronics, music and the like are their path to something much larger than themselves.  This something gives them comfort when their Adventures take them deep into dungeons where they need to find their way past familiar and unfamiliar monsters.  I think, for me, writing is the Way.  The other activities seem to be just a way to see into the Mystery through eyes that are only partially focused through music, electronics, drawing and the like.

Fine.  Now I’ve gone and got deep.  Not to worry.  It’s Day of the Dead eve and these are perfectly good thoughts to have tonight.  The souls of those who know more about these things are about to be let loose to visit in our dreams and desires.  Might as well get things properly lined up.  Who knows what gifts of insight my Mae might bring me, what experiences of the other side I might receive from Ricky or Darryl.  And mom and dad and all the others behind them might have stories I can use to clarify my purpose.  Sam, dear Sam, might even bring me closer to the forge and show me how the center of the earth creates, what the Earth Dragon dreams about.  I can use that in my story tomorrow night.

Night all.

Blessings on us all.

Just got notified that my Catrina fabric has been shipped.  I’m looking forward to seeing how it turned out.

I realized today, after spending an exciting hour or so in the library finding stuff, that the fabric design is part of this year’s novel.  Even though I have a story line, I don’t have a lot of details to work with.  Usually this doesn’t bother me.  Usually I don’t notice!  Usually, also, I have had a lot of other elements that I’m trying to fit into the novel, elements I’ve had in mind for a while.

My composing strategy is to ask “how does this fit into the world?”.  Then I make stuff up to fit.  For example, I bought a sewing machine the other day.  It’s a beautiful White Family Rotary machine from about 1909 or so.  It’s electric, but I read that this model usually is set up as a treadle.   Since I bought the machine during the time I am planning for Nanowrimo, I wondered how the machine might fit into a world without electricity.

I decided that the people who brought the machine into the world also brought the treadle base as well as the electric parts.  It is possible to generate electricity manually (think bicycle light), and the people who brought the machine know how to do that as well as have the materials to do it with.  So, what’s the big deal?

Well, in the first novel major havoc is wreaked by someone creating electricity.  Ok, so it was done on the scale of a major lightning storm, but it shouldn’t have been done in the first place.  Electricity is prohibited in the world.  So, how is it possible that an electric sewing machine is ok?  Ah!  That’s what makes the story interesting this time around.  Answering that question helped me create a little more depth about the world, help me to define this particular aspect of the landscape.  It also helps bridge between the world of this novel and the next one.

This novel is the last of this series.  This series has been a way for me to create the world and get a bunch of ideas out of my head and onto paper in a proper context.

Ooo…  Watching a kid’s show, Zula Patrol, about clouds. Today I found a book about drawing clouds.  Weather is an interest of one of my major characters and part of the conflict in the novel.  Love me some synchronicity!

I’m off to visit Ravelry to check up on the gang intending to write next month.  I get to go to the local kick-off party, here in Sacramento.  I’ve been working for the previous ones.  Looking forward to hanging out with other people writing furiously.

Oooo! Less than 30 days till NaNoWriMo begins and I can start writing for real.  I’ve got lots of notes and ideas for the last of the five novels in this set.  The first one is The Tailor’s Tale, the one that started it all.  I’ve already told some of the story behind the story, though, so I’ll spare us the retelling.

I had a revelation this morning.  Not just another idea, but the kind of revelation that I feel with my whole body, a feeling of living the idea rather than just having it wriggling about inside my skull.

I was thinking about some of the ideas I had for Spoonflower fabric and Etsy.  With Spoonflower working on a marketplace, I need to rethink what I want to use Etsy for.  This is where the RPG meets Real Life.  I’ve been talking about role playing a little mystically, invoking the world of magic that is usually associated with gaming while trying to keep it on this side of fantasy.  There’s more to my idea of what a role-playing game can be, though.

It’s no coincidence that the world I built is made from the fabric trade. It’s a medium I have a lot of lust for.  I can practically hear and feel the rustle of embroidered silks and velvets when watching The Tudors for example.  The weight of the swirling cape in the opening credits is very nearly fabric-pron.  You wouldn’t know this about me if we met however.  All I talk about is the magic-leaning stuff.  I am, on a day to day basis, an advocate of empowerment, a fool for personal transformation, a getting-to-good type geek.  In another life, I used to tell myself (too keep myself sane), I would probably be a shaman.  Now, though, with the chasm of retirement looming before me, I’m thinking that I should consider myself a shaman with a fabric shop!

The RPG part?  Well, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no business, to misquote another nurse/nanny type.  For me the format of the role-playing game is perfect for organizing what I know and what I need to find out, while keeping the whole process on the higher side of fun.  NPC’s are in place as the creators of Ravelry, Etsy and Spoonflower, for example.  My Adventuring party?  So far there is only one other person, I think.  We’re friends and kind of on the same path.  Whether we are on the same Adventure…?  I don’t know yet.  Only the encounters and the traveling through the landscape will tell.

The first part of my journey will be finishing the novel. Part of finishing the novel, I discovered, is finding out more about money and economics.  The other part, a continuing part, is taking the magic part seriously.  I have always taken it seriously as a study. I’ve just not practiced it in any formal way, with any kind of focus.  Now it’s time to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into skill.

Talking to Gretchen about all of this, we came to the conclusion that this is one way to change a life, to become someone different.  With that in mind, and since documentation is also part of the RPG, I’ll be keeping track of my process.  One reason is that it’s fun.  Another, more important reason, is that some of what I am planning to do is inspired by questions from many non-RPG places.  Some of the questions are those Gretchen and I have asked each other and together of systems we’ve both investigated.

My plan is to show how I move from the system, through the questions, and into some kind of tool to be used in my Game.  The name of my game?  I guess it’s Retirement.  Retirement, the Game.   Ok… Maybe that’s just the working title.  I have an idea that there is another title waiting to be revealed, but that’s another post.

Meanwhile, consider this the first of the pre-NaNoWriMo posts.

Guess not if you are a hibernating bear!  And I’m not so sure I am not.

So… where have I been?  Writing actually.  And making my mind up that I am a writer and not a knitter.  All that means is that the needles get dropped and left behind for the pen more than the other way around.  It also means that the pen gets picked up for other things that the needles don’t.  Like drawing.  I think.

I had high hopes of making a writerly space there, but something else got in the way.  Yet another writing pursuit in the form of an online technical writing class.  That has been more troublesome than I thought it would be.  I think it’s because the universe of technical writing has nothing to do with what I actually might right about.  OK, so that’s a bit of exaggeration, but still.  I don’t work in a field where office memos are part of my everyday speech pattern.  As it is I had to create a Second Life project for one assignment.  I also ended up using the Comic Kazes blog for another.  And somewhere along the line I discovered that it might do me well to learn Adobe Acrobat for real.  Something about on-demand publishing.

Which of course sent me running back to my NaNo-novels to see how ready they might be for publishing.

Only if by publishing you mean getting someone to put them into print for me so that I can use them like I would any novel I would want to analyse.  Only this time I would be quite critical and tell the author how she might improve the story and the obvious typos.  I think that would be quite satisfying since I know the author would listen to me.  Nothing like talking back to an author knowing you will be heard!  Gives reading with a pencil much more impact.  More power.

Now, I want to shift the blog to where it was heading anyway. Shift it visually away from knitting.  And I just got something.

I wrote a couple of comments in response to a couple of my grandmother’s fans.  In one of them I was remembering reading Mae’s book of poetry and I wrote that I was sitting in her mother’s chair and my mother was sitting nearby knitting.  That’s the connection and I never saw it till now.  My mother didn’t write. Neither did my great-grandmother.  Granny crocheted and Mommy knitted.  I suspect, though, that Mommy knitted instead of writing.  I suspect a lot of women did needle work instead of something else they wanted to do more.  Which makes Mae’s book even more remarkable.  I know that my mother had the desire to write and to make other kinds of art.  For one reason or another, she didn’t.

So much for returns and revelations.

Why do we keep turning away from home to feed our desires?  Perhaps because they get buried at home.  More revelation.   I am looking outside myself for source and sustenance.  At the moment, I am also looking at what appears to be some Granny wrapped in a lace shawl. It’s just photos of my first lace piece draped over a chair.

Proof that I can follow directions as well as finish a complex task.

I think I’m doing battle with ghosts here.  Letting them out so they can go home and leave me to play.  I know this lace thing is good.  I also like the practical stuff, like sweaters and socks.  I just don’t know how to put it all together with the writing and drawing and the rest of my life’s tasks.

Oh well.  That’s what Second Life is for!  Taking me away from all this.  You can’t really knit in SL.  And besides, I get to be a Shaman Bunny.  Can’t do that in Real Life, and while a bunny

can write in Second Life, it can’t in Real Life….

So there!

OK… done venting.  Will be back with more about the Shaman Bunny or another story.  Meanwhile, I’ll be changing things around a bit.

Whew! It’s been a long time it seems. I’m not counting NaNoWriMo though it’s a significant amount of writing. I’m thinking about the incidental writing I started on 100words.com, that exactly 100 word post we are supposed to create. I’ve found since I started that practice (and let it slip for a while) that I like the idea of using the form to write stories. There is just enough room in that many words to create a complete, if very short, story. There’s room to establish place and time and person. There’s room to finish with some emotion. What there isn’t very much room for is build up to action, character devleopment, maybe a couple of other things.

I decided that I would pursue the story idea by setting up a single situation that has a beginning, middle and end: crossing the street. You must admit there is a lot of potential for all kinds of things to unfold in such a storyscape. I already published a few for the month of February. I’m going to keep it as my theme for this month and see how it goes. In another place I did something similar, writing one hundred words at a time to create a story. I hadn’t been able to squeeze the whole thing in a single hundred words, though. Ended up with, I think, three hundred. Still very short.

I know I started a knitting theme here and I haven’t dropped it. Knitting is both a practice and a metaphor, though. The blog is where all gets knitted together into a single garment. Kinda like the knitted shirts in the story. Don’t ask me which story! There are a few versions. The one I know it by is The Seven Swans. I watch on Jim Henson’s The Storyteller as some smaller number of ravens, three I think. Anyway, the point is that I see those finished garments as somehow representing aspects of themselves that the boys had lost or forgotten with the death of their mother and father’s remarriage. Or at least that’s what came to me just now! I hadn’t given the idea a single thought before this moment. Wonder why now?

Meanwhile, I have to start dusting off my writing since I decided that I am applying for an MFA in creative writing. This is almost out of the blue, not quite. Remember that call to adventure Chris Baty posted on the NaNoWriMo site? That’s all it takes. Someone putting out a call that resonates with me at the right time and “poof!”, it all comes together. Kinda like being an overnight sensation after working at it for twenty-odd years. I’ve been gradually going public with the decision since moving too fast usually had the result of pushing me into my fear zone and not letting me out. Almost got stuck in there earlier today. I was feeling like I was just dreaming of something that I couldn’t have, wasn’t qualified for, when I got into conversation with a friend, who studies art. There was something about sitting with her and just talking that got me seeing what it means to be a writer. No, strike that: what it means for me to be a writer.

First of all, it finally registered that I prefer writing to anything else. I will write, albeit posts in forums, when I will only dream about knitting or quilting or any of the other creative things I do. I used to complain that my drawing journals filled up with words faster than with drawings. I guess I’m letting go the idea that I will have drawing journals anymore, right? Nope! In fact, the way I knew that this decision was probably not just another daydream is the way other elements in my life stepped back in importance. Suddenly all were willing to serve the writing in a way I’ve never experienced before. That’s the experience I hold onto when I am in doubt.

The hardest thing in the process may be defining myself as a writer. And then again, it may not. There may be no hard thing in the process, just things I haven’t addressed yet. I’m trusting my greater self here. It’s not let me down before, so I don’t expect that it will this time. I just have to remember how to hold my mind in patience. There’s lots of stuff to do between now and whenever I send the application in. My plan is to make the January 2009 application date (and yes, I will triple check that that’s the right date). I was briefly considering November, but that’s saved for NaNo. Who knows! Maybe writing a novel every November is what I’m meant to do with my life. It wouldn’t be a bad purpose.

OK. That’s enough catching up for now. Gotta write more stories.

I’m only a little surprised that I have already made the first steps on my Adventure.  I found some much needed advice and a toolkit to carry.  DIYplanner.com and 43Folders.com are delightfully geeky and just what I need.  Between them I’ve accumulated both the reasons and the means for having and organizing ideas without sitting down with the big book and figuring it all out.

The treasure is a deconstruction of productivity concepts embedded in a constructed daily planner.  It’s as if I ordered a bunch of spirit helpers to go out and find/create the tools I needed to get on with my plans and ideas.

My favorite part so far, ok one of my favorite parts, is the collection of writer’s pages complete with variations on story boards. One of my other favorite parts is the templates.  These are the patterns the pages were created from.  The idea is to either modify (hack) the pages to better suit your own needs or to create pages of your own design to enclose activities no one else is working on.

I spent the last few days reading and evaluating the sites for myself while taking in a little bit at a time.  One of my favorite people seems to be a hero on the sites–Ben Franklin.  Not that I’ve studied him or anything.  Just something about his creativity and the profusion of his ideas and adventures.  He was my kind of Adventurer and this seems to be my time for trying to follow his trail.

Finally finding a use for all the 3×5 cards I’ve piled up, I printed out the Hipster PDA.  This is a good idea since I use my PDA so often that the battery totally drained and I lost all my data.  The thing about digital systems is that they are inflexible.  They force us to bend to their limits instead of serving ours.  This is probably why the people on these sites are techies–programmers and the like.  They know better than anyone the value of working on paper and the need for a flexible system.

My new motto is going to be: Look to the Geek!

Oh, and one of the page designs seems to suit itself really well for jotting down knitting patterns as I make them up!  The layout is perfect.  Since I’m using the 3×5 cards as a carry-around, I may have to scan the little pages to do something else with them.  We’ll see.  That the pages are loose and can be moved around with ease makes using the system more functional than my usual journal.  The 3×5 system is a simple way to start, a way to find out what works and what doesn’t.

Meanwhile, the basis for much of what got all of this started is reading about Getting Things Done.  Evidently there’s a big book about it, productivity, and lots of people have read it.  The people I’m reading have digested it and put it to use and simplified it.  In other words, hacked it.  Life Hacker is where I got directed to from Ravelry.

Knitting and writing: two worlds that provide more than just entertainment and relaxation.  The creator of DIYplanner also does NaNoWriMo.  That’s it! Anyone worth knowing will be found either writing in November or knitting anytime.

More on the Adventure as I go.  Meanwhile, I have a yellow sweater to finish.

Chris Baty of NaNoWriMo issued a general Call to Adventure and like a good adventurer, I responded:

What do i want in my garden for this year? Now is the moment of power, the time to plant for this year’s profusion and beauty.

It’s raining, softening the earth, cleansing the air and the plants themselves. The colors, the plants, the groupings all will contribute to the beauty of the garden. Some annuals and of course perrenials. Trees and grasses grouped together. Pots and boxes. Edibles and cuttables. Environmentally suited. I love my succulents that reach deep in the earth and create a savings of water. Seed plants also save resources for another time. Flowers that dry, leaves becoming wreaths and swags. Cuttings to be regrown and passed on. All resources and assets to share, to build an economy on.

This is the first time I’ve really felt the garden for myself. Art and fashion are calling to me even more than writing at the moment. I still have the long novel to work out, and while that has anchored writing, there is more to do with it. Like a vegetable garden or an herb garden, the writing needs to serve more everyday needs. Knitting keeps me quiet and grounded these days. I’m happy. It is the beauty of the garden’s function. Knitting is hummingbirds and butterflies and ladybugs. It is other birds and insects and worms. Practical beauty.

Now is when I put together my ideal garden. And this is also when I add drawing and music. So much to decide on and plant. Chris Baty is hosting a further adventure and it coincides with the new year’s blessing I composed for the Ku’mmunity and continues the theme of profusion. OK so the idea of profusion comes from me, but the opportunity for profusion, for planting a garden of fashion and art and music–that comes from the call.

I’ve been courting the idea of more artistic clothing or at least being styled to reflect my interests, beginning to invest in myself as an expression of beauty as balance, of inner and outer symmetry. Here is my opportunity to commit and consumate.

Listen! Song is everything. The hum of the bird is the bird making itself manifest.

I’ve finished one “leg” of the second wedding scarf. And I’ve started the work to design a little shawl for a little lady as well as having decided that a scarf knitted on the Bond is appropriate for a 5.00 gift exchange.

Back to work.

I forget that the holiday season intensity that everyone else talks about isn’t part of my life.  Not directly anyway.  What I forget it that while I don’t do any of the shopping and shipping, or travel planning, or whatever other people do for the holidays, I am the one holding the fort while they do it.  I forget  until I come home tired and fried.  I forget until I realize that I am behind on my own gift making.

Yes, I have a couple of other occasions to knit for.  There’s a whole new crop of babies in my life that I want to make something for.  There’s still one more wedding gift that I’m behind on.

OK.  Enough whining.  I’m happy that I have all this to do and that all of it is about knitting.  I was happy that when I felt an uh-oh for spending money the other day, and I looked at what I spent it on, it was presents for four people.  Most of being behind is because this is the first year of knitting gifts for me.  I don’t have experience with most of the designs I’m using.  One of my neighbors admired the scarf I was wearing, something I’d made for myself, one of my experiments.  I have that one design that I can just reproduce.  I don’t have to figure out what needle size, or wonder whether it will turn out well or be long enough. I’m making a beanie for the son of a friend of mine (the brother of the lap doily recipient).  I know that one will get done quickly because it’s “blind” knitting meaning I don’t have to look at what I’m doing.

Oh, and I’m also behind posting pictures and keeping up with the blog.  There’s so much going on, I haven’t figured out where the end of the thread is and so haven’t yet unraveled it.  I’m still writing the story of my NaNoNovel.  That excites me.  I started drawing again.  Found this great book, whose title I’d have to get up an go find out, that made sense out of the one kind of drawing I never found a use for: doodling.  I must say, though, that I don’t think it would have sunk in as it has if I hadn’t come back to knitting.  Doodling in drawing is like swatching.  Not like swatching for a project but swatching to learn how a pattern works.  Working with Knitting Delight, I learned how swatching works with the design process.  Doodling is like that.  It’s a way to practice design problems and to work out technical details.  From knitting lace, I recognize that doodling takes part of the whole drawing process and just repeats it over and over.  Knitting the wedding scarf was a kind of doodling.  I took one line of the whole pattern and repeated it.  The same for the scarf my neighbor admired.

The effect of both processes is that I feel much more confident with both lace and drawing.  I have a hard time knowing how to break things down into simpler pieces so that I can practice the parts I don’t know.  From knitting, again, I found that the best way for me to practice is to design something.  When I ‘m doodling, I’m designing the page.  I haven’t quite got the hang of just scribbling.  I want to learn something, build muscle memory.  When I took Judo for a couple of semesters at school, Sensei told us that we should practice correctly.  I get that.  We train our muscles to perform for us while we relax into the pleasure of the task.  Doodling… I’m making and solving a puzzle.  I guess I’ll have to post some of them.  They still look like a tangle of yarn to me, so, yeah.  Knitting and doodling.

Who knew how much I would have to be catching up on after NaNoWriMo this year!  The great yellow sweater is nearly done.  It’s had to share space with more writing, work and family that I didn’t have the previous years.  Oh, and there was no sweater either.  The knitting, at least with this degree of commitment, was not part of my life the previous couple of years.

As for the sweater… I have the hem to finish, an armhole to close and the neckline to decide a final design for.  I put ribbing on it to get it started since this is the first top-down  and raglan that I’ve made.  I think I want more neck and will probably pick up stitches and add something turtle-ish to it.  I might not even take the ribbing out.

Still haven’t decided how I want to finish the bottom.  Someone might think that with my bulk I’d want the least attention to it I could manage.  Nope.  I’m actually considering a knitted finish meaning the hem would roll.  I think the inconsistency of rolls everywhere else and something different on the hem would bother me more than  calling attention to my dimensions.

I haven’t fully visualized my options, though and I can still wear it unfinished.  Ok. So, it would only be at home, or in an emergency.  Why not?  Isn’t that what lifelines are for?

Meanwhile, it’s time to finish up the second wedding scarf.  The first one, the one that started it all, is done but for the blocking.  Since I decided that I would give the scarves to the couple at the annual New Year’s Eve party (where we spent most of our time over the years), I’ve been able to focus on other tasks and getting me into something warm and functional.  Plus with all that stockinette knitting, my hands are fully exercised and the rest of the knitting should go more quickly.

OK.  That’s it for now.  Still writing on the novel, a first for me, but that’s all that’s new on any other front.

Later.