Dogs Steal Yarn

Happy Halloween!

Thumper's first sentence

Thumper has been talking for quite some time now. Months and months, and I wish I could recall exactly when it started (or I wish I'd written it down, rather than assuming I would remember). His first word was daddy, and then came mommy, ball, Dido (for Diego), belly, etc etc. In recent weeks he added no and not to his arsenal, and began to use them rather forcefully, testing the toddler waters. It was always single words or two word combos (like, "me that" or "my that" when he wants something) mixed with his own Thumper non-English language, until the other day. The other day, he produced his first sentence. Three words, all strung together in context. I was so proud. Though...the sentence itself... I hope it doesn't hint at some really terrible two's ahead of us.

His first sentence: "No, not that!"

And he's been saying it ever since. This morning, he decided to up the level of difficulty and add another word. "No, not that, Mommy!"

I love that he's talking, I love how verbal he is. But is it wrong to wish he was saying "yummy scrambled eggs" or "I love you, Mommy" or something like that?

Sigh. No, Mommy. Not that.

ten minutes turns into twenty...and not even any photos for you

It’s Wednesday evening, so it’s writing time again. Thumper and Billy dropped me off at Tandem so that they would have the option of either going out or staying home (we only have one car and I need a new bike helmet so didn't want to ride here). Thumper doesn’t like to be away from me if I’m in the house, so it’s best if either they or I leave. We’ve decided, for this week at least, that in the evening it makes sense for me to be the one to leave the house and on Sunday mornings they can go out and leave me to write in my office. I tend to be easily distracted when trying to write in cafes, so we’ll see how it goes. I’ve got ten minutes to blog now, and then must write.

Writing this second novel is such a different experience from writing the first. Partly because I’ve done it before and have a better grip on my process and what works for me, partly because I’m a different person now than I was when I wrote the first, older and a mother and not in the throes of the hothouse MFA world. But mostly it’s different because this book is different. I thought I had a PROCESS, and that was how I would write all of my books. But now, with this second book which is a different kind of animal than the first, I’m starting to understand that it’s the project that dictates the process.

I wrote the first book entirely blind. That is, I did no planning whatsoever, no outlining, no thinking about what would happen next. I sat down each day and freewrote and let the characters do whatever they wanted to do. I went down a lot of wrong paths that way, and had to edit my way back on track, but that was all part of the process. I got to know the characters well that way, and I like to think that all the writing I did that ended up getting cut, all the excess and all the wrong turns, was background that informed what did make the final draft. The final draft is just under 300 pages. I threw out at least that many pages over the course of the four years it took to write the book. I write my short stories blind, as well. Freewriting first draft is what has always worked best for me.

I’m still freewriting the actual text of this new book, but I’m finding that the story itself demands that I be a bit more deliberate as I write, a bit more aware of where we’re headed. The first book was entirely fictional. This new one is historical, fiction but based on recent history (the East Village 1994-95). So there’s a historical, factual spine to the story, and the fiction is the flesh I’m hanging on it. That means that as I write I need to be aware of how the fictional story interacts with the historical facts, how the fictional timeline intersects with the historical timeline, etc etc. I need to be able to let the prose sprawl in the way that I do, freewriting so I can turn off that damn editor in my head, but at the same time I need to be able to always have my hands around the story, making sure it moves in and around that historical path, if not always firmly on it.

So how do I do that, as a writer who feels stifled by the mere idea of an outline? (Outlines are fantastic if that’s how your brain works. My friend Philip is an amazing, amazing writer and he tends to outline. I, on the other hand, feel constrained by it. I can’t even write on lined paper.) I decided to use index cards (an excuse to use office supplies! I LOVE office supplies!) to map out the historical timeline. I got a big bulletin board at Fred Meyer (“Fred Meyer!” Who out there remembers that Dead Kennedys interlude? That was all I knew of Portland for most of my life). I wrote each point on the historical timeline on an index card (flipped over to the blank side to avoid those pesky lines). These are on white index cards. Then I got a pack of colored index cards. There are three points of view in the novel—two main characters, and then a narrator who pops in occasionally to sound off about the historical/political aspects. The narrator pov exists outside the timeline, so no need to map that out. I assigned each main character their own index card color, and I use those cards to map out their storylines so I can see how their stories align with the historical story. If a restraining order was filed on X date in the real world, I know the characters need to be involved with that at the corresponding point in the story in the fictional timeline, etc.

I’m only 65 pages into the story at this point (I was 76 pages in when I set it aside before the baby was born, but I ended up trashing some when I read back through it the other week), so we’ll see how well this system works going forward. Knowing me, there’s an excellent chance I’ll abandon it and just build up a huge pile of words in first draft and have to edit the hell out of it and beat it into shape to conform with the historical facts later on. But at least I’m making an attempt now. Given my limited writing time now, it’s especially important to me that I be somewhat efficient and be able to pick up where I left off from one writing session to the next. (I used to write 6 to 8 hours a day almost every day before! I had no idea what a luxury that was. Luxury of the childless, though, so I don’t miss it so much).

Okay…so I just took 20 minutes to blog instead of the allotted 10. Ah well.

And now, really, to work.

Not a Rhinebeck post

I may not be at Rhinebeck with most of my knitty friends, but I'm still managing to have the best weekend I've had in...well...maybe since Rhinebeck last year?

Yesterday morning, Billy, Thumper, and I met my friend Tereza and her son at the Children's Museum. Tereza and I were friends a million years ago in undergrad, and hadn't seen each other since graduating in '95. We found each other again on Friendster (last year, obviously, since Friendster is now a ghost town). Guess where she lives? And she has a son 10 months older than Thumper. In Utopia you reconnect with old college friends and it turns out they've moved to the same city as you and have children close in age to yours. (She and her husband are expecting their second in January. I think an acorn hat may be just the thing...) It's wonderful getting to know Tereza all over again, this time as adults and mothers. It's also comforting to have someone in town who knew me as a teenager. It's nice to have something outside of our immediate family that isn't so entirely NEW, you know?

Thumper had a blast at the Children's Museum. I think we'll be spending a lot of time there. Yesterday they had a truck petting zoo set up outside, with a fire engine, an ambulance, and a backhoe. Thumper was all about the fire engine.

Yesterday evening we had some friends over for dinner, including Tereza and her son. (Her husband was home with a cold, unfortunately.) I made an entirely vegan meal for a crowd of meat-eaters and I'm happy to say it went over VERY well. A house full of friends, a table full of food (including tostones...mmm...), a couple of happy toddlers... Clearing the table and finding our friend Kent already up to his elbows in soapy water, doing dishes, comfortable enough in our home to just dig in and start cleaning... The sound of Tereza speaking to her son, a voice I used to hear in the halls of our freshman dorm, when she lived across the hall from me... Seeing Billy with friends he's known for 18 years... The house really felt like home for the first time last night.

(Kent is featured in a story in the Oregonian today. Check out the paper version if you're local, because the online version doesn't include the great photos of him--one of them with his two boys.)

And then we slept in this morning, Billy made us blueberry pancakes, and then he and Thumper saddled up and headed out to give me four (count 'em! FOUR!) hours to write. Twenty minutes of which I'm spending here. A fine weekend, indeed.

Even if people are now starting to get reminders from #&%@ Shelfari in my name.

And yeah...I didn't go to Rhinebeck, but I did treat myself to some sock yarn. You know...because I don't have much sock yarn at all. Behold.

It's from Fearless Fibers, in the Inner Sanctum colorway. Mmmmm....

Okay. Off to write. If only there were some tostones left over...

I am a spammer, apparently.

Today I accepted an invitation to Shelfari. I won't link to it because I'm pissed at them right now. I let the system access my gmail account so I could see what friends were already on there. I clicked to invite those friends already on the service. Fine, right? After that I was going to go through all the imported addresses from my contacts list and send some other invitations. Well, I use gmail, so my address book contains the addresses of every person, list serv, business, etc that I've ever emailed. And if you've ever emailed with me you already know what happened. Invites went out to my entire address list.

That would be fine--because I do want to know what everyone is reading--if it only went to friends and acquaintences both in the real world and online. But it also went out to former teachers, former friends, people I've bought and sold with on eBay, business contacts, relatives, etc etc etc.

And so then I got the bright idea to email an apology for the spam to my entire address book and Gmail decided that I'm a spammer and shut me down for 24 hours. But I only got to send that email to the first 500 people in my 837 contact address book. So I'm shut out of sending email AND I've now spammed people twice in a one-hour period.

Ugh.

I think I'm just going to put the laptop down and back slowly away.

Ten minutes to blog

And...GO.

Billy and Thumper just headed out the door for their boy time and my Wednesday evening writing time. I'm allowing myself ten minutes of blogging before I dive into the writing. Shouldn't take that long, even, because I don't have all that much to say.

It feels weird to be so far from New York with Rhinebeck approaching. Everyone blogging about meeting up at Rhinebeck and knitting this sweater or that shawl to wear at the festival etc etc. When I was at Rhinebeck last year, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to get back this year because I'd be living across the country. It hadn't yet occurred to me that I might ever move away from NYC. Ever. Makes me wonder what THIS year will bring.

Anyway. I don't even want to be at Rhinebeck, per se. I just want to see all the people who will be there who I either only ever get to see at Rhinebeck or who I used to see all the time and now can't see at all. Maybe next year the kiddo and I will time a visit to my mom with Rhinebeck and make the trek up. Maybe. Again...who the hell knows what this year will bring.

I didn't have to go to Rhinebeck to finally meet Mariko in person. After something like four years of online friendliness, we finally met face-to-face for coffee and treats. She's great, which is no surprise. I think Thumper may have a wee crush on her.

Okay...that's four minutes. Let's see... I'm almost done with the knitting for the Donkey Jacket. That's not as remarkable as it sounds. When I set it aside it was already nearly done. I've got one sleeve and the ears left to do, then the seaming. I'm enjoying knitting it much more now than I did last year. Last year I was making it to be grown in to. This year I'm making it for Thumper to wear now. That, apparently, makes all the difference. I hope to have it done in the next few days, at which point I promise cute modeling pics of my little donkey.

Six minutes. But that's enough. There's writing to be done.

PS: Awesome portraits of my dear friend Lawrence Quigley here, plus a link to a really cool portrait project. Worth checking out, so do click through from his post if you have the time. It's especially nice to get a glimpse of Lawrence in his studio. He's one of the people I miss most. Sigh. (Utopia would be so much better if all my friends lived here.)

Since last we spoke...

...the vegetable garden bed has been finished and the cover crop (Crimson Clover) sown. Thumper was a big help.

He also helped me do some recycling.

Our new couch arrived today, so the living room now looks like a living room. (No photo though, sorry. Once we get the house really done, with the paintings and mirrors hung etc, I'll probably post some photos then.) It was on sale for CHEAP at Levitz! Woohoo! Let's hear it for affordable couches for homes featuring super daredevil climby jumpy toddlers.

And I got to write for three hours this morning, which was fantastic. And I'll get to do it again Wednesday evening. The plan now is for Billy and Thumper to get some boy time (and me to get writing time) Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. With those two blocks of time, I think I can get some real work done on the book.

No knitting! Just writing!

Except that...well...Thumper is about to outgrow his Accordion sweater and has long outgrown his other sweaters. And I've just thrown out two pairs of socks due to acute heel blowouts. And it's pretty much always sweater and knit sock weather around here, so... Knitting. There will be knitting. The trick will be to find a balance in my free time, so that writing time isn't eaten up by knitting time (a bad procrastination habit that simply won't do any longer).

The guidelines (which I'm making up right now on the spot for my own purposes and which will most likely be of interest to no one but myself, but here's me thinking out loud, so to speak) :

1. Billy is now taking Thumper out for just-the-boys time on Sunday mornings so I can have a few hours to write. There must be absolutely no knitting done during those hours. None of that "just a few rows to help me think this through" crap because that's a lie I tell myself so I can knit and avoid the writing.

2. Thumper tends to take one two-hour nap per day. If I write for the first hour of the nap, I can--if the writing isn't going so well that I don't want to stop--knit for the remainder of the nap. I may not knit for the first hour and write for the second, because that second hour of sleep is never a sure thing.

3. If he goes to sleep before 9pm, I have to write for at least an hour before I go to sleep or pick up the knitting. If he goes to sleep between 9 and 10pm, I can take a stab at the writing before picking up the knitting. If he won't fall asleep until after 10pm, I should remember to move the knitting off the bed so I don't impale myself on it upon collapsing into bed.

It's 10:50 right now. It took from 8:30 to 10pm to get him to sleep tonight. (He was a champion sleeper in New York, but all the changes lately have him thrown, and I don't blame him one bit. I'm sure he'll settle down soon.) I'm feeling pretty good still, so I'll do a bit of work on the novel before sleep. Can't knit tonight because there's no knitting in the bedroom and lately he's been waking up everytime I leave the bed. Must remember to set some knitting next to the bed tomorrow.

So I'm going to let myself knit after all... And what will I be knitting? I'm not going back to the Empire Waist cardi yet. I think I know what to do with it, but I'll let it sit a while longer. For now, I want to finish the Debbie Bliss donkey jacket I started for Thumper last year, which should still be a bit big on him thanks to the way she sizes for ginormous monster babies. Then I want to knit him a little pullover that's been in my head for a while. And some socks for me. Nothing fancy. Simple knitting that I can pick up and put down easily. Nothing so fantastic that it will tempt me away from the work.

That might be one of the hardest adjustments I've had to make (am continuing to make) since having a baby--the fact that I get so little time to myself that I need to be really disciplined about how I use it. Sure, there needs to be downtime that gets frittered and puttered away, because frittering and puttering are necessary to some degree. But if I'm going to keep writing, and knitting (hell--and getting long enough showers that I can wash my hair), then I need to make good use of those little windows of free time. Everytime I think I have it down, Thumper's schedule and needs change and I have to adjust again. And again. All this shifting. And I'm sure once he's older and started school and I have the school days to get work done, I'll miss these early years when I had him all to myself so much of the time terribly. Already I feel nostalgic for the sweetness of the first months when we spent our days lying around and nursing. But what did I feel at the time? Some moments of loving that sweetness and the shapelessness of the days with a young baby. But mostly I was overwhelmed and exhausted and afraid. These babies...they turn us inside out in so many ways, don't they? I mean, I do love my time with him. I love it so much. But I want some more time for me. Need it and I'm not sure how I'm going to get it. We've toyed with the idea of daycare a couple mornings a week so I can have that time to write, but I don't think either Thumper or I are ready for that separation. I get nervous just thinking about it. There's a wonderful woman right around the corner from us who runs a daycare in her home and I love the way she is with the kids and they all look happy when they go past our house on their daily walk/parade, but even having him right around the corner but not with me...I'm just not ready.

Clearly I'm more tired than I thought I was. Rambling and where was I going with that? What was I saying? Right. Knitting. I was being unreasonably strict with myself when I said no time for knitting now. I need to prioritize but that doesn't mean knitting is out. God, how dull. How dull. Did I really just say all this out loud? (well, typed, but you know what I mean). I'm blogging about how I need to make time for both writing and knitting. Really? Gah.

And I'm going to hit publish, too. What the fuck. Just to prove that I just type these things and hit publish without editing. Just to prove how very dull I can be.

Sleep. I needs it. G'night.

Ah--but one more thing. Hey Portlanders--what's the deal with all the huge spiders EVERYWHERE? I mean HUGE. And EVERYWHERE. They're creeping me out.

Building up the soil

Two important developments on the settling-into-the-new-home front:

I've set up my office and gotten back to the work of writing the next novel. I started this book when I was first pregnant with Thumper, after sending the first novel out to my agent. The story of the revisions process, the first round of submissions to publishers, etc, has been told here more than once and I'm not really in the mood to dig back into it. The upshot is that this current novel (Novel Number Two, let's call it, as the working title isn't good enough to make public) was put way back on the back burner for a year and a half. I picked it up again when my agent started shopping Novel Number One (Drowning Practice) around to publishers again. But then we decided to move across the country. You can guess how much writing time I had during that process.

Well, we've now moved. It's done. We're settling in. And so I'm back to work. I've been away from the project for so long that I don't feel like I have my hands around it anymore. So I'm doing the background work I need to do to get my head back into it. Lots of freewrites for character background. Thinking about who these people are and what they want and what they don't want you to know about them. Rereading my research on the historical facts involved. That kind of thing. It feels good. With Thumper around I don't get a ton of writing time, of course, but I'm making good use of the time I get.

Which means I haven't knit a stitch since arriving in Portland. (Okay...I think I knit five or so stitches on a sock once.) But I'm fine with that. Priorities, you know? I love to knit (of course), and I've had a great time designing a few pieces in the past year, but it's too easy to use knitting to avoid the writing when the writing isn't going well. I wrote the first book before I was a mother. I had the luxury of procrastination then. If I'm going to keep writing novels now that I have a child, I need to make the little bit of time I get really count. I'm itching to rip out that empire waist cardi and redesign it to make it work with the yarn, but that has to wait. It simply isn't as important as the book. My agent is pushing me (in a good way) to throw myself into this next one and get it written. She's right (as she so often is). Time to buckle back down.

The second development? We've started to build up the bed for our vegetable garden.

With the help of our neighhbor Eva and her wheelbarrow, we mixed two wheelbarrow loads of the communal compost with two bags of (organic) potting soil and the native soil. We'd hoped to do more than that, but there wasn't enough compost ready and I didn't want to deplete the entire communal supply (not very neighborly). So we need to buy more potting soil and some bags of compost to finish building up the bed. Raised beds work best here, I'm told, because of the amount of rain. Much better for drainage. That's a 6' x 8' bed. Plenty of room for lots of good stuff for a family of 3. After we get the soil all in there, I'm going to sow a cover crop for winter, then let it sit until March. I've already started looking at online seed catalogs. Dreaming of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, artichokes, beets, turnips, parnsips, winter squash, tomatoes, okra, kale, spinach, etc etc etc...

Okay. Back to work. Billy and Thumper are out on the town to give me a few hours to write. Happy Sunday.

Getting better...

We're about 80% or so unpacked now, which feels a hell of a lot better than being totally hemmed in by boxes did. Now we need to hang our chandelier in the dining room, buy a new couch for the living room (thanks to Oscar), and figure out where to hang the paintings and mirrors. The fun stuff. Yeah...there are still boxes to be unpacked that are hiding in the basement and downstairs sun porch. I'm just happy to be able to see the beginnings of a functional living room and dining room.

Today was Billy's first day of work, Thumper and my first day of finding our new weekday routine. We're going to be trying on a couple of kid-friendly daytime knitting groups for size this week, and also have big plans to hit up a storytime at the library. Today we just did what we used to do back in Brooklyn. We loaded up in the stroller and went for a walk. (The difference in Portland being that I was sure to tuck our rain gear and the stroller rain shield into the carry basket. We didn't need them, but apparently you really never know.)

We strollered over to Tandem Coffeehouse, which until right before we moved in had been Mabel's, a knitting store/cafe. Now it's the same owner but no yarn. Great timing, right? But it's a lovely coffeehouse, with a nice big play area, so Thumper and I liked it just fine even without the yarn. It worked out way better than I could have ever planned, actually. Thumper fell asleep right before we arrived and stayed asleep in his stroller for an hour. I slowly sipped my coffee, and ate a bagel with Nutella, and wrote in my notebook for a solid hour. An hour. Uninterrupted. In a cafe. While he got a very nice nap. I couldn't believe it.

While he slept, I managed to solve a plot/character problem in the new novel that was really tripping me up, and had a decent bagel (which is probably about as good as bagels get here, because I've had some pretty bad ones so far) and a great cup of (Stumptown, of course) coffee. Life is good in Portland. Or Utopia, as Billy and I have taken to calling it. "In Utopia all the children time their naps to allow their mothers much-needed creative breakthroughs on their novels." We bust out with sentences like that constantly.

When he woke up, we played for a while in the play area, which was the reason we'd walked there in the first place. I was hoping to maybe run into some other kids around his age. We didn't--there weren't any other kids there--but Thumper did make a toy choice that just may indicate we're doomed when he hits his teen years.

Historically Guitar Boys have been nothing but trouble for me (except for you, Lon. And mostly you, Tad. Okay...and for the most part you, Nick). Is it too controlling to hope I don't have a budding Guitar Boy on my hands? (And while we're on the topic, why is it that I know so many guitarists? Maybe it's just that the world is too full of them.)

So we're settling in pretty well. I miss my family, and my New York friends, but I think we'll be happy here. Really happy. I'm going to establish the bed for the vegetable garden this weekend, to give it a chance to settle in before I start planting (in March, I think? I need to look more into local planting times etc). And how will I establish this vegetable garden? With some bagged soil and some of what we've already got, and then--get this--with compost from the neighborhood compost. Yep. There's a shared compost for our neighborhood at the corner of one person's yard. From the look of the bag of tomatoes our neighbor Eva gave me tonight, it's fine compost indeed. I had been planning to get a small bin for our backyard, but now I'll definitely contribute to the communal bin instead. See what I mean? Utopia.

PS: Please go check out this post at Rachael's and please do consider reading her chapters and giving chapter 2 that "10" vote it totally deserves. Because Rachael rocks. That is all. Thank you.