One Month Later

This little pair of lovelies is Gypsy Girl in the colorway Scrimmage. Everyone say it with me now -- "Da Bears!"

This sock yarn is destined to warm the feet of my father as he braves the Chicago weather to watch his team try not to screw it up too badly. And I really didn't intend to buy it, but what can you do? He's got a milestone birthday next month, and half his fall wardrobe is navy and orange. So these new socks will go with almost everything.

With my luck, they're meant to barberpole.

(sigh)

But we'll cross that crazymaking bridge as it's being blown up.

Now, I can rationalize this purchase about a thousand different ways. We all know I'm good at that. It's for a gift. It's entirely too unique to pass up. It's only sock yarn. (That one is a personal fave.) And so on and so on....

But I know deep in the honest corners of my heart that I wasn't going to buy any more sock yarn for a loooooooooong time. Those stash bins are full, baby. I've got nowhere to put the Scrimmage. It's only been one month since my shopping spree at Stitches at which I purchased something like 100 skeins of yarn on top of the several hundred already in stash. And post-Stitches, I said I wasn't going to buy any more yarn until I knit down my stash. I have enough yarn now. Really, I do.

My plan was -- IS!!! -- to treat the sock yarn and the other yarn as separate stashes, and to use a one yarn in/two yarns out equation for a while. If I knit two projects, I can buy yarn for another project. This will keep the stash manageable (in theory) and maybe slowly whittle it down some. Great theory, right?

These kinds of things only work if you have a little thing called discipline. Which I don't. Obviously.

Since Stitches, I have knit one skein of Socks That Rock, those Lagoon socks I finished a week or so ago. And I've knit half a cashmere-merino sock out of that Jojoland variegated. So, given the two-out/one-in equation, what the bloody blazes am I doing buying more sock yarn?

It's like a damn disease, this yarnbuyingitis, and I've got it bad.

But I do really like this new yarn, and I think my dad's going to get a kick out of it. And I'm just going to have to knit faster....

Note to Writers

I know there are some writers out there who have discovered this blog. I don't blog too much about writing or publishing, so you're all very patient to wade through the yarn posts for something like this little nugget I'm about to share. Only you can decide whether it's worth it.

Last night, I attended a writers' group thingie where a speaker talked about writing a synopsis. The speaker was excellent and made many intelligent and articulate points. Really, she did. BUT -- yikey crikey -- her sample synopsis was seventeen motherfucking pages long.

Oh, yeah, that's right. I dropped the MF bomb up there. A seventeen-page synopsis deserves it.

This was an actual synopsis she submitted to an actual editor who probably read the first paragraph and then said, "OMG. I can't believe this thing is seventeen pages long." And then she set the synopsis aside because, dear dogs and cats, who has time to read that? She has just finished a fifteen-minute scheduled meeting with her senior editor that ran over by a full hour, and she has only ten minutes until her next appointment, a conference call with a cover artist. In that ten minutes, she has to pee, eat, refill her coffee mug, return fourteen phone calls/emails from writers all "checking the status" of their submissions, and hunt for the earring that vanished out of her left lobe hours earlier. She also has to soothe the bruised ego of a copyeditor who went into a snit over an author stetting a comma, and then she has to call the stet-happy author and have a chat about house style in a way that won't cause the author to go into a snit of her own. And then she has to find her advil, because by then she will need it.

In ten minutes. All of that. Plus she has to stare down your seventeen page synopsis.

As the industry demands on editors grow larger and larger, the industry standards for the synopsis are getting shorter and shorter. It used to be a page of synopsis for every 10,000 words of text. Now, try a page for every 20,000 to 30,000 words, and some are limiting the synopsis to two or three pages regardless of the length of the manuscript. If you sell on proposal, you may have a little more leeway, but it's probably not a good idea to push it too hard.

Be kind, be short. Your editor will love you for it.