Bear Down

I ran out of knitting, so I decided to cast on these new socks.

bwahahahahahahahagigglesnortgiggle
~slaps knee~
~doubles over~
~wipes tear from eye~

Aah, that was a good one. Ran out of knitting. giggle

This is Gypsy Girl in the Scrimmage colorway of Bears blue and orange, which THANK GOD is not a barberpole. These socks are destined for my father. I cast them on because I have no room to store them in my sock yarn boxes. And also because maybe I have lost my mind.

For some time now, I've wanted to hang with Trish over at Nana's Knits on open knitting Thursday. I was actually free(ish) Thursday afternoon, so I headed over to her shop with the Scrimmage yarn in tow. Because it appears that attending an open knitting afternoon is all the excuse I need to cast on something new these days.

I have so much knitting OTN that I can't even tell you how much knitting I have OTN. I doubt I could list all the projects from memory. I can tell you this, though.

In my regular purse, I carry the Jojoland cashmere blend sock. (Remember that? I'm just past the gusset on the first sock. This yarn feels like clouds.)

In my sock bag, I carry the two pairs of Gypsy Girl -- the Ominous Skies barberpole in blue/black/grey, and now Da Bears socks. Also the jaywalker, which I intend to sacrifice to the knitting gods someday. Though, honestly, it won't be much of a sacrifice.

In my knitting bag, I carry the aran watchcap that Dreamsweaver and I are knitting together (maybe 2/3 done), the Butterfly blouse (maybe half done), and Fulmar (swatched but not starting until Monday).

In my other knitting bag, I carry the secret knitting, which is er maybe 3/4 done. Except I don't really carry this but to the knitting chair and back, because this is secret and it's not ready to leave the house yet.

In my other other knitting bag, I carry the cabled cardigan in progress, which is about 1/3 done. Except I don't really carry it because it never goes anywhere these days. It just hangs from a doorknob and looks forlorn and neglected. Because the sleeves were doing weird and wonky stuff and had to be repeatedly frogged. Plus because I have too many projects OTN and can't seem to ever make time for this one.

So. Obviously, I had to take a NEW project to Nana's to hang out with Trish and the gang. ...sigh...

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.