I know, I know, there was an earthquake somewhere else in California and though it injured no one and caused no damage, people worry. But I am fine.

Before I left, I packed my bags (obviously) and in my carry-on, with my books and laptop and knitting, I stuffed a pair of yoga pants and a shirt, a change of clothes, and some basic toiletries. Nothing fancy – deoderant, small toothpaste, travel toothbrush.

I always pack this, it being a precaution my mom always told me to take in case my luggage was ever lost in transit. And I always look at it, and how bulky my in-flight bag is and wonder if it’s really necessary.

On Sunday night, I found out.

Our flight was late getting into Detroit, which wouldn’t have been dire, except we didn’t have a gate to arrive at, so we spent 45 minutes waiting on the tarmac for our gate to open up – and for the air traffic controllers to be ready to guide us into the gate. Which meant instead of a mad dash to catch a flight that might have waited for us, we completely missed our connection to LA.

And there wasn’t another flight out until the morning. Not only that, but the next direct flight to LA was booked solid, and we’d have to fly through Salt Lake City in order to reach LA by 10:50am. Which meant a stupidly early flight the next morning.

All of which meant that we were spending a night in Detroit with no luggage.

It didn’t suck as much as it could have – the airline admitted it was their mistake and got us a hotel with a shuttle to the airport, plus vouchers so we could get meals. I got hold of our voice director in LA (thank goodness I had her cell number on me, though she probably cursed the day I gave it to her when her phone rang). She cancelled our morning session and got it rescheduled for Wednesday. (Incidentally, she was a superstar, and got flowers.) My co-worker got in touch with our hotel in LA so the wouldn’t cancel our booking when we didn’t show up the first night.

I was able to remain calm and poised  on the phone with the re-ticketing agents. While we waited in line to get our tickets. While waiting to find out about hotels. This was not because I am a naturally calm person. It was also not because I ‘looked on the bright side of things’. Not because I have any special skills.

No, I got through it all very nicely because I knew that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t have to wander into a studio the next morning in smelly socks, day-old underwear, with unbrushed teeth. No matter what happened, I was going to be at least reasonably comfortable, and that made a world of difference.

And I have my mom  to thank for that.

So, thanks Mom.

When I highlight text and click on a style, I would appreciate it if you would put the text in that style, and not in some other random format. Or unbolded. Or italicized, or whatever else you take it into your head to do.

Also, I would like if you didn’t decide, of your own sweet will “But I like the style it’s in NOW!” and refuse to change it.

Finally, when I paste text, and click on “keep source formatting”, I would appreciate it if you would actually keep the source formatting and not pull the same bizarre shit you were doing with the styles.

Honestly, does nobody TEST this program? It does stuff like this all the goddamn time.

It can’t possibly have been me. I deny all knowledge. All former blog posts to the contrary have been hacked.

I had so much planned for Christmas knitting this year that even with cutting back, and then cutting WAY back, it still won’t all be done by Christmas (2 projects to finish before the holidays, 2 after).

And after that I have declared it to be a Year of Selfishness, where I will make things to please myself and not worry about things like deadlines and how many projects I have on the go. Nobody put this pressure on me but me, of course, but now I am deliberately taking it off and saying no, I shall benefit from my knitty madness before I make plans to make six dozen projects for other people.

And OH, THE SOCKS I SHALL MAKE. Socks with my own charted patterns. Socks from books of marvellous sock patterns. Socks that are plain, but knit in deliriously wonderful yarn.

The next project on the needles will be two toe-up rainbow socks, worked on one needle. They sound thrilling and terrifying, and I am hell-bent on using up every little bit of the rainbow yarn (thus the toe-up method).

I was recently in Los Angeles for a voice recording session and my big thrilling outing while I was there was visiting not one, not two, but THREE upscale yarn stores. When I confided in my father that this would be my big thrill while I was there he said,

“Why don’t you take a tour, and see the stars’ houses?”

Because frankly, the stars’ houses don’t interest me, and the yarn does. Because as dull and insipid as it sounds, I get a real charge out of knitting (out of crafting of many kinds actually, but at the moment it’s knitting.) It doesn’t sound like a thrill-a-minute kind of hobby, but it actually can be. Mastering a difficult technique, turning out something beautiful and intricate out of sticks and string – I love it all.

You don’t have to like knitting – it’s not for everyone. But I walked around Santa Monica, and did a yarn tour. I bought myself a really cool sock book, and some incredible yarn, and I was happy as a clam. I don’t feel like I missed out on a thing.

One of these notes says “REMEMBER: Sensawunda”. Which is to indicate to myself that I should be adding a ’sense of wonder’ to the things I’m writing – that the player should have an awareness of the beauty of the world we’ve created.

On Monday morning I returned to my desk and noticed a new sticky note, covering the old one. It now reads “REMEMBER: Chumbawamba“

“Money should flow toward the author.”

This means, if you are an author and want to publish your work:

• You do not pay your agent (if you have one) up front. They take a percentage once they sell your book, and not before.
• You do not pay your publisher anything. They pay you and advance and/or royalties. You do not pay ‘editing fees’, or anything resembling such.
• You do not have to call bookstores and get them to carry your book. Your publisher does this. And they do not charge you for it.
• You do not pay any fees for promotion or advertising. Again, your publisher handles this.

I hear some of you say “But what if I self-publish?”

In which case:

• You pay the costs of printing the book.
• Once you have paid for printing the book, the company that printed it gets no other money from you. They give you the books you ordered. They do not split profits. They do not do promotion or send press releases. You give them money, they give you books, and you are done.
• Know that it’s highly unlikely that bookstores will carry your book, and you are unlikely to sell more than 100 copies. This is why it is the method recommended for either (a) just having a copy you can hold in your hand, or a few copies to give/sell to friends, or (b) a book of limited interest to a big publisher – for example a history of your family.

Others have laid this out more clearly than me, and if you’re confused you should definitely check out Preditors and Editors and Writer Beware.

Yes, this post is in response to the whole RWA/Harlequin Horizons controversy.

Yesterday I had a meeting with my bosses about problems I have with the script, things I think need to be strengthened and changed (keeping in mind that we have some technical constraints and some things can’t change now because the game is too far along). Three people in a room, talking about script problems and how to fix them, and we worked out some pretty solid stuff. When I got back to my desk I had an e-mail waiting from an outside editor who had taken a look at the script and offered her notes on it.* Most of it was totally expected – and it clarified a lot of things for me, in terms of stuff I knew wasn’t working the way I wanted it to, but couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong with it or how to fix it.

This is what a good edit pass does: it takes the basis of the first draft, and it helps you iron out the wrinkles, add the scenes you didn’t think you needed, points out the places where you overplayed something you thought was subtle, or where you underplayed an important plot point. I do the same thing with my writing – I have friends who read (some of) my stories in their ‘beta’ form, offering suggestions as to how they can ge strengthened. It helps a lot.

But, of course, I am a writer and I feel that my first pass should be perfect. I recognize logically that there are ways to strengthen what I’ve written. Few first drafts are perfect. Yet every time I get edits back I feel totally flat. It has nothing to do with the editor – most of them know how to handle writers gently, so that they don’t sound like they’re saying “this is the most horrible thing ever”.  I feel like I should have been able to do better. Like I should have been able to pull myself back from what I was working on and look at it objectively. Like I should have planned better, come up with stronger ideas, generally made things awesome, without having to resort to somebody else to do it for me.

This is stupid for several reasons:

1. You cannot be objective about your own writing.  You are too close to it. It’s sometimes possible, with time and some effort to go back and look at something with a fresh perspective, but you rarely have that kind of time, at least in the games industry (and too often the first draft is what gets into the game – is it any wonder game stories often fall flat?)

2. I can always be better. It doesn’t matter that I know what I’m doing (and I do). But there are people out there who know more than me, or who know different things than I do. Having someone to help me improve only benefits me and the story. I can’t know everything. I will get better – but there’s no reason that I should feel like a horrible person or a horrible writer just because something I did wasn’t perfect the very first time I did it. It’s silly.

3. (Most importantly) This is why we have editors. They are the people who specialize in looking at something and seeing its flaws and suggesting ways to fix those flaws. (as an aside: Some writers are good editors, some aren’t — it’s a completely different skill set. I do pretty well editing other people’s stuff, but it’s not the same thing as editing my own.) Editors are there to make things stronger, more consistent, and they are there to help writers do their jobs better. Their work is not a magical fix – they point out the flaws and I have to fix them. But the editor is there to show me what needs to be done.

So while it is understandable that I feel a little downcast about the work ahead of me to improve the script, I shouldn’t worry or feel  upset that I am being helped by an editor – that’s what they’re there for. It’s a tool of the trade and I shouldn’t feel bad about using it.

(Take that, brain.)

*This was a happy accident – I wanted an external editor on my last project and couldn’t get one.  This time it was requested for a whole bunch of non-writing reasons. (Long story). It’s worked and I will ask for this on the next game, for certain.

Yeah, it’s a charming little habit.

Last night it was particularly bad, and Scott actually got up out of bed, marched out into the hallway, and yelled at the cats – Tybalt and Baron being out there, looking guilty. They took off, but not too long after, the noise started up again.

I was dead asleep (it’s been a long week) so the first I heard of this Scott gets up and says “I know what’s causing that noise!” and I realize that I’ve been hearing the claws-on-the-wall squeaking for some time now, and have just been sleeping through it.

I wander into the hallway, blinking against the light, and mumble something about “Wuzzgoinon?” and Scott points me to Miho and Baron, who are sitting on the steps… with a mouse. They’ve got it cornered on the steps, and it’s terrified. Whenever it tries to make a break for it, they bat it around some more, but it doesn’t seem like they’re moving in for the kill. I tell them to finish off the poor thing, but they’re not even listening. I’m not sure if they don’t know what to do with it, or they’re just playing with it.

Scott grabs an old towel out of the closet and tries to grab the mouse to get it out of the house, but before he can do that, the mouse makes a break for it and the cats whap it with their paws again, knocking it down the stairs. Scott chases it (as do the cats) but it runs under the sideboard, and from there to freedom, or it hides, or something, because we can’t for the life of us find it, despite moving all the furniture around, running broom handles under it, and pulling out the drawers to let the cats at the insides to see what they can find.

It is 1:45am, and I am exhausted after an extremely long week at work. There’s nothing we can do, so we go back to bed, and I spend a good long time counting sheep and wondering how many mice there are, and if we will catch the thing, and what horrible diseases it might be carrying (*shudder*).

At 6am we hear a telltale squeaking again. We drag ourselves out of bed. This time it’s Tybalt and Baron who have the mouse cornered – again on the upstairs landing by the bathroom door. It’s learned the lesson that the cats don’t pounce until it moves, so it is sitting veeeeeeeeeeery still. Scott grabs it with the towel, runs downstairs, runs outside (in the cold and dark) and pitches the mouse into the woodpile.

We went back to sleep. The cats, I know, prowled around for a good long time, sniffing any spot that still smelled of mouse, and Baron looked like he was wondering what we had done with his new squeak toy.

Hopefully it won’t come back, or if it does the cats will actually rise to the occasion and, y’know, actually kill the thing because they are cats. That is their job. They’ve gone after flies and spiders in the past and killed them all quite handily, so I don’t know what was up in this case, other than they’ve just never seen such a fun toy before and killing it perhaps didn’t occur to them. I’ve given them a stern lecture about how they’ll have to do better next time.

It comes between one thought and the next, a half-formed glimmer of something – the distant ring of a bell, or someone standing just at the edge vision who isn’t there when you turn. Possibly it’s real, but possibly not, and it’s moving almost too fast to catch. Yet I grab after it.

It is slippery, or only as substantial as a ribbon of smoke. It is words, and gaps between those words. It looks solid, like a brick but it isn’t. If you look closely, if you reach out, it’s gone, and your hands are empty.

The sky may be solid blue, but that doesn’t mean you can grab hold of it.

And yet, I grasp. Cupping my hands around it, grabbing whatever corners of it I can reach. And then, with one hushed breath, I try to whisper its name.

And it is pulled out of the realm of colour, out of the realm of smoke. It becomes  something or some thing – only a fragment of what it originally was, but this I can touch. This I can use.

I bind it up with words. I am a spider, and it is caught in my web, and I am spinning it round with spider-silk. I am a magician, and I have caught a fairy and I am holding it fast in cage of iron bars that I am making even as it struggles to get away. Trapped. Solid.

Usable.

And yet somehow, less than it was. Always less than it was. And never what it might have been. I am the one who caught it. I am the one who bound it. And so the idea now reflects me. Its gaps are filled with me – my thoughts, my way of seeing the world, my blood – if you like to go so far.

I have taken it from the air; I have bound it; I have made it visible; I have  given it life.

And in doing so, I have killed it.

I rarely tell you about knitting on this blog when it’s going well.

Why is that? Well, it’s because reading about knitting that’s going well is kind of boring, unless you’re a knitter. Heck, even if you are a knitter, it can be deadly dull. Mostly what I would be doing is giving you an update on my progress – stitches, repeats, and frankly I have Twitter and Ravelry for that.  Really, the updates don’t require more than 140 characters — “Hey, I finished another repeat at lunch! Go me!”

So now I’m going to tell you about knitting going badly. Oh, so badly. Because that’s what’s fun to write. And that’s what it’s fun to read about (or so I think, anyway.)

This all starts with the item listed as “Black Lace Shawl” on my Knitlist. I bought the yarn for this ages ago, and after much deliberation I chose a pattern that I thought would suit the person this is intended for, and would work well with the yarn I bought. In fact, I had much more yarn than the project strictly called for, but that’s fine – I was planning on making the shawl a little bigger than the pattern suggested. And after that I would probably have enough yarn left over for a small pair of socks.

Actually, I wanted to start the socks first, but the nature of shawls is that you want the yarn to be exactly the same colour throughout. If I run out of yarn after the first sock, I can buy another skein in the same colourway and if the socks are a slightly different colour, it won’t be that noticeable. But a shawl – if you have a colour variation in one of the skeins because the colourway is the same but the dye lot is different – well, that’s the kind of thing that’s going to show.

So I started the shawl first.

It was a rough start.  The pattern is simple enough – only 8 rows, and half of them are just straight knitting. But for some reason, I couldn’t get the rhythm of it. I kept wrapping in the wrong places, losing count, finding myself at the end of a row with too many stitches or too few, picking back, starting again, getting two more rows before making another mistake.

Then there was the yarn – oh the YARN. It’s called “gloss” because it’s a wool/silk blend, but let me tell you, it isn’t as glossy as I’d hoped. Not at all, really. And splitty! Oh it splits if you look at it. And because the pattern makes some very loose stitches, I kept picking up the wrong stitch – usually the stitch below the one I was aiming for.

Here’s the thing, though – I just finished a rather large afghan in a different pattern, so I was used to a completely different stitch pattern – that explained why I couldn’t get into the rhythm. It would clear up once I’d been knitting for a while. And the splittiness – that can be got around too. I’d be more careful when I was knitting, and be a little gentler with the yarn. That can get better after a while too. It doesn’t go away entirely, but it does get better.

With that in mind, I soldiered on through the pattern. Eventually I got about 5 repeats done, and decided to do a test blocking of the pattern.

For those who have never knit lace before, it generally looks kind of crappy and bunchy while you’re knitting it. Then, you wet it, stretch it out and let it dry, and the pattern becomes clear. So, because I was still having difficulties at this point, I decided I would do this, and see how the shawl was going to look.