K.V. Johansen's Blog, page 8

Testing: Macedonia, Here I Come

This is by way of being a test of my ability to write a post from my Kobo, and an announcement. April 26-28, I’ll be in Macedonia for the launch of the Macedonian translation of Torrie and the Pirate-Queen and the “Days of Canadian Literature” Event. Very exciting. As it’s such a short stay, I’m not taking my computer, but I’d like to be able to update the blog. Writing this way is very clumsy, but it works. Sort of. Expect brief dispatches! Next, must figure out how to upload from camera-less tablet. Eight weeks to go…

Post-script, added from a real computer: Okay, aside from “to writersunion a post” and a lot of missing spaces, that was reasonably comprehensible. I’ve now edited it to make it more so. I am no good at this one-finger tablet typing. It would be better if the tablet could register my fingers, but half the time it can’t. Non-conductive skin? Anyway, onwards with my preparations.

“Magic on the Edges”

Magic—not spells and hurled fireballs, but that inspiring combination of wonder, awe, and excitement that drives artistic creation—is, for me, born on the edges of things. Edges mean boundaries and borders, tension and change and flow. In the landscapes of fiction the rise of desert into mountain, the uneasy meeting of the cleared and settled with the primeval forest, the hint of island shadow on the horizon of the sea, are the sorts of places that suggest Story. They are zones of transformation where things can or might or should happen, the places where change is found, and change coming for good or ill to a character or to their world is what drives stories. . . .



The complete essay is a guest post over at Fantasist Enterprises, so you can head on over there to read it all.

Casting On. Again.

Well, the epic sweater continues to share its uncanny kinship with my writing process. (“Out of cheese error, redo from start …” as Pratchett’s Hex would declare. If there’s ever a literary award for most drafts of a published novel, I’m sure to be a contender for, ahem, well, several works. The Shadow Road’s record was definitely beaten by the thing I finished in December.) (Blackdog, if you’re curious, did not go through such scrapping of chapters and characters and so on; it was mostly one draft written in two long stages, with a normal amount of rolling revision and revision after finishing the first complete draft.) Anyway, I was working on my corrugated ribbing in black and grey and thinking, okay, I hate purling, I loathe purling, but this is going okay, only two inches and then I’m into just plain knitting. But it began to look wrong. And wronger. And then there was no doubting. Something had gone badly awry. You know that bit in Starmore’s Fair Isle book where she says to join and “do not allow to twist”?

Yeah. That. The knitting gods were not merciful, and it was twisted. It was worse than twisted, it was a spiral. It was a slinky, going ’round and ’round the cable of my circular needles. I guess this problem doesn’t arise on double-pointed needles; at least, in all the mittens and hats I have knit, I have never had this happen.

Eventually, even the friendly neighbourhood knitting goddess decreed there was nothing for it but to unravel it, and this I did, with sorrow in my heart. And some muttering of unpleasant language, because knitting into a spiral seems to result in one’s yarn turning into a large snarl, or rather, unravelling a two-colour knit spiral does.

This morning, though I have other work I need to do that’s rather more urgent, I was determined that, blizzards causing a day of licence and all, I would take at least a little time to myself and cast the thing on again, so I sat down to do so, with Mister Wicked keeping a close eye on the proceedings in case an opportunity for Fun should arise. (Fun of the “chase-chase, grr-grr, I have your yarn” variety.) I’m wondering if the cable cast-on technique results in this spiral twisting, because the thing just kept going around and around. I usually cast on with one needle and my thumb. I have no idea what that’s called, but it’s fast and easy and is how I’ve always cast on since I was a mere infant. (My mother has now switched to knit casting-on, where you knit a stitch and then slip it back to the other needle — getting fancy in her old age!) However, for this sweater I wanted something tidy and tight, hence the cable cast-on, which I really like the look of. Trying to straighten out the spiral before I joined it, though, rapidly came to seem a physical impossibility for anything short of an octopus, or one of those goddess-statues with many, many arms.

But wait! I’m a human. I have thumbs and ingenuity. And clothespins. The clothespins are the useful item here. I started untwisting (or de-spiralling) and pinned each bit as I went, making sure to clip it so the stitches were held very firmly onto the cable and couldn’t start to wind themselves up again. It got trickier as I approached the end, but I was successful. I triple-checked it, to make sure that every stitch was the same way up, because no way am I unravelling this ribbing again. Then, very, very carefully, with all clothespins in position, I knit two stitches to join it up. The clothespins all fell off then; I guess it wasn’t really thick enough for them to grip properly for their weight. However, the first round of my sweater is now joined up and has not a single twist in, so all in all a successful morning’s work. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the morning’s work I should have been doing.

Treasure the small victories.

Only … how many more rows to go? And there are steeks to be mastered, plus my determination that once the purling is done, I will learn to do one colour English and one continental. (I usually knit two colours with one on the index and the other on the middle finger of my right hand. I’m still doing that for purling, because I don’t trust it any experiment involving purling to go well.)

Not epic fantasy but an epic sweater

Why is it epic? Well, it’s dense, complex, consists of many interlaced strands, and is not something you knock off in an evening. It has also been restarted several times, showing more similarity to my writing method than I like in a mere hobby. Also, the end result should be elegant, sturdy, and endure for many wearings, regardless of passing fashion. All in all, I’ve seen worse metaphors.

So here it is, a sweater designed by myself using Alice Starmore’s Book of Fair Isle Knitting to “design your own gansey”. What you see here is the cable cast-on bottom edge with half a row of corrugated ribbing begun. I’m making it to be rather oversized, both because I like my sweaters to fit large, and because I don’t trust myself and my gauge swatches and this way, if the knitting ends up being tighter than in my test piece, I’ll still be able to wear the sweater.

I expect it’ll take rather longer than a book to finish, given that, well, I have books to write, and that is my work, whereas knitting is only play. And crocheting? That’s play too, and I enjoy it a lot more than knitting, which requires grim concentration, I find. However, proper mittens that stand up to real life outdoors, and Fair Isle sweaters, are not achieved by crocheting.

Alice Starmore’s excellent book has been reissued by Dover, by the way, ISBN 9780486472188.

Home-Made E-Reader Case

I was recently given a second-hand ereader/mini-tablet (the plan being to buy ebooks instead of trade paperbacks, and thus to prevent bookquakes in the study), but when I decided I’d better get a case for it, to prevent it being damaged by all the things I lug around in my briefcase when I travel — books to read, books to read from, notebook in case I think of something to write down — I discovered that for my budget, cases are rather on the expensive side. Forty dollars for two pieces of cardboard and some vinyl? I could buy a book for that. Or even two or three. And they don’t look all that sturdy, really. There are lots of patterns for knitting or crocheting an ereader case, but there’s not any more protection there than in a tea-cosy.

Cardboard, I decided, I could manage. But old corrugated cardboard on its own didn’t seem good enough. Women of a certain age apparently get … urges.

They start to … make things.

Out of felt. And “fun foam.”

Glue guns are involved.

ARGH! It can’t be happening to me! I’m too young!

However, my ereader was living in a bubble-envelope, in constant danger of being mistaken for something more sturdy and not made of glass and electronics, so action had to be taken, preferably before I set off for my next series of school readings.

But as it turned out, I couldn’t make the glue gun I borrowed dribble out more than a tiny bead of glue, which promptly solidified into a hard cold lump and had to be scraped off my cardboard. I’m safe from the regression-to-kindergarten cut-and-paste craft urges for a while yet.

Despite this, I did make a fairly sturdy ereader case out of corrugated cardboard, a piece of “fun foam” (red in the photos), a piece of felt (blue), some strong white glue (for laminating it all), and lots of duct tape.

Lots and lots of duct tape.

“And you think they’re going to let you on an airplane with that?” asked the Spouse. “It looks like a bomb.”

Oh.

In which cartoon?

But on reflection, though it may not look like a bomb, the sort of paranoid security that once told me my ballpoint pen “looked very suspicious” while clicking it repeatedly (to see if it would explode?) and which dropped my netbook on the floor — it survived, no thanks to them, and I held up their line while I booted it all up again to make sure of that — is likely to dissect my laminated case in order to make sure I’m not smuggling ze microfeelm. Which you couldn’t do in a vinyl and cardboard boughten case, oh no.

So, for situations where the Kobo has to look respectable, I think I’ll try this double-layered crocheted pattern from Ravelry, which at least has decent padding. I could add a thin sheet of hard cardboard between layers to protect the screen, too.

No duct tape involved.

Fair Isle, Novels, and Outlines: Orchestrating a War, Designing a Sweater

I’m between novels at the moment, resting my brain a bit, but doing a lot of reading and research towards the next. I’m also plotting a Fair Isle sweater. I don’t write with outlines, but sweaters don’t work that way. Not for me, anyway. I’m using Alice Starmore’s instructions for designing your own “gansey”, and trying to work out something that will fit me the way I like a heavy sweater to fit (nice and loose for lots of layers underneath), that will be right for my gauge on the needles that seem right for the yarn, and will use the yarn I have on hand from the abandoned and unravelled project. I have a whole lab notebook of graph paper (which has stern injunctions that everything must be done in ink, no pages removed, each page signed, etc. for patent protection — where did this notebook come from, the JPL?), crayons, calculator … I’m drawing and colouring blocks of borders and peeries and doing complicated math. Very complicated math. The JPL would be proud. “So, six stitches per inch = x, divided by y, need border patterns that will fit into z evenly so it will be centred, damn, I can’t remember how to work out factors (JPL would not be proud), better just try random division and write down all the whole numbers I get, and how many rows to the underarm gussets? Since I have a variety of yarns that are “well, almost, but not exactly” the same weight, I’m hoping for the best. They seem to end up the same gauge when knit together, and that’s the important bit. More or less. Well, okay, they don’t pucker, that’s point one in my favour, and I’m taking six rather than 5.5 stitches per inch for the size, so it won’t end up too small, anyway. (Not like the last sweater I knit, which was in adolescence, just as I went through a growth spurt, which resulted in outgrowing it in both the arm and, er, chest regions by the time it was done. Must find it and give it to Number One Nephew, who at least won’t have to cope with the latter problem.)

So what does this have to do with novels? Well, the thing is, this is not how I write a novel. I’ve just finished reading Diana Wynne Jones’s Reflections and was interested to find what I’d always been fairly certain of, she wasn’t an outline person either. Outlines, she said, killed the story, which is exactly my experience. I wrote a book with an outline once. And it was horrible, dead and flat. I threw it out and wrote it again — not a revision, but a completely new file, finding out the real journey the characters and their situation had to take to get to the end I could glimpse in the distance. That turned out to be a much better, living, story. However, I also once started writing a story too soon, before the character and the situation that would be the seed of it all, in my normal way of writing, showed up, and that was just as disastrous and time-wasting. It was a sequel, so I had the vague shape of it, knew certain things that needed to happen and so on, but I didn’t have the seed from which the story needed to spring burning in my head. I floundered and floundered, trying to force the writing onwards. I didn’t have an outline (I tried making several — they were all failures and got me no forrarder), but I didn’t have the driving heart of it either. I was making things up and it showed, flat and discordant. I went through a record number of drafts and some false starts that added together would probably make several novels in length before I realized where the root of the problem lay and was able to let the proper heart of the story take over and drive the journey. The result, I think, was the excellence that only happens when the words are on fire. Like Jones, I have to have the burning seed of the story, and a few scenes along the way, and an idea of the the end, and then the rest is a journey of discovery that is sometimes hard good work and sometimes a transcendent poetic inspiration.

Frowning and calculating and clutching my crayons, designing my sweater, I am thinking about this, with relation to the book I’m currently brooding on. I know where it starts — even some of the dialogue of the opening scene is there in my head, though that may go completely differently when I come to write it. I have two significant moments that are detailed and could be set down at any moment, allowing for the fact that I’m not exactly certain where, geographically, they happen, the characters not having set out on their journey yet. (They are, in fact, hanging out in a tavern, a good place to wait, no doubt, though one of them has a notoriously poor head for drink.) I have an ending. (I often write the endings quite early in the book. By the time I get to them, they’re usually quite different, but significant bits of the dialogue or relation of the characters to one another and the world endures, and it’s important to have that distant mountaintop on the horizon so I know where I’m going from the start.) This book is a bit different in one thing, though, and that is that it does contain a war, not mere skirmishing and short decisive battles. And that means — I have done this before, in something that never saw the light of day but was very good training — forethought is required. Rather like calculating all those repeats of peerie and border patterns for the Fair Isle sweater, trying to make sure things will fit in evenly, in fact.

I don’t need an outline of my story. I do need an outline of my war. Real wars are fought more the way I write a novel. It begins, and both parties have their eyes on the distant mountaintops of their respective intended end result, but little certainty of what the journey there will be like. Fictional wars, however, need to be rather better planned. Otherwise the wrong side might win, after all … Actual battles along the way can happen as necessary, but I definitely need maps and arrows, distances and times, which province starts off on which side, worked out before I start. Somehow, designing the sweater has left me certain that for this impending story, an outline — of the war, not the story of the characters — is necessary. Realizing this now, rather than a quarter of the way into it or worse, will hopefully prevent me having to make massive revisions to story and map partway through. An outline of the war, probably no more than a big map with arrows and a list of times and notes, will provide the stage on which the story will unfold.

I expect it will be done and probably, dis volentibus, published, before the sweater is ever finished. I am not one of the world’s speedy knitters.

Mister Wicked and the Nor’Easter

It snowed and it snowed and it snowed, and the wind blew and blew and blew. After the blizzard, though, it was clear and cold and sunny, and Mister Wicked and KV went outside to dig. Mister Wicked liked to dig. KV did not. Mister Wicked dug with his paws, here, there, and everywhere. KV began to dig out the path to the door, and the car. It did not take very long, though, for Mister Wicked to decide he was cold, even though he was wearing his nice warm coat. It was all very well, thought Mister Wicked, for the humans to tell him his ancestors were mighty German Shepherds and Siberian Huskies. In the genetic lottery, he might have gotten the shiny white fur and the big pointy ears and the curly tail, but what he hadn’t gotten was any underfur. And it was minus seventeen, and a cold wild wind was blowing from the west, and even with his coat on, he was cold. So Mister Wicked hit the aluminum storm door, bang, which is how he lets the humans know he wants in, when he is out. (When he is inside, he hits the garbage can, clang! to let them know he wants out. The humans want to teach him to ring a bell, which will sound nicer, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

“Wimp,” said KV, in a genial way, and she tried to open the door to let him in.

The door would not open. Mister Wicked did not understand the subtleties of mechanics and physics; he did not know that the outside latch of the storm door was frozen like a rock, so that the door, once it was closed, could not be unlatched from outside. (KV, until that moment, had not known either.) All he knew was that the human, with her silly big leather mittens he was not allowed to chew on, was rattling the door but not letting him in.

“The door is stuck,” she said, and rattled it some more, which is what humans do when things are stuck. Then she hit it a bit. Mister Wicked hit it again too. The door was suitably chastised, but this did not make it open.

Fortunately the Spouse was inside somewhere. Unfortunately, he thought all the knocking on the door, and the rapping on the window, and the thumping of the side of the house, was only KV shovelling snow, so he sat at his computer, typing, typing, typing, and ignoring all the banging.

KV used the broom for sweeping off the car to beat … – - – … on the side of the house under the Spouse’s upstairs window. The Spouse was oblivious.

Mister Wicked hit the door again and looked reproachfully at KV.

“The door is frozen,” said KV. “Look.” And she pulled and pulled on the door handle.

Now Mister Wicked understood. For some reason, even a human could not open the door. Mister Wicked found this very worrying. He was so worried he stood up on his hind legs and put his paws on the human’s shoulders. He stared at her with big round worried dark eyes. “Oh no!” his eyes said. “We cannot get in! We’re trapped outside! What shall we do?”

What do you do when your Spouse ignores someone beating the house in Morse code? That’s a very good question. KV climbed on a snowdrift and began to throw large lumps of snow up at the Spouse’s study window. Mister Wicked was excited. Yes! This looked like a good idea. He began to leap about and dig, to demonstrate his enthusiasm for her Cunning Plan.

And it worked. Soon they saw the flash of puzzled glasses peering out the window. “Help! Help!” shouted KV, and she pointed to the door. “We’re frozen out!”

The Spouse came downstairs, opened the door, and let Mister Wicked in. They fixed the storm door with the rubber band off some broccoli, so it could not latch. And then the Spouse and Mister Wicked went to sit down in the nice cosy warm house.

KV went back to shovelling snow in the cold and windy winter, all alone.

Ereaders, hah. Sorting them out, who has time to read?

I suppose I should say, “Ereaders disguised as tablet computers, hah …” because what I actually have is a cast-off Kobo Vox. (You know how when young, you’re always dressed in older siblings’/counsins’/neighbours’ outgrown clothes … well, being on the somewhat poor side of getting by, that’s how I get my technology, too.) An in-law moved up to the latest device, so I inherited his old one. I’d decided that switching to buying ebooks for much of my fiction reading would be a good move, now that so much is published for trade paperback rather than mass. Gave him a good excuse to buy a new toy while doing me a favour! I loathe trade paperbacks. They take up too much room, yet are less durable than a mass market, more prone to splitting spines if read more than once. Non-fiction trade size is different; it’s usually better bound and printed on better paper, but the soft mass-market quality paper used for much trade fiction gets its corners beaten up so quickly just in day-to-day living, and if you actually carry them around with you … anyway, my study is becoming filled with teetering heaps of trade-size sf. (My ideal physical book is a nice little hardcover, the sort in which Everyman is currently reissuing all the Wodehouse. However, the publishing industry does not, apparently, exist to gratify my library format desires.)

So … for a week now, I have been wrestling with the Vox. First I needed to remove my relative from it, as I really didn’t want to read his email. Then, well, you know how it is when you move into a new space or whatever, you have to sort of scurry around and put your own mark on it, make it yours. Change the wallpaper, re-arrange the furniture, scatter your things around. Or in this case, remove a number of Gutenberg Jack London works. Can’t stand Jack London. (Sorry. But I can’t.) Then I discovered a cache of every cover of the Economist from the past year, which were apparently automatically saved every time he read an issue of the magazine. Eek! My device is full of photos of smug fat rich men! Got rid of that. Deleted the multiple browsers and reader-programmes and settled on one of each, plus an anti-virus, in addition to the hardwired-in Kobo stuff. I wonder how you do all that hunting in the depths and deleting of memory-devouring rubbish on the next generation of “Let us do your thinking for you” tablets, which you can’t connect to a computer at all in order to actually see their insides? The Fisher-Price navigation method (randomly hit big colourful buttons and hope something happens) incites tooth-gnashing very quickly. Then assorted collections of emailed photos. Ah, that’s where all the memory went.

After several days of that, it was time to buy an ebook. Diana Wynne Jones’s posthumous essay collection Reflections was my first purchase from Kobo, and to my surprise, it all went very simply and efficiently, without any trouble at all. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised; that’s what the thing is for, after all. (Since the ebook of Blackdog is available from Kobo for all ereaders that handle epub files, it’s good to know first-hand that purchasing it is so straightforward!) Then it was time to consider the actual reading experience. More hunting around and randomly hitting buttons — well, not that random, as I have in fact read the pdf manual. Twice. All ninety pages of it. Yay! I can make the reading programme look like my old preferred writing programme, WS 4.0 — well, with a nicer font and everything, but … white text on black screen, and the brightness turned quite far down. Lovely! I find it soothing. I don’t know why. Maybe it evokes days long ago, working on my first books, pre-Windows. Actually, I went on running Wordstar in a DOS-shell for years after Windows computers came along. I like MS-DOS, which, I suppose, is why I don’t like Fisher-Price buttons on grown-up machines. Maybe the Vox isn’t a grown-up machine?

So there I am, reading my book. But I bought the edition of Diplomatic Immunity that came with the disc of ebooks of earlier Bujold in it, so I decided to put those on too, and there the tooth-gnashing commenced again. Since it couldn’t see the micro SD-card (I think I’ve since figured out how to do that …) I ended up going through long processes of finding directories, putting files into directories, as epubs, zipped, unpacked … nothing worked. Gah! And then I found this little bit of instruction on how to put such epub files onto the Kobo Vox. Victory! So simple. If someone tells you about it. So essential, as old travel books on Gutenberg have in the past been frequent research reading for me, back in the days they were all text files.

Now, I thought, I can sit down to read.

That’s when it crashed and the screen froze. Couldn’t turn it off. Couldn’t turn it on. It was frozen halfway through entering my password to open it. ARGH! This was not, I thought, going to solve the great stacks of trade paperbacks problem after all. Much consultation of the web disheartened me. There appear to be many forums devoted to the Kobo Vox’s tendency to drop irreparabley dead of a frozen screen. Where is a ^/alt/del when you need one? And finally I found it, on the actual Kobo website. Hold the power button down for six seconds. Not more, not less. Finally it will shut down. Then, turn it back on. Hey presto, a reboot!

Finally, I could sit down to read Jones’s essays.

Heavy muzzle laid on ereader. “Hey,” said Mister Wicked. “There’s a blizzard out there. I’m getting in touch with my Inner Husky. Let’s go for a walk!”

“What are we having for supper?” asked the Spouse.

Dispatch from the Desk: The Delicate Dance of Revision

The final part of the current story is, I think, the most challenging interlaced narrative I’ve done. There are a lot of important events happening in the space of eighteen hours or so, in about half a dozen different narrative clusters (a couple with more than one point of view character per cluster) and in two places several hundred miles apart. Events in one geographical location have a vital and instant effect on the other, though. (That’s magic for you. I suspect mystery novelists don’t have to deal with such instantaneous effects. Well, except over the telephone.) Oh, plus one narrative node has been knocked an uncertain number of centuries into the past. It was all perfectly co-ordinated, of course. And then I decided that some of the matter leading up to that fraught night and morning needed to be expanded, and expanding earlier things made people do different things later, which made other things twitch out of place and suddenly . . . wait, it’s night again. Which night? Last night? What’s last night doing there? It’s the middle of the morning. But if I move it back, then event A gets witnessed here and it’s far more dramatic if the reader doesn’t witness it till there, and character X cannot plausibly look the other way or sleep through that, yet must be followed by the reader at this point because of event B . . .

I think it’s all sorted now, but I feel as though one word out of place and the whole thing goes pear-shaped.

Must fix the numbers, as Chapter XXVII now comes after Chapter XIX. If I had to write my books longhand I’d go mad. Or whoever had to type them would.

Working on new chapters

A while back I decided that the current project was far too long. I panicked towards the end, seeing the ridiculous length and far over-deadline state of it, and rushed to a conclusion, compressing a whole important facet of the story. I was not happy with that, and once I’d taken time to rest the brain a bit and think, the solution seemed obvious. One story, two volumes. Fortunately, it seemed to have a decent dividing point somewhat over halfway through. In fact, by taking out a single paragraph, the first two-thirds seem suddenly able to stand on their own, with, yes, a bit of an ominous “obviously to be continued” note. Right now I’m working on some new chapters to insert into what is, I hope, going to see the light of day as volume two. It’s kind of fun, going back and expanding the bits that should always have had more weight. A couple of characters who were very fully developed in my mind but who never seemed able to emerge from the background are able to take centre stage for a few scenes and bring some greatly over-compressed events to life.