K. Eason's Blog, page 8

now is the autumn of your discontent

I am feeling cranky and at odds with... everything? Not really combative, more restless. Like I should be doing something but I'm not, and whatever I've forgotten/am neglecting is going to bite me in the ass. This is what happens when Type A personalities have nothing on the immediate agenda. I'm like a border collie without sheep. Pretty soon I'm gonna start chewing on the furniture and digging in the garden and okay, letting this metaphor go now.

Part of it's the university teaching quarter starts in 2 weeks, but the HS class already started, like, a month ago, and I'm in that limbo between working my ass off and having something to do one day a week for 3 hours. My just-finished novel (RORY TWO)  is off at my agent, and I haven't gotten the editorial notes on the first book (formerly SRP, now How Rory Thorne Destroyed the Multiverse, aka RORY ONE). I'm not writing anything at the moment. Not that I don't have ideas. It's just I don't want to go launching into a new project when I know revisions are coming.

Instead, I'm spinning a lot of fiber (like that bagful on the right. It's, like, 4-5 hanks of compatible colorways all mixed up to be spun out at random).  I'm making Christmas socks (2.5 pairs of 5, or halfway done!) and bingeing Netflix and Prime series. (The Good Place has to be one of the best things in a long time.) We've gone hiking a couple of times, now that things have mostly stopped burning. But the last couple of weeks I haven't had anything I had to do except the HS class.

Maybe that's it. I'm freaking out because I'm not under any deadlines. I'm...taking a vacation. It feels weird.

the spiral rug

Or, that time I successfully felted BFL blend handspun. BFL is, IME, a PITA to felt. Merino, Icelandic... look at it crossways and it felts. My last rug, even with a merino strand, required two rounds of agitation in hot water and throwing it at a floor (that works. It's magic.).

So. Before felting:

 Note the stitch definition and the large gaps between threads; I deliberately used a bigger needle than the yarn weight called for in hopes that the extra room would allow for extra agitation in the felting process.

Also note that amazing blaze of color in the center. I think all four skeins were the same colorway, but the first and last were definitely a different dye lot. (The first might be a different colorway; the orange is pretty distinctive. I don't know because I get fiber from M's excess stash and it's not labeled.) Anyway, also note the grey striping makes it seem wavy and wrinkled, but I assure you, it's flat.

I was so damned happy to be done with this rug that I forgot all about bagging the project and sticking a towel into the cycle to give it something to felt against. I just threw it in hot with a drop of Soak and let it go. Maybe that's the secret, although everything going through the washer for the next few days is going to sport tufts of wool.

I wish I'd remembered to measure it... unfelted, it was about 36 inches in diameter, I think. Here's a before and after with Murdercat for scale.

Review of Michael Mammay's Planetside

Planetside by Michael Mammay

So: Planetside is military SF meets hardboiled detective novel. There's a missing lieutenant, son of an Important Person, and an almost-retired combat veteran, Colonel Butler, is sent to investigate. The general who sends him says "get it done." The blunt simplicity of that directive drives the narrative. There are not a lot of stylistic frills here, nor meditations on the meaning of life. Butler describes his environment and observations with a spare, dry wit and an understated sense of drama. Butler's cool makes the action in the book--the explosions, the surprises--that much more, well, dramatic. And surprising. You're walking along the narrative, thinking (like Butler) you know where it's going, and then bang.

I really can't talk about the plot much without giving things away, because it's a mystery as much (more than) it is about firefights and violence, even though the story has its share of both. There were moments where I saw echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and moments when I laughed out loud (not the same moments). The military is, of course, at the core of the story, but Mammay's military is composed of people--good and bad and venal and brave and scared--and not caricatures. (Confession: I grew up in a military family. Reading this book felt a lot like coming home.) Morality is grey, but also crystal clear. Mammay does a fantastic job of showing multiple perspectives (no easy feat with a first-person narrator!); the war itself feels like a character as much as the people walking around and fighting and dying. Mammay spools out the backstory slowly, in fragments, relying on the reader to put things together as much by what's not said as what is, and lets the reader--through Butler--figure out how to feel, and what course of action to take despite an increasingly muddy morality.

Don't look for heroics (although there are heroes). Don't look for drama (though there's that, too). Look for a smart, and smart-ass narrator who does his best to get it done, while never letting anyone--least of all himself--get too comfortable in their assumptions.

tiny horses, part three

And here we go. I think I'd've found tiny foal eyes difficult 10 years ago, but it's a lot harder now, thanks, eyesight and also, because I had no blue paint and used colored pencils and even with my best fancy-ass sharpener I can't get a super-fine point.




Thus concludes the Tiny Horse Painting Project.

tiny horses, part two

The rose dapple grey, because it was hard. A rose grey is, well, a grey with reddish or peachy (or burgundy) undertones to the greying. Grey in a horse is like grey in a person--it's a loss of pigment in the hair. Sometimes it happens right away, sometimes more slowly. A rose grey is when the base color shows through the greying. Sometimes there are dapples, sometimes not. Of course I want to do dappling, because it's hard, and also, if it works, it looks pretty sweet. Since I work in acrylics only, I have to a) work fast (it's hot outside) and b) make sure my layers are thin enough I don't cover the base color too much.

First a basecoat with what appears to be bright copper under the grey. It is, in fact, bright copper.  It was so bright that I couldn't even deal with it and had to layer the grey over it in the same sitting.

We'll skip day two, Dapple Day. Dapples are the biggest PITA, like, ever. Two or so hours of dabbling and stippling and swearing and being absolutely certain it's all ruined. This, Second Day Painting, feels most like the first draft of a novel.

And then, final coat, final draft... when you sit back and think ok, that's...that's pretty cool.

tiny horses, part one

So here is a thing that I do: customize model horses*. I started doing it when I was a kid, when Breyer was the only game in town. And I sucked. I kept trying, though, and even though I never got amazing, I got better. I hated the prep work: sanding, filing, carving, basically all the sculpting. Hated it. Perhaps because I've never had the facilities to really get into it--torches, inflammable locations, a concrete floor--but even if I had, I just don't like sculpting that much. At its core, model horse customizing is about artists doing painting and sculpture work on a model equine body. There comes a point when talent supplements skill, or it doesn't, and I've pushed my skills about as far as I can.
 Anyway, I stopped customizing a few years ago, when we moved from the student housing apartment to something 100 square feet and a bedroom smaller. Even then, I wasn't doing much; poor light quality, an excess of cat hair. But after we moved, I packed up most of my remaining models (after the massive purge of the early '90s), except a fistful of the tiny ones that were gifts or models I particularly loved. I had two sad unfinished mutants, too, but too bad for them. I was done. 
Then I discovered this summer on Amazon that Breyer makes blanks of my favorite scale (1:32) for sale, specifically to get kids into the hobby, and... I succumbed. I bought some paints. I dug out my reference materials, and my files, and my carbide scrapers, and my sandpaper. 
Summer's a good time to paint; I can take over the dining room table for storage, and I can paint outside on the patio where the light is good. I had to buy a magnifying lamp because fucking aging eyesight, and because I like the tiny ones. I got the warmblood "family". 
Then of course I started with my mutant, who had been one of these guys before the judicious application of candle flames and epoxy modeling paste. I straightened a leg and a head/neck and gave him better hair. I love the wild patterns you can get on a Clydesdale, (I love wild patterns in general, which are of course the hardest to paint) so I elected to try a grey sabino with some roaning and a lot of white. I did a little googling, found a couple of horses I liked for inspiration, and got to it. 
And then, in three drafts (a horse pun!): Day one: basecoat blocked in. Day two, roaning and sabino pattern added. Day three, mane/tail, hooves, eyes, skin, etc. He still needs a name (yes, he. The models are accurate. This one's a gelding.) 










* You can also show model horses. Live. Like, you take your horses to a place with a bunch of other people and you set them up on a table and you take them into "the ring" for their classes and people judge them on realism and on artistry. You can do this with original factory finish horses or your customized models. This is a thing that I also did, which I why I know I am not a brilliant artist. I stopped showing long before I stopped painting because I am competitive as hell. 

okay, now it's done. Ish.

I finished the zeroth draft of the WIP (let's call it TGK for now) last week, reread the whole thing in order this week, discovered all the repetition and extraneous crap (when you are writing every other day while teaching 3 classes, you lose threads and get sidetracked and forget what you wrote two-three-eight months earlier) and now we have a functioning draft one, about 4k lighter than it was a week ago. There's still a Rat round to go--she's my first beta reader, always and forever, amen--and then it goes to my agent. I think we're still a couple of drafts from worth a damn. Kudos to the writers who produce super-clean drafts that only need copyediting because I am not one of you.

I test INTJ on the Meyers-Briggs test, which, you know, take with grains of NaCl and all that, but it's true I like things to be finished, not hanging in limbo. Except manuscripts. Then I get to the end and think of all the ways I could've gone with the narrative, all the choices the characters could've made, and I become certain I have written total shit, and if only I could go back and rewrite--but that way lies madness.

Now I need to plan two classes and re-sisal rope a cat tree. And finish a small pile of knitting projects. Cat tree first.

the cat days of summer

For what is there to do in summer than lie about in the garden? Tinycat favors lounging tomato-side, on eight inches of weathered table. Murdercat prefers the cool dirt of the Norfolk pine pot. The pots are the same size, for reference. 


Of course these photos are terrible, because the moment Tinycat realizes she's about to be photographed, she'll move. A woman's gotta move fast around here. 

in the garden of the gods

No, really. That's the name of the park: Garden of the Gods. I wasn't being all writerly. I'm not sure which gods had this garden, but they sure like red sandstone. Possibly they tried and failed to raise tomatoes? I don't know. Not much grows willingly in that climate except scrub oak, scrub pine, and sage.

So we made our annual pilgrimage back to see parents, and while we were there, we got an unexpected opportunity to go hiking, and we leapt upon it. If I had my way, that is all we would do in Colorado: stay in the mountains and hike around. But his parents cannot travel into that kind of altitude, and at the moment, neither can mine, so we spend much of our visit sitting or walking slowly through Manitou Springs or Old Colorado City (read: tourist trap shops). And this trip, given all the toadshit of spring, we didn't feel like we could take time to stay in the mountains, even for a day. I told Nous not to stop the car as we drove over Vail Pass, or I'd jump out and disappear into the trees and that'd be that. Woman goes feral in forest. 

Anyway, the Garden of the Gods is basically a park full of big-ass red sandstone rocks that people climb in contravention of safety regs, and sometimes fall off of. It gets mostly road traffic, or people hiking on the paved bits around the biggest rocks (that, see above, people like to climb on in contravention of safety regulations). Locals use the trails, but it's not the kind of hiking that's strenuous enough to attract hardcores, and yet takes enough time/requires enough effort that the casual tourist wouldn't make it. And, you know, it's at 6400 feet, so that's enough altitude that people unused to it feel it. And it can get hot down there, and the trees in the park are mostly scrub. The yellow orb of death is brutal. (You see how I say down. My ideal is up there over 7K, closer to 8-10k. Tall trees, cold air, not much of it.)

We got lucky: clouds and abnormally cool.  The hike itself wasn't hard--maybe 250 feet of elevation change, no glacial rivers, maybe 3-4 miles. We'd had rain the night before, too, so the dust was minimal, but not enough to make mud. Which, you know--fortunate. I hadn't brought hiking boots. I had to do this hike in little Merrell trail/water shoes with basically mesh sides. It was five kinds of awesome and despite the altitude-induced headache (stubborn! we hiked at the same speed we would've at sea level, and paid for it) it was totally worth it. Next time, though, I am just bringing the damn boots.

And here, we see Nous in his guise as two-legged bighorn sheep. He cannot resist climbing out onto ledges. In his youth he might've tried scrambling up the big rocks and been one of those unfortunate, smashed-flat people. Fortunately he has aged into wisdom.

Now we're home again, and it's back to work on WIP. Which...well, here is a blog post! You can guess how that WIP is coming along. Tomorrow, back to work.

despite all my rage...

Get it?

The laundry-closet is now rat-free. Peanut butter and technology triumph where Murdercat fails.