Surgical Strike

I know this may be a disturbing image for some - heck, I get a little twitchy myself, looking at it.  I thought it was interesting, though, how only by doing this (cutting open the patient), can you get to see this:

The Fascinating Sweater Guts.  I know - I probably need get out more.  But it is cool no?  See how the inside is a perfect reverse of the outside?  It causes me to pause and reflect on the nature of surgeries, both physical and intellectual.

I am in the process of re-writing my book, which is very like surgery, in that it has a lot of blood and guts, and makes me long for painkillers.  Each word and sentence and turn of phrase has to be taken apart, examined for possible problems, and then stitched back into place.  I want the result to be beauty-enhancing reconstruction.  I deeply fear a Frankenstein outcome. 

I am intellectually balanced on the scalpel's edge between the way I would like to write my writing and the number of pages there are to put it in.  This means that I have to reduce the number of words without changing their meaning.  That's not so hard, but I am finding that the edited version of things always sound like somebody else's writing.  And of course, putting everything under the microscope this way creates a serious loss of perspective, so maybe I'm worrying about nothing?

One of the problems with introspection is it's awfully hard to know when you're done...

Scientific Experiment

It all started last year at this time, when my daughter invited nine of her closest friends over for a birthday sleepover.  Everything was going great until the day before the party, when I got a gnarly case of Strep Throat.  Yeah, I know:  I think that one was Mother of the Year award number 6.  Rather than cancel/ruin Lindsay's party, Phillip bravely threw himself on the grenade and hosted all 10 little girls down in the living room, while I convalesced in an upstairs bedroom.  It worked, in that nobody came down with my crud.  It also entitled Phillip to some massive Karmic Payback.

In the interest of fair play, I handled this year's little girl birthday party SOLO.  We had a sleepover at a local hotel (the kind with a swimming pool and breakfast buffet - I may be slow, but I'm not dumb), while Phillip stayed home, grinning smugly to himself.

The girls were very well-behaved.  What you may not know about 10-year-old girls is that however demure and mannerly they may be in their normal habitat, when exposed to members of their own species, they become VOCAL.  And by that, I mean LOUD.  Way. Loud.  And High-Pitched.  There are some 10-year-old girls that only dogs can hear.

When you take the same 10-year-old LOUD girls to an acoustically perfect indoor swimming pool enclosure, you are setting yourself up for auditory discomfort.  When you stay in said enclosure with them for (I am not kidding) 3.5 hours, you are going to experience some temporary ringing at best, and permanent hearing damage, at worst. 

That's where the Scientific Experiment comes in:  As knitters, we are all familiar of the soothing and restorative powers of our work.  I wondered, (around the time my ears began to bleed) could knitting actually distract me from physical pain, as well as irritation?  Could working on a sweater relieve the discomfort inflicted by squealing little girls in a tiled pool room?  What choice did I have, but to try? My Observations:

Hour 1:    Okay, this is not so bad.  As long as I can keep the rhythm of my stitches consistent, the racket does, in fact, recede a bit from my focus.  Drop a stitch, however, and all bets are off.  Man, are they loud.  How can so much noise come out of such small people?

Hour 2:    My prediction was that by this point I would have half a sleeve, and the sound level would have receded from my consciousness to a dull roar.  Instead, I have 1/4 of a sleeve, and a headache.

Hour 3:    Things are looking up:  Either the small mermaids are beginning to tire/become hoarse, or I have begun to experience hearing loss.  I still only have 1/4 of a sleeve, having stopped to serve drinks and snacks.  Feeding them was probably a tactical error, in terms of their energy levels.

Hour 3.5:  I have triumphantly arrived at the end of the party.  Or at least that's what the clock says.  Extracting the reluctant merry-makers from the pool remains to be seen.

Overall, I would say that the party was a success.  The experiment proved that while nothing short of tarmac-approved airport hearing protection would have been appropriate, the knitting did help keep my nerves intact.  As a bonus, while Phillip was still somewhat smug, he was extremely sympathetic to my pain, and even poured me wine when I got home. 

Karmic Debt Settled.

Mischief Managed.

Sorry, what did you say?

A Name For The Baby

The baby in question is of course, not a real baby, but my book; heretofore referred to as "My Book", "The Book", or in moments of impending doom "The @%$#$O! Book".

The process of becoming a writer is much less predictable than the process of becoming a knitter, or at least it has been for me.  When I knit, I have a general degree of certainty that Yarn + Needles = Knitwear.  It may not be the knitwear that I intended, but I am pretty well guaranteed that with enough tenacity, and possibly wine, I will ultimately end up with a final product which is knitted. 

With writing, the equation seems to be a lot more ephemeral.  I often find that Time + Inspiration = Drivel.  And other times Deadline + Desperation + Crashing Hard Drive = Brilliance.

Such seems also to be the nature of naming books.  Back when I decided that what I really needed to do was write a book (sometime after deciding that I needed to design a sweater, but before deciding that I needed brain-enhancing vitamins), the title was one of the first ideas which suggested itself to me.  It was as organic as the designs themselves.  The name was perfect; it was descriptive, it was pithy, it was original.  When a publisher decided to actually make my book, it was also the first thing to go.  Apparently, there is a lot more to know about the naming of books than I knew.

Since my editor delicately informed me of the "New Working Title" of my project, its name has changed about 4 times that I know of, and probably more than that.  It seems that these things are decided by committees, or at least by more than one all-seeing human, and certainly not by anyone so lowly as the author.  I have hated every single name given to my book so far, until yesterday.  I so loathed the last one that I actually forgot it, which is probably for the best.  I was embarrassed to ask again what my own book is named, and I put it off for about two months.  When I finally summoned the courage to inquire, I received a whole new answer.  Thankfully, this one is much better, and I really hope it will stick. 

The whole experience with the name got me thinking about the nature of books and their covers, and of course, judging them thereby.  I realize now that the name given to my book is much less important then the guts inside of it, and the guts are much less likely to be changed at the publisher's whim.  As an experiment, I visited my favorite random name generator for a brainstorming session, which yielded some truly remarkable monikers.

If my book were:

A Tavern:                                       The Laughing Devil
A Fantasy Realm:                         Good Glimmering Barony
A Corporation:                              European Power Semiconductors
A Tree-Being:                               Madhazel
A Western Character:                  Edith "Bad Kid" Byrd
A Pirate Ship:                                The Dreaming Executioner
A Rampaging Giant Monster:    Gogospew, the Blasphemous Dweller of the Howling                                                                           Universe

So what's in a name?  Nothing.  And Everything.  On different hours and different days, my book could have been named any one of these, quite accurately. 

I'm dying to share the name of my book with you, and I promise that I will.  Not today, though, because the fact that they have finally chosen one I can live with means that telling the world prematurely could jinx it.  Also, how lame is it to make a big announcement that the baby has been named, and then CHANGE it later because somebody at the publisher had a different idea?  No, the day will come, and we'll all welcome my little monster into the world library with the appropriate publisher-sanctioned fanfare.  Until then we'll all just have to wait patiently for the arrival of little Wolfgang Nebuchadnezzar, and hope for the best.