So there I’ve been, chugging away (some days better, some not) on Book V, and also trying to read outside that box a little because of the BBC panel discussion coming up, and suddenly…I’m on the phone to the lovely folks in London (who have been uniformly encouraging and lovely)\u00a0 to talk about the upcoming program.\u00a0\u00a0 My day-writing in fantasy has been separated from my night-reading in SF by other things, some of them LifeStuff (like knitting while waiting at the hospital for my husband to be done with a test procedure…even a slow knitter like me can accomplish a fair bit of 2×2 ribbing in 3 hours!), and thus I’ve been able to cope with the difference in cognitive function each requires.<\/p>\n
But thanks to the time zone thing, BBC needed to talk to me in my morning, their afternoon–and my morning brain is presently dedicated to Paksworld.\u00a0\u00a0 So the request to come up with nifty high-tech SFnal entertaining ideas fell on a brain buried deep in late medieval ship construction, navigation,\u00a0 sea currents off the coast of Prealith and eastern Aarenis,\u00a0 the economics of the sea trade between the East, the North, and the South, the possible reasons for the decline in elven populations,\u00a0 sibling psychology in prominent families, etc.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 All my bright ideas were bubbling up from the wrong substrate.<\/p>\n
I had thought that by not actually starting to write in the book before the call came, I would be able to switch on the SF brain, but that didn’t entirely work.\u00a0 I could retrieve stuff I’d already done, but I couldn’t\u00a0 innovate at a speed suitable for an expensive long-distance phone conversation.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I felt slow and stupid, in fact.\u00a0 So now I know that to prep myself for next week’s taping, I will have to wake up the SF side and suppress the fantasy side for a few hours.<\/p>\n
It’s clearer now what they’re hoping for from me as a participant, and I expect I’ll do OK on the day, but it’s not my natural posture, so to speak.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile–entering stuff in the yarn stash file while waiting for the phone to ring–I discovered that I have (as many people probably discover) more yarn than I realized.\u00a0\u00a0 Just in the yarn bought for socks, I have enough for 10 pairs beyond the\u00a0 two pairs of socks now on the needles.\u00a0 But I also have yarn of types not suitable for socks (it was beautiful, it was on sale, “I’ll find something to do with it…”),\u00a0 yarn that I don’t have enough of for socks\u00a0 (a ball of this, a ball of that),\u00a0 two balls of super-chunky novelty yarn that need to be made into gift scarves before next winter (a long time coming in Texas), and that’s not counting the yarn inherited from my mother.\u00a0\u00a0 the “I’ll think of something…” yarn doesn’t attract me as much now as it did…it was shortly after I started knitting again and was trying out different yarns to see what I liked…and now I’m committed to worsted wool and lots of socks.\u00a0 (Besides the socks for myself, I have three pairs on request already.)\u00a0\u00a0 If\u00a0 all I had in the stash was the yarn for socks and the yarn for the gift scarves, I wouldn’t have too much.<\/p>\n
Today is music day (voice lesson and choir); the knitting goes along for the period between the two, and the traveling notebook (not electronic–pen & paper) also goes along so that any bright ideas can be set down.\u00a0\u00a0 Tomorrow should be an all-clear writing day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So there I’ve been, chugging away (some days better, some not) on Book V, and also trying to read outside that box a little because of the BBC panel discussion coming up, and suddenly…I’m on the phone to the lovely folks in London (who have been uniformly encouraging and lovely)\u00a0 to talk about the upcoming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[112,107],"class_list":["post-1571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1571"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1573,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions\/1573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}