News: Island Refuge, Oral History, and Boat People!

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Guided by local folklore, archeologists found one of the "island refugia" (not really an island, but an ice-free zone in the middle of the Ice Age glacial area) that people boating down from Beringia used as a base for their marine hunting and gathering - 14,000 years ago! At last, at last, at last! It's amazing what you find when you look where the most knowledgeable people tell you to...

On a more personal note, turns out I enjoy making patchwork. Who knew? It may be genetic, as the gramma I take after the most was an avid quilter. Not going down that rabbit hole, though. This'll be a skirt. Because I have about two skirts that are fit to be seen in public.

Dadgummit to Heck

I have now put the same damn zipper in wrong seven times.

Only four ways to put it in at all exist. Three of them are wrong. So I'm repeating myself. Multiple times.

But if I don't make my own pants I don't get pants that cover my butt. It actually costs me more woman-hours, and more tears of frustration, to buy a pair of pants that doesn't quite fit than to make one that fits perfectly.

And seven times is nothing - I'm well into double-digits for queries on every work I have ready to sell. So when I stop being lightheaded, and have gotten myself round some chocolate, I'm going for lucky #8.

Because even if you're bad at something, if it's the only way to get what you need, you're stuck.

Edit to Add: I was wrong. I just invented two brand-new wrong ways to put in a zipper. Clearly, I have talent for this. Too bad it's not one I can be paid for.

Tomorrow is another day. Today I'm thinking: Sims and more chocolate.

Salvage

Well, it's been a little while since I did a sewing parallel; mostly because I haven't been sewing. But yesterday I finished a dress, first time I'd made the pattern and I had to take an extra dart to make the bodice fit. It was Good Enough, but a little uniform. I decided I wanted to put some embroidery around the hem, so I got out my handy iron-on patterns.

Embroidery is one of those things that gives you a lot of bang for the buck on the "making an impression" front. People who don't embroider are always way more impressed than ironing on a pattern and filling it in with repetitive hand motions justifies by the effort involved.

So I'm ironing away, putting the border originally intended for a pillow slip all around the hem, which is always several miles around because I need full skirts to accommodate my stride, and I wonder, "What's with that blue smear on the back of the paper?"

And then I realize it's not just on the paper, it's on the fabric.

And then I look and I realize that I had some blue plastic hangars a tad too close to the iron and had gotten some melted plastic on one edge of it. Just a little bit; but enough to get on the fabric in more than one place.

And guess what? The iron, being hot enough to apply a transfer, was also hot enough to set the plastic dye right down in the fabric. So it might be possible to wash it out, but by the time I even noticed it, it was too late to do so by any means that would not wholly obliterate the transfer I wanted there.

So the whole dress is ruined, right?

Maybe. But I'm not tossing it out.

Because I'm thinking, those blue smears are tiny. Maybe by the time I've finished embroidering, they'll have faded so only someone who knows where to look can see them.

And maybe, while I'm embroidering, I'll think of a good way to disguise those smears, bury them under another decorative motif. I've got to ponder (and study my iron-on transfers) about that. If I can pull it off, I'll deserve the reaction embroidery gets a lot more than I normally do, because making them look like part of a decorative whole require some true creativity on my part, not just an iron-on and repetitive hand motions, given that there's nothing symmetrical or rational about the location of the smears in relation to each other.

If nothing else, I can still wear it around the house or out to the grocery store, because who looks at what other people wear to the grocery store? Pleasing other people with the outfit is nice, but secondary. I'm making it for me.

It's different with writing, except when it's not. You won't often discover a serious blemish in a story at a stage at which you can't just rip it right out and rewrite. But maybe there's a factual error that makes nonsense of your heroine's behavior and the deadline is cast in stone, no time to do the research and rewriting necessary. Maybe that error can be turned into your heroine's mistake, or a lie told to her, and the screws of suspense tightened by cluing in the audience while she's still acting on bad info?

Or maybe you and your editor have a serious disagreement about what is and is not a blemish, and removing what he wants you to destroys your whole vision? Maybe you don't have to take it to a different editor (though you should give that notion serious consideration, too) - maybe there's a way to twist that particular point into something that works for both of you?

Or maybe the work has some inherent weakness that makes it unpublishable, in the normal way of things, like it's full of in-jokes that render it incomprehensible outside of a demographic so narrow it's not a market (like your own family or gaming group or church) or it's a blatant fanfic or it has to be a picture book but it also has to be too long for a picture book. But - it's good, for what it is, and you can't bear not to share it. You can still find a way to share it. Print up a copy just for the family; self-publish it in some narrow corner of the internet; make a one-off edition for the friend the heroine is modeled on and give it to her for her birthday; use it in a class to illustrate some point.

Never wad up a work you like and just chuck it away. Not without due process. You can always throw it out later if it turns out to be genuinely unsalvageable.

Yet Another Sewing Analogy

So I'm making a pattern I've never sewn before, and on Friday it came time to make the back center seam of a bodice with a lining and no zipper. I read the directions, and they made no sense. None. I tried to follow the directions and they still made no sense. I manipulated the pieces as directed and it all seemed physically impossible. So I gave up.

I woke up a number of times during the weekend, worrying about this bodice.

Yesterday I went back to it. And it was easy. Obvious, even. This despite the fact that I was pretty light-headed, which makes seeing how two-dimensional patterns translate into three-dimensional garments exponentially more difficult for me.

Sometimes you have to let a problem rest and let your backbrain deal with it. I can't promise it'll take as short a time as a weekend. That block at Ch. 10 I referred to awhile ago has been there a good deal longer than that. But the backbrain does in fact keep working, out of sight, if your frontbrain will let go of a problem and allow it.

They don't seem to be able to work simultaneously, sorry.

Fresh Eyes

Warning: Another sewing analogy.

So, there's this blouse. It's a pattern I've made several times before, but I made a cutting error and had to let it sit for about a week while my backbrain worked on a way around it. I got back on it this week, solved the problem all right, and yesterday I was all but finished - just the buttons and buttonholes to do. Buttonholes are hard in themselves, but my machine has a wonderful automatic buttonholer that makes them much, much easier. So the only stressful part of buttonholes for me is cutting them - there's always a danger that you'll lose control and the buttonhole will be bigger than the buttonhole stitch intended to contain it. But this concern is largely obviated by inserting a pin to block the seamripper (or whatever) from going too far.

Guess what happens if your pin is bent, though?

So on the verge of finishing what was going to be a very cute blouse, I ripped a buttonhole right through the front edge, ruining the whole thing. Unless I could think of a way to fix it. No way could my limited darning and patching skills cover it up, nor make the cut area strong enough to hold together under the strain of daily wear. But I didn't want to give up on it, so I dropped it, did something else, and when Damon got home I griped to him about it. Damon knows about as much about sewing as I do about programming, but he gripes to me about programming problems so I get to gripe about sewing problems to him. Fair's fair. He took it, turned it over a few times, started to suggest something, realized it wouldn't work, and than asked if I could edge the blouse front with a ribbon or something, to disguise the patched area and restore structural integrity to the blouse. Which made me realize that I might could; and as it happens I even have some double-fold tape in the right color to do it (unless I decide a contrasting color would look better. Hmmm. And I might want to do the bottom and sleeves the same way).

And this is why humans have that annoying habit of griping to other people about problems they can have no realistic expectation of solving. Obviously, I would have preferred to have griped to someone who could sew; but as it happens, a pair of fresh eyes was all I needed, not a level of expertise. I do the same thing with him and his programming gripes sometimes. Mostly I can only make sympathetic noises, but sometimes I'll ask an intelligent question that will help him see his way clear. If I could program, I might come up with better questions more often and if he could sew, he might have been able to offer helpful advice in implementing the solution to optimal effect, but what we do for each other is better than nothing and good enough.

This is why authors join critique groups, team with writing partners, and swap manuscripts with friends. Such arrangements work best among people in the same field. The author of a book for children and the author of an adult romance may not understand a lot of each other's problems, and a writer of biography could find writers of fiction frustratingly focused on all the wrong things. But those who write children's books may also read romances, writers of fiction often love biography, and a problem is a problem is a problem.

It is not fair to give a manuscript to a non-writer, or a sketch to a non-artist, and expect a useful critique. Don't do that to them. But listening to problems, soluble or not, is part of the social contract. Creative problems are like any other problems, and a non-specialist is as likely to be of service with them as with any other kind of problem in which he has no particular expertise.

And if not, you can at least get feedback in the form of sympathetic noises.

Adjustment

Late today, because the computer was sick - needed a new power supply. I've been writing a blog post in my head all day, but it seems to be two posts intertwined and I'm not sure I can separate them out enough. And it's late and I feel crappy, so I'll take the shortest component I can tease out.

I've remarked more than once on the difference between brains and their capacities at different periods of our lives. The advantage of the mature brain is that, though it has trouble learning brand new things, if it was trained well during its early years, it doesn't have to; it can recognize commonalities between this new thing it's doing and that old thing that it's done before, a hundred different times, in a hundred different guises.

But I was reminded again this weekend that you can't afford to get cocky about that. Not, at any rate, in any creative activity. Because each time you do it is different.

In this case, it was the slacks. I cut the waistband too small. As far as I could (or can) tell, I cut it exactly the same size as I did last time I made that pattern, and I can still wear the slacks I made that time; but I could barely get into the new ones and they would not have been comfortable to wear. Either I'd marked the pattern wrong, or something was different about the fabric, or - something. This morning I recut them (this is why I always buy at least half an extra yard of fabric; it leaves me with a varied stack of remnants too small to make a garment of, but it gives me lots of room to make mistakes) and now they fit, at last.

But I've found the same thing with other projects. This or that rhetorical trick, structural element, viewpoint, whatever, worked last time I wrote a story; but it won't work for this one. I can fight it, or I can try something different. I worked well with this editor on that book, but she's not right for this one. The greatest sonneteer in the world will write a bad sonnet if the poem in question is really a haiku.

You've got to work with what you've got, not with what you used last time.

Just because you know how to do something, doesn't mean you'll do it right this time.

The mature brain can't make much in the way of new synapses; but it can still be flexible.

I suppose I'll have to dust, now...

So I have this blouse about 3/4 done and yesterday I ran out of thread. I decided not to make a trip out just to get thread and to combine it with an errand I had to do today.

Then I realized that I needed to unpick the last seam I'd put in.

And then Damon needed the car today (but we'll do a whole bunch of errands together after work).

Yup. You can have entire years like that.

Half an Inch, Half an Inch, Onward

Pride goeth and all that. After congratulating myself on my improved sewing skills yesterday, I returned to the piece, repinned to make everything tighter - and found that I'd made an error of about half an inch on one piece. Which, if I can't match the fabric, or locate a similar-textured contrast that makes sense in that location - I suppose I could recut the collar in the contrast - will waste about half the fabric.

Nobody is ever good enough at anything that they never screw up.

Certainly I never will be!

A Habit's as Good as a Strength

We all have strengths we need to play to and weaknesses we need to make up for. In writing, my strengths are character and dialog - characters are always there when I need them, and all I need for dialog is to listen to them talk. My weakness is plotting. If I didn't have an audience to think of, I could happily follow these characters around listening to them talk and watching them live their lives all day long, whether it got me anywhere or not. Which has caused me to build up a lot of muscle in the art of Cutting to the Chase, for which I have neither natural aptitude nor inability.

In sewing, my only strength is patience. I have never been able to see straight lines, assess distances, or translate two dimensions into three; I'm not intrinsically interested in clothes much (though when I'm sewing I become more interested); my mind is apt to wander during the numerous tedious bits; and if I don't focus hard I will always, always put the bobbin in upside down. But patience and perseverance can make up for all that, eventually. I'm accustomed to pinning every pattern layout twice, to leaving several hours or - if the fabric's really nice and/or no longer available - a whole day between pinning and cutting, to ripping out the same seam many times, and so on. I don't enjoy all that, but sewing my own is the only way to get clothes to fit, so I do it. Eventually.

So today I was doing my second pinning of a complicated set-up involving two different patterns and one fabric, and I noticed something. I was pinning the patterns perfectly on-grain the first time more often than not; and when I folded two pieces that hadn't been folded before in order to shorten the waist, I was doing it freehand and finding, when I checked against a piece that had been folded the last time I used that pattern, that I'd done it perfectly first time.

This is huge. It meant I not only eyeballed the correct length, I got my fingers to perform the operation properly. I've finally got enough experience at altering patterns to fit my figure to skip a lot of the do-overs.

I was almost as proud of myself as I was the first time I realized I was leaving out all the scenes I'd have to cut later anyway during the first draft!

And, since I was still pinning and my back brain was free to keep turning up connections, I thought about this thing I've been doing on my sims newsgroup lately. People who get their sims into some sort of soap operatic pickle and are unsure how they want to proceed from there often solicit advice, and of course I'm never shy about offering it. My basic plan is always the same: a) pay attention to your sims' behavior and extrapolate from that what they would really do if they were people instead of pixels (this is essentially my approach to the plotting problem, too - plot is what the characters do, so playing to my strengths means letting them solve their own problems instead of trying to make them follow some plan of my own) and b)think about what would be most fun for you to play. Because after all, they aren't writing a novel, they're playing a game, and if they aren't having fun they might as well go wash dishes or something. I then will append some concrete examples of possible ways the game might go depending on circumstances, giving their situation the Garage Sale treatment.

What I realized while pinning was, that this is plotting. Rudimentary plotting, sure; but since most of the time I don't know much about the sim in question at all, and in no case do I have the intimate character knowledge on which I rely to make up for poor plotting skills, it really is plot work I'm doing, and moderately successfully, too. I never used to be able to do that without miring in a quicksand of Too Many Ideas, Too Little Logic, and I never mire anymore; though how much that has to do with improved plotting skills and how much with improved ability to apply the brakes before I lose control is a hard question. Not one that it's important to answer, either. The point is - I can do now what I couldn't do then.

I'll never be Agatha Christie, but I don't need to be. All I needed was to improve that skill to the point where I'm not hopeless at it anymore. And I've done it.

All it took was decades of practice, developing a habit of mind.

Just like lining up with the grain and shortening a waist.

How It Works

So anyway yesterday I got to the actual sewing part of making a blouse I haven't made before (View F) and the second step was to pin the "front" to the "side front." So I laid out the front pieces, and laid the side front pieces on top of them. And then I reversed them. And then I turned one of them upside down. And then I looked at the drawing in the instructions. And then I laid them out again. And then I dug out the cut pieces of pattern again and checked that yes, these were the front and the side front and no, I wasn't missing any bits of them. Though I did discover that I'd overlooked the top back piece, and had to get it out of the pattern bag, cut out the top back pattern piece, clear everything off the cutting table, lay the fabric out again, and cut the top back. Which didn't help. But since I had the pattern pieces out I looked them over, made sure I knew which way they were supposed to be oriented in relation to each other, and I pinned the front to the side front as best I could. None of this was helped by the fact that it was too hot to go without the ceiling fans in the sewing room and not hot enough to justify turning on the massively inefficient air conditioner in the adjacent game room, so my pieces wouldn't lie still.

The problem, you see, is that there's a massive curve on the side front piece, while the front piece is almost completely straight. Also, there's no facing pieces for the armholes, which worried and distracted me.

But I got the piece pinned, walked off, ate some ice cream, read a bit, and thought about those two pieces. They have to fit together - the pattern says so. It's just like the two essential scenes that have to be adjacent to each other in the book but don't have obvious connections. How exactly does the character get to Point B from Point A in time for the second scene? And given the rules laid down by the teacher in the first scene, isn't the necessary behavior of the secondary character in the second scene too massively risky and stupid? So you think and you rearrange and you tear your hair out and you draw a map of the playground and name the class turtle and eventually, all you can do is sit down to write the first scene knowing that the second scene is coming up and if you just get it all down in rough you can fix it in revision.

So I said: "As ye sew, so shall ye rip," and I returned to those pieces, fiddled with and repinned them a bit, and I sewed them. It took a lot of coaxing to get the pieces to lie flat to each other, but they only have to do that while within a certain range of the needle and it was indeed possible. And while I was ironing the result I realized; "Oh, this is doing the same job as darts at the bust and waist!" Which, trust me, made sense of the whole thing; and also points me in the direction I need to go if I have to revise the fit, because I know what to do with a dart that doesn't fit me. (I usually have to shorten it; not sure how to do that here but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.) Just like, when I'm writing a story, I don't realize that the job of the playground scene is to show the relationship between the protagonist and the clique which will reach its crisis in the conflict over the class turtle introduced in the classroom scene, even though when I first started writing I didn't even know the class had a turtle; and once I know that, I know I'll be able to make it all work.

Demonstrating yet again that it doesn't matter what you're making, the underlying processes of creating it are the same.

(And no, I don't actually have a story under way about playgrounds and class turtles. Those are by way of example and I don't know where they came from. Which might or might not mean they're going somewhere.)

Stupid Days

Sometimes characters who are supposed to be smart do monumentally stupid things, and every intelligent person reading the book (or, more probably, watching the screenplay) protests, because nobody in the story notices the stupidity.

If you have to have a character do stupid things, you need to make him self-aware about it and make clear that it's an aberration and he, and the people around him, know he did something stupid. Because we all have days like this occasionally:

I had an ice pick in the back of my head. (Note that, to the best of my knowledge, I've never actually seen an ice pick. Yet the metaphor for sharp, localized pain comes naturally to me. I must have learned it from people accustomed to ice picks, such as authors, or my mother. How many of our routinely-used metaphors have become cliches with no force because of such learned usages? That's something to beware of.) So I wasn't getting anything useful done. But I had to buy more fusible* before I could work on the blouse again, so I drove to the mall that till recently had a decent JoAnn's and a Hobby Lobby, and now only has the Hobby Lobby, which I don't like to go into because all those rows and rows of useless stuff make me dizzy and they don't carry notions at all. Somebody explain the retail logic behind stocking patterns, fabric, and ribbons, and no buttons, thread, pins, or zippers. Seriously, this is one of the biggest mysteries of the age. But anyway, seeing that the JoAnn's was gone I decided to see if Hobby Lobby had maybe ordered something as useful as fusible by mistake, and patted my pocket as I was closing the car door, realizing as it latched that my pocket only contained chapstick and my keys were still in the ignition. Furthermore, I wasn't carrying my purse, with the spare keys in it, since I was wearing jeans with a back pocket that holds my wallet and my glasses case fit in my cardigan pocket.

So I went on into Hobby Lobby, found some fusible, and saw that they were having a 99-cent sale on Simplicity patterns. I wouldn't have gone out of my way for it, but hey, I do need that pattern for a Hawaiian flowerdy shirt. I didn't find one, but I got five other useful-looking ones, checked out, and asked the friendly check-out person if the management or mall security would help me out with the key problem. The thing about Moby is that he's sufficiently old, you can get him open with a coat hangar if you happen to know how, and everyplace I've done this before, the programmed male response of helping middle-aged white ladies in distress has always served me well. However, her manager only said he didn't know where to find a coat hanger (why a guy with that little mechanical enterprise is even in a craft store, much less managing it, baffles me); and mall security has a policy of not helping people who locked their keys in the car.

All right, so I had to bus home. I didn't have a bus book, so I took the opportunity to look over my cheap patterns; and found that three of the five I had picked up in the wrong size. Well, drat. That's stupid thing number two.

At home, since my house key is on the same ring as the car keys, I broke into the house (which you'll excuse me given details about on the internet; as it happens, I know how to get into my own house without a key and without breaking anything), got the spare car keys, ate lunch, and then called Damon to find out where the spare keys were, because I didn't want to break into the house a second time when I got home. We had a long Abbot-and-Costello conversation before he realized where my brain disconnect was and patiently pointed out that, once I got into the car, I would have access to my house key again.

Oh. Duh.

That's how stupid I was yesterday. And I'm not sure I'm any brighter today. You can see why I didn't even try to accomplish anything meaningful, and I certainly didn't work on the blouse. It'd all be to do over.

But there's always weeding and laundry. And the redbuds are showing pink. And the mountain laurel at the mall had bloomed. And I at least remembered to exchange my patterns. Even days of mind-boggling stupidity with ice-pick headaches needn't be wasted.

*For non-sewers: Fusible is a thin treated fabric that you iron to fuse it to the inside fabric of things like cuffs, collars, and button plackets.

No Hurry

Realizing that the reason I still hadn't done any sewing was that I'd gotten it into my head I needed to make jeans; and this is much too intimidating a project to launch into after such a long hiatus, Saturday I dug through my stash, picked a new project, ironed the fabric, laid out a pattern, and pinned it.

By then it was getting late, and I've been advised not to pin and cut out on the same day, to reduce cutting errors. For those of you not accustomed to sewing, a cutting error can be anything from cutting two pieces when you need four, cutting with the grain (the direction of the threads) lying wrong in the piece, using a piece from the wrong pattern (most modern patterns offering a number of different options, so that it's possible to cut the sleeve for A when you want B), omitting a piece, or just plain messing up the cutting. Since, most of the time, you buy a piece of fabric with the intention of using it in a particular project, and only buy the recommended amount for the project, a cutting error probably means you don't have enough fabric to correct the error. Which is all very well, if you can run back to the fabric store and buy another half yard; but if you're working from stash, the odds are good the store won't have the fabric you bought last year anymore. And I'm pretty sure the fabric I was using was one I'd bought off the clearance table. All this being true, although I was anxious to get properly started and didn't feel like ironing and pinning was enough progress, I left the pinned fabric and did something else.

As I got into the shower Saturday night I suddenly realized: I don't want to make a fitted blouse with that fabric. I want to make a "Hawaiian flowerdy shirt," which by definition has to be loose. I don't have a pattern for a Hawaiian flowerdy shirt, so I needed to unpin that fabric, put it away, iron another piece of fabric, and start over. So if I hadn't followed the advice not to pin and cut on the same day, I'd have ruined the outfit. I probably could have made an acceptable blouse, (hmm...maybe it'd be flowerdy-shirty enough if I left out the darts? No, because they need to be loose in the shoulders, too), but "acceptable" and "the one I want" aren't equivalent terms. So even if the pattern was laid out perfectly and I'd cut with a steady hand, if I hadn't followed the "don't pin and cut on the same day" rule, I would have made a gigantic cutting error, and repented at leisure.

It takes me forever to do things, even working on them every day. I frequently feel that I'm patient to a fault, and it often works against me - patient people tend to get crappy customer service, for example.

But patience is so often the difference between success and failure. It pays, when you think you've completed the final draft, to let it sit overnight and give it one more read-through in the morning before sending off that query, or summary, or manuscript. Cutting errors are every bit as fatal to careers as to outfits; but only if you parade them around, and don't recognize them till later.

(BTW, I got dizzy ironing the contrast fabric for Fitted Blouse Take 2 yesterday, and didn't get as far as ironing and pinning the fabric for the main blouse. Which is frustrating, when I had so much energy Saturday. But the main thing is, I did work on it, and will again today. Also, more book shuffling!)

The Look

So this morning, as part of my routine, I clicked on a sewing newsgroup, ran the search for new posts since my last visit, and read the two or three in threads that sounded like they might have something useful to me in them. I generally only go there once a day unless I have a sewing question and no one else to consult, because I'm not into the whole clothes thing enough to hang with these people, who can get down and dirty about style and stuff. I've never been like that: don't wear makeup, hate shoe shopping (you'd hate it too, if you had my feet), choose my clothes based on factors like pockets. I only sew at all because I can't get clothes that meet my basic utility criteria unless I do. But today on one of the threads I read someone asked for advice on what to wear to a writer's conference, so I replied, and realized I have in fact accumulated some opinions on this topic.

First of all, when you're at a conference you're going to be running from panel to panel, standing in long lines at booksignings, browsing the dealer's room, and accumulating free stuff - handouts, schedules, maps, business cards, catalogs, galleys, books. So whatever else you do, come prepared with something on your feet that won't render you lame the next day, and something in which to carry your loot that won't a)be easily lost b) take up as much space as you do c) violate the rules of the venue and most of all d) injure you. I'm serious. I know someone who tore a ligament at midwinter ALA carrying around the catalogs she collected. I have an enormous backpack, designed to carry a laptop, that can be squashed into any number of shapes and fit into a surprisingly small space even when laden with books and food. (I don't go anywhere without emergency food.)

Second, one of the prime reasons to go to conferences is to hook up with people in your profession. Of course you plan to schmooze editors and agents and get critiques from big names, but be honest - didn't you choose this conference over that one in order to finally meet in person your favorite blogger or members of your online group who also plan to attend? Then you get there and the spot where you agreed to meet is harder to find than you thought, or bigger than you thought, or contains more people than you expected. So how do you find each other?

I once had to take an online friend of mine to the emergency room when she ran a high fever during ALA. In her conference report afterward, conveying the disjointed sense of unreality under which she labored, she said: "Peni wears a western hat. That's how you know it's her." And it's true. I started wearing a hat thirty years ago when I became dependent on the bus. I want one in summer to keep the sun out of my eyes and I want one in winter to keep my head warm. I like hats. Most people don't wear them because they restrict vision when driving. So without my ever intending to, The Hat became a kind of trademark. When I'm meeting someone who's never seen me, I usually tell them: "I'll be the one in The Hat." When I'm in a crowded venue with a party that gets separated, I tend to be the focal point that brings everybody back together, because when they can't see faces they can see The Hat. I went to Winter SCBWI in 2008 and didn't wear The Hat on the con floor because I was staying in the same hotel and didn't go outside; with the result that people were looking for me on the second day based on the color I wore on the first day, and missing me because I'd changed clothes. If I want people to find me, I have to wear The Hat. The Hat itself changes year to year and occasion to occasion, but if I don't wear some variation on it, nobody knows it's me.

You don't have to have something as permanent as The Hat, but it doesn't hurt to choose your clothes with recognizability as a key criterion. For a particular conference, you could be The Lady in Red. The Guy in the Cardigan. The One with the Big Braid Wrapped Around Her Head. Anything your friends can home in on. Jeans aren't distinctive enough; jeans and superhero t-shirts may be, depending on the conference.

And last: Periodically throughout your career, stop and ask yourself whether now is a good time to do a little branding.

It's easy to go overboard on this sort of thing and become a caricature, especially if you do it prematurely. Even at a science fiction convention, there's something pathetic about dressing up as your own series character. If you haven't even sold the series yet - don't do it. Please. Don't. And it takes a very special mystery writer to carry off wearing a deerstalker and carrying a magnifying glass. But if you're subtle and modest and have a sense of humor, and if the brand you're trying to associate with is (as it should be) a true enthusiasm of yours or a natural part of your life, go for it. Chris Barton, who wrote The Day-Glo Brothers, has a fluorescent green tie. I have an outfit with cave art embroidered all over it and get t-shirts with megafauna on them as often as I can. If you write westerns and you live west of the Mississippi, you can probably knock their socks off in New York with your "cowboy look" wearing clothes already in your closet. But don't wear the riding heels, wear the boots you'd wear to walk around the exhibit halls at the rodeo, even if they're a little down-at-heel.

But don't obsess about any of this, either. Odds are good you've already evolved an effective look without thinking about it. Trust your look the same way you trust your style and voice, as natural parts of you that only need to be polished a little bit to shine.

And by Left They Mean Right...

I've been wandering around doing miscellaneous things this morning, and finally decided to just go put in the zipper wrong until the penny dropped. It finally did, and I have now written on the pattern "And by 'left' they mean 'right.'"

I always had a problem with that. I remember a time when my chief problem in dressing myself was that I was continually putting things on backwards because it wouldn't click with me that the front had to face away from me when I donned the garment in order to get the correct result. When I have to make left-or-right decisions I still glance down looking for a long-faded freckle on my right hand to make sure I don't pull left. Though the freckle is gone, I know that the right hand is the hand on which I reflexively check the freckle.

No, I don't expect you to follow that. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but me.

The trouble is that 'left' and 'right' are subjective terms, and in order to get the correct one it is necessary to be oriented the way the person giving you instructions expects you to be. I hardly ever am. And clockwise and widdershins are not "left" and "right," because any circle that goes left at the top goes right at the bottom and vice versa. Although one of Charles Fort's most famous aphorisms is "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere," apparently I am the only person in the world who ever orients a circle starting with the bottom point.

However, I can learn my way around urban spaces like nobody's business; and for years I always knew, when I walked into a restaurant, where to find the restrooms. This no longer functions infallibly, but that may be my own fault for preferring nonstandard restaurants.

I console myself for my lack of spatial acuity by telling myself that it gives me lots of sensitivity to alien viewpoints. You know how when somebody says "you have something on your face right there?" and points to the corresponding point on his own face, you always reach for the wrong spot? That doesn't happen with me, because I comprehend that I am functioning as your mirror, and point at the mirror-image spot. If I explain something and can't make myself understood, I do not assume that I am speaking to a stupid person, but to one with a different set of intuitive assumptions and will try out a different set till between us we hit on the ones that will work, or abandon the attempt. Conversely, I am frustrated to the point of murderousness in conversation with someone who denies the validity of my, or anyone else's, world view. When I'm writing a character, I can freely give them opinions I don't share and tastes opposed to mine and not worry about sounding convincing.

I may or may not have gotten the "see another's point of view" skill if I could tell my left from yours without conscious effort; but believing that I wouldn't is at least comforting, so please don't disabuse me of the notion.

Zippers, agents, and other conundrums

I have now made, by my count, one rough draft and two complete pairs of slacks with fly-front zippers. I am now working on another rough draft to work out some more details of the fit; and by working I mean the pieces have been cut out for about a week and I got the four darts in yesterday. It took me a number of tries to do the darts, yesterday being a bad day for the gyroscope, so straight lines were hard and so was finding the right side of the nondescript cloth I'm using for the rough draft. I then tried to move on to the zipper, and couldn't do it.

The first three, successful, times I did this zipper I did it wrong first and, having done "wrong," was able to see how "right" would look, go back, and redo it. (Hint, always baste for the first try at a zipper.) This is time-consuming but it's not as if I'm on deadline here. Yesterday I put the thing together, pinned it, played a computer game, came back, stared at it some more, unpinned it, put it together again, and left off in despair. Every way seemed impossible and besides, the zipper is too long even though I cut it to the right size (I know it was the right size - I measured it). I'm hoping it's just the gyroscope screwing up my capacity to recognize spatial relations, which was never my strong suit anyway.

I've spent most of my life being treated as a smart person, because I read so much and because I don't let learning a new task daunt me. Within certain fields, I'm a quick study, and nine-tenths of learning a new thing is not getting intimidated by the onrush of new stimuli. A little methodical sorting, some focused concentration, and a well-placed question or two, and I'm good to go. I don't for a moment believe that I'm smarter than average, and the zipper thing proves it. I have to re-solve the problem every time and on some days I can't solve it at all, because it relies on a portion of my system that I never developed well and which is a little messed-up physically. I do not have the skill "insert a fly-front zipper." I have a skill set that enables me to insert a fly-front zipper, or work a complicated math problem, or whatever, given sufficient time and a way of checking the result.

In the same way, I do not have the skill "find a publisher." I'm not certain anyone does, though I know people I am willing to believe do if they cop to it. I have, without an agent, sold twelve books to major houses and a number of short pieces to a number of different venues; so I have a skill set that makes finding a publisher possible. As far as I can tell, finding an agent takes the same skill set.

What I lack is any way to check the result. I have this in common with practically everybody. The moaning and wailing goes forth from the internet daily: "But why did this agent/editor that should have wanted me reject me? What does this rejection mean?"

A rejection doesn't mean anything. The market for print media is shrinking and the supply for it gets bigger every year. Even twenty years ago when I started, when it was possible (I know; I did it) to send a complete manuscript to a major editor like Margaret K. McElderry and get it read, I knew - because I'd been studying for this role all my life - that works get rejected more often than they get accepted. There are a thousand reasons to reject a work and only one of them is "it stinks." Editors are overworked, overwhelmed, and underfunded. Most of them don't even have assistants anymore. Most of them didn't have first readers even when I started. Writing a helpful rejection is too big an addition to their workloads in most cases.

And now that agents are acting as first readers, everybody has to have an agent. But getting an agent is harder (at least, if you're me, the person with the solid mid-list background and crappy interpersonal skills) than getting a publisher. An editor only has to be able to convince a committee to believe your book will work as one element of a list in one year. An agent, to be effective, has to be in love with the book and your whole career as well as having a small enough client list to make room for one more who's going to take as much time and attention as you are.

This is a discouraging prospect for someone, like me, who hates meeting new people and distrusts salesmanship and who, at the time of assembling the query, isn't particularly in love with a project, myself. Generally speaking, by the time I've drafted a book, revised it into something resembling publishability, polished a hook, and crammed the whole into a one-page synopsis, I'm fed to the teeth with the thing. Having to write a query letter under those circumstances is like having to put in a zipper that will only work properly if I both set it up perfectly the first time and am feeling madly, passionately enthusiastic about wearing slacks at the time of sewing.

Under those circumstances, I'd never get a pair of slacks that fit. Ever. I wouldn't even try, because that's never going to happen. And I like wearing skirts. A lot of people never get well-fitted slacks and never mind it. I can, too.

But the stories I write are The Most Important Thing. Stuff other people consider vital to happy lives, I've given up in favor of writing stories and never felt as sacrifices. So I arm myself with the knowledge that how I feel isn't important, but getting an agent is; and I have the skill set; and I make the attempt anyway. Sure, I can fail. But the only way to fail permanently is to die or abandon the attempt.

I wouldn't do it if it weren't The Most Important Thing. I don't know why anybody would.

So that's my words of wisdom for this day without a gyroscope (when staying upright is a chore and I can't trust myself to write a query). Decide what The Most Important Thing is, and go for it. Everything else can fall by the wayside.

You can have more than one Most Important Thing, but they'd better be compatible.

Progress, and the Lack Thereof

Yesterday, I wrote a necessary conversation justifying an action, a dangerous and indeed foolhardy action, that Di is determined to make and which renders the rest of the plot probable.

I also tried to fix the neck band on a blouse. This operation, tricky in and of itself, has been twice interrupted by machine malfunctions, and when I finally thought I had it, I discovered unacceptably big sewn-in wrinkles. So I took out the bad part and tried to fix it, several times. I got bored of ripping out stitches so I put in my Sims 2 disk and played while ripping; then I'd go back and sew some more and realize that nope, still didn't work. So I was ripping more than I was sewing, and soon I was fed up and playing more than I was ripping, and then a friend came over. So I ripped the whole thing apart and ironed it all flat and made an appointment with myself to take it from the top at one o'clock today.

This morning I wrote a few paragraphs beyond that necessary conversation, paced, stared off the balcony, went downstairs for water, let the cat out, thought perhaps Len should have bought a gun for Hebe and Di which she'd then have to teach them to use, decided to go back and put that in its proper place, had second thoughts, left the laptop so long it went into sleep mode; and finally came in here and started doing internet stuff. I know what needs to happen, I just don't have it all lined up in my head. And I keep distracting myself with less important, easier stuff.

Just like I know how that neck band is supposed to work, but can't make it lie straight. Yet.

It would be easy to think of yesterday afternoon's and this morning's work periods as wasted time, but it isn't true. Sometimes you have to rip out more than you sew and sometimes you have to unwrite as much as you write. Your intention is being channeled through your conscious mind and your hands, but their ability to fulfill your intention is imperfect. So of course you have to do, and do over, and make false starts, and stare off the edge of the balcony and realize you're thinking about your game instead of your story, and wonder if there's a connection or you're being lazy, and get a drink and start over.

As ye sew, so shall ye rip.

(But sometimes, you should give your husband the game disks and tell him to hide them for a week. Writing was easier when all the distractions aren't right there in the tool you're using.)

Teaching: Sewing, writing, whatever

(BTW, Happy Moonwalk Day.)

I have undertaken to teach a friend of mine garment sewing. She's handy and crafty and makes other sorts of fabric and leather items, but she thought she didn't know how to sew clothes because her technique has been to eyeball things on the rack, say "That looks simple," and proceed freehand. This worked for her on things like drawstring bags but not on things like harem pants. (She is of the fen and has places to go where harem pants are appropriate attire.) I told her she could too, and all we needed to do was get a simple pattern or two under her belt and then she'd know she could do it and could proceed from there.

So I took her to JoAnn's and she picked out a simple blouse and a simpler skirt from the $2.99 rack (always look in the $2.99 rack first; that's my philosophy). We already have (probably) enough fabric from a past failed attempt for the blouse, so we got fabric and notions suitable to make a skirt compatible with that. Two weeks ago we put together a rough draft of the skirt using some god-awful flimsy aqua stuff she doesn't remember acquiring (I'm thinking, garage sale, $1 an acre - who hasn't picked up crap like that?). T is too big to wear misses' sizes and too young to wear women's styles, so I showed her how to scale the pattern up, how to read the pattern, and how to lay out the fabric. I could see the light bulb go off over her head a couple of times as she realized why her freehand attempts hadn't worked. She hadn't known about things like grainline, or how the selvage isn't always perfectly straight, and without experience of the way a two-dimensional pattern translates into a three-dimensional garment she'd been cutting everything too big.

And she nailed it. She even got the zipper right first time. Today's the first day she's been able to come back to put together the real skirt, and then we can move on to the blouse, and after that I expect she'll be pattern drafting while I'm still plugging away at the same handful of patterns that I know how to make. But -

I picked up the notions while she stood in line to have the fabric cut, and I couldn't find the right kind of tape. The package said "twill tape" and I could only find bias tape and hem tape. I couldn't tell from the outside of the package what it was used for, and I figured twill is woven on the diagonal and bias is cut on the diagonal, so I got bias tape. When we did the rough draft, I learned that the tape was for the waist stay. I got worried about it, because the point of the waist stay is to, you know, make the waist stay. Bias stretches. And it's a bias-cut skirt, very flippy, and it's really cute on her, but it won't be if the waist stretches out. So I got onto the Stitcher's Guild sewing newsgroup and I asked. The lady who responded said yes, we needed to ditch the bias tape, but if I couldn't find the right kind cutting the piece so that the waist was on the selvage might work instead. Somebody else said a ribbon could be a waist stay, too.

I've now found some twill tape, in not quite the right color, and today I'll explain it to her and she'll decide whether to try the selvage idea or use the off-color tape, and that will be another bit of knowledge she has. Maybe my status as the sewing guru will be damaged, but that's okay. One of the things I'm teaching her is that you don't have to be an expert to do this. All you have to be is not afraid of failure.

That's one of the things I want people to understand about writing, too, but apart from one-day workshops I've never taught writing and I'm never likely to. I'm game to try if someone wants to pay me, but the fact is, writing is so easy for me that I'm afraid to teach it. I understand instinctively, or at least absorbed so long ago I can't remember learning, many things about writing and reading that other people need to be taught. I barely had to be taught to read, and from the start I was reading books in a different way than the people around me did. I always knew I was going to write these things, and from the moment I read my first word ("Exit," in the hall of my kindergarten on the first day. I had no idea what it meant and I'm not sure how I'd absorbed enough about phonics to sound it out.) , I've been doing so as a producer rather than as a consumer.

When I'm confronted by someone who is so intimidated by the blank page they can't start, someone who doesn't know how to choose which scene to write or how to get out of one scene and on to the next or how to make dialog sound natural or how to choose a point of view, I don't know what to tell them. When I start breaking down a work in structural or thematic terms during revision, a person who is at the stage with writing that T is with sewing gets a scared, glassy look, not because the material's too hard for them, but because it comes so naturally to me I don't know how to guide them past the notion that "I don't know how to do this so it must be hard."

This does not mean that these people are less talented than me, or that they won't in time write books that make mine look crude; it means I happen to have a knack for something they have to learn, and you can't teach knack. I jump right in and they need somebody to guide them in step by step. If I try to do that, I guide them down the wrong steps, or I skip steps, or I sound like I'm talking down to them. Because I completely lack the knack for teaching, and nobody taught me to write. Or rather, "Carolyn Keene" and Louisa May Alcott and Diana Wynne Jones and Shakespeare taught me by example, and I was equipped by nature to absorb those lessons.

I have no knack whatever for sewing. My mother taught me to do it and I continue to teach myself, with much recourse to advice from better sewers, much seam-ripping, and reiteration of patterns till I understand how they work. My favorite pattern, the one that made me into a person who sews rather than a person driven to sewing by necessity, has this funky stuff going on with attaching the neck band that I have to relearn every single time - I can't retain it.

Nobody's going to be intimidated by my way of showing them how it's done. They'll probably wind up feeling superior to me. And I can live with that. One reason I'm teaching T is so I'll have someone nearby who can help me when I'm stumped! All my sewing "experts" (who would all deny being experts if you called them that) live in different towns.

I don't need writing patterns because I understand how stories work, but I could no more break that down into teaching terms than Thai could explain to me how to fall asleep in the middle of the day. (I can barely fall asleep at night and daytime is impossible even when I'm desperate; I'm as unskilled a sleeper as you'll ever meet.) Lots of other people, especially beginners, need patterns, and it's not because they're lesser writers. They just have different knacks and have to come at the process in ways unfamiliar to me. Someday we'll all be sitting in critique as equals discussing structure and theme and character and whether the POV needs to change.

'Cause everything's doable once you know how.

Metaphors only go so far

I can go on at length about the ways in which sewing and writing are alike; or gardening and writing; or cooking. All are creative. All involve extensive periods of drudge work and apparent negative progress. All can be done professionally or as a hobby, to formula or idiosyncratically. All have rules that, once you understand them, you can decide to break.

But you know how sewing isn't like writing? I get to decide when I'm done, and then I can use the result. Making my first pair of slacks was tough, and they aren't perfect; but when that cool front came in, I wore them. I cobbled together a blouse out of red and blue remnants, realized that required a white skirt, made the skirt, put star-shaped buttons on the blouse, and now I'm ready for the Fourth of July. Nobody can tell me to go back and fix this or that if I've decided the outfit's good enough. I don't have to submit it, collect rejections, review and tweak it every six months or so, unpick the waistband because an editor thinks it might wear better with a dart in the back, try out three or four different styles of button, and then get rejected anyway until I give up and it's packed away in a drawer, never to see the light of day.

And cooking isn't like writing, because not only do I get to sit down and eat the result without consulting anybody (whether or not my husband or the gaming group, my usual cooking audience, cares for it) but because if I mess it up there's no fixing it. Scorched rice stays scorched. I can't fix it by deleting the brown bits and adding some sauce. If I want rice, I eat it with that smoky aftertaste or I start again from scratch in a new saucepan.

And gardening isn't like writing because - well, for one thing, because I'm not remotely good at it. But even there, once in awhile, the jasmine blooms, I rake out some edible potatoes, and the mint doesn't entirely die back in the drought. But revision is a much, much bigger deal in gardening than in writing; and although adverbs sometimes grow all over a manuscript like rye grass, getting them out doesn't blister my hands.

Results. I'll take them where I can get them.

Reflections on the To-do List

Not blogging much this morning as I have too much to do; so much I drank caffeinated tea to help me along. (My husband refers to this as "taking speed.") Maritha Burmeister is having a signing of her first-ever book, The Twelve Dog Days of Christmas in New York, at the Twig between 5 and 7 this evening, so I'll have to leave off reading old newspapers at the library to take either the ten or the nine bus out there; then I can take the 20, transfer at Five Points, and get home later than I usually like to be out. I turn into a pumpkin by 10 PM and late suppers are a bad idea for me.

Okay, I don't have to do that. But, though Maritha and I are hardly best friends, and picture books aren't an area I was ever big on even when I was small, I like her, it's her first book which is a big deal, and the little girls for whom I've been buying picture books are going to outgrow them soon so I better do this while I can. Besides, I want to live in a world in which people go out of their way to go to book signings, and it's my responsibility to myself to do it as often as possible. To myself, and to Maritha, who has worked hard for this day. I actually hope I don't have much of a chance to speak to her, because the only signings at which the author has plenty of downtown for conversation are the ones with no lines, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody!

What Thai did to the glass of tea this morning has rendered cleaning the study more urgent. I totally don't want to do this. The study is the most complex room in the house, and you can't even dust without making decisions about pieces of paper that wouldn't be lying around if anybody knew what to do with them. I've mopped up the worst of it, but that's only the beginning and we all know it.

And dammit, I want to at least get the blouse I'm working on back to where I thought I had it at lunchtime yesterday. I can't get over how much sewing resembles writing. Everything takes longer than you think it will, sometimes when you think you're almost done you blink and recognize what you did wrong so you have to rip out seams, sometimes you rip out the wrong seam, the workspace is always a shambles when you're done no matter how organized and tidy you thought you were being, when you get on a roll you work at it longer than you should, and no matter how much you want to move on to the next, new project if you want to get anything done you really need to finish up the thing you're working on, even though you've gotten to the boring part. (The sleeveless version of this blouse looked so simple, it should have been the ideal place to fuss with the darts...)

And OMG it's how did it get to be 10 AM? It's impossible, I tell you! So off I go.

Unity

Bear with me here for a bit.

I have 2 new dresses hanging in my closet. I think they make me look purdy. On the first one, I had not quite as much fabric as the pattern said I needed for the view I'd chosen, and I was matching stripes for the first time ever, so I was hyper-alert when cutting. I called my Reverend Mom twice, pinned and repinned, smoothed and resmoothed. The result is near as nothing perfect, though I had to redo one of the sideseams about five times to get the pocket right. On the second one, I had enough fabric and I figured I knew how to do it, so I relaxed, and made a cutting mistake that left me with insufficient material for the bodice, and the fabric wasn't available anymore. So I did the bodice and sleeves in white, with the cuffs in the same bright orange-red-green-with-gold-curlicues fabric as the skirt, and a little embroidery at the neckline, and I think this is better anyway. Less overwhelming. Monday I stitched the hems on both, wasting a couple of yards of the orange thread because, though I know how to wind a bobbin, I kept doing it wrong. So, like the pockets, I did it again and again and again until I did it right.

It was like writing a book; except I don't follow a pattern when writing a book. At least, not anymore. I've been dealing with stories so long that I don't need one, any more than a fashion designer, or one of those people who make all their own clothes and draft their own patterns from scratch, needs to review how to make a dart. But I bet they still make occasional cutting errors, or can't seem to get the bobbin wound once in awhile.

The thing people lose track of, or never notice to begin with, is that all human endeavors have an underlying unity. Making a dress is like telling a story is like building a house is like baking a cake is like playing a game is like programming a computer is like raising a kid is like fighting a war. Depending on our interests and aptitudes, we may feel that we are good at one of these things, competent at others, and hopeless at others; but the underlying process is the same.

I think it's an evolutionary thing, like anatomy. An anatomist can take a bird skeleton and a human skeleton and an elephant skeleton and show you how to match up the bones and how each species has adapted the underlying structure to different needs and uses. Creativity, learning, and skill are part of our mental anatomy. No matter what we apply them to, the basic functioning is similar.

No matter how good we become, we will always make mistakes, and no matter how inept we think we are, we can learn enough to get by on if we let ourselves. The difference between a good writer and a bad one is less talent and more willingness to judge some passage or plot inadequate and redo it.

And "inadequate" is relative. My hems do not meet professional standards. The dress I described above as "near as nothing perfect" would not be good enough to put on a runway model or sell in a store. The story your kid loves to hear you tell may not, if written down, be good enough to publish; your presentation of it may not be good enough to take on the road. So what? Do the meals you cook have to be restaurant quality? Because you're the best basketball player at your local pickup games, do you feel ready to challenge Tim Duncan? You don't have to be able to do something at a professional level in order for it to be worthwhile.

Since I started sewing, I've started noticing clothes. I never did before. A lot of people don't, I think, looking around me; not even people who are paid to do so. Actors and actresses are dressed by professional costumers, yet they appear on screen in clothes that don't fit, with standing wrinkles in places where the outfit should have been altered. It's not as painful to me as reading a book full of grammatical errors, flabby prose, plot holes, and lazy characterization; but that's because books are my profession and clothes aren't. I wouldn't know a good basektball player from a bad one, because I hate team sports.

You can apply all this to your own life and activities however seems best to you. I just thought I'd point it out.