All works have stretches of dullness, sometimes lengthy ones. Alas! Now I’ve passed the body shaping, and zoomed past the stripy area, you can see by the yellow yardstick that I am about three feet in. There is no point in even dreaming of eyeballs and sockets until I hit five feet. So I have 24 solid inches of extremely dull knitting, round and round the body, now 18 inches across, in plain white yarn. My cone is holding up amazingly well, and I foresee that the entire body will easily be made without running out.
Perhaps now is the time to divert the weary hour by considering the art of keeping on. I think it’s Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of success is just showing up. A clever thing to do, if you can manage it, is to work your own habits. Con yourself into producing! I have difficulty doing this with writing, but it is easy to knit and keep on knitting. I have difficulty sitting and doing nothing; knitting is a great quiet way to stay awake during speeches, sermons, etc. In other words, knitting has become the default activity for me whenever I’m not doing anything else. You can get a lot of squid knitted that way. If only I could get it to where I’m writing novels whever I’m not doing anything else — but now habit is working against me.
My newest novel Speak to Our Desires is out exclusively from Book View Press.
I also have stories in Book View Cafe’s two steampunk anthologies, The Shadow Conspiracy and The Shadow Conspiracy II, as well as in BVC’s many other anthologies.
