Donna Druchunas's Blog

In about 7 hours I have to get on a plane and I woke up this morning with my right ear completely clogged. My sinuses have been bothering me for the past few days but I've ignored it. Now I must dope up with Sudafed and hope that this clears up by afternoon or I'm in for an unpleasant flight.

It's only 3 weeks until I leave for Lithuania! I need to get an idea of what I want to do there for the first 5 weeks of my trip (the last 2 weeks will be traveling around the country with my co-author and photographer, getting the research and photos for the book on Lithuanian knitting).... it's not that I have nothing planned. I'll be going to language school in the mornings, doing homework in the evenings, and working for at least a couple of hours every day, but I also want to write. I don't think I want to blog on this trip, at least not on a daily basis as I've done on previous trips. I think I want to keep a journal that possibly can be the foundation for a book in the future, or perhaps just to gather my own thoughts as I spend the time on my own, learning a new country and a new language. I want to get as caught up as possible on my current writing projects before I go, because I don't want to work on any of those projects while I'm gone, and I don't want them hanging over my head waiting for me to come back at the end of summer.

Well, TAFN. Just thinking....

This is going around the blogosphere so here's my contribution:

In 10 minutes .... I'll be getting dressed and ready to go out on my morning walk if it's not raining.

In 10 hours .... I'll be done with my work for the day and getting ready to have dinner and then watch some TV or a movie on DVD. Maybe I'll knit tonight.

In 10 days .... I'll be frantically trying to finish up all the writing and other odds-and-ends I have to do before I go to Lithuania.

In 10 weeks .... I will be in Lithuania, near the end of my trip, traveling around the country going to museums, wool mills, knitting and spinning guilds, and much more.

In 10 months .... I will be done writing my book on Lithuanian Knitting and working on my memoir. I'll also be -- ack -- 47.

In 10 years .... My house will be paid off and I will be retired from mercenary work so I'll just be able to work on my personal writing projects. I will still be traveling every summer, and Dom will be able to make longer trips because he will be retired too. We might buy a small house or condo in Portland, Oregon or some other place we fall in love with -- maybe in Europe -- so I can get away and write when I need a break from the regular routine here in Colorado.

Make one yourself! Say that writerdd sent you and I get free points. (Some things cost points but when you sign up you get a bunch of free credits and you don't have to enter any payment information.)

It looks like I will be teaching in Switzerland next June (2009), and then I'll be heading up to England for WoolFest!

As I've mentioned before, Barbara Walker is my role model. As she did in her career, I intend to write about many other things besides knitting in the future. Although Barbara doesn't knit much any more, she's still writing and has a new article in the May issue of Freethought Today.

Like Dom, Barbara had problems with religion from the time she was quite young. (I, on the other hand, didn't start to seriously question my faith until my mid to late twenties.) In her article, she explains her childhood worries about prayer:

When I was a child, my Catholic friend Patsy told me that her parents were paying a priest for special prayers to get her grandparents out of purgatory. I was fascinated. I asked, “How can you tell when they’re finally out?”

Patsy didn’t know. I continued, “And why do you have to pay? Can’t people say their own prayers for free?”

Patsy said they could, but ordinary people’s prayers don’t work as well as priests’ prayers, because priests can talk directly to God.

“I thought anybody could talk directly to God,” I said. “Yes,” Patsy answered, “but God listens to priests.”

“Well,” said I, “if God won’t listen to you, why would you bother to pray?”

As Barbara began to lose her faith, she discovered that “prayer could also serve as an assertion of authority among grownups.”

Another way to look at this is to ask, "What is prayer, anyway?

The church attended by my childhood friend Patsy was one that insisted--publicly and officially, at least--on the literal reality of God's ears. This church demanded belief in a god who could hear every prayer, whether or not he deigned to answer it: a god, in fact, who wanted and needed to have the entreaties of his earthly children rising around his throne always, flattering and pleading, constantly singing his praises and begging for his intercession. I thought that sort of a god was like a petty bureaucrat, vain enough to enjoy making ordinary folks grovel.

I disdained prayer because I thought such a God more contemptible than admirable.

More realistically, we may view prayer as simply putting a hope into words, or communing with one's inner thoughts. It seems pointlessly self-abasing, and at the same time unwarrantedly arrogant, to imagine that an immortal being is listening to everything you say. If we "pray" for anything at all, perhaps it would be best to pray to ourselves for a keener awareness of our vanishingly small significance in this vast universe, and our human responsibility to take better care of ourselves and each other, because we can't depend on any other-than-human creature to do so.

Amen.

As usual, there are many more interesting tidbits in Barbara's article.

Hat tip to Hemant.

Well, I worked for about 2 hours this morning and now we are heading out to see Indiana Jones. I've read mixed reviews (mostly bad), but I want to see it anyway. I suspect it is fun and entertaining, but not spectacular (like all of the other Indy movies, only the first one was really good)... but this last one has great casting, so I don't know how it could suck.

I'll be posting my Monster Sunday article on skepchick tonight.

I'm not going to finish the new book this weekend, but that's OK because I'm flying to Florida next weekend and I'll take it on the plane, which is much better than reading a chapter a night before falling asleep.

Fuck.

I wanted to work this weekend. Work and relax. Daydream. Journal. Bake cookies. Spin some yarn. Knit.

I don't read and knit at the same time. One or the other overtakes me. I read four books in the past week or so, and I was going to take a break. But it's not going to happen. I was sitting at Borders this morning having a chai latte because I can't drink coffee without getting heartburn any more, and I read the prologue to Apples Are from Kazakhstan by Christopher Robbins.

I got goosebumps.

The book came home with me.

This, I think (if it makes any sense), may be the book I want to write about Lithuania. Not the knitting book, but the personal book.

Well, that's it. My plains have been waylaid. I do have to work though, so I'll put in a couple of hours then reward myself by sitting outside all afternoon and reading Apples are from Kazakhstan.

Fuck.

I finished The Girl with No Shadow by Joanne Harris and it's at least as good as Chocolat. It doesn't really get good until the second half, IMO.

Artist Theresa Honeywell created a knitted motorcycle that was on display at the Georgia Museum of Art in 2006.



Why do I know about this? Dom just got a scooter to drive to work and running errands around town. It will cost about $15 a month of gas instead of almost $100 to drive our Jeep. He was looking around for motorcycle covers because we have a huge cottonwood tree in front of our house that drops stuff on our driveway all year long, including lots of sappy aphid poop all summer, and he asked me, "Hey, do you want to knit me a scooter cover."

"Nu-hnu. Nope."



I'll stick with the Mini Cooper until I can get a plug-in electric car and solar panels to power it in a few years. And I get to park in the garage!

I am a geek. This made me chuckle:



From http://nfccomic.com/

Oh well. I'm chugging along here, getting a lot done every day, trying to get caught up by one month from today when I leave for Lithuania. I've also been taking some time to relax and am reading The Girl with No Shadow by Joanne Harris. It's the sequel to Chocolat. So far it's pretty good, but nowhere near as good as Chocolat. :-( I hope I never try to write a sequel to anything. Sometimes trilogies are good, but I don't think I've ever read an actual sequel that could hold a candle to the original book.

That's it for now. I did a repeat on my shawl last night and I am just writing, writing, writing, and doing bookkeeping. Mostly writing, so I can get that May list finished. My June list is shorter than I thought it would be but it has a couple of big items on it that have suddenly become more critical than they were last week.

I can't sleep. My sinuses are congested and I don't know where the sudafed is since we rearranged the house and mom moved in.

I finished the gift-knitting project that I mentioned a while ago and am back to working on the lace shawl from Knit So Fine, but I have no new pictures.

I'm starting to feel nervous about my trip to Lithuania. First I'm feeling the pressure to finish up everything I need to do before I leave, second I'm worrying about my travel budget even though I think I have plenty of money put aside for the trip and, third I haven't traveled along for more than a couple of days in a long time and never in a place where I don't speak the language very well. Of course what I'll be doing while I'm in Lithuania for 4 weeks before Dom arrives is attending language school, and I have been studying on my own for a while, so perhaps that will be remedied a bit. At least I know everyone in the tourist district speaks English and I can speak enough Lithuanian to buy trolley-bus tickets and such. I feel like a huge wimp because I don't think I've ever been so nervous about a trip before, so what's up with that? Vilnius is a beautiful city, it's not even on my "city-meter" when compared to New York -- I mean, I think it's about a quarter of the size of Denver -- and I've been there before so I know my way around at least partly.

I hope it's just jitters because it's a long trip and I have a lot to get done before leaving. I definitely don't want any loose ends hanging over my head while I am gone.

So, should I read or watch a movie? I've been reading a lot lately, and writing a lot, which is why I haven't been knitting very much. Which is why I haven't been blogging about knitting. I have been working on a couple of knitting books (one on schedule one behind schedule, both need to be finished before I leave), but I've been putting my knitting energy into working on those books instead of blogging about knitting.

Well, there you have it, the mad musings of an insomniac. I hope this doesn't become a recurring problem over the next few weeks. I'm used to being awake the night before a trip, but not a month of nights!

I keep finding knitting posts on science blogs! This is from Bad Astronomy. Phil has completely nailed this.

Old media slays me. They still haven’t figured this intertubes thing out.

Years ago, people posting fan sites for Star Trek were threatened with legal action by Viacom. Same with Simpsons fans and Fox. For some reason, these megacorps were really really wringing their hands that some fan someplace might actually be promoting their shows! Mind you, in most cases the biggest infraction these fan sites were guilty of was posting pictures from the show. But otherwise, what they were doing was basically free advertising. In fact, it was even better; ads are annoying, but fan sites actually can build communities of thousands of people, all of whom will watch the show and spread the word.

The latest dumdum in this case is the BBC, and of all things they threatened a website that was posting knitting patterns of Doctor Who aliens! How counterproductive is that? (Answer: supercounterproductive).

Why on Earth (or off) would someone do this? How brain-dead do they have to be to actually stop enthusiastic fans from saying good things about their show?

I get a lot of traffic from Doctor Who, as well I should: I love the show, and talk it up quite a bit here. I wonder if the BBC will try to take me down, or at least the pages where I promote it?

In case some stuffed suit at the Beeb is reading this right now: I’m doing your job for you. For free. And I’m doing it better.

… oh. Maybe that’s why they worried.

Please go to Micro Revolt and use their KnitPro software to make a knitting chart of the Doctor Who logo and knit something with it. Screw the BBC. I'm so sick of all this ridiculous copyright "protection" bullshit.

Bumped to the top for my own convenience and to add some notes.

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My May task list is much shorter than my April one was, but it does include a couple of large projects. Still, at this point I can work at my day job in the mornings, and on my personal writing projects during the afternoons (with a few breaks to check work email), and knit at night while I'm watching TV. This is a great schedule. I should even be able to take weekends off to read!

Here's the to-do list:

1. Finish Ethnic Knitting Aventure, #3 in the series. I'm pretty sure it will not be totally done by Wednesday (the end of April) but it's getting darn close.

95% COMPLETE!!! I REALLY NEED TO GET THIS DONE AND OFF MY PLATE. I CANNOT LET IT GO INTO JUNE.The drawings are taking me longer than I expected but I should have this done by the end of the month!

2. Tech edit the projects for my next lace book. I'm the author, but I have designs from about 20 other designers, which I'll tech edit before I turn the book in to my publisher. Then they'll be tech edited a second time by the publisher and edited for style and consistency, and I hope to have all of the projects test knitted during production as well.

GOT OFF TO A GOOD START, FINISHED THE INITIAL READ THROUGH OF ALL PATTERNS AND CONTACTED DESIGNERS WITH QUESTIONS. (There are some new twists to this project that I can't talk about yet, but I hope to have it totally nailed down by June as well.)

3. Round 2 of legal paperwork for the nonprofit association I'm working with.
THIS WEEKEND? NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. ONE AFTERNOON DURING THE WEEK SHOULD WORK.

4. Finish the gift knitting project, block it, and wrap it up in a pretty package (not, it's going on a plane so it can't be wrapped).
WORKING SLOWLY AT NIGHT

5. Teach a couple of classes at a local yarn shop.

I think that's it. I can hardly believe it!

But there's still a huge list for June, which I have to finish by the 22nd, when I leave for Europe. I'm starting to get nervous about the trip and being all caught up before I leave. I don't want to come back, after six weeks, to a total disaster.

A few odds and ends from past tech editing jobs may trickle in, but I have no major mercenary projects on the table for the rest of the year so far. I may pick up one or two jobs in the fall after I get back from Europe, but I'm not going to decide now.

The problem is, after my mom moved in there's much more work of organizing and cleaning up the house than I expected. It's sucking every spare minute out of my life and really getting on my nerves. Dom's in a pissy mood, too.

but it usually does....

I hesitate to write this because I don't want any of my older friends to read it and get mad at me, but the old people around me are dragging me down. I am tired of hearing people complain about sex on TV (I mean the Sopranos is so old news already), about the way popular music sucks, about how all the movies are made for and marketed to young kids, and so forth. Those are all the things I like! I love that taboos are being broken on TV. I like music by young, hip artists -- including some hip-hop. I am quite sure that most of the movies I like best are targeted toward 19 year old boys. What's wrong with me? I don't think I'm having a mid-life crisis. My tastes have always been this way. I love change. I love the future. I love the way young people reinvent themselves with every generation. No, I don't want to be young again. There's too much pain and anxiety involved. But I find people who are younger than me, people in their 30s and 20s, to be much more energizing and fun than people in their 60s. My older friends were around to experience the 1960s and many claim to have been hippies. What the hell happened to them to make them turn into such conservative (not politically) old farts? I need some more younger friends. The closer I get to 50, the less I want to let myself turn old. No, I don't want to act my age. I guess someday I might look my age, but there's nothing I can do about that. But I sure as hell can stop myself from turning into grandma. I know some of my older friends feel the same way but for the most part, they're not pulling it off. I hope that's not bad news for me. Sigh.

The more I think about this, the more I want to do it. I am definitely planning to put my books online, probably for free, after they go out of print. But this has all got me thinking that I might be looking at this all the wrong way. This is the key point: I don't think most people are not buying my books because they don't like them. They're not buying my books because they've never heard of me or my books! So what can I do about that?

Here are some recent thoughts from Cory Doctorow to stir up your brain juices:

My latest column in Locus Magazine, “Think Like a Dandelion,” came out of a talk I had with Neil Gaiman about the bio-economics of giving stuff away for free. Mammals worry about what happens to each and every one of their offspring, but dandelions only care that every crack in every sidewalk has dandelions growing out of it. The former is a good strategy for situations in which reproduction is expensive, but the latter works best when reproduction is practically free — as on the Internet.

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans...

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship...

Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That’s because “I should buy a copy of this book” is inevitably followed by, “Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!” and the moment, as they say, is gone.

Read the rest here.

And here is another interesting post on the same topic.

I've been writing a LOT lately. I like that. Perhaps that's why I haven't been blogging here much. I've been writing longer posts for Skepchick -- shorter than magazine articles but long for blog posts --, working on a couple of book proposals, rewriting a chapter for the second Ethnic Knitting book, and submitting essays to anthologies. I have been completely enjoying the writing process and I've been happy with the way the pieces are coming out.

I also have been enjoying living here in Colorado in my house. I have been thinking that I never want to move again. It's not that Colorado is my favorite place I've ever lived (it's not, San Diego is), but it's just that I like not moving. I like getting to know a town, the back roads to Target, the best places to take a walk or sit in the shade, the best coffee shops, the times to stay home because certain roads will be to crowded. I also like keeping the same friends, the same doctor and dentist, and knowing where I can go and find a pair of shoes every time without spending hours trying on different styles.

So, time for lunch and then I have to clean carpets. So, just a couple of thoughts for the day.

Today I am off. I've been busy all week writing handouts for upcoming classes, talking to my agent and publishers about future books, answering questions about manuscripts, designing sweaters, doing stuff around the house, and so forth. I'm not as busy as last month, but I'm still just going along day by day crossing things off my lists.

Today I woke up at 5:00, had breakfast, and fell asleep again. I didn't wake up until 10. Not it's noon and I still haven't done anything so I've decided that I am (already) taking the day off.