Monday, October 24, 2011

Where I've been

Right here, knitting! And crocheting. A couple of weeks ago some friends had a baby and I crocheted him a sweater. My older son saw this and was very upset that the sweater wasn't for him, so I crocheted him one too and am now knitting one for my younger son, just to be fair. I knit and crochet the same way I write, which is to say I've unravelled the pieces multiple times to start again once I find a flaw or a better way to do the final piece. I'll even unravel the sweater I made for my first son and redo it as knit - because I'm getting very into no-seam raglan sweaters and figuring out how to put designs on them. It's right brain exercise :-)

Things have been exciting around here, though. I'm also in the process of getting ready to sell my book jewelry on Amazon. They approved my application! I'll take a couple of months to get everything all set up the way I want, but in the meantime, the jewelry is for sale at www.bookjewelry.artfire.com - and closer to Christmas shopping time I'll hold a sale through Artfire, as one last hurrah before we move onto Amazon.

That, and I've been reading a book I am about to resort to the nuclear option on. I will not finish it. That's really saying something because I read a lot, of all sorts of quality. I spent ten years in Critical Mass reading rough drafts of books - though I have to admit most of those were better than my final drafts. Unfortunately, I put this book down about a week ago and haven't had the slightest impulse to pick it up again and find out what happens. Oh well.

And I got a rejection letter the other day. I won't bother to list whom I'm getting them from anymore, but this was on a novella. Those are not easy to sell because they're long and I'm not enough of a name to pull readers into a magazine just because I've got 12k words in it, so this one might get me a stack of rejection letters. We'll see, though. Once I get new toner for the printer I'll send it out again.

Now back to this sweater. I've been watching Youtube videos to learn tricks to speed up my knitting speed, switched my technique from American to Continental and... yes, I'm just babbling now, aren't I? ;-)

2 comments:

  1. That's so cool that you've got so many creative talents.

    I'm not as forgiving as you are, I guess; I regularly stop reading books that don't keep my attention. I try not to let that happen very often, though, by carefully selecting what I want to buy or swap.

    Good luck on selling your novella, though! Is there a special market for novellas, or just basically the same market as for shorter stories?

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  2. Hi Melanie! This is a library book that I've quit on. Like you, I'm very careful about what I buy, but at the library I often grab books look different from my kind of thing, just to see what I've been missing. Nothing much in this case.

    Novellas can be sold to some of the pro science fiction markets - Asimov's, F&SF, and others that I'm researching. They're also the length of a children's book, so if the subject matter is appropriate you can try to sell them to a publisher. They're expensive to buy any way you look at it, though, so that's why they're harder to sell.

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