Both of my chairs are occupied by one of my dear ones right now. Mr. Trent is in my ploffice chair (The ploffice got a makeover as my youngest is solidly into his teenage years and wants to trade in his Legos and Pokemon–but not all his Legos and Pokemon–for expensive things like his own computer and 3D printer. Pray for me. Naturally my husband and son decided to build a computer and so half of one sits on a repurposed desk adjacent to mine. A chair for this desk still needs to be sourced from somewhere… and soon, but for now it is being sourced from my desk). The cat is in my writing chair (located in my bedroom), and when I walked in she lifted her head and glared at me, “Don’t even think about it!” Noted Miss Kitty. Noted.
There are more chairs downstairs, but there are also dishes and laundry downstairs. AND a quilt. And may I just say that the allure of completing anything in a single sitting–whether it is a seam or single cut or something more impressive like a block– is mighty appealing.
There is both a reading chair (with footstool) and desk chair in my daughter’s room, but when I tried sitting down in there earlier this evening we started jamming on ukuleles (hers is blue, mine purple) and then she started showing me everything she’s learned on the guitar (why didn’t my high school offer guitar as an elective?). Fun stuff to be sure, but no writing gets done in my daughter’s room.
I feel like writing, which isn’t something I’ve said in a long while. But I don’t feel like working on my novel while I am sitting criss-cross-applesauce on my bed, which means it must be time for a blog post and a bit of an update.
Happy October! My monthly newsletter will be coming out next week. My blog, which I had hoped to heaven would be tended by then is still lacking my planned August and September posts, which exist… Just in messy draft forms. “Woof” as my sister is fond of saying. What else is new?
During this fabulous Year of the Fire Horse I’ve been busy, busy, busy. I’ve been drafting, dravising, and now take-no-prisoners quick-and-dirty drafting my next fairy tale which is an Ambitious story with a capital A. I’m currently 68K words into my sweetpunk retelling mashup of Rapunzel X Demeter/Persephone. I have maybe 15ish more chapters to messy draft/dravise, and the hope is to make tremendous progress by next week. The kind of progress that will dazzle newsletter subscribers and give hope to all my readers who are curious about this project that features a neurodiverse MC and her very imperfect mother.
I’ve been working on this project for a good long while. Since my youngest was an infant, in fact. The short of it is that it rained so much in the first year of his life that I started fantasizing about deserts and dragons and a version of Rapunzel where the heroine is not only trying to escape her tower, but trying to escape the never ending rain to a far off desert.
There are notes, and early drafts, and more notes, and later drafts in notebooks, on hardrives, in the cloud, in GITHUB, and combing through them to figure out what I want to say has been… time-consuming (also overwhelming, also discouraging). Why can’t I write faster? Why am I taking so long? Am I stuck? Am I blocked? Am I not ready to tell a story that is so personal? What the heck is going on? I’ve written entire drafts in a single night. Last year around this time I wrote an entire novella in a couple of weekends. Why can’t I finish this book? I honestly thought it would be done last April.
Maybe this draft is taking a good long while because writing is like quilting. Let me explain.
If you’re a writer, love a writer, or have been in the book world long enough you’ve probably heard of the plotter vs. pantser debate. Some writers plan and outline their novels. Other write by the seat of their pants and discover the story as they go. There are other terms for pantsers (Joanna Penn favors the term “discovery writer”). Revision is a necessary step no matter how the muses deliver your draft to you, so does it really matter?
Well… Yes. It especially matters if you started a project years and years ago as a pantser, only to realize that you’re a lowkey plotter–except you’re a visual plotter (notecards pinned to bulletin boards with strings and arrows and sticky notes) and to date Scrivener’s index cards setting is the only digital method that works for your maddness.
What does this have to do with quilting? Why are we even talking about quilts? Because after a very busy weekend of volunteering at my local therapeutic riding center’s annual fundraiser, I was craving some quilting. I don’t know how else to say it. Sometimes I just want to sew. Sometimes making apparel is fun, sometimes it is too fiddly and I just want to piece fabric together. Simple geometry for the win. You know?
This isn’t something new. I have a longstanding scrap quilt project that I return to now and again. I also have a love of fabric shopping that I get from my mama. Quilting is a mentally organizing activity for me. It’s often a preferred form of weekend self care.
Making a quilt, like writing a novel, is a long involved process. Most of us can’t do it in one go. It takes time, organization, and adoption of a method. Some of these methods involve carefully planned patterned blocks. Some of these methods are pure madness, liked the “Crazy” quilt my grandmother used to enter in the county fair until she was tired of everyone offering to buy it. Random pieces beautifully stitched together happhazardly to make a cohesive whole is a Vibe (notice the capital V).
Sometimes it is the color pallette that makes a quilt beautiful. Sometimes it is a clever, novel pattern. Sometimes it is the beautiful execution of a classic design juxtaposed with bright modern colors. Sometimes it is the careful, precise technique. Other times it is the whimsical detail of the quilted stitches. Sometimes it is the quality and texture of the fabric used or the weight of the fill.
Some people are truly born with a gift when it comes to quilting. Others learn the craft through trial and error. Most all quilts these days benefit from handing the project over to someone else with professional longarm quilter expertise.
I’m trying to piece together not just scraps of hardwon truths I’ve gleaned from my own experience of being an imperfect mother of twice exceptional neurodivese kiddos with this book, I’m trying to salvage the beauty of what started as a crazy quilt, turning into a cafeully patterned set of blocks, with the addition of different color palletes. It’s taking time. My pieces are small. The quilt I want to make is enormous. There’s a lot of holding a scrap up and seeing if it’ll fit, only to discover another block in that a different scrap of fabric would fit better.
I’m getting closer. I’m making progress. It’s just taking longer than I’d like. And in the world where other authors have their colors, fabrics, and patterns down, and can church out one beautifully made quilt of a novel after another, I feel like I am letting everyone down going so slowly.
Maybe two twin quilts are better than a king size quilt, but I’m too attached to endings to publish this novel in parts. Also, I’d have to be pretty darn sure those quilts would seamlessly match, and the only way I know how to do that is to make them both at the same time, which means finishing this draft in its entirity.
Now that I am 68K words into this draft, I can see it taking shape. I know where its headed. I know the themes I’m writing about. I know I’m on the right track. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be gorgeous. It’s going to be complete.
