Handwork – Page 12 – Deborah Makarios

August 2, 2019

What Next?

The Wound of Words (draft 2.2) has now been despatched to the lovely people who volunteered to be beta readers, and I… what am I going to do?

I’ll be carrying on with the Grand Productivity Experiment, but doing less writing work and a lot more house and garden work. Especially garden work.

You don’t catch me using a chainsaw in a tree. Or anywhere else. I am attached to my limbs and I would like it to stay that way.

There’s the redcurrant to prune (at last!), the mighty Balrog to hack back again (the shed porch disintegrated and collapsed under its weight this year), and the dozens of poles shooting out the top of the apple tree like some sort of living candelabra to slice off.

And once I’ve done all that (no doubt with the assistance of the Caped Gooseberry’s superior musculature), it’s on to the potting, the planting out and the weeding.

Inside, for those inevitable days of Much Water, there’s pruning of another sort to be done (aka decluttering), and a truly remarkable quantity of mending to work my way through.

At some point, of course, whether sooner or later, it will have to be decided: what writing project do I work on next?

July 12, 2019

Letting Go of the People You Might Have Been

I think it was the hats that finally clued me in.
I own thirteen hats, and as I walked to the yarn shop to obtain materials for the fourteenth hat, I brooded. More than that, I mused, I prayed, I meditated. On such subjects as simplicity, the significance of hats, and the wisdom or unwisdom of buying yarn for another hat.

And this is what I realized: the reason I have so many hats – the reason why I have trouble getting rid of any of these hats – is that they represent the people I could be.

Continue & Comment

July 9, 2019

Grand Productivity Experiment: Phase Three… Partially Indigestible

Here’s the thing about frogs: there is no shortage of them. Life is, in fact, frogs all the way down. But I must confess that some of the frogs I ate this last week in my Eat That Frog experiment didn’t go all the way down.

I had three problems with it. First: how do you know when you’ve eaten enough frogs for the day? If “there’s always a bigger fish” then logically there is also always a smaller fish, and therefore a smaller frog. When do you stop?
Second: if the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time, how many bites should you take out of an elephant-sized frog in one day? (And how big is a bite, anyway?)

Continue & Comment