Deborah Makarios – Page 176

October 16, 2015October 19, 2017

The Quotidian QWERTYUIOP

December 6th, 2014: a wonderful day. I wrote “The End” on the first draft of my fantasy novel, provisionally titled Tsifira. It was the culmination of (cough) years of work. But the work was only beginning…

After spending six months on another project to clear my mind, I turned my attention to redrafting Tsifira. (I feel a bit silly calling it that, since that is the one title I can pretty much guarantee the finished book won’t have, but there it is. Working title.)

To prepare for the epic task, I had a week off, and then spent three or four weeks reading up craft books and taking notes on how to tackle it. And then I began.

Since I think best in long-hand, I had written the whole novel that way: filling seven 120-page exercise books. (Next time I shall just buy a ream or two and be done with it. I can count quires instead of volumes.) Typing it up, I assumed, would be a mere formality, a prelude to the actual work. After all, anyone can type.

Cats use hunt-and-peck; or rather, hunt-and-pounce.

I had reckoned without the sheer bulk of the thing. I can type up the text three to four times as fast as I wrote it, but…
I did the maths. Six pages was an average day working long-hand; twenty is a good day typing up. Seven 120-page exercise books contain 840 pages. Divide by 20 (pages per day) and that’s 42.

42 working days to type up the novel. Doesn’t sound like a lot, until you call it eight and a half weeks, and drop eye surgery in the middle of it.

Or, to look at it another way, since my typing speed is 60wpm, and the manuscript is approximately 158,840 words, typing it up should take about 2,647 minutes (and twenty seconds) – a little over 44 hours. That’s less than two days! assuming I don’t stop for tea, sleep, turning the page, or trying to figure out what exactly that squiggle says.

Suffice it to say that I began the typing up on the 29th of July, and I still have two and a half volumes to type. I am hoping to finish the lot by the end of October. I am also hoping never to write any draft so long again. I have finally understood the brilliance of early writers who did most of the drafting in their head, and only wrote down something already shaped as close as possible to the final form.

But every time I find myself frustrated by how long this process is taking, I remind myself that I have learnt a massive amount through it, and will no doubt learn more before I have finished with it.
And then I carry on typing.

October 12, 2015

How Do You Type?

Touch-typing? Hunt-and-peck? Or the ultra-modern thumbing?

What speeds do you clock? (Free test available here.)
My speed works out at 60 words per minute, taking into account the fact that I go back to correct errors as I spot them, rather than leaving them be. Quality, not quantity, as the family motto says – or would, if we had one.

October 9, 2015

My Cat is a Fibre Snob

Let us be honest: cats are weird. There are cats who like to sit on people’s heads; cats who are obsessed with toothbrushes; there are even the famous cats who like to hide in boxes.

My cat (hereinafter “the Cat”) is a fibre snob. Like most cats, she likes to sleep on our bed (or, as she thinks of it, her bed), but she is very particular about what exactly she sleeps on. It was some time before I noticed the trend behind her choice of sleeping location: she prefers wool.

She is particularly pleased when there is a wooly dressing-gown available with the capacity to accommodate her furry middle-aged spread, but if there is no wool in evidence but that of a solitary bed-sock which has wandered off from the herd, she will carefully settle herself on that – even if she overflows it on all sides.

I suppose I should be grateful that she hasn’t shown any interest in occupying said socks during construction – unlike her son (hereinafter “the Kitten”).

But I am quite certain that should I ever be fool enough to take her to a yarn shop, she would within seconds be ensconced in the most expensive yarn present, with a self-satisfied purr emerging from her smug little face. Qiviut, perhaps, or vicuña.

Of course, it could be argued that I am to blame for this snobbish attitude on the part of the Cat. I don’t think I’ve knit anything acrylic since long before she joined the family, nearly six years ago now. And while it is nice to know that she approves of my fibre choices, it is a little annoying that everything I knit ends up as a mixed-fibre piece: lambswool and domestic short-hair; merino/possum/tabby blend…

That’s the downside of tortoiseshell/calico cats: they have hairs to stand out on everything. Knitting something dark? The cat sheds white. Knitting something light? The cat sheds black. And if you think to outwit them by knitting something with flecks, well, they’ve always got the orange to fall back on.

So there she sits, on my dressing-gown or my jersey or the Caped Gooseberry’s bed-socks, shedding madly, legs primly tucked under her in the classic “cat of paradise” position (i.e. no legs).

Incidentally, have you ever wondered what’s actually going on under all that smoothly arranged fur? They look so sleek, so well-arranged, so put-together. Like a swan cruising serenely through the waters.
Well, wonder no more: the internet hath provided.

The secret is out.