Writing retreat, days 2 and 3

I’ve been making good progress the last two days. On Monday, I wrote the chapter on project postmortems (the actual title is “Celebrations and Contemplations”) and outlined the two remaining chapters. Today, I wrote the chapter on Growing as a Designer, and wrote the bare bones of the final chapter (advice for those who want to sell crafts professionally). I also started a sticky-note outline of the entire book. I printed all the chapters out and am literally cutting them apart into logical blocks of text. Then I’m taping each block to a sticky note that summarizes the idea of the block, and putting each note/block of text up on large sheets of foam core board, arranged sequentially. It looks like this:

The chapters are color-coded. Blue = Chapter 1, pink = Chapter 2, yellow = Chapter 3, and green = Chapter 4 (which is only partially done).

I had been feeling bad about “only” being able to complete one chapter a day despite eliminating distractions, but have since decided that this is totally silly. If I had been able to write a chapter a day at home, I could have written the entire book in just two weeks! And 4189 words in one day is a pretty darn good word count, even if a lot of it was drawn from interviews. So I think I’m actually making good progress.

Thankfully, I have made almost zero progress on the tablet weaving. I say “thankfully” because my total lack of progress indicates that I’m actually focusing where I should be – on the book. However, in some of my longer rest breaks, I did set it up and have been doing a little weaving. I haven’t attempted the complex braid design yet; I’ve just been turning the full deck backwards and forwards, which is challenging enough right now! But I have a few inches of band woven, which look like this:

I’m quite pleased with myself for having figured this much out. The band is 40 cards wide, which means 160 threads, but since I used 30/2 silk, it makes a rather narrow band anyway – I’m guessing 1 to 1.25 inches. That’s fine with me; I have no expectations for this band, as it’s primarily a learning exercise.

After six hours of concentrated focus spread out over the day, I’m mentally exhausted! I’m headed off to the sauna and hot tub to finish out the evening. But I’ll leave you with this lovely shot of Tigress – captured on camera while disemboweling her rightful prey.