Whee!

After a long radio silence, we interrupt this program with breaking news:

I just found a cool product for archiving websites!

http://www.bluesquirrel.com/products/whacker/
(actually, there are quite a few such products available)

Good for grabbing your favorite porn site and setting it up in an archive (or on CD), so you don't have to keep subscribing to it. (Or, in my case, collecting and archiving all the AIDS Lifecycle rider pages, so you can go trawling through it for information later.)

This is a real godsend because there are about 1500 rider and roadie pages, about 1/3 of which are populated with all sorts of interesting information, but which will be deleted in the next month or so to make way for next year's riders.  So now I can archive them and refer to them later.

Also, thanks to a couple helpful programmer friends, I've trawled through the entire website and have that list of rider names/numbers that the office wouldn't release to me earlier. I feel smug.  :)  It will help a lot in networking.

Book-wise, I went through a long and mostly despairing week wherein the plot went to hell and I lost all understanding of the center-point of the piece.  I spent several days looking at topic after topic and shuffling things around and around, with no results.  Finally, in desperation, I actually did the RTFM thing ("read the fucking manual!") and read two books on writing creative nonfiction. 

Voila!  The answer popped out.  I was thinking about the book the wrong way.  I was thinking of it as conventional nonfiction and trying to work out how to write a nonfiction book with a strict linear chronology--and work out who the characters were and what parts were relevant to the theme, whatever that was.  I missed the point.  The book is a quest story.  As soon as I understood that, the two questions I needed popped out immediately:

Whose quest is it?  --The collective participants in ALC3, i.e. the riders, roadies, and staff.
What are they questing after?  --Community.  It's about the journey from a bunch of individual cyclists to a community.

That answers a lot of my questions about how to arrange the plot, what kinds of characters i should be looking for, and what order to introduce them in, but I'm not going to inflict all the gory details on you here.  (If you plan to write a quest story about the growth of a community during a trip, send me a private email.  ) 

But I find the idea of the right model to be fascinating...as with most things, the big difficulty is not so much finding "the right answer" as finding the right question.  Once you ask yourself the right question, the answer practically unfolds itself. 

It's also a good argument for reading the effing manual. 

I do find that having the right thought-model is 90% of learning anything new, though...if you have the right framework, you can work out just about anything, and if you don't, you won't understand a darn thing.  90% of mental blocks also come from having the wrong model.

For example: if my mental image of a car is "complicated piece of machinery that I don't understand and might break", I'm not going to learn much about cars.  If I approach it with the thought that "this must make sense, I just have to learn how it works," then it's suddenly much easier to build my new mental model of cars.

I confess that I still consider cars to be inexplicable creatures, but I did overcome my fear of bicycles last week.  I actually picked up and read my book on bicycle maintenance, and performed the basic set of recommended maintenance on my bike, all by myself.    I have now gone from "bikes are complicated and scary machinery" to "it's all very simple".  Mind you, I still don't plan to tighten my spokes and true my wheels myself, but I understand how it works.  More to the point, I view bikes as basic mechanical objects that must make sense, rather than "I think I'd better leave that to the experts."  This makes me very happy.

I had a few interesting moments at Lambtown Fiber Festival--I gave a talk on SE Asian textiles there, and got some guanaco (very rare relative of the alpaca), but I'll defer that to later.

Also, I'm almost done with the spiral shawl!  I've finished knitting it and am now weaving in 128 ends (!).  Then I can wash and block it....!  It is *gorgeous*.  Even nicer than I'd hoped.  My first thought on seeing it was, "This belongs in a museum!"  I'll post photos as soon as it's fully complete.

And I'm pretty sure it fits through a ring, though I don't have one to test it at the moment.  Whee!  Another ring shawl.

A book of 300 pages...

...starts with a single word.
 
Or, more accurately, a single page.
 
I've written the first page of the book today, and while that doesn't sound like a lot, it is.  One of the biggest problems I've been having is finding my "voice"--the tone, rhythm, and breathing of the book.  The same story can be written in dozens of different ways just by changing the tone and focus--is it an adventure book? is it a love story? is it a travel guide?  There are so many aspects to the AIDS Ride that I could go in dozens of ways. 
 
I was wrestling with whether to make it a Mount Everest-type story (585 Miles in 7 Days!), a grappling story about overcoming-internal-challenges (I Was a Drug Addict, Now I'm an AIDS Rider), a story about AIDS, about cycling, whatever.  Believe me, there are at least two or three hundred ways of writing this story and I think I've tried every single one of them by now.
 
But I think I've decided.  It's a love story.
 
Which is a bit of a surprise, since I had planned to write the book about courage--not the adrenaline rush that sends people into burning buildings, but courage of conviction, of compassion--to overcome one's own boundaries, to push beyond what one thought was possible.  But in the end, I think the ride is really a love story--about people loving and caring for each other, supporting each other while doing something damn near impossible.  And people who care enough to do something so difficult to support others.
 
So anyway, having found my "voice", I'm now writing.  I have the introductory paragraphs for five riders so far--I'm not quite sure where I'll put them, but I know I'll need them, so I'm writing them regardless.  Once I have those written, then I'll start the description of Opening Ceremonies.
 
I frankly expect to throw away most of this writing--a piece of writing evolves as it grows, and the early parts don't match the tone of the ending ones, so they generally get tossed away.  But the irony of the thing is, of course, that you cannot get to the end parts, the final tone, without writing those first few throwaway pages.  It's an evolutionary process.  So you have to write the pages even knowing you'll throw them away.
 
I still think 90% of writing--or doing anything for that matter--is not worrying about whether it's perfect or whether it fits or whether it can be done, and simply doing it. 
 
It won't be perfect.  You'll throw away stuff that looks lopsided, ill-favored, whatever.  But you have to do it.  You have to produce the lopsided, six-year-old dribbly clay sculpture before you can sculpt Michelangelo.  It's just how it works.  There's nothing wrong with you, it's just the process working itself through.
 
So anyway, I've made my start, and even though I know I'll probably toss it later, it's a good beginning, and I like it.  Tomorrow I'll continue writing.
 
Oh, and today I finished spinning and plying 215 more yards of yarn for this spiral shawl.  The whole skein weighs only 11.7 grams (a bit under half an ounce).  I think it's enough to finish the shawl.  Tomorrow I'll start knitting the shawl's border.
 
If I didn't mention it before, by the way, I'm looking for a job in the Bay Area, and you can find my resume here.  If you see something you think would suit, let me know.  (My specialties are product and project management, but I'm open to new things, too.)
 
Tien

More on book-writing

I spent a good couple hours today laying out the plot of the chapters. It's quite complex, as I have in-depth interviews with something like 20-30 riders, and six or seven themes I want to cover. My head is spinning.

But I'm making considerable progress...would you like to know my secret? I'm using Visio! I'm flowcharting each chapter, using rectangles to represent each scene. The scenes are color-coded according to point of view (different colors for different riders), which gives me an immediate visual "read" on the narrative flow, and an easy way to tell where any given rider appears. This gives me a very modular approach, and makes it easy to move topics around.

I'm also making substantial progress on my spiral shawl--I am 3/4 of the way spinning singles for what I *hope* will be the last ball of yarn on the shawl (!). I've been working on it, off and on, for the last 13 months, so it'll be fantastic to have it done. It's now well over 60" across, has over 2000 yards of yarn in it, and is going to be *gorgeous*. I have no idea what I'll tackle next, once I finish. It won't be another ring shawl; I'm having RSI problems in my left elbow from spindle-spinning.

So I will have to find something else to explore. Maybe I'll take up sex. Maybe I'll take up sky-diving. Maybe I'll take up sex *while*...hmm. No, some hobbies should *not* be combined. :-) Okay, well, I'll think of something.

If you haven't seen the spiral shawl, there are photos of it on my textiles page. Scroll to the bottom. It's now much bigger but still very beautiful. It is also symbolic. There are eight stripes on each of the spiral arms--in order,

earth (leaf design)
air (stars)
fire (flame pattern)
water (ripples)
light (plain white)
darkness (openwork star pattern)
right action/activism (AIDS ribbons)
compassion (heart)

The last two aren't in the photo, though.

Earth, Air, Fire, and Water are the four elements in Wicca; there's also a balance between light and darkness, each essential to the other. So those six represent the world in Wicca, or at least in this shawl. :) The AIDS ribbons are for activism, which I feel is essential--not just activism, but right action; consciously choosing to do the right things, to act with compassion. The heart is for compassion, which is the center of all things.

The shawl is put together in a clockwise spiral, which in Wicca represents growth and building. It is the complement to my travel shawl, which was spun and knitted while I was traveling in Southeast Asia, and runs counterclockwise, symbolizing letting-go, leaving behind the past life. So the travel shawl was about leaving the past life behind, the spiral shawl is all about building a new one.

I put into my spiral shawl the essentials of a good life--balance between the four elements, light and dark in balance/order, compassion, and action.

I don't know why, but I almost always make symbolic works. I feel that art--and especially knitting--is a patterning, a chance to reshape one's life through the medium one works in. Handspinning in particular is a meditative craft, so working on a symbolic piece like this gives me a chance to center, and think about what's really important.

Just created a blog...

After being told by about a bazillion people that I need to start a blog, I'm finally starting a blog. So, now y'all can keep track of what I'm up to.

Today's big news: After six months of prep-work, I FINALLY started writing Chapter One of my book about AIDS Lifecycle. It has been an immense amount of work--networking, interviews, and emails--but I finally feel like I understand the ride, its logistics, and (more or less) the rider community. So now I get to sort through 60+ hours of taped interviews and 1000+ photos (and don't even talk to me about model release forms!). Still got piles of interviews left to go, too.

When I started this project, I thought the effort involved would only be on par for training for and riding 585 miles in 7 days. I was a naive young idiot. (Now I'm a naive, somewhat-older idiot. Still doing it.)

But anyway, after six months of preparation, I've finally taken the first step and started writing Chapter One. It feels kinda like falling off a cliff, but I'm doing it, and that's the important part. Can't fall off the cliff if you don't jump. Er, um, you know what I mean...

Tien