And for my next trick...

I’ve spent most of the weekend reducing piles of cloth into clothing and hats with nothing but a sharp pointed stick of metal and some string.

It sounds pretty mystical when you say it like that, but really, there’s very little magical about sewing. The most impressive thing about sewing is that we pay other people to do it for us (and they have the gall to charge $80 for a pair of slacks??? You must be joking). With sewing, the most difficult part is taking something that is completely flat and fitting it onto a human body, which is not (unless you’re a 10 year old boy, but even they have some curves). You have to know how to sew curved edges to straight edges, and once you crack that mystical barrier, the whole sewing thing steadily becomes easier.(I have pictures, but I can't find that silly cord that connects my computer to a camera.)

But it’s not really that simple. I took my considerable experience and sewed a witch's hat, and learned once again that I do not know everything I need to know about sewing (the hat is too small for me to wear, so I’ll be crafting another or getting some bobby pins to hold it in place…).

Writing is sort of like that. Using nothing but twenty six letters and a handful of punctuation, we build whole worlds. It sounds pretty mystical when you say it like that. Once we have the basics, we can put our thoughts onto paper for someone else to experience. How cool is that? Sure we make mistakes, and sometimes we put a curve where there should be a straight line, and the hat's too small to wear. That's part of the process, that's a rewrite. I'm really enjoying my writing and my sewing. But I’m only human, and making costumes takes a lot of time. So does revising a dissertation. Also, next week is Write On Con. Because I’m only human, I think I’m going to blog a little bit less. I don’t know for how long these tasks will slow me down, but expect a few cheating posts where I show off my L337 Ski11z with a needle and thread. I’m also signed up for a couple blogfests that I’ve already done a bunch of leg work for, so that’s what you can expect out of August. I promise I'm still around, just not as much...

Also, if you haven’t seen, the Game On Blog Tour started today!