Progress!

(non-yarn content, too, this post -- scroll for it baby!)

Pics later, I promise, gotta get 'em off my phone!

I had to choose between yarn & blogging yesterday since my regular afternoon/evening routine was interrupted by doctor's appointments and grandparents in town.

The yarn won. I got another 8 rows on the new shopping bag's 1st panel.


Not much, I know, but learning a new stitch pattern on a project like this is always slow going. I have no idea how long I crocheted yesterday, but it was long enough to watch 2 more episodes of "Heroes" on the DVR with the commercials skipped (sorry NBC!)

Today I finally got to work on my scarf again! I haven't touched it in months, so that was nice. It's a very small yarn/hook though, and a very long scarf, so got a few inches done in the 15min I had on break at work, but that's all.

Also managed to get another 3 rows on the shopping bag ("Burn Notice" on the DVR, lol) tonight, so pretty sure I made my 20min for the day. Woohoo!

AND NOW FOR MY NON-YARNALICIOUS NATTERING:

I was part of a small writing group a few years ago that met at a restaurant in Hyde Park that was so danged crunchy I couldn't even get coffee there (FAIL!).

I quit going for a while due to family stuff (it was 2hrs on a Saturday morning) and when I went back about 4months later, they were GONE. A little digging on the Writer's League of Texas website tells me the group apparently called themselves, "15 minutes of fame" and had a Yahoo! Group and other stuff I had no clue about. They moved to BookPeople (i.e. even ~further~ into Austin!) and now appear to be defunct.

What I liked about this group was the format. I don't currently have any writing goals other than to do MORE of it. I have no target market, nothing I want critiqued, etc. The group was very freeform, loosely based on Natalie Goldberg's, "Writing Down the Bones". Met for 2 hours, socialized a little, then did 10-15min sprints based on prompts suggested at random by everyone, then read aloud.

You ~could~ bring a WIP and read from it, instead, if you wanted an opinion, but writing was supposed to be done with the prompts each time. It was a refresher, a mind and word expander for 2 hours a week. I wrote a lot of dreck. I got stumped and wrote nonsense sometimes, but by golly I WROTE.

I also wrote the only piece of fiction I've ever sold at one of these Saturday morning sections. It was flash fiction and sold to a now-defunct webzine, but, by george, someone paid me ($10--woohoo!) for my fiction.

I'm trying to start something similar with Jenn.

Something closer to home, so my precious escape-from-the-house time isn't mostly spent driving downtown. Something with no heavy expectations of me, particularly since I am living in the land of the dayjob these days.

Jenn wants something with a structured (at least a little) critique format so she can work on stuff to submit to publishers.

We're working now to establish a happy medium, most likely still based on "Writing Down the Bones" (gawd I love that book!). Will let you know when we figure it all out and will put out a call for other interested writers once we have something firmed up.

In other news: I'm going to be a grape stomper!

I'm taking my mom to a small vineyard this weekend for her birthday so we can channel some Lucy & Ethel and gets our feet purple. There will be photographic evidence of this expedition (it's included in the package) but there are no guarantees I'll share the pics.