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Here’s another reason why I love living in the city center. Right in our neighborhood is a yarn shop with not only gorgeous skeins and buttons but also a big mama loom where the shop proprietor/ artist-in-residence sits at the window and weaves.

The weaver is very friendly and enjoys having the children come in to watch. When I say “big mama” I mean the loom is the size of a four-shelf bookcase attached to my dining room table.

My seven-year-old daughter decided she wanted to weave something herself, and luckily the Waldorf kindergarten (where my son goes) had a loom for her.

My daughter, the chattiest of Cathies, will actually sit quiet and weave for 45 minutes at a time. It’s pretty astounding. Hasn’t she done a beautiful job?

Speaking of the Waldorf kindergarten, check out this wheelbarrow my son was playing with the other day:

Even the wheel is made out of wood. I think if I’d handcarved this puppy I’d have it on a display shelf somewhere, but my lucky little guy gets to put dirt and grass in it and wheel it around.

This week he’s been completely gaga over the simple bows and (blunt-end) arrows they’ve been making with string and green twigs. His first one broke, but I’ll try to get a pic of the next one.

In other news, I’ve been trying to focus on my revision, which is why you haven’t seen me here much this week. Speaking of which, I should get back to work! Have a great weekend.

Sometimes, when I read a book, I find myself drifting and losing interest. There can be a lot of reasons for his. Maybe I, as a reader, am not in the proper state of mind to lose myself in the story.

Sometimes, though, the writing contributes to the drift. When this happens, it's a great opportunity to study and learn from what went wrong. Here are some questions I should ask about my own writing.

Are the characters well-rounded?

It's very difficult to care about characters who do not have many characteristics. Those characters who are cartoon characters, who can be classified with a single attribute are just not very interesting. I don't care about them if I can substitute descriptive terms for their names. The mean one never does anything for anyone. It's all about her. And she's beautiful and rich and everyone has always given her whatever she wanted. Really? There's nothing in her background that would cause her to have a need for power and attention? She's just evil, because she's the evil one. The sweet one is trying so hard to make everyone happy. She never thinks of herself, always putting others first. She will start the process for being recognized as a saint soon. Heck, even saints with some flaws are more interesting. That Paul guy had some real issues with pride. He even made sinning competitive. "Before I was good, I was worse than the rest of you."

Is something happening?

Okay, my characters are well-rounded and have bracket stories and conflicting characteristics. But all they do is sit around and think about it. Or what they do is what I mostly do in my life. They go to work, and come home, and clean the kitchen, and read a book or watch tv, and then they go to sleep, and then they get up and take a shower and get dressed and go to work. Don't get me wrong. I have a pretty good life. But it would make a lousy book.

Is my main character involved, actively engaged, in what is happening.?

The movie Forrest Gump is well loved. One of tzhe things that movie did is place Forrest in the middle of all sorts of events the audience was familiar with which caused the audience to see it in a different way. In some ways, it was just a gimmick, but the idea is right. In every scene, I need to think about where my character is in the scene, and how he is actively engaged in it. My main character can't be a paaive observer.

I'll be thinking on these things as I tackle some revisions.

I have to admit, I really hate villain POVs. There are so few villains that have any redeemable qualities, and especially starting a book out with the villain’s point of view when they’re murdering and/or plundering just makes me go, “Why do I want to read this book, again?”

This is actually one of the things I hated most about the Wheel of Time series, though I loved the series in general: I hated the amount of time spent on this Forsaken’s love of naked mindless servants, and that Forsaken’s love of skinning people, or whatever. Yeah, yeah, I get it, they’re irredeemably evil. Get back to someone I’m actually ROOTING FOR, which is why I’m reading the book!

Sometimes it’s important to briefly show the villain’s point of view to convey to the reader some information that our hero doesn’t have, but I find more and more that my tolerance for even these kinds of scenes is thinning fast. Too often it’s a substitute for more subtle forms of suspense, laying clues that the reader could pick up if they were astute, the kind of clues that the main character should be putting together one by one to the point where when he or she finally figures it out, the reader slaps their own forehead and says, “I should have seen that coming!”

It’s a completely different matter, of course, when the whole point is for the “villain” to simply be someone on another side of an ideological or political divide where there are no true “bad guys.” Usually this happens in a book in which your narrators are unreliable, which can be very interesting.

But there’s a line for me, generally the pillaging/raping/murdering/all manner of human rights abuses line, at which I’m sorry, I just don’t care about this guy’s point of view. The equivalent of this in middle grade books—where pillages/murders/rapes are (hopefully) fewer—is the pure evil villain who’s just out to get the main character because the villain is black-hearted, mean, vile, whathaveyou. Evil through and through, with no threads of humanity. (Though honestly if he’s killing people “for their own good” to protect a certain more nuanced human viewpoint, I generally still don’t want to see that from his POV.)

So, what’s the line for you? Do you like villain points of view? Do you feel they add depth to a story? At what point do you think a villain POV goes from adding nuance or advancing the plot to annoying?

ETA: Coincidentally, my author Bryce Moore recently reviewed the Captain America movie and had this to say about how a character becomes evil, which I think is apropos to this discussion:

Honestly, if writers spent as much time developing the origin and conflicted ethos of the villains of these movies, I think they’d all be doing us a favor. As it is, it’s like they have a bunch of slips of paper with different elements on them, then they draw them at random from a hat and run with it. Ambitious scientist. Misunderstood childhood. Picked on in school.

That’s not how evil works, folks. You don’t become evil because you get hit in the head and go crazy. You become evil by making decisions that seemed good at the time. Justified. Just like you become a hero by doing the same thing. A hero or a villain aren’t born. They’re made. That’s one of the things I really liked about Captain America. He’s heroic, no matter how buff or weak he is.

This is, perhaps, the best description of why villain POVs bug me so much: because they’re oversimplified, villainized. And for some stories, I think villainization works, but I don&

Rice is not the first thing that comes to mind when you are drinking a nice, cold beer. And if you’re a beer connoisseur, even less so. For many years, it has been considered to be an affront to the institution of craft beer making to use rice. However, some beer makers are toying with the use of rice in beer again as homage to the practices that occurred before the Prohibition. This counterculture attitude reflects how beer brewers are looking to the past to evolve current drinkers’ palates. The following excerpt from the The Oxford Companion to Beer goes into detail on exactly how rice is used. Enjoy! — Nathalie

Anheuser-Busch is the largest single buyer of rice in the United States. Budweiser beer is brewed with rice making up a large portion of the grist.

[...]

It is commonly held, at least among craft brewers, that the use of rice in beer is to be abhorred. To quote Maureen Ogle, from an article in the LA Times, “Rice is considered by many brewers to be what the nasty, industrialized brewers use to water down their beer” and “craft brewers treat rice almost as if it were rat poison.” The article goes on to state that rice lowers the body, flavor and color of beers made with elevated rice adjunct levels, which seems rather to reinforce the notion.

In fact, German brewers arrived in America to find that it was difficult to make good beer using the high-protein, six-row barleys available in the United States at the time. Looking for ways to dilute the malt, they began to use rice and corn. The end result bears little resemblance to good German or Czech lagers but their customers enjoyed this form of beer and millions of people still do. Although rice may once have been a cheap alternative to barley malt, it no longer is. Sharply rising prices have resulted in much higher material costs for brewers employing rice in their mashes.

Interestingly, despite the assertions by many American craft brewers and beer enthusiasts that rice is anathema, some craft brewers are experimenting with production of “pre-Prohibition” lagers that mimic the beers made in the United States in the late 1800s. These are relatively highly hopped but are very light bodied, the result of the use of up to 20% rice in the mash. Other craft brewers are experimenting with the use of specialized rice types that actually add interesting flavors to the beers.

View more about this book on the

This was a fairly simple and oh-so-satisfying project. I bought the pashmina (silk and cashmere) for a few dollars at a thrift store and used it as a sort of throw in my son’s room when he was a baby. It was just the right color at the time, but after it outlived its usefulness, I felt obligated to wear it.

The problem was, it just wasn’t my color, so I never did. It seemed too luxurious to get rid of, so finally I decided to overdye it. I had to choose a color that was in the same vein but deeper. This coral color (Deka calls it “Hibiscus”) seemed just right, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. The color is very slightly uneven, but to me that’s just part of the charm of hand-dyeing.

I have to confess, though, that I’m still a little lost as to how to wear a pashmina shawl—maybe I should look for an online tute? The beading is also a little fancy for my taste. I could remove it, but that feels a little drastic. In the meantime, the shawl is keeping me warm at home.

For tips on overdyeing, see my post How to Overdye. If you’re in the US, I recommend dharma trading for supplies and directions. Remember: only try this with natural fibers, and please not with anything precious, because you never know what your results will be.

I threw in a few other things while the dye was ready, including this tablecloth from the thrift store here:

You may remember it from this earlier post. I love the dipped-in-Kool-Aid look it has here—so much more interesting than the brown on white. I’m planning to make some travel sacks for my daughter to pack her shoes and dirty laundry in. This always seems to be an issue when we travel, and it’s nice to have something handy and cute to use.

Speaking of fiber arts, the haiku sweater is off the needles (woowoo!) and Amy Karol had this great post on knitting attitudes the other day. And by the way she seems to have found a similar cookie thing like ours (where you can print letters) at Williams Sonoma. She’s a much more patient mommy than I am because she let the kids do a bajillion different words. I’m inspired.

Also, regarding fiber arts, I was totally happy to see the return of annekata. She had quit blogging for awhile, but she’s back!

2 Comments on Overdyed Pashmina Shawl, last added: 1/27/2012