Part One - Rejecting the Premise
Towards the end of a summer of excellent books, I picked up this one - One Summer by David Baldacci - from the pile of unread things. It came in a pack of 10 books that I bought on a whim a while ago, so I had no idea what to expect apart from a light read, but the blurb piqued my curiosity. Apparently the main character Jack has only weeks to live and is preparing to say goodbye to his family when his wife is killed in a car accident - who will take care of his children? Well, "something remarkable happens which gives Jack the valuable second chance he'd only dreamed of". Interesting, you think. Transplant? Drug trial? Oh no, dear reader. It takes quite a lot for me to throw a book down in disgust after 60 pages, but the premise of this one is just so blindingly contrived as to be ridiculous. I won't spoil it just in case you want to read it, but it did make me consider how important it is to have a solid premise for your novel, and how books with ridiculous premises get out there. Surely at some point when you're writing it, or at least at some point when you're publishing it, someone's going to ask you what it's about, and when you give them the three-line plot summary, surely that someone's going to say "Sorry, what now? Really?". But David Baldacci is evidently either so famous that no one dared say it, or someone said it, he ignored them, and the publishers figured they could sell it in packs of 10 books so people would buy it before they realised that the premise was... well, disappointingly dodgy.
Part Two - Stash Crisis!
A friend happened to mention the other day that she really wanted to have a go with a drop spindle. I happen to have a drop spindle, and some fleece to go with it, from the days a couple of years ago when I wanted to have a go with a drop spindle, so I said I'd dig it out and send it to her. I was pretty confident that I knew where it was. And even if it wasn't there, my stash of yarn and yarny things isn't that big, so there weren't many other places it could be. Indeed, it was in the second place I looked. However, in the first place I looked I also found a whole host of yarny things that I'd forgotten I had. Completely and totally forgotten. Nice things, don't get me wrong (isn't it always nice to find yarn you didn't know you had?), but the finding of them did lead me to have a bit of a stash-related crisis. How much yarn is too much yarn? If I don't go through the boxes of yarn I have often enough to have an accurate mental catalogue of what's in them, then do I have too many boxes? Should I weed out some of the stash? If I'm going to weed out some of the stash, which of the nice things do I get rid of? If I have a jumper's worth of yarn but absolutely no plans to actually knit a jumper, should I get rid of the whole lot? Even though it's really amazing yarn in a really beautiful colour that I coveted for ages and that (I think) someone finally bought me as a present? If I have a lot of yarn that I'm not using, it it ok to spend the yarn shop voucher that a very special person bought me as a present because he didn't know that I shouldn't be allowed more yarn? Does the fact that I'm planning to move house in the next year mean that culling the stash is even more imperative? So far, all I've managed to conclude is that it would probably be a good idea to go through the stash and log everything I have on Ravelry. That way a future stash crisis is much less likely. Though it doesn't really help with the problem of buying more yarn...
Knitterly types, how do you organise your stash?
