Gansey Nation

Just a short blog this week, as I’ve got to get ready to head off to Edinburgh this afternoon (Sunday) for a meeting on Monday; and I’ve got a stack of banana pancakes to whip up for Sunday brunch, too.

There’s a splendid Welsh proverb—’many drops wear away the stone’. It’s an encouragement that if you persevere, even if it’s just a little bit each day, in the end you’ll get there. (Either that or I’m reading it wrong, and it means that no matter how resilient you are in the end you’ll be worn down—I mean, think about it from the stone’s point of view.)

But let’s go with the positive meaning for now. After knitting away, just 1-2 rows a night, a couple of inches a week, I’ve finished the body pattern; the first stage of my rocket is completed, and I’m on to the second, the central strap that divides the body from the yoke. Suddenly I have the feeling that I’m getting somewhere. (At this rate I’ll have to start thinking about yoke patterns soon…)

I wasn’t quite able to get my zigzag and diamonds to coincide in the end, but that’s OK. It only took half an inch more to zag the last zig, so I just added half an inch of plain knitting to the top of the diamond column—which mirrors the plain knitting between the welt and the start of the body pattern.

The central strap is a herringbone pattern, common to Scottish ganseys, running from right to left (so the wearer should always stand on the right in photographs). It will consist of 30 rows, or two and a half inches in my stitch gauge, and will, I think, be quite distinctive. (See pattern chart for details.)

I’ve included a picture I took on my phone this week, of a couple of ducks on the river paddling away from me as fast as they could go. There was some chemical foam in the water, so that as they zipped off they left these neat lines, like a jet’s vapour trails in the sky. I expected to see an empty river the next time I passed by, just a load of ducks floating upside-down, all their bodies except for their little legs underwater—or even a new breed of mutated evil super-ducks, seeking vengeance on anyone caught in possession of an orange—as my colleague at work observes (rather wearily, it seems to me) I probably watch too many cartoons—but no, everything was normal. (Maybe it just takes time.)

Right—time to pack. But before I go, I thought I’d share this with you. We reached a couple of milestones last month—there have now been 3,000 downloads of my novels on Amazon since May, and for the first time in a month we passed 200,000 hits for this blog. And if that doesn’t deserve a big stack of fluffy golden banana pancakes marooned in a rich, deep tropical lagoon of prime quality maple syrup, thick and gurgling warm from the bottle, I honestly don’t know what does. (Hey, banana’s a fruit—it counts as one of my five a day, right? And maple syrup comes from trees, so that’s probably two right there… And then there’s the lemon juice…)

So here we are, the clocks have gone back and winter is suddenly standing at your elbow like a grinning lawyer who already knows you’ve been left out of the will. Whichever way the clocks go, back or forward, I always feel jet-lagged; even the extra hour in bed’s a swindle as I just end up lying awake wishing I was asleep. Bah. And possibly even humbug.

We had our first snow of the winter on Friday, great grey-black clouds sweeping down from the arctic dumping snow and sleet and icy rain on us. In some parts of Britain possessing a German army greatcoat and paratrooper boots might seem like an affectation—here it’s a survival tactic. (As the Russians say, there’s no such thing as cold weather, only the wrong clothing.)

Next up—Halloween, that ghastly festival where you glumly sit perched on the edge of your sofa, unable to relax, waiting for the scuffle of childish feet on the gravel closely followed by licensed extortion with menaces (this is probably how Terry Pratchett’s Thieves’ Guild started). I imagine that the experience of living through the Blitz, listening to the German rockets overhead and wondering if this time they’ll land on you, must have been uncannily similar.

As you can probably guess by now, I’m not really in a party mood. But what can you do? Short of dipping the mini-Mars bars in laxative chocolate or rigging up an anvil suspended over the porch from a fishing rod (also known as the Wile E Coyote Gambit), you just have to take your medicine. (Speaking of medicine, I did toy with the idea of rustling up some Harry Potter every-flavour beans, but it was just too much trouble getting the earwax. Maybe next year.)

[amazon_link asins=’B009UGK8E8′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’ganseyscom-20′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’c9c998b6-c88f-11e7-bc59-137fc9ea5efc’]As I mentioned last week, my third novel, The Wraiths of Elfael, is now launched on an unsuspecting world. I’ve been comparing my feelings to those of an anxious parent sending their not-especially-bright child off on their first day at school, expecting them to come back with a nosebleed and a black eye after being beaten up by the rough kids. But thinking it over I don’t think I need worry. Just one look at the cover tells you this is a book that can look after itself.

I’ve written a short piece about the origins of the story and some of the background—if you’re interested, you can find it here. It’s a winter’s tale, full of ice and snow and wolves and dark magic, the first part of a trilogy. It’s going to be free on Amazon from Monday through Wednesday, and will be joined on a free promotion on Wednesday by my other two novels, my contribution to the Halloween spirit. As ever, any promotion you can do to let people know it exists via Facebook or Twitter—and if you should happen to read it and enjoy it, an Amazon review—would be greatly appreciated.

When I can get my fingers warm enough to knit—mainly by breaking the chunks of ice off my knuckles with a toffee hammer—I keep knitting. As you will see from the pictures I’m now halfway through my third diamond. As expected, the zigzag and diamond combination won’t quite end in sync, so I’ll have to resort to one of the cunning stratagems I’ve been preparing.

Finally, Margaret’s been doing her usual magic with shawl-y type things (I’m a little vague, since it mostly seems to consist of knitting reproduction spiderwebs which then get stretched out to the size of fishing nets, the sort of fine work I imagine Galadriel tried her hand at when she wasn’t getting all fey and seeing the future in the bathroom sink). Anyway, we thought we’d share them here, and wish you all a very happy Halloween—and if you should happen to know where I can get an anvil and some fishing line at short notice…

You know sometimes you feel like you shouldn’t have got out of bed? Well, I’m starting to think I shouldn’t get into bed in the first place. Thanks for the sympathy and suggestions over the pulled muscle in my neck last week. I was all set to write about how it was finally better now—but I had a relapse last night, so it’s back to sciatica of the neck. I have all the mobility of Batman in his body armour, and every movement is so slow it feels like the rest of the world is on time lapse.

It really wasn’t my weekend. How frustrating is this? Harper Collins, the publishers, having seen the success of Amazon’s kindle self-publishing boom, have just held an open call for unpublished fantasy manuscripts that they can publish as e-books. (It’s a bit of a cheat, really—you don’t get an advance, just royalties on copies sold, like Amazon, so in fact it’s basically self-publishing under the Harper Collins brand; but since you benefit from their marketing and promotion, it’s still definitely worth having a go.)

The window for submissions was advertised as being from the 1st to 14th October. So I’ve been beavering away, getting a couple of manuscripts ready, writing synopses, and “query letters”. Today—Sunday the 14th—I went to upload them, only to find that Harper Collins had closed the website at midnight on the 13th.

I can’t really complain—it was ambiguous, and anyway my teachers always told me that my habit of leaving everything to the last minute would come back to bite me—but all the same I can’t help feeling a shade dischuffed. (As the guy from Airplane almost said, looks like I picked the wrong year to give up chocolate!)

So it’s only going to be a short blog this week, partly because of all that wasted effort, and also because Margaret’s off on her travels again, to London and Edinburgh, and I have to figure out how to work the blog controls again. (Apologies for the ropey photos this week, too—it’s just me and my trusty iPhone, I’m afraid—and you’ll have to wait till Margaret’s back midweek before you’ll be able to click on the photos to enlarge them.)

I’m another couple of inches further on with the gansey. I know it looks like I’m knitting a “top hat cosy” (I should have gone into design, all these brilliant ideas), but you can see the pattern starting to emerge properly now. I had been concerned that the zigzag might disappear into the background, or be too thin, but it stands out quite distinctly. (Remember, this pattern section will only go as far up the body as the underarm gussets.)

Rainbow over Wick

At least I’ve found a way to knit which doesn’t involve too much discomfort in my neck, though it does involve a sort of slumped posture rather like the Hunchback of Notre Dame lining up a tricky shot at pool, or a crash test dummy. (And anyway, since I keep doing the damage yawning in my sleep I’ve decided I need more interesting dreams…)