Isn't it Romantic? (Chet Baker version)

Okay, I've delayed and procrastinated for probably over a month, but I finally completed my writing exercise for last month's online meeting.  And yes, it was massively late, and it's up to my writing group as to whether they still want to critique it, but it had to be done.  How can you write a trashy novel if there's no trash in it?  The assignment was an exercise from a book on writing fiction as follows:

Write a sex scene where you know the characters well and where the sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it, that only he or she would desire so very much that particular person under those circumstances.

Well, it's written now.  I'm not sure it's particular, or peculiar, and I'm certain that it's schlocky and full of cliches, but the first sex scene I've ever written is drafted.  I did write it in the novel context using my characters, but it's out of sequence, so now I have to catch up in the novel to the part where this happens. I gained 2,000+ words, but I don't know if I want to count that really until I catch up as substantial revisions may need to be made to connect it up.  I need to think about that.

In fiber news, since I fixed the wheel and I had fiber that I had taken out of the closet for the Maine trip, I spun some more this week.  The fiber is from Spin-a-bit and I bought it at NH Sheep and Wool this last go round, I think.  The picture to the left is the fiber batt as I bought it.  There are shiny things in it, which are very pretty.  I'm not sure why I'm so into shiny things right now, but that appears to be the case. To the right is a crappy picture of the singles being spun.  I took a bunch and this was the best of them sadly.  I think it was just too dark in the living room.  To the right, bottom, is a picture of the skein of yarn after I plied it.  I like it.  It's a little more aqua than I normally like, but the purple balances that out I think.

In knitting fiber news, I finished the back of the purple tramline sweater.  On Tuesday I was showing some knitting friends the cable cross that I had done incorrectly and one of them spotted another incorrect cross.  ARGGHH!  And of course, that one was way at the beginning.  My options were to intentionally drop a 28 stitch wide cable back and reknit it back up.  I thought about it and said no freaking way.  My second option was to cut the cable, push it back to the other side to recross the cable correctly and graft it back together on the other side.  I have done this before.  It can be done.  I just didn't want to do it with a 2 st by 2 st cross, as I was concerned there would not be enough yarn to weave in after cutting.  My knitting friends said I was being insane and to leave them alone, it was the back of the sweater and nobody would notice.  Given that one of them spotted the second incorrect cable, I kinda wasn't buying that.  I wondered whether I could duplicate stitch over it to hide the incorrect cross.  They still told me I was insane.  But I couldn't help it, so I decided to attempt it, even though I had never heard of duplicate stitching in connection with recrossing cables, but hey, it might work.  So I duplicated stitched over the incorrect cable cross to make it look stitches were coming over it from the line below. I think I like it better than ignoring it, but I didn't weave in the ends, and I'll take it to guild tomorrow to see what people think.

I've started designing a scarf for Elaina at work out of the autumn colored Manos del Uruguay lace yarn I bought at Stitches.  We're headed to Boston today and we're planning to have dinner with Laura V.

Stay tuned for further updates.