If you’re here because you heard my interview with Mary Beth on Getting Loopy, welcome! (If you aren’t here because of that, go have a listen. If you were listening live but didn’t hear the end because we went about eight minutes over, you can hear those last eight minutes from that link, too.)
A few things we talked about: Interweave Crochet, CrochetMe.com, IC submission guidelines, Knitting Daily TV, books I’ve written or co-authored, posts I’ve written about editing, John Scalzi’s blog (I do read other blogs, just to be clear. I’ve just been thinking about his a bunch lately).
Having listened to the podcast, here are some follow-up thoughts:
I actually do think my background in linguistics is relevant to the work I do in crochet. Studying language as an entity involves breaking it down and analyzing it and looking at even its smallest bits to see how they contribute to the whole. My ability to examine language certainly influences my ability to use language, especially in a technical way, which is how we use it in crochet patterns.
When I mentioned that patterns float to the top as I sit surrounded by submissions, I meant it in a pattern recognition sort of way—trends in constructions or yarns or techniques or whatever start to pool together, and I slowly develop an overarching perspective on what the issue can become.
Mary Beth holds a contest each week, and the contest this week is for a signed copy of Crochet Me. Go have a listen for how to enter and for the special word you need to use be eligible.
And now, I want to hear from you, gentle readers. It had never occurred to me that designers might feel pressure to tell me what they think I want to hear when they put together their submissions, and I hope I cleared that up (to reiterate: tell me what you want to tell me; that’s what I want to hear). But now I’m really curious: What do you think I want to hear? Leave a comment.
Did you phone in to hear the end of the show, live? That’s just cool. I’m really digging the Blog Talk Radio format. If you didn’t catch it, we talked about why I’m motivated to keep being an editor instead of something more glamourous and less “in the trenches” (MBT’s words, not mine — I’ve never looked at it that way).
Finally, I was very, very serious about the fedora thing.
Man, that was fun! I hope you enjoyed.
I think you would want to hear that “I’m an excellent pattern writer” and “I have all my patterns tech-edited before they come to you” and “I generate all my own schematics”. When in truth, every time I design a pattern, the process goes differently. Sometimes it has percolated for a long time and allowed me to test and re-test the pattern before I even submit it. Other times, the pattern comes to me like a tidal wave and I “make it up as I go”. Either way, I believe in following my energy. If I feel inspired to go a direction, I go there, then later I decide if it is worthy of submission. If it’s not worthy of submission, then I’ll have ‘gotten it out of my system’ and I’ll be free to follow the next inspiration. :)