In a weird cosmic miracle that I was really not expecting (and hesitate to write about for fear of jinxing both), my knitting and my novel are both going very well today.

This was not the case yesterday. Or two days ago. Or really, at any point this month before today. The first week of November, my novel was kicking my ass but my knitting was pretty much non existent. I got a little bit done here and there on one sock but it was not going well. I hated the sock I was making and it was taking FOREVER. But my word count was going really well, so I was surviving. But then I started panicking about the knitting situation a little bit. I finished the annoying pair, and that helped somewhat. Now I've got 3 and a half of my eight pairs done and ready to go. Fine. So I started to cast on another pair, and it sucked. Sucked hard. I'm doing something a little weird with this pair, but I really needed it to work out because this is going to be my absolute favourite pair when it's done. (It is so cool that even though I'm sure the eventual owner does not read this blog, I'm not going to risk it because most of the coolness is in the surprise.) I frogged it at least four times and had a huge pile of frogged yarn sitting next to my chair. Argh! But whatever, I'll ignore the knitting and work on the novel.

Then, around Wednesday, I hit an enormous block. Huge, gigantic blocky thing. My novel was sucking. I didn't care. My knitting was sucking. I did care about that. (At this point, I wasn't worried about hitting the 50K, because I was already at about 41K, but I'd lost all motivation to write. However, I was getting very concerned about the highly impending Christmas and the long list of things still to knit!) So I ditched the novel and cast on a Jaywalker.

I love that pattern. It is so fast once you get going on it, and by Friday night I had a big chunk of it done. I didn't write a word on Friday, but I got a lot knit!

Yesterday rolled around, and we had a write-in. Great! Write-ins are usually super productive for me. Neville and I (Neville is my laptop. Have I mentioned that before? Poor beloved Giles died a tragic death a few months ago. I'm not quite over it yet and I still miss him.) So I get to SUB where everyone is meeting, and settle into one of their surprisingly comfy chairs, and I proceed to have the least productive write-in EVER. Seriously. EVER. There came a point in the day when Patrick and I actually went and rode up the elevator to see if RATT was open since we figured alcohol might help with the writer's block. It SUCKED.

But I did get some knitting done! Clearly there was some kind of cosmic balance at play here.

Until today! I got home from the waterpark last night (Ben and Jana were in town so we went to the waterpark, which was very fun although there are too many damn stairs in that place!), and had a PM waiting for me from Patrick, who basically bribed me with booze to get writing again. (Which was very kind of him. Since we're technically competing, it's in his best interest for me to be sucking, but he took pity on me because he is nicer than I am.) So today, once Ben and Jana dragged themselves away from Sims (shortly after SimBen and SimJana had SimTwins) and went bak to Calgary, I sat down and started writing.

And lo and behold, I got over the block. Weirdly, it was 900 words of bra shopping that got me over it, but hey, whatever works, right? And then, suddenly, I kept going, and before I knew it I'd written 4500 words and was less than 2000 from 50K. So I wrote like the dickens for a few more word wars, and just like that, there was 50K. It wasn't even painful getting there! (Well, today. Yesterday and the few days before it were definitely painful.)

So I figured my knitting was totally screwed, and I did have another false start on this super neat sock that required yet more frogging. But I took a deep breath, cast on AGAIN, and just kept on going. And now, it's done! Well, the hard part, not the sock itself. But I got the weird section done and now it's just straight stockinette and suddenly, this list doesn't seem so impossible.

Now that I've tempted the fates I'm going to go back up my novel and double check all my knitting. I'm sure my cosmic ass-kicking is impending. You'd think I'd learn my lesson from my novel, given that the first line of it is "I've heard of tempting fate, but this is ridiculous."

Apparently I'm a slow learner.