Long-time readers of this blog will recall that, back in April, I landed an agent to represent my novel, The Accumulator. At that time, I promised to update this space news about whether you’ll be able to find my writing in your local book store. Well, I have bad news and good news.

I learned this past fall that none of the major publishing houses were interested in The Accumulator. This is not a huge surprise, in retrospect, given the amount of risk an editor would need to take on a young(ish) writer like myself whose publishing record is limited to poetry, radio commentaries, a short story that won’t be appearing in print until this April, and this blog. Facts don’t insulate us from disappointment, though, and that disappointment has a lot to do with why things have been so quiet here.

But here’s the good news: The Accumulator is now a semi-finalist in Amazon.com’s Breakthrough Novel Award contest, the end result of which is a publishing contract with Penguin. Which novels get ushered into the finals will be the decision of Penguin and Publishers Weekly, but a huge factor in that decision is customer reviews.

So here is where I need your help.

If you have the time and inclination, you can read an excerpt of The Accumulator here, on Amazon.com. And then, if you feel inspired (and you’re not put off by sex, drugs, or violence), write a review! The service you will be doing for me is incalculable, and will pretty much put you in the black, karma-wise.

And if I move on to the finals, my karma will be squarely in the red——and I will owe you all a thousand hand-knit sweaters.

This DNA scarf, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is now in the hands (and around the neck) of my cousin Matt. Matt has always been a big fan of my knitting, so I knew he’d appreciate pretty much anything I made for him. As a post-doctoral fellow in chemistry, I figured he’d get a good laugh out of receiving a scarf with a double-helix, and from a knitting perspective, this pattern was easily the best one out there on the ‘net. Little did I know, it’s also a slam dunk from a scientific perspective.

For one thing, the DNA on this scarf twists around to the right, regardless of the direction of the scarf. As Matt explained to me, this is called the “right-handedness” of DNA; if you were to place your thumb on one of the strands, you would have to twist your hand around rightwards in order to follow the strand upwards. The second big feature of the scarf is the asymmetrical quality of the double helix. See how the pattern shifts from side to side? This is because the two strands of DNA are not evenly spaced apart. The double helix has ” . . . a major groove and a minor groove.” (Thank you again, Matt.) Lastly, the scarf pattern features the correct number of base pairs (ie. ladder rungs) between turns of the helix.

Many visual representations of DNA blow it on one or all of these counts. Like, for example, this Israeli postage stamp:

The internet is rife with these kinds of errors, but the most egregious example is in the real world, and something of which I don’t have a photograph——a paperweight from the gift shop at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Which was, until last October, run by James Watson. As in Watson and Crick, two of the three scientists behind the discovery of DNA.

Why am I boring you with all of this? It shows what happens when we place ourselves in the care of a really good knitting designer. Not only was the pattern for this scarf easy to follow and fun to knit, but June Oshiro actually tricked me into creating an accurate representation of DNA, something I most certainly could not have done on my own. I’m not a scientist, but I hope that the patterns that I’ve put out into the world result in hand-knit items with even half the elegance.

Note to scientists: Did I make any errors in this post? Don’t be shy about letting me know.

If I’d been a more responsible blogger, I’d have told you about the survey from Knitting Daily that asked what men really want in a hand-knit sweater. As it is, I’m just in time to point you toward the results, which many of you have probably already seen.

The surveyors were cagey about the absolute number of responses, and they astutely avoided stating any results that would allow us to calculate it. Nevertheless, one of their numbers is quite surprising: 52% of the responders were non-knitting men. This makes me very happy, because . . . well, when I’m about to start knitting a sweater for a woman, here’s a typical example of her side of the conversation:

“Oh boy! I really prefer cardigans to pullovers. They’re much more flattering to my shape. Maybe a cable or two, but not too many. Gets too busy, you know? And can you bring it in a bit around the waist? That would be fabulous. Let’s see . . . colors . . . I like light-ish greens, some blues. No pink. And how about . . .”

But what happens when I ask a man?

“Um . . . I don’t know. How about brown?”

I’m generalizing, of course (sort of), but the fact is that when you’re planning out a sweater intended for a non-knitting male, you have to ask leading questions. The Knitting Daily survey asked those questions, which I’m adding to my repertoire the next time one of my guy-friends asks me to knit him something.

The other survey results were not so surprising. We males prefer dark colors and minimal texture, with exceptions made for minor ribbing and the occasional cable. All of this confirms a brute——but little-discussed——fact of knitting: the sweater your guy wants the most will be, from cast-on to bind-off, the most boring thing you’ve ever knit. It’ll look fabulous on him when you’re finished (and he will actually wear it), but in the meantime, it’s yard upon yard of stockinette stitch for you, with nary a cable in sight. But fear not! There are two things you can do about this:

1. Embrace Buddhism, which will cause you to realize that boredom is merely beginning of the path to The Four Noble Truths.
2. Take my men’s pullover sweater class at Article Pract in Oakland, at which we’ll be knitting this:

   

   Well, almost this. See how those raglan seams go right up the collar? That’s cheating. We’ll be doing it much better.

There’s a third option, of course. You can shift gears entirely and take my poetry class at the Writing Salon. Knitting and writing aren’t all that different from each other, really, except that . . . we’ll, never mind. Come and find out for yourself.

Despite majoring in philosophy in college, earning a master of fine arts degree in writing, and committing most of my free time to producing fiction, I’ve somehow managed to end up surrounded by scientists, doctors, and other people of a left-brain persuasion. There’s my cousin Matt, who recently completed his PhD in chemistry and now has a postdoctoral position at Harvard; my friend Danica, who is the proud owner of a PhD in biophysics; Marissa just started her residency in internal medicine at Oregon Health Sciences University; Will, who is working on devices that will eventually end on Mars; and then, of course, there’s just about everyone who I work with at my day job.

While this makes for particularly interesting dinner parties, it also means that my knitting often takes a serious left turn. Just last week, one of the physicians for whom I work asked me to knit her this:

Now, I have actually seen one of these first-hand (a real one, not a knitted one) and while some of the anatomy is exaggerated here, I have to admit that it’s a pretty good representation of a uterus. And who would have thought that fallopian tubes could be so cute? It thrills me to no end that I have a job where someone can ask me for one of these with a straight face. Can you imagine your supervisor asking you to knit this for her? I didn’t think so.

But it doesn’t stop there! In a few weeks Z and I will be visiting the east coast, and one of our stops will be Boston, where we’ll be seeing the aforementioned Matt. He’s way too busy running experiments and getting published in Cell to read this blog, which means that I can show you this:

This is a slightly modified version of June Oshiro’s brilliant DNA scarf, which I am knitting with my new favorite scarf yarn: Berroco Ultra Alpaca. It’s 50/50 alpaca and wool, which keeps its price reasonable while still retaining some of that alpaca coolness. Matt just moved to Boston from San Francisco this past June, which means he’s really going to appreciate this scarf in about one month. Okay, okay, I know what you’re saying; Matt works with methyl-lysine analogs and recombinant histones, and what do they have to do with DNA? Nothing, probably, but DNA makes a much nicer cable pattern than either of the above items. At least I think it does. I can’t find a picture of recombinant histones.

If you have a scientist in your life——or happen to be one yourself——you should check out this handy guide to geeky knitting patterns. There’s already so much math involved in knitting, it’s really not such a big leap. Besides, in case you haven’t noticed, we geeks rule the world now anyway.