The Crochet Side

I received an email yesterday from Interweave requesting a bio/byline from me. This is the first time I’ve ever had to write a bio for a publication; the first time I’ve had to be somewhat serious and tell the little girl in me to NOT put how I like to twirl toy guns.

I let the email sit for 24 hours before opening up  Notepad. I probably sat there for 10 minutes in silence, terrified of the blank screen. It’s the same feeling when I sit down to write short stories, poetry, sketch…frozen in time and stuck. Eventually I snapped out of it and came to the decision to freewrite–let it all flow organically out of me, from the heart, through the fingers, onto the keyboard.

What I had wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. I edited a bit, removed a sentence, added it back, removed it again, tweaked the beginning and fiddled with wording. Finally, I just had to say the hell with it. If it’s not what they’re looking for they’ll let me know, right?

So, in case it’s tweaked before the issue goes to print, here is what I sent them…

Brianna is the woman behind The Crochet Side (www.thecrochetside.com), a blog about her crochet ups and downs; and behind The Yarn Side (www.theyarnside.com), a small hand-painted/hand-dyed yarn line. She doesn’t claim to be a master of any one thing, but she’s pretty good at a few. Her first love was crochet; her second love was dyeing yarn. Now she tries her hardest to combine the two while staying cool in an all too hot Florida.

Playful, right? Not awful, not great…definitely not a piece of literature, but whose byline really is? That’s not really the job of a byline, I suppose. But telling a quick 3rd-person story, and attracting the reader into wanting to pay attention to that author/designer/et-cetera–that’s what we want. I hope what I’ve written is good enough to do that. Bring readers here; bring readers to The Yarn Side.

I can’t wait for the Winter ’09 Preview to go live. I can’t wait to share that with you all.  I can’t wait to see my name in print. Sounds sort of self-centered of me, doesn’t it? I always imagined myself to be published, but not like this; I wanted to write books, and here I am putting my stamp on crochet patterns? Well. The twisted paths we find ourselves on.

I wish my grandfather was alive to see all of this come to fruitionl, but I–well, let’s not get into a discussion about an afterlife. I know he’d be proud of me. I know he already was. I get to share it with my family that’s still with me, with my friends, with you.