Barbara Hambly's Blog, page 47
November 21, 2010
NEW Further Adventures!
Sitemistress Deb just informed me that my two NEW tales are up on "The Further Adventures Of..." section of my website (barbarahambly.com, for those who've just joined us...)
"Princess " is a John Aversin story - and boy, it was good to be dealing with John and Jenny again! John is hired to rescue a beautiful Princess, with some extremely unexpected results.
"A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven " is a January story - Rose, not Ben (who is out of town for the events of the upcoming novel The Shirt On His Back ). One of Rose's neighbors is murdered and Rose has to solve whodunnit from the luxurious confines of a jail-cell in the Cabildo (using Dominique as her - er - legperson).
Deb tells me somebody came in and bought the first copies five minutes after she had them up - BEFORE I'd announced it anywhere, so somebody must have been either keeping watch, or had good timing.
I am EXTREMELY pleased with both stories.
Princess is novella length - about 12,000 words.
I hope you enjoy them!
November 14, 2010
Little blue birds
Holidays (and a screaming deadline) are coming up soon...
Just finished the preliminary roundup of Little Blue Birds - meaning, I've unearthed 12 place-settings of Blue Willow china from various caches around my house, preparatory to washing them and throwing my first Family Thanksgiving in many years.
Generally my mother and I split the Holidays: Mom would do Thanksgiving, I'd do Christmas. But as the younger generation has added Plus-Ones and Live-Ins to its circle - and as years go by, as years will - the group is sometimes fairly large for my parents' place, and my Mom is now 82. Healthy as a mule, thank heavens, but even mules slow down when they get to be 82. (I know the usual expression is, "healthy as a horse," but horses are actually rather delicate creatures... And it wouldn't be nice to say "Healthy as a rat" or "Healthy as a cockroach," even though THEY are going to see Humanity into the grave and then some).
Anyway, I also have a 30-foot Great Room and 12 feet of dining-table... and Blue Willow place-settings for 12. (And a garage full of chairs).
And I am much looking forward to the challenge of brining a turkey and roasting the sucker, though the Family has its assigned Bring-Withs: rolls, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, etc. (Mmm, creamed etcetera is so good with gravy...) The only hitch is that, since I teach the night before Thanksgiving and generally spend most of the day at the college (to avoid traffic-patterns), I have to get the house set up Tuesday.
After spending an entire year locked in a squalid study with a cat in my lap, I look forward to formal entertaining. It makes me feel very girly and Martha Stewart, which is always pleasant. (I do NOT have special Thanksgiving-theme bathroom towels, however. One must draw the line somewhere).
November 10, 2010
Question to the Group Mind
And, how do you use a kanji dictionary? I understand it goes by the radical character of the kanji (the little box with the feet, or the pig-symbol, or whatever). Is there a rule about what IS the radical, or do you just try all the likely candidates until you find the little picture that you want?
I suppose the time is coming when I'll need a Japanese keyboard and the program for it. How difficult is that to put on and take off?
WoW - tomorrow night the Deadmines? (Provided the crashing issue has been resolved?) I'm trying to get over my aversion to getting killed.
November 7, 2010
Fishies
But, dear friends asked me to visit them in Oceanside in between events, so it all worked out well. My friend works for the parish at the Mission San Luis Rey, and I spent part of the afternoon visiting the Mission (one of the best-preserved and most beautiful of the California Missions - though owing to the limitations of adobe construction, all the missions are pretty much Victorian reproductions of the originals). The last time I was there I was in grade school - a LONG damn time ago. But only a few years before my previous visit, the nuns who taught at the school there had decided to have a koi pond built, and now - 55 years later - my friend's husband is the Warden of the Koi.
I very probably saw some of those same fish when I was there 50-odd years ago. The mammoth matriarch is about twice the size of my cats - 28" long, and weighs close to 30 pounds. Not as big as the monster koi they have at the Honolulu Airport, but pretty impressive. She's a variety they don't breed anymore, not ornamental, a dull bronze mottled with black, but intelligent and inquisitive (before they figured out she was a lady, her name for decades was Perry Mason). Others were gorgeously marked, and I was pleased to learn that like dragons, koi alter their markings as years go by. Koi can be trained, and rank about as intelligent as cats. (Well, if they're as intelligent as my beautiful Jasmine that's not saying much...)
Now back to work...
October 30, 2010
Ancient Roman Murder Mystery
The bad news is that the first January book, working-title Dark Souls , is due really, REALLY soon, so I'm again facing a) no spare time and b) owing myself TWO nervous breakdowns instead of just one. I'm doing the best I can but it doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere.
But, I've got a good draft of the Rose-and-Dominique short-story (what Rose was up to while January is out of town in The Shirt On His Back ), and a good running start on the John Aversin short-story, "Princess." (The Rose story is "A Time For Every Purpose Under Heaven.") I hope to get them both finished and up on the web-site in fairly short order, if I don't have a nervous breakdown first.
Oh, yes, and I expect the manuscript of Shirt - and of Sup With the Devil - to both show up any day now to be edited. Both on the same day, the way these things run.
On the subject of doing two stories at once, here's words on the subject of the book I wrote in between The Walls of Air and The Armies of Daylight.
THE BABY-EATERS
That’s what I originally wanted to call it, only St. Martin’s Books wouldn’t let me.
Later on, Del Rey took the same attitude. So the book that I wrote between Walls of Air and Armies of Daylight is variously known as The Quirinal Hill Affair (the St. Martin’s hardcover title) and Search the Seven Hills (the Del Rey paperback title with that Cecil B. DeMille style cover).
Mostly, I wanted to do a book about the early Christians. As a medievalist, I’d done a year as teaching and research assistant for Dr. Jeffrey B. Russell, one of the foremost medieval scholars in the country. His specialty was Church history, so I’d had a front-row seat on the quarrels and back-biting that characterized the early Christian community: the nasty rhetoric flung back and forth between those who believed that Jesus of Nazareth had been actually God, those who believed he’d been simply a great teacher, those who believed he’d been adopted by God, and those who believed that not only had he been God, but that God wouldn’t do anything so icky as actually take the form of a human body that did human things like go to the bathroom. Those believed that Jesus had existed only as a spirit, and faked his death on the Cross for our benefit. It hadn't really hurt. The moment the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal, the Christians started actively persecuting one another over these beliefs. At the time the story takes place – during the reign of Trajan, 2nd century a.d., when they were all being persecuted by the Roman authorities under the equivalent of the Patriot Act – all they could do was call each other names, which they did a LOT.
Quirinal Hill is written, basically, from the standpoint of the average educated Roman, who would see the Christians as total – and dangerous - nut-cases. If there wasn’t a persecution going in their area, they’d make trouble, hoping to be martyred, or in one case at least, went to the local authority DEMANDING martyrdom. (He told them to get the hell out of his office). During the Hellenistic era, there was a lot of competition going on for “strangest religious sect” – it was a time of spiritual upheaval all throughout the Roman Empire, and the ease of transportation and communication only complicated the issue. Rome’s original religion (before they borrowed gods wholesale from the Greeks) was sort of strange and totally unsatisfying emotionally, and with its immense immigrant population, Rome had armies of foreign gods. Christians did NOT make much of an impression. Dr. Russell, to whom I dedicated the book, read it before publication, caught some of my more egregious mistakes, and was pretty entertained.
Since I was still living in Riverside at the time, I did a lot of research at the UCR library, where I’d studied getting my M.A. Among other thing, they had a huge collection of the Church Fathers in Latin, which was most useful, although some of the most fascinating stuff was medieval rather than early. I still remember toiling through the Elucidarium of Honorious of Autun, a 12th-century tome that described the beliefs held by the average Christian in the Middle Ages… stuff that had nothing to do with actual Church doctrine. Things like the general belief that the souls in Hell got Sundays off (or, in other legends, Christmas and Easter only.) And that the souls of the blessed could look down from Heaven and watch the torments of the damned, which – being righteous – they took delight in, as if “watching fishes disporting in a pool.”
Quirinal Hill was huge fun to write. Too much fun, perhaps. My friend Laurie described it as “neither fish nor fowl,” and predicted I’d have a hard time selling it, which was true. It never seemed to fit in quite anywhere. Very irreverent, very violent, rather gory, it was my first crack at a historical murder-mystery, and it confirmed my addiction to research. It’s always annoyed me slightly that Ancient Roman Murder Mysteries later became a well-recognized sub-genre and brought fame to the likes of Lindsay Davis and John Maddox Roberts. I always wanted to jump up and say, “I did it first!”
But obviously, not as well as they.
October 22, 2010
Hallows Eve
An also less than optimal experience trying to deal with the tech support department of the company that makes my Internet Security system, since the tech support people a) do not speak English terribly well (though they insist their names are things like "Frank" and "Jay" - male and female both) and b) are CLEARLY reading from a script. If anyone has a suggestion about a good Internet security system wherein a) the firewall can be toggled on and off easily and at will and b) the tech support people are b-1) native English speakers and b-2) actually based in the US, I'd like to hear about it.
Another day on the screenplay. The cats like it - Jasmine cozies up in my lap and Rocky sleeps in her favorite spot, the printer. In the process of putting stuff into the new filing cabinet I discovered a PERFECT photocopy of a 1935 guidebook to Peking, something I remember getting YEARS ago and have not the slightest recollection who gave it to me. But since it's the perfect thing for an upcoming project, I am grateful.
I must have scared the hell out of my History-2 students, because they clearly studied like demons for this exam.
October 17, 2010
The Walls of Air
The Walls of Air
A lot of writers were scared of Lester Del Rey.
Del Rey Books was named, by the way, after his wife, the remarkable Judy-Lynn Del Rey, but Lester was the chief editor; he was the one I dealt with. He was about 4’10”, looked about a hundred years old (he was in his mid-sixties when I met him, 78 when he died in 1993), and had huge, crystal-blue eyes behind enormously thick coke-bottle lenses and long fingernails stained with nicotine. He gave the impression of a slightly demented wizard who had started to transform himself into a goat and then got distracted half-way.
I was terrified of him.
He was bar none the best story-doctor I’ve ever encountered. He could spot where a narrative was weak and immediately come up with a fix. The years I worked with him were the equivalent of a writing-class for which I got paid. I’d type my manuscript (being very careful to put up carbons the night before – a whole stack of little black-and-white paper sandwiches, ready for work the following day: that’s two sheets of paper with a piece of carbon-paper in between, for those of you who don’t remember what an actual typewriter was), and send it off to my agent, who would send it on to Lester (after she presumably had it photocopied, something that wasn’t all that easy to do in those days even if I’d had the money). It would come back in a thick brown envelope and it would be about a week before I’d have the nerve to open it, because Lester could be VERY caustic. His handwriting was tiny (about the size of 7-point type) and very neat, and I’d hyperventilate with stress for awhile and then re-write.
(By the way, I loved Lester).
I’d send the corrections back and then would get galley-proofs: the typeset story printed out as long, snake-like strips which would later be cut up to fit the actual pages. A galley page was about 2 ½ feet long, with a narrow line of typeset in the middle. That always made publication feel very close.
By this time I’d moved off the back porch and a block and a half down Seventh Street to the upper floor of an old 1920s craftsman bungalow, set in a big yard about three blocks from the railroad tracks that divided the University area of Riverside from downtown. At night I’d hear the trains go by. From the window of my workroom I could see them, when I’d be working during the day. I was still training in karate several nights a week. I could tell the house had been built in the 1920s because when I’d drive back from the dojo I could see, on the chimney which faced down 7th Street, an old-style anti-clockwise swastika built into the brickwork, as they used to do for good luck.
At this point also I got my first Pekinese, a little red-brown bitch (I use the term advisedly) whom I named Whiskey. The kitchen of the apartment was a narrow little galley with a door at one end, and I’d let her out onto the platform outside and she’d hop down the flight of wooden stairs, to wildly bark to protect the trash from the trash-trucks. When I’d bathe her (in the kitchen sink – I’d hold her by head and tail and run her back and forth under the faucet. This was before flea medications), I’d towel-dry her, and then she’d run frenziedly around and around the apartment, shaking herself wildly UNTIL I LEFT THE ROOM. Then she’d go lie down. When I came back in, she’d leap to her feet and run frenziedly around the apartment shaking herself again.
The woman next door had four dogs – a big mongrel named appropriately “Lug” and three chihuahuas – and her yard was separated from ours by a chain-link fence. Since THE way of establishing dominance for a dog is to poop on another dog’s territory, Whiskey would back herself up against the fence-wires and poop ON THEIR YARD while Lug and his ankle-biter minions stared in amazement: “How did she DO that?” Not the sharpest daggers in the armory.
Whiskey, by the way, was living proof that the legend of dogs being able to sense ghosts is not true in all cases. And at the time, I must have been totally psychically insensetive as well (although that seems to have changed, which is a story for much further down the line). A couple of years after I left that apartment, I learned that only a few years previously there had been a double shotgun-murder in my bedroom. So either I and Whiskey both were completely insensetive, or the doomed lovers had left no unfinished business behind them on the earth…
Which brings me (briefly) to the Haunted House on Seventh Street.
All the students who lived off-campus knew about the Haunted House on Seventh Street. It was a neighborhood of old houses that rented rooms to students, so a number of people I talked to had either lived in the place, or talked to people who had, and there was something DEFINITELY weird going on there. On the other hand, this WAS the 70s, and though the marijuana being smoked then was considerably milder (I am told – I gave the stuff up around 1980) than the hybridized weed common today, it was also cheaper then and some people smoked an AWFUL lot of it.
In any case, I never knew exactly which house it was, but I made inquiries before moving into both of the Seventh Street houses I occupied to make darned sure I didn’t stumble onto the place by mistake.
* * *
October 14, 2010
PatchVex-2
October 13, 2010
PatchVex
The upshot is that I may not be able to play Thursday (since when I left the house at 9 am, the download was claiming it would be at it for another 48 hours - 2 DAYS - or more). That's IF it doesn't abort again.
I really, really hope that Blizzard will QUICKLY come up with some other way of doing this kind of thing. (I know that phoning them will involve a 2-hr wait in the phone queue, because of the patch).
I'll update the situation tomorrow morning, but I may simply not be able to play tomorrow evening.
And no, I haven't forgotten about a blog-post about writing... it's just been a difficult week.
October 9, 2010
Time of the Dark
Jotting down what I recall about the first book - Time of the Dark - made me realize it may take more than one post to talk about a book.
And writing about writing made me realize, what a DANGED long time ago that was.
When I wrote The Time of the Dark I was living in Riverside, on what had been the back porch of one of those old houses along Seventh Street. I was taking karate four nights a week, hanging out with the dojo gang, taking classes to get a credential to teach High School, and hadn’t written anything since 1973.
Everything I’d written before 1973 had been what would have been fan fiction, if I’d known about such a thing: stories about characters in Star Trek, Dr. Who, various of the Westerns I was seriously hooked on, written for my own entertainment and shared with nobody. (Thank God – it was beyond terrible. Well-written, but TERRIBLE). I’d gotten an M.A. in medieval history at UCR just in time to have the bottom fall out of the market for college teachers, so I borrowed a large sum from my father to go back to school and re-tool my skills for the only thing I knew how to do, which was teach.
Then at Christmas I had a dream.
It was heavily Lovecraft-influenced: the hero (whom I didn’t know) and the old wizard hiding out from enemies in one of those run-down little house-lets you see (or did see back in the ‘70s) if you drove east of Barstow or Bakersfield, sitting out in the middle of the desert, long-deserted and surrounded by nothing. No electricity, no water, and the cell phone was decades from being invented. The young hero goes to the moonlit kitchen and sees this Thing – this Lovecraftian awfulness – oozing in through the cat-door, tiny as a cat, but growing. He runs in panic back to the wizard in the other room and the wizard says (in that perfect Alec Guinness voice), “Did you think they’d be human?”
By the time I’d written ten pages of this I knew there was nothing I could be but a writer. Which was a darn pity, because I’d just borrowed a large sum from my father to go back to school and learn how to be a High School teacher, and I had no way of paying it back.
I’d wake up at 4 a.m., write until it was time for me to go to the High School for student teaching observation, cry all the way to school, cheer up for the class, teach my own classes, and be in tears by the time I got to the parking lot to go home. I did this for months.
I might add that the master-teacher at the school who was supposed to be observing my class NEVER did so, not from the first day: he simply dumped me into a classroom of 9th-graders and vanished. I later learned that this was for the very good reason that he was an alcoholic: he’d show up drunk for FIRST PERIOD at 8 a.m. – always polite and friendly, but he initiated some EXTREMELY inappropriate conversations before first period class (“Uh – why are you giving me a graphic account of your visit to your proctologist, sir?”) – and by fifth period, the one I taught, he was sound asleep in the teacher’s lounge. The school was also installing air conditioning in the classrooms, most of the ceiling-tiles were torn out, and sometimes black cockroaches the size of chihuahuas would fall out of the ceilings and wander about the classroom. First time this happened I borrowed a flip-flop from the nearest student, smashed the thing so that its little guts covered nearly a whole floor-tile, and asked, “Anybody here take biology?”
It was that or have the suckers showing up in my desk.
No wonder ToD turned out a little gruesome.
I was probably the only person in California who was happy when the infamous Proposition 13 went through at the end of that year, because it meant that there was no frakking way I’d get a job teaching. I’d completed my course-work but didn’t bother to take the exam for my credential. My dad – seeing the handwriting on the wall – asked, Would I like him to get me a job working for General Dynamics (the nice folks who brought you the Stinger missile)? (That’s where he worked – at one time or another half a dozen family members were employed there, including my brother). (He knew that was the only way he’d get his money back.) I spent about 30 months correcting the grammar of engineers and doing production-tracking of marketing proposals, and sneakily working on ToD at lunchtime.
I’d made out a list of publishers who did fantasy, ranked best to worst, and sent Lester Del Rey (at Del Rey Books) – over the transom, unagented – the manuscript of Time of the Dark, with outlines for Walls of Air and Armies of Daylight. Two weeks later I got a letter back from Lester saying, “We’ll take it,” and realized I hadn’t the slightest idea how to get an agent. I got a list from Sherry, the woman who ran a store called A Change of Hobbit in Westwood, and called down the list til I found an agent who’d represent me (I mean, I’d already sold the book…)
They thrashed around with the contract for almost a year, and I signed the contract, sent it in, went to a week-end karate tournament in Las Vegas, came back Monday morning to GD to the news that the company was downsizing, put your stuff in a cardboard box and have a nice rest of your life.
So I did.
