Theodora Goss's Blog, page 52

Going to New York

Status report: Today, I worked on the introduction. It's going all right. By the time I get to sleep tonight, I should have about ten pages written, which is theoretically half its length. Theoretically. And then I'll take a break for four days, while I'm in New York. I won't be able to concentrate on academic writing there, and I won't have the sources I need with me anyway. So instead, I'll work on the YA novel chapters I need to get to Nathan and Alexa by Sunday, and then on my Folkroots column. I'll also take some books to read: Stephen King's On Writing and Michael Chabon's Reading and Writing, which is a collection of essays that I'm really enjoying.

I grew up around Washington, D.C., and we used to go to New York almost every year, usually for the opera. I still remember my mother taking us to see Madam Butterfly, which has to be the most boring opera in the world. My brother slept through most of it. If you want to take children to see opera, take them to Carmen. In fact, take anyone who has never seen an opera before to Carmen. It's the one opera everyone can learn opera on, partly because it's so easy to follow. It's all plot. I still love the Placido Domingo version.

As you read the rest of this blog post, you can listen to "Près des Remparts de Séville." This is where Carmen first meets Don José. I love how defiant and seductive Carmen is in this version. Poor Don José is a gonner from the first note.

It was difficult, going to the New York of those days, for a hypersensitive child. I experienced the city as overwhelming. When I moved there after law school, I went into the city to work, but I lived outside the city in Larchmont, and often on the weekends I went out to the countryside, to farms or apple orchards, or small towns with antiques stores. I still don't think I could live in New York. But now, I love to visit. The city feels much more familiar, more like a home, the way cities like Budapest and Paris have always felt to me. I love to go into the little grocery stores, or wander around the streets and see the small shops, or walk through Central Park. And I love the museums.

Tomorrow, I'm taking the bus down. It will cost me $35 round trip, which is one of the advantages of living in Boston. And then on Friday, I'll go to the MET and see the Alexander McQueen exhibit. While there, I'll stay with friends, and meet friends for coffee or dinner. And I'll have time to work on writing. It will be a quiet, cozy sort of visit, for New York. I started this summer knowing I would have a lot of work to do, but also wanting to visit three places: San Francisco for the Isabelle de Borchgrave exhibit, New York for the Alexander McQueen exhibit, and Asheville for the antiques stores. The only one of those trips I wasn't able to make was the trip to San Francisco: the exhibit was too close to the school year, and I had too much to do then. But I think I'm doing pretty well. I also wanted to go to the seashore, and I didn't get to do that. But next summer I will definitely go down to Nag's Head, North Carolina for a writing week or two. I have my cottage all picked out.

I still have to pack, but that's easy, for New York: jeans and black shirts. Maybe a black skirt in case I go somewhere fancy.

I grew up traveling to all sorts of interesting places. I hope I can do that more in the future. That's one of the things I'm working for, this summer. Which is why after I finish this blog post, I will go back to that introduction, and keep working at it until it's in proper shape.

YA Challenge Update

Status report: I'm working on the introduction. Today was a long day, and I didn't get much writing done. But tomorrow I'm going to spend all day working on it. The first section is done, and I want to write the second and third sections, if possible. And then, on Thursday, I'm taking the bus to New York. I'm going to take my computer with me, not to work on the dissertation, but to work on the YA novel and my Folkroots column. I need to have enough of the YA novel revised so I can get something to Alexa and Nathan by this Sunday, for the workshop next weekend. (This weekend in New York, next weekend in Asheville. I love traveling.)

Nathan is also working on his YA novel, and Alexa has recently posted about her research: "YA Novel Challenge Update 3 – Research in the Real World." The post starts,

"I spent four hours today learning about guns. Not reading books about guns or gleaning information from episodes of Mythbusters, but buying ammo, having a crash course in gun safety, and then shooting a Glock 9mm and a .22 caliber revolver in the midst of the heat and smoke at the local firing range.

"What was my bleeding-heart liberal ass doing at a firing range? Research."

That might actually be good research for me as well, at some point. It's been years since I've shot a gun, although when I was in college, I went to a firing range and learned to shoot a .22 pistol and a 9mm Glock. And later, on random occasions down in Virginia, we would go into the pasture, set up soda cans, and shoot a .22 revolver, and sometimes a .45 caliber M1911A that belonged to a friend, and once a 7.65 Argentine mauser made in 1910. I preferred the .22s – when you're 5'4″ and 120 pounds, kickback can be fierce. Like Alexa, I didn't get any particular pleasure out of firing a gun. It was just something to experience. I would like to learn fencing, though. In my novel, Sherlock Holmes has fencing foils in his umbrella stand. Can I put the fending foils in the umbrella stand and not use them by the end of the novel?

I've been having a specific, crucial problem with my YA novel: voice. I wrote several chapters, and they just felt flat and stale. And I thought, whose voice am I writing in? Whose perspective am I writing from? While I revised my dissertation chapters, that question stayed with me, pestering me. And one night I thought, this novel isn't really about the central mystery, is it? It's really about monstrous girls. So I wrote a prologue about monsters. In that prologue, I found my voice. It was the voice of Catherine, who had also narrated "The Mad Scientist's Daughter." I know, it sounds obvious that I should write in the same voice for the novel version, but it wasn't obvious to me. I was deliberately writing from a third person perspective, no particular person narrating, because I didn't want it to be Catherine's story. I wanted it to start much earlier than she comes into the narrative. But when I made Catherine the retrospective narrator, suddenly the story had attitude. It had a point of view it had been lacking. And I realized that I could go through the chapters, rewrite them from that point of view, and make them live. ("It's alive!" I would have shouted in triumph, but it was about 2 a.m. at that point.)

I'm going to give you that prologue. I'm not going to post any other excerpts from the novel: this is all you get. And I don't know if it will actually end up in the final draft. But it was, at least, a way for me to get into the heart of the novel, to find its voice.

Prologue: How to Be a Monster

I. Be Frightening

Justine is the most frightening of us, although Catherine is the most deadly.

When Justine walks down the street, people stare at her. Sometimes they stumble back before recovering themselves. Then, they try to ignore her, lowering their eyes or, if they are women, hiding behind parasols. And yet, other than her height, she looks perfectly ordinary: a girl with a long, pale face and brown hair in a braid around her head. We've tried persuading her to wear a more modern style, but she refuses.

She is the most gentle of us, the one most likely to carry a spider outside instead of crushing it under her boot heel. But she is seven feet tall, and that frightens people. So they stare, and stumble back. Boys have run after her, taunting her. They have even thrown rocks. It's not a good idea to throw rocks at Justine. She's gentle but strong. You don't want to feel her grip on your shirt collar, hear her asking, as though genuinely curious, "Why would you do that?"

But Catherine is the one who can tear your throat out.

II. Be Beautiful

Mary says we are all beautiful, in our own way. Hers is a conventionally English way: blue eyes, and the pink and white complexion that the English are famous for, like old roses. If you see her walking in the park, you will immediately think: There goes a lady. Diana, as dark as a gypsy, with unruly ringlets of black hair tumbling down her back, could never be mistaken for a lady, no matter how demurely we dress her. But when she flashes her eyes and tosses her head, few men can resist. Which is useful, when we need her to pick pockets.

Even Catherine is attractive, when her scars are covered with paint.

But the most beautiful of us is undoubtedly Beatrice. Imagine an alabaster statue come to life, as though Galatea has stepped off her pedestal and put on modern clothes. With her black hair looped up, she looks like a Greek goddess. And when she speaks to you in her lilting Italian voice, you want to stand still and listen as long as she continues. Of course, if you listen too long, you will begin to feel faint. It's the poison, entering your system. Eventually, paralysis will set in, and after that, death.

III. Be Clever

Mary is the cleverest of us. If we need to steal the Koh-i-Noor diamond or kidnap the Prime Minister, Mary is the one who can formulate a plan. Although she would never allow us to do such things, no matter how Diana pesters. She's so moral.

Beatrice has contributed seven papers to the Journal of the Horticultural Society. She is always making some discovery or other about the plants she grows in the conservatory. She sells some of the potions she makes to the Medical College, which helps pay our expenses. Justine can quote philosophy and poetry until you fall asleep listening to her. Catherine has studied with T.H. Huxley himself.

And Diana knows the criminal underworld of London as well as Professor Moriarity.

IV. Be Distinctive

We are all different. Beatrice with her luminous beauty, as though she were lit from within, and her academic credentials (she has a degree from the University of Padua). Justine, like a tall, sad lily, reciting "The Lady of Shalott." Diana, who swears like sailor and does a cancan in the drawing room. Mary, rational, orderly, saying to us, "Girls, we've been summoned to Buckingham Palace. Diana, do you think this time you can refrain from stealing anything?"

And I, Catherine, curling on the sofa like a cat, because I dislike this cold, wet England of yours! Writing this story for you, so you can understand how we came together and what we did – we monsters.

Death of an Artist

Status report: I'm so tired that I'm having a hard time even keeping up with this blog. Chapter 2 is done, although I still need to add some critical sources. But I need to go to the library tomorrow, and some are coming through interlibrary loans. Once I get those, I'll be able to add them. I finished Chapter 2 on Sunday. Today, I started writing the introduction. It should only be about twenty pages (double spaced), but to make it more manageable, I've divided it into five sections (at least for my own purposes): a section on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the freak shows that were happening all over England around that time, a section that explains my argument, a section on the critical history, an outline of how I will present my argument (basically, what the various chapters say), and finally the implications of my argument and what I've left out. By the time I go to sleep, I will have finished the first section on the Great Exhibition and freak shows.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm too tired, as though I can't do it anymore. And somehow I make myself sit down in front of the computer and keep going. But it's not easy. When it's done, I don't know if I'll ever want to look at this material again. At least, I know I won't be able to look at it for a while. And in the meantime, there are so many other things I need to do, even small things like answer emails, that I constantly feel overwhelmed. And more often than now, nowadays, I just can't do it all. So the emails pile up, and the to-do list grows, and I just can't do it. It's all too much.

As I write this, I'm listening to Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black." Before she died, I didn't know much about Winehouse. I casually assumed that she was like all the other pop stars I don't listen to who are always featured in the tabloids. I'm not sure why I started becoming interested in her after her death. I think I just wanted to know what her music sounded like, why there was such a to-do. And that's when I realized she wasn't one of those pop stars, that she was actually something quite special. A genuine artist.

If you haven't listened to her music, here is the song I'm listening to as I write this, and that I've been listening to quite often in the past week:

We live in a world where so much is crude and stupid. Including many of the reactions to her death – that it was predicable and somehow deserved. That there are more important things to mourn. But I think the death of an artist is always something to mourn. Artists are strange people, and many of them aren't particularly good at life. But they produce works that form our cultural dreams. How poor we would be without Michaelangelo's David, or Ulysses. The world would be less interesting, less complex. We would have less to think about, less to wonder at. My world would be less beautiful without "Back to Black," now that I've heard it.

It's always sad when we lose an artist. We're always justified in mourning, no matter what else is happening in the world. And what we think of the life, how we judge it, ultimately doesn't matter, because we're not left with the life. What we're left with is the art. Cy Twombly died recently, as did Lucien Freud. I didn't particularly like Twombly's art. I could appreciate the power of Freud's. They had a lifetime to develop, to give us their best, and I'm glad of that. It's sad that Winehouse didn't.

Jewels and Gems

Status report: Yesterday, I spent the entire day reading academic articles. Today, I couldn't take it anymore. I had to get out. So I went to the Museum of Fine Arts for a new exhibit, Jewels, Gems, and Treasures: Ancient to Modern. It was a small exhibit, a single room. As you walked around, you could see the history of jewelry-making, from ancient Egypt to modern designers. The most interesting period was of course the nineteenth century. I saw a set of earrings that was made of taxidermed hummingbirds.  It was creepy but also beautiful, as Victoriana tends to be. The most beautiful pieces were from the end of the century, when masters like René Lalique were designing.

I tried to take photographs, but the room was dark, and the jewelry was lit from above and behind so the gems would sparkle. Of course I was not allowed to use flash in the museum. So it was almost impossible to make photograph turn out well. But I will show you the most beautiful piece in the exhibit, which appears on the catalog:

It's a silver brooch with a marsh bird on it, in enamel. The original was just as stunning as the picture. The exhibit presented a good argument for looking at jewlery – at least some jewlery – as wearable art.

It was good to get out, to remind myself that there are more things in the world than this room, my work. Sometimes it feels as though, day by day, I'm becoming more despondent, more tired. And I need to finish what I'm doing. I can't get stuck in the slough of despond, not now. But some days are difficult, especially when I have to read articles that are deadly dull. For hours at a time.

So I'm glad I went to the museum. Here I am, by the way, standing in front of the museum. In one of my new favorite dresses, which is comfortable and summery. In honor of the exhibit, I wore pearls.

I'm afraid that's all I have for you today. I'm very tired, and I'm trying to keep going, and some days are better than others. At least today I saw some beautiful things. They reminded me that I want to make beautiful things myself – things that are beautiful and true. I just need to get to the place where that's possible, because it can't happen when academic articles are jostling around in my head, you know?

Dreaming and Decorating

Status report: It's been a dreadful day. Would you like to know what I did for most of it? Well, I'm going to tell you. When I first wrote Chapter 2, I used the Penguin edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. But the scholarly edition, the edition used by scholars in their research – what they call the authoritative version – is the Oxford Complete Works. So what I did today was go through the last section of Chapter 2, which is on Dorian Gray and "The Soul of Man under Socialism" (for which I had used the Harper & Row Complete Works), check all the quotations, and correct all page numbers in the parenthetical citations. Every single one. It took hours.

I keep telling myself that I'm learning valuable things in this process, but sometimes I'm so bored that I could sob into my decorative pillows, and sometimes I'm so bitter that I could kick the walls. And I'm starting to feel the way I felt when I was working as a corporate lawyer: as though I'm spending time that I could be spending doing so many other things – writing stories that people are actually going to read, for instance. I think my disenchantment with academic writing started the day I went to a seminar on publishing academic books and learned that selling 3,000 copies was considered a success – an academic best-seller. At that point, I had already published my short story collection, and it had sold well over 3,000 copies. And I thought, but I want people to read what I write. I don't want my work to sit in a library somewhere, where only graduate students consult it. I want to communicate.

So, as I mentioned, today was dreadful. Once my work was done, I had to do something. I didn't know what – it was already seven o'clock, and here I was in the suburbs, with nowhere to go. Stuck.

So I did the best I could. When I'm feeling desperate, I usually try to make or change something. So I went to the fabric store and bought a pillow insert, so I could make a pillow out of the fabric I bought yesterday. I don't have time to actually make it now, but at least I have everything I need, for when I have the time. Then, I went to the bookstore and bought three decorating books. These, specifically:

Somethings seems to have happened to decorating, and I think it's a good thing. It's an interest in a more casual, artistic, cottage style. That's the style I like best, using older pieces, making rooms beautiful, comfortable, filled with space and light. But also quirky, with individuality and character. Each of these books is about that style. I bought the French General book specifically because I like the French General aesthetic: it's actually a store in California that sells all sorts of things, including fabric designed by the owners. Here is the store's website.

So today I'm completely despondent, but at least tonight I'll have beautiful pictures to look at. And I'll think about what I want in the house I'm going to have, someday. That Witch's Cottage I've been wanting for so long, with the high, airy rooms, and the old wooden furniture, and the claw-foot tub. And the cat sitting in the window, while white gauze curtains blow in the breeze. (With an enormous garden, filled with roses and herbs, and a sundial, and a pond.) That's the sort of thing I need to keep me going, when I'm dealing with everything I'm dealing with now. That dream, and the knowledge that I'm working to make it a reality.

Choosing Patterns

This is going to be a short post, because I'm very tired.

Status report: By the time I go to sleep tonight, I will have finished the second section and half of the third section of Chapter 2. That means one more half-section to go. It will be the hardest half-section to revise, but I tell myself that it's only ten pages (singled spaced, not counting footnotes, but still). It's on The Picture of Dorian Gray and "The Soul of Man under Socialism," by Oscar Wilde.

Today, I revised and revised, and the only fun thing I did was take a half-hour to go to the fabric store and buy a half-yard of two fabric patterns. (I keep using the world half in this post. I think that's because I'm living a half-life.)

I thought that if I was going to invest in reupholstering a chair, I wanted to be absolutely sure I knew what it would look like. Buying half-yards of each pattern would allow me to put them on the chair itself, see them under the correct lighting. I actually didn't realize that lighting would make such a difference: they looked much brighter, brasher, under the lights in the fabric store. I liked them so much better when I had taken them home and draped them over the chair.

Tell me what you think.  This one is Normandy Rose:

And this one is Fairhaven:

I think I like Normandy Rose best, for this particular chair. The nice thing about having half-yards is that I can use the fabric for making pillows. Not that I have time right now. But eventually I'll have time, and I'll be able to make pillows with roses and morning-glories on them. (Fairhaven actually has morning-glories on it, in colors that work with Normandy Rose). These particular patterns have been around for a long time, and I don't think they're going anywhere. And they work with all the other patterns I love – the colors talk to each other. Patterns should talk to each other, they should speak the same language; they should never actually match.

Like these:

Because, you know, I'm not Diana Vreeland:

While I'm working on my dissertation, I sometimes look at the Apartment Therapy blog to cheer myself up. That's where I saw the picture above, of Vreeland's famous red living room. And then, just as I had done with Coco Chanel, I started collecting quotations from her.

"You gotta have style. It helps you get up in the morning."

"The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it."

"Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal."

"The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell – unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls."

"The best thing about London is Paris."

"I loathe narcissism, but I approve of vanity."

"I'm terrible on facts. But I always have an idea. If you have an idea, you're well ahead."

"Without emotion there is no beauty."

"Never fear being vulgar, just boring."

"What do I think about the way most people dress? Most people are not something one thinks about."

That sounds rather narcissistic, doesn't it? But when you're an artist, you have to not think about most people – what they want, what they like. Unless you're the most commercial of artists, trying to please the public taste, not trying to do anything more than that. But if you have an individual vision, you need to concentrate on what you want to create. You need to ignore the public.

"I think your imagination is your reality."

I think I like Diana Vreeland. But this one is my absolute favorite:

"The idea of beauty was changing. If you had a bump on your nose, it made no difference so long as you had a marvellous body and a good carriage. You held your head high and were a beauty . . . You knew how to water-ski, and how to take a jet plane in the morning, arrive anywhere and be anyone when you got off."

If I could take a jet plane in the morning, I think I would get off in Paris . . .

Walking in Boston

Status report: This morning, I went to the university library to pick up some books and photocopy an article.  I wasn't able to finish the footnotes to the second section of Chapter 2 yesterday, so I'm going to work on them tonight. And then tomorrow, I'm going to complete the second section and go on to the third section.  Once that's done, later this week, there will just be the introduction to write.  And then, the entire dissertation will go together.  I will spend August making final revisions, and hand it to the committee on September 1st.  At least, that's the plan.

But this afternoon I took some time off to show my friend Luke Taylor around the city. Luke and I first met when he was in middle school.  His mother was a friend of the family, and she knew that I was a writer.  Luke wanted to be  a writer as well, so she told him that he should talk to me about writing.  I still remember reading some of his earliest stories and writing him a recommendation for his first writing workshop.  He's now a college student working on a degree in filmmaking.  We met up at the Boston Public Library and walked through Copley Square, which was once again holding a farmer's market.  I particularly liked this booth with sunflowers.  Van Gogh would have liked it as well.

We walked through the Common.  Here you can see one of the swan boats, and the financial district in the distance.

I've always liked this part of Boston, which reminds me of a European city.  Here is the bridge over the pond.

We walked across the bridge and through the park.  There are always musicians playing here.  In summer, it's as though Boston becomes an enormous performance space.

I took a picture of these roses in full bloom.  At first I thought they must be hybrid teas, since that's what you always see in parks.  But I smelled them, and they were almost certainly the David Austin English roses that were developed in the 1990s.  They smelled almost like roses should, although the David Austen roses don't have the heady fragrance of the true old roses.

Lining the park are the brownstones Boston is famous for.  I put Miss Lavender's School of Witchcraft in this neighborhood.  It seemed like the right place.

I should probably have gotten a better picture of the Capitol Building, but the streets were clogged with people and buses.  That's what Boston is like in the tourist season.

We walked to Quincy Market, where there were more tourists and street performers.  I wanted to show Luke the touristy Boston, so he could at least say he'd see it.

But then we headed across the river, to Central Square.  We had lunch at Asmara, the Ethiopian restaurant, and walked across the street to Pandemonium, the science fiction and fantasy bookstore.  I bought Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio.  It's a book that's trying to make a point, and I want to see what sorts of stories they've chosen to make it.  We walked down Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Yard, which was also filled with tourists.  I miss the way it used to look when I was in law school, with elms like the pillars of a great cathedral.

Harvard was also having a farmer's market.  I tried Kombucha, simply to say that I'd tried Kombucha.  It was all right.  But honestly, I'd rather just have tea.

Of course we had to stop at Burdick's for chocolate.  They have the most amazing pastries.  Honestly, the best I think I've tasted in the United States.  They taste like pastries you might buy in France, where pastry-making is an art.

Then we walked back to Harvard Square and stopped in the Coop.  I remember when it was very much the Harvard Cooperative Society.  Now, it looks more like an average bookstore.  (Coop is pronounced like a chicken coop, by the way.   Not like co-op.  At least, it was when I was at Harvard.)

We took the T to MIT, where we went into the MIT chapel, which was designed by Eero Saarinen.  It's one of the loveliest, most restful modern buildings I've ever been in.  From the outside, it looks like a brick cylinder surrounded by a moat.

On the inside, it's luminous.  What looks like falling rain is actually a cascade of metal rectangles that reflect the light.  The chairs are simple, almost like Shaker chairs.  It's all brick, stone, wood, metal – and light.

Finally, we walked down to the Charles River.  The view from the river is one of my favorite views of Boston.

See what I mean?  We walked across the bridge from MIT to Boston, and then went into the Boston University bookstore.  Yes, our third bookstore of the day.

At that point we had seen downtown Boston and Cambridge, three universities, three bookstores, and a river. We were tired, and it was time for me to get back to work. But it was so nice to get out for an afternoon, show the city to someone who had never seen it before, talk about the differences between Boston and where we had grown up (since both Luke and I grew up in Virginia). Also, talk about the differences between writing and filmmaking, which was a fascinating topic.

Now I'm going to work on the second section of Chapter 2, as long as I have the energy. And I'll be back at it tomorrow. When I get particularly tired, I remind myself that the world is still out there. It's big and beautiful, and I will spend a lot more time in it. Soon.

Roses All the Way

Status report: I'm tired and despondent. The revisions to Chapters 1 and 3 are finished, except for the introductions, but I'll need to write the general introduction first and make sure those are consistent with it. I'm working on Chapter 2. I've revised the introduction and half of the first section. By tonight, I'll have the entire first section done. Then two more sections to go. Those will take a bit more time, because I need to add some footnotes. Once I have Chapter 2 done, all I'll need to do is write the general introduction, for which I already have nine pages of notes. And then I'll put the whole thing together, go over it all one more time, and it will be done. At that point I'll only revise what I'm told to. The whole thing should be ready to go to the committee on September 1st.

I write all this to remind myself of how far I've come, how much I've already accomplished. How little, in the grand scheme of things, still needs to be completed. I need that sort of encouragement, because the day to day of it is grueling. It's hot, I'm despondent as I've said, and there isn't a lot I can do that's fun or interesting. At least I'll have the trips to New York and Asheville to look forward to.

I honestly don't know what to write about today, except perhaps fabric. Yes, fabric. Yesterday, I bought that Victorian chair, and during a break from revising, I went to the fabric store to get a sense for what sort of upholstery fabric I might want on it. Because, as you know, it needs to be reupholstered.

So I looked at a couple of my old favorites, like Waverly's Norfolk Rose:

And Waverly's Fairhaven.

These pictures are taken with my cell phone, and they're darker than the actual fabric, which has a cream background.  I was thinking of the Waverly patterns because they're fresh and feminine, which is what I want on this chair. The chair itself is visually heavy, so I want a fabric that's light. And I was thinking of roses because there are two carved roses on top of the back rest, and I thought the visual echo might be interesting.

Then, while I was looking at fabric patterns online, I saw this:

It's the same pattern as the pillows I bought several weeks ago, pink and red geraniums on a taupe background. I fell in love with it when I saw the pillows, and I still love it. So I put one of the pillows on the chair to see what it would look like:

The pattern is probably too big, isn't it? So I don't know. I like it better than the Waverly, but I'll have to talk to the upholsterer and see what he or she says. (Also, it's quite expensive, about $32 per yard. But it's worth paying for upholstery fabric, because you're going to live with it for a while.  Also, no visual pun on roses, but that's all right.)

So at least that distracted me for about an hour from the dissertation.

It's hot and I'm having no fun at all right now. And I think, my life needs to change, and it needs to change soon. Or I'll jump off the roof. (No, that's not a serious threat. I don't think I'd look very attractive splattered on the driveway. I'm much more likely to look out the window toward Camelot, get into my boat, and float down the river. That's more my style.)

It's such a small thing to keep one going, a chair to reupholster. But some days, that's the sort of thing that gets me through.

The Mess

Status report: Today, I worked on Chapter 2. I will be working on Chapter 2 late into the night. But I took some time to go to my favorite antiques store, where I did something that may be very silly, I don't know. I bought a chair. This chair, specifically:

I know, the upholstery is tattered and stained. But the chair itself is a lovely old Victorian piece, with roses carved on the top. (Those did not come through well in the photograph.) It will need to be reupholstered, of course, which means that my $40 chair (yes, that's how much I paid for it) will probably need another $140 worth of work. But I saw it sitting outside the antiques store, and something drew me to it. Some pieces of furniture have a sort of charm about them, something that makes them particularly attractive. I liked its proportions and how low it was: the perfect height for me. I can imagine it reupholstered in a Waverly pattern, perhaps something with roses on it. And I have to say, when I sit in the chair, even in its current tattered state, it has a sort of magic about it: I feel calmer. I think proportions do that to us, make us feel certain ways. In my grandmother's apartment in Budapest, with its 18-foot ceilings and enormous windows, I always feel calm and at ease.

And I need calm now, because my life is a mess. I have so much to do, and there's simply no way to keep up. You can always tell when my life is a mess, because my room is a mess.  There are papers and books on the floor, pictures that still need to be hung up months after I bought them.

The necklace I bought is still on top of the dresser in its box, rather than in its proper place in my jewelry drawer.  I still need to move the painting behind the mirror.

The beside table is overflowing with books I haven't read, although at least I've managed to clear off the chair.

There are stickies on the table, because I've been marking pages as I read.  Research, you know.  At least the bed is made.  I can't stand unmade beds.

In the other bedside table is the manuscript for a poetry collection that I've had no time to work on.  The shelves are covered with writing projects in piles.

The books are completely unorganized, so when I go to look for one, I look on all the shelves, trying to remember where in the world I put it.  I miss the days when I knew where my books were, but that was in the apartment, two years ago.

There are stickies on the walls and on my desk.  The desk itself has a constantly revolving pile of papers, depending on what I'm working on that day.

I think I have three computers in my room: my current one, my old one, and the netbook.  Plus my Blackberry.  Well, at least I won't lose contact with the world.

The other desk is covered with the dissertation, in piles.  Also my calender, marked to show all the deadlines.  There are so many of them!

And that's the end of the tour.  The desk with piles, the printer.  Paper, paper everywhere.  When I die, will I be held personally responsible for the deaths of all those trees?

I know, all I'm doing in this blog post is complaining. But that's all I have for you tonight: complaints and the knowledge that I need to get back to Chapter 2.

Someday, and it's going to be someday soon, I'll have a space I love.  It's going to be perfectly organized, and everything will be in the right place.  I'll know where my books are.  The paintings will be hung, properly framed, on the walls. There will be no piles on the floor. The new chair will be reupholstered, and I will sit in it, looking around, pleased and satisfied.  Until then, I'll do the best I can with what I have, even if I sigh when I look at it. And I'll trust that it's coming – the place in which I'm going to write all those brilliant books.

The Secret Garden

Status report: It's been a strange day. I'll tell you why in a moment, but first, an actual status report. Chapters 1 and 3 are revised. I'm working on Chapter 2. I'm going to try to finish that chapter over the weekend, so that next week I can focus on the introduction. I need to get that done by August 3rd, because on the 4th I'm going to New York. I'll be there until the 7th. Then I'll have another week to revise, and then I'll be in Asheville for a couple of days. It will be nice to get out of town for a while.

So my status report is that I'm working on Chapter 2, hoping to have that finished soon. And I'll be working on the introduction next week.

Why did I have a strange day?

Well, as you know, the edits to The Thorn and the Blossom were completed yesterday. Today I looked at the Amazon page for the book, and I saw this:

The cover! Isn't it gorgeous?  Now, I still can't tell you anything about the story itself.  But I can tell you this.  What you see above isn't the cover of the book.  No, it's the cover of the slipcase.  The book actually goes inside the slipcase.  And I'll tell you about it as soon as I'm allowed, but I promise that it's going to be just as beautiful.

When I first saw the slipcase at Readercon, I thought, it looks like a secret garden.  Like a thicket through which you push, to enter an enchanted place. I hope the book itself will be that sort of enchanted place to its readers. I also think it's interesting that the design looks so much like something I would choose and love. I mean, doesn't it look like the dress I'm wearing in the photograph on this page? A little like a William Morris design gone wild and natural, rather than stylized.

And then, I received the final proofs for my Folkroots column in the August issue of Realms of Fantasy. Which also has a gorgeous cover:

My column for the August issue is about monsters, as you can see from the title. I think it will interest Realms of Fantasy readers. I certainly hope you like it! And the next column will be "The Myth and Magic of Narnia." I especially enjoyed writing that one.

Finally, my brother wrote me a message that said, "Did you knew Kevin Brockmeier mentioned you in Salon?" And he sent me a link to this article: "A Wistful Farewell." It's about the closing of the Borders bookstores, and in it, prominent authors reminisce about their experience with Borders. Brockmeier writes,

"The truth is that I've only known three Borders branches well – in Ann Arbor, in Madison, Wis., and in Gainesville, Fla., – but at each of them, I've discovered books I grew to love, and not just best-sellers, either, but strange little small press books: In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss, I've Heard the Vultures Singing by Lucia Perillo, Written Lives by Javier Marias."

So, Kevin Brockmeier read and liked my short story collection! Now that is seriously cool.

Do you see why my day has been so strange? Here I've been, correcting the citations to H. Ling Roth's The Aborigines of Tasmania and adding a footnote on the influence of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels on H.G. Wells. And all the while, the important things have been happening. And they've had nothing to do with my dissertation. They've been the real things, the things that happen in the world. The very large world outside this room and the research I'm doing – a world I very much want to be a part of. And will be, I hope. Soon.