Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 162

Crazeberry Hitchhiker

So Dina James sent me a package.

Unfortunately, well, there was a hitchhiker…

Coffee! Thank God!

Wait, why is it…

A soft rustling.

Uh-oh.

Oh dear God no.

HAVE WE MET?

I ATE IT ALL

NEED MORE CRAZEBERRIES

THIS SMELLS RIGHT

C…O…wait…I CAN’T READ!

BREAK IT! EAT THE SWEET CRAZEBERRIES INSIDE!

MUST…PRY…OPEN…

 

At this point I was still staring, bemused. I realized I was barefoot, and further realized, with a sinking sensation, that this would probably end with me screaming…

To Be Continued…

Writing, Bulldog Edition

Odd Trundles

It’s sunny, which means that running today will mean dodging people on the sidewalks. I like rainy days better, probably because most people have the sense to stay inside. I, presumably, do not. Ironic.

As I tap this out, however, the Princess is playing tug of war with Odd Trundles. To see a bulldog playing tug is to see a creature whose deep genetic itches are being thoroughly scratched. You can imagine little Odd (I use the term “little” partly tongue-in-cheek, because he is a good 60lbs of bulldog, and also truthfully, for he is built very close to the ground) clamped onto a raging piece of man-cattle, chuffing through his upturned nose that has been turned into a blowhole and growling gleefully while his eyes roll back into his head out of sheer joy…well, you get the idea. In all other ways he’s a broken thing–prone to dermatitis, yeast infections, spinal problems, you name it.

But when he’s pulling on his half of the tug rope, he’s a star. He’s doing what he’s designed for, and it makes him the happiest dog on earth for those few minutes before the rope stops playing and he staggers away, drooling and grinning, to flop down and go to sleep. He falls over, dreaming of yet more battles, and when he wakes up he drags the rope to anyone near him, wagging so hard his entire body shakes.

Again? Again? Please, again?

I’ve often compared the feeling I get while writing to what a cheetah must feel while running–doing what you’re designed for, what you were created expressly to do. Sometimes I look at this little bulldog and I think I’m using the wrong metaphor.

Not Done Yet

So yesterday 5K words slid out of my head, whole and bloody, and the zero draft of The Iron Plague (also known as “that trailer-park elf book”) is finished. This is a cause for celebration, yes, because this book has been in my head for years (ever since my writing partner told me about a dream her spouse had) and now it’s out.

But I’m not done yet.

My NaNo goal this year is to get Iron Plague into first-draft shape by December 1. Which means that the manuscript, which currently stands at around 51K, will probably grow to about 60K. I know where most of the growth needs to come in, too. I work fast, loose, and hot on the zero draft, getting the corpse of the story out onto the table and ready to be prettified. It’s very, very rare that I let anyone see a zero draft; the work can still be killed at that point. Which is, incidentally, part of why I don’t work well with others; the chill of another gaze can blast a tender young shoot of a book into a blackened stub. I know it’s probably Preshus and Speshul of me, but it’s how I work.

Anyway, the zero draft has to lie fallow for a little bit now–probably around a week, while I finish copyedits on The Ripper Affair, the third Bannon & Clare. Then it’s back to Jeremy Gallow and Robin Ragged–longtime readers will probably remember early versions of them in the Courts of the Fey anthology–and once that’s a reasonable first draft, I send Iron Plague off to my lovely agent and go straight into revisions for Ruby’s story, the final Tale of Beauty & Madness.

Finishing the damn novel is just the first step. It’s a lulu of a step, don’t get me wrong, and should be celebrated. But afterward another long slog begins.

It makes me tired just thinking about it today, which is why there’s no Friday photo. My brain pretty much feels like it’s been pummeled by a very enthusiastic boxer, and I’m stuck in the “fire bad, tree pretty” phase that happens after I finish a zero draft. So…off I go, to finish the rest of my morning and stretch out my tired fingers. (The new keyboard, by the way, has held up splendidly under these past few days.)

Over and out.

photo by:


Muffet

Expecto Montoya

Driving back from the Prince’s first piano lesson, the windshield wipers going. I’d picked up a Harry Potter sheet music book for the Princess; the Prince was looking at it in the car on the way home. “Harry looks mad,” he said.

“Well, Harry might have a thing or two to be mad about,” I replied.

Then, from the back seat, in a sepulchral tone: “Hello. My name is Harry Potter. You killed my family. Prepare to die.”

I laughed so hard I almost ran off the road. I’m still giggling.

Sometimes, I dare to think I’m raising these kids right.

Not Juggling Chainsaws

4500 words on Iron Plague yesterday. I found out what a secondary character’s motivations are, which was nice–I knew said character wanted something, just not what. Turns out the Muse, as usual, is smarter than I am, and had her own reasons for the way that character acted.

The book is spiking toward the finish, which is good because soon I have to stop working on it and shift to copyedits, then come back and hopefully do a first-pass edit and THEN shift to revisions on yet another book. It’s not as dangerous as juggling chainsaws, but it does make one’s brain feel rather like it’s being pummeled by a large Swedish masseuse.

Also pummeling my brain: piano practice. I never learned to read music, being told I was unmusical; I did sing in choir but that seemed different, since I only needed to hear the tune once to sing melody or harmony. So I’m nervously hoping learning to read music won’t be impossible. So far, with the finger numbers and the note-letters below the piece, I manage to make a fair go of it. Without those training wheels, though, I’m not sure what will happen.

Last but not least, the new keyboard is doing…all right, I guess. I’m almost as fast on it now as on a regular flat keyboard, and it solves a couple of muscle-ache problems. I spend so much time tapping away at it that we’ve reached a detente, and yesterday I found myself typing without having to think about the keyboard at all–by far my favourite state of affairs.

So today, it’s more Jeremy Gallow. We have a betrayal, a battle, and some justice to write.

Over and out.

photo by:


katmary

Hot NaNoWriMo Deals!

In celebration of NaNoWriMo, I’m offering some sweet deals:

* 15% off the Quill & Crow ebook at Smashwords–just enter code WM92V (not case-sensitive) at checkout.

* Also, sign up for any of my editing packages during the month of November and get 15% off the total price! Note that my waiting list is long, but all you have to do is sign up in November and your editing package, no matter when I do the edits, is discounted.

Enjoy!

*steps away from soapbox, vanishes into a puff of smoke*

A Night at the Opera

Long-time readers will know how much I hate my birthday. It’s not getting older–I flat-out love getting older, because the further I am away from my childhood, the better. Any family event was so stressful, growing up, that I find myself dreading anything approximating it nowadays, and getting nervous several times a year as those occasions approach.

However, my friends have told me I’m ridiculous, and a Birthday Restoration Project has been underway for years now. Earlier (much, much earlier) this particular year I broke down and bought myself a birthday present: season tickets to the Portland Opera. I had never seen a live opera, despite listening to recordings and watching them onscreen (Carmen with Julia Migenes comes to mind here) and I figured this would be a good way to do something nice for myself.

I’m so glad I did.

I went to the Sunday matinee of Strauss’s Salome at the Portland Opera. I figured, Sunday, the traffic and parking would be fine, and the kids are of an age where they can be left to their own devices for a short while.

Despite a comedy of errors early in the day (toilet overflowing, dropping a glass jar on a tiled floor, turning my ankle on a walk with Miss B, the Prince, and my sister, almost slipping and killing myself as I got out of the shower) and a further non-comedic comedy of errors (wrong address, weird parking situation, walking eight blocks) I made it to the venue in time. I was so nervous I almost threw up twice in the ladies’ lounge before curtain. (I don’t do well with crowds.) Anyway, I was soon settled, and my seatmate was a very nice gentleman who was amazed that it was my first live opera, and congratulated me on such a nice birthday present for myself. He’d seen Strauss’s Salome several times, and we chatted about the opera until we discovered that he was actually supposed to be seated in the row in front of me. So that mixup was resolved, and just after that the lights went down.

All sorts of things make much more sense to me now, after seeing an opera live. I knew singers had to project an amazing volume to be heard over the orchestra, but now I understand just what’s involved in that. Plus, there’s a lot of things in opera staging I hadn’t understood until I saw it played out live–things like the physical endurance required not only to sing but also to stay in one posture while someone else is singing, there under the hot lights. A lot of structural things about the music make more sense to me now, as well. The Portland Opera has this thing where a translation of the lines is projected above the stage, like subtitles, and I for one was thrilled by how accessible they made the entire thing. Sadly, I don’t have the time to be fluent in all opera’s many languages, so this added to my understanding and enjoyment immeasurably.

Salome is kind of a weird first opera. For one thing, it’s one act, no intermissions. For another, it was Strauss’s shot at becoming an international name, and he chose to do it through scandal. There is plenty of scandalous stuff in there–necrophilia, lechery, adultery–but I can’t help thinking that it was the big chorus where the Jews and the Nazarenes are arguing about religion that Strauss expected to be the more, ahem, revolutionary bit. Strauss, being sort of a Wagner fanboy, used a lot of leitmotifs, and though I’d listened to several different recordings of the opera in the weeks leading up to seeing it, I hadn’t appreciated how those motifs moved the characters around the stage.

The performers were an absolute treat to watch. Kelly Cae Hogan played Salome as a teenager who doesn’t understand the power of the emotions moving through her, navigating the treacherous waters of Herod’s lecherous attraction to her and completely blindsided by her sudden crush on Jokanaan (John the Baptist). Marry that to an absolutely incandescent voice (the bit where she has danced for Herod and demands the head of Jokanaan blew the doors off even the Decca recording, IMO) and her ability to project the selfish coquetry of teenage innocence at the mercy of hormones, and you’ve got a stunner. By the time she was kissing the severed head, blood dribbling down her white dress, you believed she was well and truly obsessed and would carry the head around until it rotted, a la Isabella and the pot of basil.

Ric Furman as Narraboth, so obsessed with Salome he ends up stabbing himself, was electric. I actually believed, when he staggered back onto the stage dripping with blood, that he’d done himself some harm. I should note here that Hogan’s portrayal of a teenager was so spot-on that her alternate insulting and complimenting of Jokanaan’s appearance made a ripple of amusement run through the audience, but by the time Furman’s Narraboth stabs himself that amusement had turned to steadily-mounting unease at the looming trainwreck and afterward, you could have heard a pin drop, so rapt was the audience.

I should also make special note of Rosalind Plowright as Herodias, Salome’s mother. When she’s on stage, you can barely look at anything else, and her portrayal of a proud, fierce royal woman insulted by Jokanaan’s slurs and determined to keep her daughter free of Herod’s grasping fingers was fantastic. It’s to Plowright’s credit that her Herodias doesn’t take the cheap way out of seeming jealous of Salome. Instead, you have a nuanced, layered portrayal of a character who is not given much to be proud of in the libretto. She was amazing.

Herod, Alan Woodrow, provided a steadiness and a believability that stabilised the entire production. It would be easy for such a salacious opera to go off the rails into absurdity, and Herod’s role is one of the keys for providing complexity and grounding. As a dictator who makes a promise he can’t back out of, as a stepfather entranced by his stepdaughter, he could easily have descended into scenery-chewing, but instead his Herod is all too human. So is Jokanaan, sung by David Pittsinger–his John the Baptist manages to rivet you from inside a cistern, and it’s to Pittsinger’s credit that by the time he stumbles out on stage you believe him a fiery God-mad lunatic who is humanly drawn to Salome but repelled by his own attraction. The music and his lines could have turned him into a one-dimensional cipher, but he manages to be complex and strangely human.

The staging was fabulous, and the Seven Veils dance was colorful and well done. The supporting cast provided a great deal of foundation for the principal singers to rest on, and the costume director deserves special mention–Jokanaan in chains and a bag over his head was a punch to the gut, and Herodias’s tall, sparkling presence was only enhanced by her dress. The peach veils for the Seven Veils dance were a nice touch.

The opera itself is a fabulous interplay of relationships. (My temporary seatmate–remember him?–remarked that there are six relationships onstage, and not a single one of them is reciprocal.) Of course Salome and Herodias are blamed for everything, Strauss’s moralizing was heavy on Original Sin. There’s a lot of sex-shaming, which shouldn’t surprise one, but what I didn’t understand until seeing it live was the layers of doubles and Strauss’s symbolism. White, black, and red are used over and over again in the music, Narraboth, Herod, and Salome all describe the objects of their affection and their sudden feelings of doom in those colors. Narraboth and Jokanaan are opposites, one so heavenly minded he’s no earthly good and the other so obsessed with a fleshly woman he can’t say no. Herodias and Salome, as the only significant female characters (though Melissa Farjado‘s Page provides a quiet, steadying stage presence that makes the horror even more awe-inspiring by contrast) could be played as rivals for Herod’s affection, though in this production the singers don’t do so (to their great credit, as far as I am concerned). Herod and Jokanaan can be seen as mirror images in the music as well–one the earthly authority, the other spiritual authority, at variance; they can also be seen as carnal urges and conscience.

That being said, the criticism involved in Strauss’s deft skewering of religious arguments and the cacophony they create should have been a greater reason for some of the scandal around the opera’s original performances. I think everyone was so shocked by the smexy Strauss managed to slip in said criticism almost unnoticed. It could be that, like Milton, he was of the party without knowing it, but I’d like to believe he spared no few internal smiles for so many people missing the damn point.

By the time the opera finished, I was slackjawed with amazement and shaking. And remember my temporary seatmate? He very kindly asked if I’d like to go backstage for a moment. Of course, I was cautious and nervous–I didn’t know this man from Adam, so to speak–but I followed, and it turned out he was the spouse of one of the singers. So, my trusty Moleskine notebook, where I’d been busy making notes before and after the opera, now has signatures from some of the cast, who were very gracious when faced with my stammering Sussex fangirl self. It put the capper on my birthday present to myself, and if that gentleman should ever read this–thank you, sir, and thank you to your lovely spouse and her fellow singers, who were gracious and patient with me. (When told this was my very first opera, one of the singers grabbed my hand and shook it, and cheerfully said “Now you’re ruined for every other one!” I could not agree more.)

It wasn’t until I got outside that I realized I was in mufti and covered in dog hair because I hadn’t been able to find a lint roller on my way out of the house earlier. *headdesk* I can only imagine how wild-eyed and crazy I must have appeared. I drove home without mishap (thank goodness) and was still shaking hours later when I crawled into bed.

All in all, it was fantastic, and I’m so glad I did this for myself. The next opera is Lucia di Lammermoor, one I’ve been looking forward to quite a lot, and now I’m wondering if it will compare. *grin*

photo by:


The Library of Congress

The Quill & The Crow

It’s here! Remember when I did regular Friday posts about writing? Those posts are being collected and re-edited (part of the website reclamation project that helped piece SquirrelTerror back together) and Volume 1, with essays drawn from 2006-2008 (God, that was a long time ago) is now available in ebook!

From the Introduction:

“I dislike books on writing for the same reason I dislike self-help books: because people mistake the work of reading them for the actual work one must do to get better at writing, or better at dealing with yourself and your foibles. The ersatz jolt of advice wears off after a while, leaving the reader in exactly the same place, and they go searching for another high. Like the diet industry, if there was ever a “magic” formula, the entire edifice would tank overnight and several people would be out of jobs.

Why am I doing this? Simple. I’ve been asked by Readers and fellow writers to collect these essays for their reference. If it reaches beyond that small audience, please be warned: there are no goddamn shortcuts, don’t mistake the effort of reading this for the real work.

Which is writing.”

Available for Kindle and other ebook formats!

Day of the Dead (Novel)

Yes, you read that right, I’m doing NaNo again this year. Don’t panic when you see my wordcount–I’m aiming for about 80K worth of novel or simply to finish the damn thing. The book’s been in my head for a while now, and I just finally decided to get it out before the end of […]

Bullshit Makes You Tired

Happy Samhain to you, dear Readers. It’s the start of a new year-wheel tomorrow, so what better time to eat candy until you’re sick and annoy your neighbors? I promised to tell you about the incredibly powerful phrase “It makes me tired.” Grab a drink, settle in. My writing partner is also my best friend, […]