Kristin Cashore's Blog, page 49

August Randutiae (Some Rather Cranky)

Every once in a while, I become overwhelmed by the crush of books I'm supposed to be reading (for research; as a favor for someone; because soon they'll be due back at the library; because everyone's telling me I should), and my soul revolts. I spend a week or so mulishly resisting reading anything at all. Then I skip over all the things I'm supposed to be reading and instead read whatever I damn well please. This is the reason I'm currently reading the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Hart Lovelace.

***

My sister codename: Apocalyptica the Flimflammer recently instructed me to think about the derivation of the word "cantaloupe." I did and came up with "singing wolf," which delighted me, but I'm finding it hard to research the further derivation of the name. (I mean, in the 8 minutes I've devoted to it just now. ^_^) According to my OED, Cantaluppi was the Italian town where cantaloupes were once famously grown, but why was the town called Cantaluppi? "Lupo" is the Italian for wolf, but according to Google Translate, "luppo" is the Italian for "development," so are cantaloupes named for singing wolves or singing developments? Both seem as if they could be rather delightful. And the arrival of singing wolves would, in most places, be something of a development. Anyway, I like thinking about it.

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[image error] Photo taken by Flickr user whartonds.
Edit (cropped) by Pharaoh Hound.
(Image:Komondor Westminster Dog
Show.jpg) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)],
via Wikimedia CommonsI enjoyed the Olympics, but often wished I could've watched them with specific portions of the commentary muted. God, certain NBC announcers. The commentary for the equestrian events was much, much less insipid than a lot of the rest, thank goodness, but I would just like to mention that during the show jumping portion (where style is irrelevant to a rider's score) one of the announcers kept going on about what an appalling thing it is, while you're on a horse flying through the air over fences, if your tie should come loose from your jacket and start flapping around. Or when you've made the dreadful choice to wear your hair in a ponytail instead of a bun, and it flaps around. Flapping! The horror! I started to wish one of those fine athletes would ride onto the course dressed as a Komondor dog (see photo) with a balloon tied to his/her horse's tail, then barrel flappily around the course with no mistakes, no rails down, in the allotted time, for a perfect score. Of course, I am not very classy, and this particular sport is nothing if not classy. Emphasis on class; Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter Zara Phillips and Saudi Arabia's Prince Abdullah Al Saud were among the Olympic equestrian competitors. Ironically, I believe Komondors are also considered to be classy, in the correct circumstances. Surely everything has its correct place.

*shudder*

***

Returning to cataloupes, I love the Tanglefoot song "Loup Garou" (French for "werewolf"). "Running through the shadows of the forest in the full moon / In the middle of the night / With his eyes full of fire and his teeth so blood-bright..." You can hear a sample if you click on the link, scroll down to "The Music in the Wood," and click on the little music button next to "Loup Garou." I dare you not to howl.

Admiral Ackbar knows a frappe when he sees one

Outside J.P. Licks in Harvard Square

The Ingredients for a Beautiful Day in Gloucester

Picturesque boats,
gorgeous skies,


fishermen in the rain,
and humpback whales.

An Evening at Home

Every evening brings a different light show over the Charles River.

Sometimes it also brings courageous goofballs onto the footbridge.

Jump in, guys!
Veritas!
Harvard's ivory towers look on with pretty disdain.

 On lucky nights, you can turn around, face the east, and see the moon rising over the Charles from the other side.... but tonight, that glowing orb is not the moon.
It's a blimp. Presumably over Fenway Park.
Home.

Writing Tools (Bright and Dark)

A few weeks ago, I showed you all the book map that I built for my office wall. This tool has proven itself to be invaluable. I consult it constantly as I'm working. It's a stupendous structural aid as I reorder the events of this book and refocus the plot. I WANT TO MARRY IT.

However, as the sight of it recently made a writer friend depressed ("I could never do that," the friend said), I feel I should add that this is the first book I've ever been able to do it for. This book is short (for me) and relatively simple. Had I tried to stick a plot map on my wall for Bitterblue, it would've taken an enormous amount of time that would have been better spent writing, it would've been more confusing than helpful, plus, I wouldn't have had enough wall space.

Each book is different and requires its own unique tools.

***

That being said, I've finally come to accept that one particular unenjoyable aspect of writing is going to be present with every single book: the sense of urgency. The feeling that I need to keep going and can never stop, that I need to finish this book RIGHT NOW; the feeling that I'm behind schedule, that I'm not going to make my deadline. Granted, sometimes I feel that last way because it's true, but the thing is, I always feel like I'm going to miss my deadline, whether or not it's true and whether or not I even have a deadline. There's always at least an arbitrary deadline in my mind. This is perfectly reasonable – the more you write, the more you appreciate how disruptive big interruptions, like long trips or (even the shortest of) public events, can be – how hard it can be to get back into a project once you've succumbed to a distraction – and consequently, the more you feel a drive to finish your current project before the next such interruption. But you can start to forget that your deadline is in fact arbitrary, and worse, you can start to forget that in order to be the best book it can be, your book needs to be allowed to take however long it takes. The harder you work, the harder you need to play, and the more you need to rest.

I don't know why it's taken me so long to realize that I always, at every moment, feel like I'm not writing fast enough. Now that I've noticed it, I'm sure I'll keep feeling it, but I think it might cause me less distress. It's just one of the ways writing feels; it's a voice, but a voice that lies; and it's just another tool in the toolbox. I'm sure it serves some purpose; it's the shadow, the darker side of the drive that allows a writer to embark successfully on enormous solo projects. We can't expect to benefit from the happier aspect of a personal quality – ambition, drive, motivation – and never be touched by its darker side.


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Speaking of which: I absolutely loved Oliver Burkeman's opinion piece in the New York Times on the positive power of negative thinking. Go negativity! (And thanks, CW.) It reminded me my favorite chapter in a beautiful book. The chapter is called "The Gifts of Depression" and the book is Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul. It's about giving yourself permission to feel how you feel; dealing with horrible, scary feelings by leaning into them instead of trying to push them away. If that sounds strange and wrong, trust that Moore explains it a lot better than I do; check it out if you're interested.

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Finally, and apropos of absolutely nothing, it occurred to me today in a rainstorm that it's possible there are people in the world who don't know the song "Love and Affection" by Joan Armatrading.  That would not be okay. As the teacher (in a story my dad told me) yells at her students,  "LEARN!" Also -- embracing randomness and thematic disintegration -- while looking for that clip, I stumbled upon this clip from the West Wing. If you know the show, it involves a performance of "The Little Drummer Boy" and Toby arranging for a military funeral with honor guard for a homeless veteran. Warning that it may make you weepy, especially if you know the back stories (and future stories) of the characters involved.

Birthdays and THIS PHONE

It's birthday season on the blog!

Many, many of my peeps have birthdays in August and/or are Leos (including me), and every year I mean to create a new birthday poll, but then August comes along and I'm doing too many other things. I suppose that's okay, since we seem to have established rather firmly that the number of people who want socks for their birthday is surpassed only by the number of people who want the power to summon any kangaroo in a 25-mile radius simply by closing their eyes and thinking, "Kangaroo, your master calls." (That poll is still open, by the way. Feel free to vote.)

Birthdays make me contemplative. I am turning the ripe young age of 36. But instead of coming up with something soppingly meaningful to say about our journeys around the sun, I'm going to express my appreciation for a device I own now, but didn't own a year ago: THIS PHONE.



Dear people who invented the iPhone 4S: THANK YOU. I can't type for extended periods of time without pain, and even when I'm dictating to my computer, there is occasional necessary keyboard use that causes me pain. But when I dictate (e-mails! texts! notes! reminders! web searches! addresses!) to this phone (which has excellent recognition), any necessary typing is on a small touchscreen, which is SO much less painful for me than a keyboard. Since I got this phone, there has been less pain in my life.

And that doesn't even touch on how much I love carrying a dictionary in my pocket at all times, having an alarm clock that doesn't sound like a truck backing up, being able to give emergency driving directions to a buddy when he calls me while completely lost in Alaska, being able to take better pictures than I'm qualified to be taking (and then share them, immediately), and the Scrabble game I'm currently playing with a friend in Minnesota. (This phone makes my faraway people feel closer!)

I'm so grateful that this piece of technology exists. I'm equally grateful that I can afford to own and sustain it. Yes, it's just a Thing. But I am blessed to be carrying this thing into my new year.

Just Another Day in the Park

I was walking through the Boston Common to an appointment the other day when a man yelled something to me about what he intended to do to me.  It was physical and vulgar. I ignored him. First safety rule: don't engage.

Waking back from my appointment, I passed him again. This time, apparently offended by my non-reaction last time, he yelled at me that I was arrogant. He kept yelling after me as I walked on. He listed many of the unpleasant personal characteristics he perceived me to have. I ignored him.

Then I forgot about it -- until I decided I wanted to blog about it. I couldn't quite get a handle on what it was I was trying to say, though, so I e-mailed a few friends. Rebecca and Jess helped me work it out -- thanks guys -- so what I'm about to say is a joint effort.

Random abuse from misogynists, in one form or another, is a routine part of many -- most? -- women's lives. It happens to every kind of woman. Women of every shape, size, and color; femme women and butch women; anyone who identifies or reads as a woman. As Rebecca wrote to me, "It happens when the shouter finds the woman beautiful and hot; it happens when the shouter finds the woman ugly. It can be sarcastic; it can be an invitation. It can mean 'get away from me' or 'get over here to me'." It is done by men who say something uninvited believing themselves to be delivering a compliment, and men saying something uninvited who know themselves to be delivering an insult, and the point I want to make is: IT'S THE SAME THING. Again quoting Rebecca, "really it's all the same when it's shouted to someone on the street." It's seeing a person as a body and no more, and not just that, but a body unworthy of respect. Plus, as Jess pointed out, no matter what is meant by it, it always feels like a threat.

Routine experiences like these, experienced by my friends, my sisters, by me and by strangers on the street around me, are among the many reasons I found myself needing to write Fire.

Checking In

Re: Bitterblue travel: I'll be in Sweden (Stockholm and Kristianstad/Malmö), Spain (at least Madrid, not sure beyond that yet), France (Paris), and the Netherlands (at least Amsterdam) in September -- it's official, my transatlantic flights are booked -- and I'll post more details when I have them.

Re: blogginess: There are a few updates I need to post to this blog, including some sort of page of Bitterblue reviews... I'm afraid some aspects of the blog have dropped to a currently unreachable part of my priority list, so things aren't as tidy around here as I prefer them. I will get to it some day. In the meantime, what blogging time I have, I'm trying to focus on new posts. I have a couple planned. One is about Tim Riggins. :-)

Re: gorgeous clouds, check out this stupendous link to "60 insane cloud formations from around the world." Thanks B, via B! :)

And re: awesome music videos, I love this ASL interpretation of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know." Everything, from lighting to acting to staging and costuming, works for me in this -- I feel the pain coming off of them in waves. Thanks R!

Margaret Mahy, 1936-2012

New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy died on Monday, July 23. She was 76 years old.

Margaret Mahy could write emotions like sadness, fear, the desperateness of courage, so that you felt them as you read. A few lines from Alchemy (2004):

Certainly the sound of her sadness had spread itself backward and forward through time.

The feeling he had been trying to create – the feeling that the day was just another day – began to shiver out of line.

He could not see an inch beyond his nose. Squinting down in its general direction, he found he could not even see his nose. All the same, still whistling and hissing to himself, reminding himself how real he was, then nodding and muttering agreement with himself, Roland stepped forward yet again, before pausing and groping backward.

She described physical sensations brilliantly. In these lines from 24 Hours (2000), Ellis wakes up with a hangover:

Ellis did not open his eyes. It seemed safer to linger in the darkness behind his lids, for his head felt as if it had split from side to side.... His stomach heaved, and heaved again, as if it were trying to tear itself out of him and set up a separate life in another part of the room.... Bending down, he imagined the top of his head was going to flop open, and that what was left of his brain would fall, squelching, on top of the phone.

She wrote fabulous sexual tension, but also strong, thoughtful, complex women. From The Changeover (1984):

The sight of Sorry standing at the school gate that morning had filled her with a soft electricity, exciting but not totally amiable.

He kissed her very briefly and said, “The Sleeping Beauty always loves the prince who wakes her. You’ve had it now, Chant... no hope for you, I’m afraid.” / “I woke myself,” Laura said.

She had a special skill for capturing the eerie feeling that Something Is Not Right Here. From The Haunting (1982):

When, suddenly, on an ordinary Wednesday, it seemed to Barney that the world tilted and ran downhill in all directions, he knew he was about to be haunted again.

She described people so well! Also from The Haunting:

Great-Uncles Alberic and Guy were there of course, tall, towering and toppling a little bit like elegant hollyhocks.

There was trouble at once with the cool receptionist, she was so very white and immaculate that she seemed to leave a bright outline of herself in the air after she had moved on, so that you saw her where she was and where she had been at the same time.

She could make landscapes come alive. From The Catalogue of the Universe (1985):

They could even see, between broom and elderberry bushes, a foxglove forest, rank on rank of tall flowers, all looking east, all looking down, as if at the sound of the crash they had swiveled their long giraffe-necks within their collars of green leaves and were waiting to witness a miracle.

She stubbornly wrote, over and over, about the entropy we all like to pretend isn't part of life. From Memory (1987):

Jonny was becoming more resigned to the smell, and felt a sort of exhausted pleasure in this mad tea party. This was the hidden machinery of life, not a clean, clinical well-oiled engine, monitored by a thousand meticulous dials, but a crazy, stumbling contraption made up of strange things roughly fitted together – things like a huge water tap, the dogleg stairs, cheese in the soap dish, and a crocheted tea cosy stiff with dirt and topped by a doll’s broken face. Jonny had always been aware of this limping machine, even under the clean, smooth surface of his own home.

And -- she was funny! From the divine The Tricksters (1986):

“Much better!” Benny agreed, shooting out a spray of cracker crumbs. “Sorry!” he mumbled, breathing them in and then beginning to choke.

“Of course I’ll look after your damned baby,” Christobel was shouting in the living room as Harry went through it to her attic. “Just get out and take that accountant with you, or I might be tempted by him. He’s the best-looking man I know.” Later, Harry came down her ladder and found Christobel watching Tibby with a mixture of amusement and repulsion. Tibby was sitting on her pink pot singing to herself and shifting herself industriously across the floor. / “Gosh, motherhood must be terrible,” Christobel was grumbling. “The things you’ve got to praise people for!”

The Tricksters is about a stupendous young woman named Harry who is trying to form herself and discovers, in the process, the power she possesses to form the world around her. "Then, at last, sitting on her stretcher-bed, she took from the very bottom of her pack an old peacock-blue scarf folded around a heavy, square book. She unwrapped it and opened it very carefully, as if guilty secrets might fall from between its pages like pressed flowers. This was Harry’s secret. She was a writer."

Margaret Mahy is – Harry is – the reason my blog is named "This Is My Secret." Thank you, Margaret Mahy, for writing the books, the exact books, that are my greatest pleasure to read, and that make me want to write.

It breaks my heart to be writing this post.

Fifth Avenue Pictures + a Podcast Interview

So, over three years ago, I spoke with Deirdre Johnson and Maria Ciccone at the Mount Kisco Public Library in Mount Kisco, New York about Fire. Only a few weeks ago, I spoke with Deirdre again and Deirdre's sister Mary Johnson, this time about Bitterblue, and the podcast is now available for listening. We talked about writing from Leck's perspective; my influences; naming; how fantasy can be a way to tell a true, real-world story; romance; lying; fathers and father figures; Hava; Thiel; characters, and how a writer comes to know them; advice for writers; and other stuff. And while you're over there, check out some of their other podcast interviews!

Ready for a walk on Fifth Avenue? As always, all photos were taken with my iPhone 4S.

Here's a candle in St. Patrick's Cathedral.


And here's a cathedral view.

A man doing road work.

 In a shop window, a lady wearing a lion shirt.

Closer look. 
 
My weirdest Fifth Avenue picture. I, reflected but substantial, am dwarfed by an insubstantial, headless, well-dressed woman who thinks it is smart to tromp on the food of doves and who lives in a world of cabs and limos, backwards writing, and one very ugly building. I am taking a picture of her and it seems that the picture is from behind, yet here is the picture I took, showing her from the front.
 
This smartly-dressed lady, wisely prepared for flood conditions, has her binoculars trained in the wrong direction. Oy! Behind your left shoulder! Or maybe (noting the ghost bird's binoculars) the lady and the bird are friends, bird-watching together? If so, I would not say they've made themselves particularly inconspicuous. 
 
Two things I like about the Met: (1) the entrance fee is a suggested $25 but you can choose to pay whatever you like/can afford. And, (2) with the exception of some of the special exhibits, photography is allowed.
I would like an aura this blue. On occasion. Not every day.
Detail from Guillaume Budé (1467-1540) by Jean-Clouet, ~1536
I always like a picture of a woman with a sword. Even if I am inclined to leave out the severed head at the bottom of the painting. (Yes, I know, this was what swords were used for, cutting people. Listen, I'm taking the picture, I get to leave out whatever I want.)
Detail from Judith with the Head of Holofernes
by Lucas Cranach the Elder, ~1530
I like to wander aimlessly in the Met and see where I end up. This time I ended up in the American Wing among the glass- and tableware.


Someone with an excellent eye for color has arranged things around here.

 


Finally: I would like Edwin Austin Abbey to design me some shoes.
Detail from King Lear, Act I, Scene I
by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1898