Lili St. Crow's Blog, page 198

Not Really Admire

Oh, the Gulag is alive and well! You can tell Putin’s continuing the grand old Chekist tradition, with only a few nods to modern conditions. One might almost admire that sort of fidelity to premodern institutions.

Almost.

Jeff Sharlet, a reporter I particularly admire, has an article up about MRAs. (I needed a shower after reading it, OMG.) Sharlet also does longform Instagram essays that are well worth a look.

Last night the temperature fell to just around freezing. I’m hoping the hostas made it. The only trouble with warm, clear days is the heat escapes once the sun goes down. In summer you don’t want a cloudy night trapping it all near the ground, in winter, you do. (Or at least, I do.)

*sigh* Today is for more Cal & Trinity, and Blood Call revisions. The interesting thing about Blood Call: it started at a dinner with my writing partner[1]. I had this idea: contract killer gets frantic call from ex-girlfriend, and then, VAMPIRES!

There may have been wine involved. Anyway, I wrote it in a furious scribble between a couple Valentine books and kept tinkering with it afterward, and now it’s sold. (All hail my beautiful, wonderful agent.)

Other than that, I have to take down a lot of fluids to stave off the cold threatening to engulf my immune system. I keep drinking water hoping it will help my body hose off the sidewalks, so to speak. I can’t afford to get sick for at least a couple months.

Onward, upward, inward, as CS Lewis would have it…

[1]WHO STILL OWES ME A JOSIAH STORY, DAMMIT. But I can wait. I really can. No, I can. *waits*

Strangely Restful

I finished Anne Applebaum’s GULAG: A History last night. Right before it I read Kolyma Tales, which means my head is full of history right now, and not very nice history at that. It’s chilling to see how well repression and the simple expedient of giving some slaves slightly better conditions in return for their help in suppression of the others works.

Next up is a translation of Anabasis, and a slightly different slice of Russian history–Russia Against Napoleon. I’ve often thought of reading Caulaincourt‘s account of the Grand Armee’s retreat–it was much referenced during the Eastern Front in the Second World War.

Other than that, there was a great deal of hither-and-yon this weekend, the kids visiting their friends and errands needing to be run. I did manage to get some hostas in the ground, some radishes planted, and also enough piano practice that the polonaise is coming along. I suppose I should practice the left hand with a metronome, but I’m not that ambitious yet. I have begun doing junior Hanon exercises instead of just plain scales to warm up. I might even devote one day of practice a week to just-Hanon. It’s strangely restful.

As for work, I finished the revisions on Rose & Thunder last week, and this week is for long, loooooooong days of producing new wordcount on Cal & Trinity as well as revising Blood Call. There’s the upcoming launch of Kin, the third in my fairytale series, my particular retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. I’m going to be highlighting the Kin launch in the next few weeks, so buckle your seatbelts for that.

And now it’s time to get started on the ten-hour workday. I’ve reference books set handily, tea brewing, and the dogs under my desk.

Over and out.

Menagerie There

I’m back! Well, I wasn’t really gone, just sunk into revising. I’d thought this book was fairly clean and easy. GOD, WAS I WRONG. Still, I can take some comfort from it. If you look at something you wrote months or years ago and don’t cringe a little thinking of how you could pull it off better, you’re probably not growing as a writer. So I’m just gritting my teeth and repeating it’s better now, it’s better now, it’s better now.

When this revision is finished, I go straight into another revision for my “assassin and old girlfriend, PLUS VAMPIRES!” book. In between all that is wordcount on Cal & Trinity, and then, revisions on the second Gallow book. It feels like I’m just revising ad nauseum with no time for new words, an exotic and not quite comfortable sensation.

I also brought Shirley the penguin home from Cover to Cover. I’m responsible for most of the menagerie there–it got to the point where my writing partner threatened to strangle me if I brought any more animal statues in. Shirley is temporarily living in the dining room, which may be her forever home if she expresses no other preference.

Also brought home: the rubber tree, a philodendron, and something I’m told is an aglaonema. Two of them came from the sunroom at the old house–remember, the one that got torn up during Neo’s Great Escape? It’s good to have the plants back, but I’m sorry the bookstore is closing. The end of an era, indeed.

It’s about time to get out the door and get my run in before I go back to the grindstone. I’m not quite sure when I’ll be able to take another breath. Oh, I almost forgot–there are cherry trees blooming.

In February.

They’re in some of the warmer micro-spots, but still. The honeysuckle on the north fence has greened up too, and the lilacs are awake. At this point I’m just hoping there won’t be a killing cold near the end of the month.

It makes me miss the plum tree at the old house–great clouds of pink blossom in spring, and every time it bloomed, I just knew everything was going to be all right. I’m going to have to find a different marker now–maybe the dogwood, maybe the birch, maybe the lilacs. Who knows?

Regardless, things are going to be all right. Even if the damn revisions are squeezing my brain into whey.

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn

Begun to Green

Hip-deep in revisions. I’d forgotten what it was like to gut a manuscript.

HA HA JUST KIDDING, IT’S BURNED INTO MY CRANIUM, I CAN’T FORGET.

*sigh*

Yeah, it’s revision time again, as if you can’t tell. I thought this book–my retelling of Beauty & the Beast–would hold up fairly well. My goodness, but was I ever wrong. Passive voice, dialogue tags, a million instances of “that,” the most horrid word of all, it’s got a little of everything. And I’m not even a hundred pages in yet.

At least when I’m done, it’ll be much better, and pretty much ready for Saint Skyla to copyedit and begin formatting. I think I’ll put it out in paper first, and only ebook if there’s a call for it. The worst that can happen is that it’ll sink like a stone! Now there’s a cheerful thought!

You’ve guessed it, chickadees: Mama Lili is in that peculiar state of frangible nerves only revision can call forth. Even the garden’s not very soothing, though another couple of roses have gone into the side-yard and the favs are growing like gangbusters. This will be the year that I need a wheelbarrow, too.

What? No, for carting compost, what did you think I’d be carrying in…oh, wait. never mind. A justifiable question, really.

Of course, the reason the garden’s doing so well is February’s unseasonable warmth. I’m hoping there won’t be a cold snap to blight everything that’s begun to green. The crocuses are out, daffodils too, and tulips are showing their bare arms, reaching for the sun. I’m worried over one of the Japanese maples, and I have to have a talk with the birch tree about the recent windstorms and the shed limbs.

All that, however, is for another day. Today is for the revisions, and my timer has just rung, so I must return to the salt mines.

See you later.

photo by:


hillary the mammal

No More Skin

It’s a Monday. Which means this morning was full of coffee grounds and boiling water slopped all over me from my little espresso machine. It’s given signal service for years now, and needs a bit of careful coddling every now and again. Ah, well, at least I got yesterday off to recover after the bag sale at Cover to Cover.

The bookstore is closing–the fire put a huge dent in its business plan, and people have been coming in to find books, but not buying them. No, instead they check their phones with the airs of connoisseurs, right before they go home and order the book off Amazon to “save” a few bucks, completely disregarding the fact of the petrol spent to drive their silly asses around. You have no idea how many people did that.

*sigh* So many people came out for the bag sale. The regulars were sad the store’s closing, but there was also a certain class of vultures picking at the corpse, and that was infuriating and heartbreaking.

On the bright side, this means my writing partner will have way more time to finish a certain carnival book for me. And there will be less weird emotional vampires walking in and expecting to find trapped prey.

To this of you who were wondering what happened with SKIN: well, I got a few messages from very entitled people scolding me for not producing free content fast enough to suit them. That had one, and only one, response from me: no more SKIN at all.

I’m wondering if people were always this entitled and the internet’s just showing us what was there all along. Not like it matters, the end result is the same.

Anyway, since I took yesterday off, today is for more revisions on Rose and Thunder–my upcoming retelling of Beauty and the Beast–and chores that I didn’t get to. The wind seems to be pulling a new weather front in, which means the cedars along the back fence are shaking their green veils. I put two more roses in the ground, as well as some rosemary and dill, and the favs are coming along nicely. If we don’t have a hard freeze in the next month, I will be congratulating myself on an early start in the garden.

*wanders off, mumbling to self*

photo by:


Dusty J

Norbert

Norbert watches over the garden. He’s in a somewhat sad state; the weather and rampaging squirrels (he came off the worst in a tripartite battle between Beauregarde, Josephine, and Hidalgo the Wonder Squirrel) have taken their toll, but he remains at his post with cheerful aplomb. He looks the other way if a starving bird plunders a few bites, but he will chase off a fat, sleek layabout. Justice with mercy is Norbert’s hallmark. It wasn’t always thus, but I think he’s learned quite a bit in the last few years.

On “Ulysses”

I finished Ulysses. My goodness, that was a slog. The allusions are fun, though characterization and coherence suffer roundly, and while I understand it’s supposed to be one of the first and most important “modernist” novels I’m rather convinced it was luck that chose it for that laurel rather than some other pile of authorial navel-gazing coming to Sylvia Beach‘s attention. I also rather think Stephen Dedalus was Joyce as he wanted to be, Leopold Bloom more like the hapless fetishizer of bottoms Joyce actually was. Circe’s island as a brothel, the Sirens as masturbatory fantasies, well, it was a man writing it, and it’s rather uncomfortably in the spirit of the original’s social conditions. Making Penelope into a cuckolding Molly only serves to highlight the fact that Joyce didn’t know shite about women, and is the biggest blackening of the Odyssey‘s eye–and the one, really, that I did not forgive Joyce for. His overheated (and inaccurate) fantasies about what a woman might think made me roll my eyes so hard it was difficult to keep reading.

I agree with Jung that there’s no rest in the book. The presentation of bodily functions in its pages (part and parcel of the “obscenity” trial) is schoolboy-ish, rather like a kid writing “bottom” in a margin or snort-giggling over Lake Titicaca. (Had Beach been enamored of another author, I might well be discussing that instead of Joyce. He was well-connected, at least.) I suppose that was only to be expected, and that schoolboy-ish or not it was daring for its time and opened a door somewhat–so that’s one point in Joyce’s favor.

I understood the allusions and the games with prose and rhetoric Joyce was playing, but it felt like he was simply dipping a surface reading of the Odyssey into used bathwater without adding anything new, interesting, or worthwhile, while taking away a great deal of power and beauty. Also missing is the idea that choices the truly disenfranchised (women, slaves, etc.) make can affect the outcome of great events as well, which the original had in spades. I’d almost prefer O Brother, Where Art Thou? as a finer homage. The Coen brothers had the benefit of looser social conditions, but still.

My views are admittedly somewhat colored by my feelings about the Kerouac Factor–young males sponging off women and kin, going off in search of “adventure,” finally producing a pile of self-referential bullshit that seems marvelous when one is twelve to fourteen but ages badly and turns puerile once one has acquired some basic perspective by sheer dint of living and thinking about things. (Or, one who wanders unprepared into the damn wilderness because living on the fringes have given a false sense of superiority and an inaccurate estimation of one’s own survival skills.) You could also call this the Salinger Factor. It’s gotten to the point where I see a young guy buying On the Road or Catcher in the Rye and I think, oh, we’re going to stick that in a back pocket and use it to draw in girls who haven’t lived long enough to know better, aren’t we. As a “classic” that a lot of slightly older males use to seem well-read and Serious About Literature, Ulysses falls somewhat under the same shade.

My final estimation of the book: not one I ever think I’m going to reread, though I’m glad I made it through. The allusions were fun, and playing the “oh, this is the prose style we’re in now” game was enjoyable, at least. I still would prefer to read Nora’s letters. I’d rate it a solid B-, for the classicism and the glimpses of historical Dublin, and for the occasional flashes of brilliance struggling through in Joyce’s sendup of penny awkward (instead of dreadful) novels. I kept reading, hoping for more of those flashes, but in the end, they remained fleeting.

Nest up: some history to cleanse the palate. Already it’s proving far more enjoyable.

photo by:

Fish Tuesday

Onward, ever onward. Cal and Trinity have moved to the forefront, since I’m no longer writing SKIN for publication.That will mean a little extra time for Rose & Thunder, too. Of course, first I have to decide if I’m really going to take C&T to Argentina. It will mean a little more research, but also, tango! It’ll be fun.

I’m suffering one of those periods in the writing life when one looks at the sheer number of people stealing copies of one’s work (otherwise known as e-piracy) and the slowness with which publishers move when it’s time to pay one, and wonders why one isn’t an accountant or something else. Writing is better than working retail, by far, but some days, man. Some effing days.

Fortunately I have the dogs and the kids, and a kitchen timer to remind me that life is made up of small daily efforts, even on days when weeping seems the only thing possible.

**time passes**

Weeping or just cocking my head and regarding the world with bemusement, since I found a fish in the backyard this morning. It was in a sad and sorry state, but it was definitely a fish, and the dogs had been at it. I took it away and put it outside the gate where they can’t get to it, and am about to go down and bury it near the roses. A proper burial, but I might not be able to say much in the way of good words for it, since I’m wondering how the fuck a dead fish got into my backyard. The fish is a stranger, so it’ll have to be a generic service. Also, I love how half my Twitter timeline is now Noah’s Ark jokes, and the other half is actively problem-solving how to get a fish in my backyard, and both sides are vocally in favor of a fish funeral.

So this is how Tuesday’s gonna be. All right. *cracks knuckles* I’m off to bury a fish.

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn

Chilled Clear Through

I have decided this week I’m going to finish SKIN,* do the revisions on Rose & Thunder (my retelling of Beauty & the Beast) and get serious wordcount on Cal & Trinity done. All that, and piano lessons, daily running (I’m back on the daily plan, and it feels good) and a whole lot of tea. If there’s any errands to be done, too bad, I’m busy with the wordage.

Of course, that’s the plan. We’ll see what actually happens.

Last night was stormy–actual thunder, which we don’t often get in these parts. Miss B huddled against me, shaking hard enough to wake me once or twice when things got loud. Poor girl. I hugged her and went back to sleep, but this morning she’s tired, too. So there was no run for her this morning, which was okay because it was extremely damp. More like swimming than running, and the Mad Tortie was at the door when I arrived home, damp and very disgruntled.

Serves her right for sneaking outside.

Anyway, I am chilled clear through even after a shower and dry clothes. Time for tea, and to get another chapter of Kori’s adventures written. I won’t be very communicative today; my raw edges are on display and every small brush is painful. A retreat from the world is in order, methinks.

* Well. It didn’t take long for someone to ruin that. SKIN is now removed from Wattpad, and will remain so.

photo by:


Moyan_Brenn (back soon & sorry for not commenting)

Naptime

I remember, when I first brought Odd Trundles home, I was worried Miss B might dislike the idea of sharing attention with another pooch. She took one look at the tiny, drowsy, wiggling bundle and lights in her doggy brain turned on. I know about this! I know this!

Her former owners bred her when she was too young–she still has issues from the malnutrition and stresses that placed on her body. (I never did find out what happened to her puppies. I suspect the worst.) She is a very maternal critter–the cats are treated as puppies, any children that come over are treated as puppies, and Odd Trundles was mothered from the moment she laid eyes on him. She taught him bite inhibition and how to sit, groomed and snuggled him, watched over him in the yard and socialised him, taught him his place in our pack. (Firmly at the bottom, but he’s happy there–he never suffers a moment of discomfort wondering where he belongs.) I still think he survived his difficult puppyhood because of her tender care and snuggles.

Nowadays, of course, he sometimes reminds her he is All Grown Up, Thank You, And No Longer A Puppy, as evidences by his seasonal alopecia (that’s the pink patch on his side). I suspect, however, that to Miss B, he will always be that tiny bundle of fur.