Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 46

Return of Skinny the Thrasher

Skinny Among the Chocolate Flower

A while back, when I asked for suggestions as to what I should put in upcoming Wednesday Wandering posts, I had several requests for an update on Skinny the Thrasher.

Who’s Skinny?  You can read about him here and here, as well as in other posts about our local wildlife.

Upon being requested, Skinny, in the way of wild creatures who are not being paid modeling fees, promptly vanished. (Actually, it probably had more to do with our taking a hiatus from putting out a birdseed block after a squirrel ate almost all of the last one in just over a week.)

However, Skinny’s been around lately, enjoying both the birdseed and suet from the new suet feeder the cats gave to Jim for Christmas.  He’s been joined by some of our winter residents, including two (sometimes as many as six) scrub jays.

Scrub Jay At the Suet Feeder

We’d been concerned that they’d get competitive with each other, but we’ve seen them sitting on the same tree limb, although Skinny often goes to check out where the jays have been perched after they move along.

Fox Sparrow: Close up

We also are delighted to have a plethora of smaller birds, including fox sparrows and two types of juncos (dark-eyed and gray-headed).  Since we leave those plants{ we’ve seen the birds foraging from in place for much of the winter, our avian co-residents don’t just use the feeders, but also continue their natural eating habits.

Female Junco By the Yarrow

Jim’s responsible for all the pictures featured here (as well as on my blog in general), so he and the birds get the credit for this week’s bit of brightness.  Take care!

FF: Yep! Still Reading.

Roary: Now Nine Months Old

For those of you unfamiliar with this column, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazines.  The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.  And it’s also a great place to tell me what you’re reading.  I’ve discovered a lot of good books that way.

Recently Completed:

Armenian Folk-tales and Fables retold by Charles Downing.  I enjoyed the translator’s note at the beginning.  Bonus: At the end of the book is a list of short proverbs.  Great windows into a society’s values.

Wolf Speaker: Immortals Book Two by Tamora Pierce.  Audiobook.  Daine is a year and a half older, and racking up the magical abilities as fast as she can concentrate.  Warning for wolf purists: the wolves are more like dogs in their body language, with a culture built more around human idealizations of wolves than “real” wolves. 

In Progress:

Emperor Mage: Immortals Book Three by Tamora Pierce.  Audiobook.  By odd coincidence, a book about dealing with the aftermath of violence altercation that was never quite a declared war.

A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon).  Mona is a minor mage with a gift for working with dough.  Lovely imagery and a gripping, if sometimes a bit improbable, plot. 

Also:

We discovered that three of our December magazines did not arrive in December when January issues started showing up. 

Worth Taking Time To Think

The Scrub Jay Of Happiness

I’m coming back from taking off most of the last couple of weeks from writing, but that doesn’t mean I took that time off from creating.  Giving myself permission not to write gave me a chance to meditate on various elements in the novel that I’m currently revising and expanding.

For a while there, my creative zone felt as if it had been packed with solidified honey.  Good stuff.  Sweet stuff.  But too much stuff.  Even after I eliminated various projects—getting the fourth Star Kingdom novel (with David Weber) turned into Baen; writing an introduction to a forthcoming anthology; doing final edits on a forthcoming short story—I still felt stuck.  I couldn’t even do much with organizing elements for my current roleplaying game scenario, which is usually my “play” writing.

A week into my “break,” I started feeling the words loosening up.  I took out my new fountain pen and worked on a short but essential element for the novel.  Staying away from my computer preserved the sense of freedom, and consequently I found my creativity loosening up.

Over Christmas week, I used the occasional idle moment to mentally continue a debate I’d been having with myself over an aspect of world-building, and finally resolved it.  Then I moved on to another element, which I resolved last Monday.

Now I’m slowly easing myself back onto my computer and into the text.  As an encouraging indication that my creativity is no longer gummed up, I also found ideas for my game coming more rapidly.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it.  In a day and age when “productivity” is too often measured by word count, it’s worth remembering that those words only “count” if they’re good words, the right words, the best words.  And that may mean taking time away from words, back into dreams, into ideas, into ideals, to where your stories come from so you can write your best.

One Won Twenty-one

Mei-Ling Is Ecstatic Over My Christmas Book

Happy New Year!  Featured above is the Christmas book I curled up with last week.   I hope you managed to chill from the holiday rush as well.

For those of you unfamiliar with this column, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazines.  The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.  And it’s also a great place to tell me what you’re reading.  I’ve discovered a lot of good books that way.

Recently Completed:

The White Cottage Mystery by Marjorie Allingham.  This was a Christmas gift from Jim, an early, pre-Campion novel.  It’s a good story in its own right, with the extra bonus of seeing how it’s first life as a magazine series influenced the style, and even things like paragraph length.

Wild Magic: Immortals Book One by Tamora Pierce.  Audiobook.  It’s funny, but I like Alana a lot better in these books than I do in her own series. 

In Progress:

Armenian Folk-tales and Fables retold by Charles Downing.  I enjoyed the translator’s note at the beginning.  I’m about a third in.  Armenian heroes definitely have the best horses.

Wolf Speaker Immortals Book Two by Tamora Pierce.  Audiobook.  Daine is a year and a half older, now facing the consequences of a dark time in her past.  Warning for wolf purists: the wolves are more like dogs in their body language, with a culture built more around human idealizations of wolves than “real” wolves. 

Also:

I’ve been doing a lot of unstructured writing, testing out my new pens and loosening up my writing.  Feels good.

Getting Ready

Now All I Need Is Black Coffee and Some Paper!

We’re just a few days out from the New Year.  Now that my Christmas preparations are taken care of, and we’re in the middle of that lovely liminal space between holidays, I’ve been readying myself to start back into my writing routine.

Over the years, I’ve been given some lovely mugs celebrating my work as a writer, and I’m marshalling these along with a new fountain pen to launch me into creative mode.

Although the majority of my writing is done on my computer, I often start a new piece longhand.  Maybe because I started writing fiction longhand, it’s as if there’s a hotline between my writing hand and my Muse that isn’t always there with the keyboard.

Even my choice of keyboard is made to provide the absolute least interruption between the Muse and getting the story into a form I can share with other people.  I use a very old keyboard on which I’ve worn away about half of the letters from frequent use.  (I really need to get some of the stickers that have been recommended to me.)  I even have a back-up of the same old model for when this one goes, because the point for me is not thinking about the act of writing.

In that way, I guess my root perception of myself is as a storyteller rather than an author or writer.  I’m just a storyteller who prefers to use writing as the way to tell my stories.  However, as my gamers can tell you, I can spin a pretty decent yarn with nothing but the spoken word.

One of my self-assigned challenges for this year may be to use a cool digital voice recorder Jim gave me for my birthday to make short audio files of some of my work.  However, on the whole, I don’t really like to listen to myself composing.  For that reason, I hope that—unlike my buddy David Weber—I don’t find myself needing to transition to voice-activated software.

That said, if the choice is that or not telling stories, you can bet I’d learn.

Now, although I’d promised myself a break (or maybe even because I took a break), I wrote a bit (longhand) the other day that got me through a rough patch in my current novel revision.  I think I’ll go insert it into the manuscript, then see if the Muse wants to talk some more.

FF: Cookies and a Good Book

Which One First?

Merry Christmas to you all.  I hope to spend part of today curled up with a good book, cookies, and a cup of coffee.  For your amusement, at the end of this, I offer “Find the Roary.”

For those of you unfamiliar with this column, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazines.  The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling.  A lovely book of mythic fantasy that is also a tale about the cost of inspiration.  Despite being firmly rooted in a specific time period and a specific setting, it does not seem in the least dated.

The Tower of Nero by Rick Riordan.  Audiobook.  Apollo and Meg return to Manhattan where their journeys began.  Possibly the oddest thing about this book is the repeated mentions that only six months have gone by since the first in this series.  These kids should have seriously PTSD with what they’ve been through.  And, perhaps they do.  I enjoyed, and there were hints as to what the next series may be about.

Tales of Ancient Persia retold by Barbara Leonie Picard.  Good translation.  I was familiar with many of the tales of Rustem, but I had never read the larger context in which they developed.

In Progress:

Armenian Folk-tales and Fables retold by Charles Downing.  I enjoyed the translator’s note at the beginning.  I’ve just started the story.

Wild Magic: Immortals Book One by Tamora Pierce.  Audiobook.  I’ve read this series, but I don’t  think I’ve ever listened to the full cast audio production.

Also:

And here’s Roary!  If you can find him…

Where’s Roary?

Baking and Decorating

Persephone Unpacks the Tree

Busy time here, as we squeeze in decorating and baking into our already busy lives. Here and there, I’m even finding time to write.

Our young cats, Mei-Ling and Roary are enjoying the changes and fuss, quite possibly because Persephone greets it all with enthusiasm.

Blissed Mei-Ling

Wishing you and yours a happy whatever your choice of celebration is!

Roary Samples the Tree

FF: This Is It!

Roary Considers the Problem of Keeping Warm

Prioritizing holiday stuff and writing, back and forth as the demands of one take over from the other, hasn’t left as much time for writing as I’d like.  But I’m still writing!

For those of you unfamiliar with this column, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazines.  The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy by James Anderson.  Published in the mid-seventies, this is both an affectionate homage to the classic detective stories of the 1930’s, and a good yarn in its own right.

Prisoner’s Base by Rex Stout.  Audiobook.  One of Archie’s attempts to prod Nero out of his typical lethargy has unexpected consequences, and Archie ends up as the client.  A good story, although sadder than many.

In Progress:

The Wood Wife by Terri Windling.  A lovely book of mythic fantasy that is also a tale about the cost of inspiration.  Despite being firmly rooted in a specific time period and a specific setting, it does not seem in the least dated.

The Tower of Nero by Rick Riordan.  Audiobook.  Apollo and Meg return to Manhattan where their journeys began.  Possibly the oddest thing about this book is the repeated mentions that only six months have gone by since the first in this series.  These kids should have seriously PTSD with what they’ve been through.  And, perhaps they do.

Also:

Holiday prep and writing haven’t left me a lot of reading time, so other than glancing at a few magazine articles and often re-reading the same paragraphs over and over, this is it!

Silence and My First Book

Doctor!

My first book wasn’t Science Fiction or Fantasy.  It was my doctoral dissertation: The Persephone Myth in D.H. Lawrence.  I’ve been told it’s pretty readable, even for a non-expert, which is nice.  What’s the good of a book no one can read?

I don’t talk about my Ph.D. very often these days.  For one, I earned it over half a lifetime ago.  I defended my doctoral dissertation on my 26th birthday.  I could have defended it earlier, but the English department at Fordham University couldn’t assemble a committee to read the document and gather for the required defense until the Fall term, so I had to wait.

Another reason I rarely talk about my Ph.D. is that I rapidly discovered that people became uncomfortable when they learned I had a doctorate in English.  They’d apologize for the grammar in their letters or even in conversation.  Oddly enough, I’ve rarely encountered this reaction when people learn I’m a writer.  I guess writers aren’t supposed to know anything about language.

I’ve even been “silenced,” most memorably by a well-meaning, well-educated, female author who let me know that a person in publishing with whom I was going to be working was very self-conscious about his own lack of education, and so I probably shouldn’t mention mine.

As I recall the conversation, she said, “It’s not that you brag or anything.  You just mention your graduate work and that you taught college from time to time, because it’s part of your life.  But I thought you should know that…”

Keep quiet.  Women shouldn’t make other people—especially male people—nervous.  The message is given over and over, usually in ways far more subtle than this.

The lack of use of the title “doctor” for other than medical professionals also reflects how the U.S. doesn’t really value higher education.  The silencing is general, usually applied to male and female alike.  Even the addressing of medical doctors as “doctor” is more an identification of a skill set than the honor it should be.  “Is there a doctor in the house?” means “Is there a body technician available who might fix this problem?”

I have friends who brag about how their colleges were informal, how they never addressed a professor as “Professor” or “Doctor.”  I think this is a pity.  Those people earned those titles.  This is the one setting in which our culture permits that to be acknowledged.  Yet people who themselves were striving toward a degree devalued their own goal by their lack of acknowledgement.

Do I give people their titles?  You bet.  Years ago, Jim and I spent a lot of time with a talented and very kind veterinarian who made herself available to help us with a severely handicapped baby guinea pig.  She is quite a bit younger than we are and, at one point, she suggested we use her first name.

I looked at her and said, “You worked hard for that title.  How about we call you by your first name and ‘doctor’?” And so we do.

Anyhow, there’s the story behind my first book…  And of one of my achievements, about which I remain, to this day, very proud.

FF: Mystery and Midnight

Mei-Ling Poses

My reading is the usual eclectic mix this week.  I haven’t found a Christmas book yet.  Any suggestions?

For those of you unfamiliar with this column, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazines.  The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett.  Tiffany Aching is now sixteen, and while she’s a highly capable witch,  changes in those she’s known her entire life may be beyond what she can deal with.

A Geek in Japan by Hector Garcia.  Somewhat dated (originally published in 2010), definitely slanted to a male point-of-view, and sometimes not carefully researched.  Nonetheless, an interesting read.

In Progress:

The Affair of the Blood-Stained Egg Cosy by James Anderson.  Published in the mid-seventies, this is both an affectionate homage to the classic detective stories of the 1930’s, and a good yarn in its own right.

Prisoner’s Base by Rex Stout.  Audiobook.  One of Archie’s attempts to prod Nero out of his typical lethargy has unexpected consequences, and Archie ends up as the client.

Also:

With the fourth Star Kingdom/Stephanie Harrington novel officially turned in, Weber and I are brainstorming on the fifth, which means I’ve been doing some research reading.