Gillian Polack's Blog, page 310

gillpolack @ 2010-05-31T17:06:00

It's Monday afternoon and I have some reading for you. This fortnight's article for Bibliobuffet is a discussion about writing with KJ Bishop, Tessa Kum and Deborah Kalin.

I may do a proper blogpost in a little. It depends on how far I am from catching up with work that my Evil Tooth (I so need to trademark that phrase) has delayed. Today has been fairly uncomfortable, but I've worked anyway and am not quite as impossibly behind as I was. All that I am, I owe to codeine and potato chips....

gillpolack @ 2010-05-30T13:53:00

Novels are about pivotal people, right? About people who are at a crux or a point and can change the world around them, or the universe around them, or find true romance for their next best friend. The right sequence of actions by the right person and lo, the plot is fixed!

Rose Tremain says about herself (in the rather fun set of interviews here) that "Her paternal great-grandfather was William Thomson, archbishop of York. Her maternal great-grandmother was a chambermaid." She's the pivo...

On Dialogue in Fiction

There's one thing that being unwell is always good for: intensive DVD viewing. Last time, I analysed plotlines. These last few days, I've been looking at dialogue.

Writer after writer skimps on distinctive speech. This is most notable in the West Wing. The patterns of speech are the same from one person to another (even to the use of "OK" as a set of reassurances and power plays and negotiations). When I watch episodes back to back I get the sense that there has been a kind of alien tak...

gillpolack @ 2010-05-27T18:38:00

My life is not boring.

The tooth next to the zombie tooth had to be extracted in a hurry last week, as I explain in vast detail on the day. You really don't want to know what happened next, but maybe need to know that I'm chockers with antibiotics and prescription strength pain relievers. And stuff. Though the other stuff is fading. And so is the pain. Give me 48 hours.

Yesterday from about 4 pm until today when all the drugs started working was intolerable in a way I did not enjoy. Since...

gillpolack @ 2010-05-26T08:14:00

Autumn has been returned to us just when we thought winter had set in early and was going to take over the rest of the year. Since chill rain and toothache (an unexpected extra dental appointment tomorrow, requiring me to leave home just after 7 am) aren't conducive of sleep, I'm doing a bunch of things before I teach and meet.

My biggest problem at the moment is, oddly, not my tooth. It's that someone wants me to summarise method of history and historiography in a couple of sentences. Not a...

gillpolack @ 2010-05-25T17:33:00

My week keeps getting rearranged. Tomorrow morning, however, is my fixed star. My Wednesday class are getting to play with my horseshoe and key. I keep looking at them and thinking "There are stories in those objects" and thought it would be a fine idea to let my students extract some of those stories. I just need to find a folktale that has either a horseshoe or a key as a crucial aspect and my class prep is complete.

Open question reminder

Just to remind you that I can be asked questions here, right till the end of Coyote Con (which lasts the whole of May.). It's worth taking a look at the Coyote Con website, BTW. There are still some very interesting sessions to come (including pitch sessions), and there are transcripts up for many of the previous events.

gillpolack @ 2010-05-24T22:49:00

Today and yesterday were very strange. Big highs and big lows, both for me and for friends of mine. I don't think I'll talk about them. Instead, I'll meander a little. My mind is in meandering mode, anyhow.

I had a totally lovely afternoon yesterday and have a horseshoe and a 19th century French key to remind me of it. Afternoons like that give the inner peace to deal with everything else, I think. It was a wonderful, wonderful birthday present, that gift of peace.

This morning my doorbel...

gillpolack @ 2010-05-22T21:26:00

Today is a keep-starting-never-finish work kind of day. I've paid all the bills I can find and I finished the tail end of a review book and started another. In a few days time, you'll almost certainly find me blogging about a vast swag of reviews or articles written, for right now I'm accumulating notes. I say a "vast swag" in hopes, you understand, of mysteriously catching up.

It won't happen tomorrow. Tomorrow is my special-treat-day-off (and I really need to cure myself of hypenating ev...

gillpolack @ 2010-05-21T14:37:00

My morning was spent on the way to the dentist or on the way home from the dentist and I now am one tooth the lesser. Appprently nervous types get general anaesthetics for this sort of thing. Me, I was given several little injections and had to answer questions, sometimes with cotton wool clenched between my teeth and sometimes with only a numb jaw to contend with. Apparently I bled exactly the right amount and also apparently the root was cleft in twain, which explains the problems it was ...