Robin McKinley's Blog, page 107
January 9, 2012
But SHADOWS is still still going*
I still feel like stagnant pond scum and the water in vases where the flowers have all died. I wrote something today when Maggie has a very large purring cat in her lap and she says that it makes her eyeballs buzz. Yeah. Only I'm like that just sitting here. **
The day did not begin well when I woke too early and lay there thinking about an intractable bit of plot machinery while my thriving young cough gleefully explored its rapidly expanding capacities. Eventually I decided there was more rustling*** going on than could be explained by my cough-driven blood pressure thudding in my ears, put on a dressing-gown, stumbled downstairs, let hellhounds out . . . and Chaos bolted out into the courtyard and began erupting in both directions. OH JOY. We've already been having hellhound follies the last few days which I haven't told you about because they wind me up and I can't afford to snap and run off into the blue, I have a novel to finish.† I do know what started this particular too-many-ringed circus: Darkness heard a monster at the cottage the other night while he was behaving in a reckless manner—which is to say eating—and isn't going to make that mistake again any time soon. Chaos missed the monster†† and initially attempted to carry on with the eating . . . but you can't just lie about eating when your brother and life partner is crammed into the back of the crate becoming one with the, um, darkness. You could see the Dawning Horror creeping over him, although Chaos isn't so much a back of the crate hellhound as a floormat with large beseeching eyes hellhound. NOOOOOOO. NOT THE BOWL OF FOOD. NOOOOOOOOO. Anyway. Things have progressed. Not in a good way. Today we appear to have added reality to the mess.
As I was hosing down the hellhound courtyard there was one of those chirpy knocks on the door, you know the one: tap, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, tap, tap. GO AWAY. YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT I'M DOING. I answered the door.††† It was the postperson, who handed me a Large Wodge of Stuff. I staggered under the weight, being weak and infirm from coughing. Will you be here in half an hour? he said in a voice to match the knock on the door. I stared at him through puffy red-rimmed eyes, a large pile of post and a bad attitude. I couldn't think of a way out of it. Yes, I said. Oh good, he said, I have some packets for you as well. EVERYTHING I HAVE ORDERED OR ANYONE HAS SENT ME IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS ARRIVED TODAY.‡
And then Raphael showed up‡‡ to (a) take the shiny new laptop away and make its possessed-by-evil battery spin 360° and spew green bile‡‡‡ so we can demand a new one and (b) tell frelling Outlook to stop playing silly buggers and function again. I mean, again Raphael told it. It giggles feebly while there's an archangel in the house and instantly goes off the rails again as soon as he leaves.§ ARRRRGH.§§ Since I'm presently trapped at home with SHADOWS, two mentally- and digestively-challenged hellhounds and a cough, I've spent some time trying to sort out my dreadful email inboxes. I spent a good two hours doing this this morning while I was waiting hopefully for the fifth or sixth mug of tea to penetrate so I could get on with SHADOWS. And when we went back to the cottage this afternoon and I turned on the desktop—and the knapsack laptop just to doublecheck—NONE OF WHAT I'D DONE ON THE MEWS LAPTOP UPDATED.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM.§§§
* * *
* The end is actually in sight. It's just nowhere near enough. I want to be able to see it without the assistance of the Hubble telescope.
** So maybe the ending is near enough. I just can't make my eyes focus.
*** Nothing to do with brown paper.
Jabenami:
And, um, on the subject of bad physics jokes…
Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving down the highway when they are pulled over by a police officer.
"Do you have any idea how fast you're going?" the officer demands.
"No," says Heisenberg, "but I know exactly where I am."
"I'm going to need to take a look in your car," says the officer and goes around to the back of the car.
"Did you know that you have a dead cat in your trunk?" the officer exclaims.
"Well NOW I do," says Schrodinger.
And from xkcd, that incomparable fount of scientific wisdom:
And, while we're at it:
Yeah. This is the kind of thing I think about at 5 a.m. when I can't sleep and Mr Military Man is going to start crunching gravel soon. Does xkcd's little brother write fantasy? Has his little brother recently started reading brain-exploding quantum physics which is having no discernable effect (he thinks) on his actual story-writing, but is making him feel like his own doppelganger?
† In twenty-three days. In case anyone else is counting.
†† We were having a typhoon.^ Wind, rain, banshees. The banshees have never bothered the hellhounds, but there is, I am assuming, a sub- or supra-banshee who has infiltrated the area recently, to the dismay of some sensitive hellhounds.
^ And I am so tired of resetting my phone machine, and the alien-invasion-klaxon back-up battery that protects the desktop from berserkers and boiling oil and is worse than the banshees. The typhoon went on for several days. I can go for weeks without getting any messages on my phone machine+ except from people like the dentist++ but over the three days of typhoon I think everybody I've ever met tried to phone me and have subsequently been variously waspish or petulant about my yet-again-un-re-set phone machine.+++
+ Probably because I never answer them
++ And I'm certainly not going to answer him. The nice young receptionist is leaving me increasingly forlorn-sounding reminders about my check-up however.~ Go away. I have a novel to finish. You don't want me till I've finished my novel, and got paid. And I don't want you at all, but . . .
~ There's a special module in Dental Receptionist School about sounding forlorn.
+++ It's not like I ever, you know, answer the phone.
http://www.quotegarden.com/telephones.html :
The bathtub was invented in 1850 and the telephone in 1875. In other words, if you had been living in 1850, you could have sat in the bathtub for 25 years without having to answer the phone. Bill DeWitt, 1972
Middle age: When you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you. Ogden Nash
The situation is made additionally complex in my case because the phone that works doesn't ring. The phone that doesn't work does ring, but it's the one in my office which is to say next to my bedroom and I certainly don't want it ringing at me at an unsuitable hour, like any time before noon. So I leave it unplugged. Why should I plug in a phone that doesn't work? Which means I don't hear phone calls. Every now and then I'll hear some clicking and muttering noises but by the time I figure out it's someone leaving a message, they've rung off, and I didn't want to answer the phone anyway, did I? No. I'll listen to the message later. If I remember. If the banshees don't wipe it first.~
~ I have a perfectly good email address. It's not like people can't get hold of me. Of course I don't always answer emails either, but I do read them.
††† I have to draw the line somewhere. I already don't answer the phone.
‡ Okay, I don't know that it's everything. Everything I know to worry about the non-arrival of. I'm well aware that anything that doesn't arrive at its destination by Christmas enters an interdimensional time warp that laughs at both Heisenberg and Schrodinger, and re-emerges at an undivinable wave/particle node which generally involves being gnawed by dragons during the detranslocation and is most often rendered as March. But some of today's haul was ordered/sent in November.
‡‡ I backed up politely, explaining that I had the lurgy. So do I, said Raphael cheerfully. I've had it since the beginning of December. And through two courses of antibiotics.
Moan.
‡‡‡ All right, I'm a little obsessed with undesirable effluvia at the moment.
§ It hasn't tried undesirable effluvia yet. Small mercies. Or no, medium-sized mercies at least.
§§ So, arguably, I don't have a perfectly good email address.
§§§ Don't do this when you have a sore throat and a cough.
January 8, 2012
But SHADOWS is still going
Well I feel like death on toast. Old, decrepit death on burnt, spongy toast that was nasty chemical-laden mattress bread in its heyday. I also have laryngitis. Well, half laryngitis. I can croak, but it hurts. There will be a cough later. Joy.
Yes, I missed service ring this morning.
No voice lesson tomorrow.
No second-Monday at Old Eden tomorrow.*
Not in a good mood.
I did, however, meet Colin and Anthea while I was out hurtling hellhounds in slo-mo this morning.** Colin has the lurgy as well so they were also moving in slo-mo.*** Oh, you sound much worse than he does, said Anthea admiringly. Thanks, I rasped.
Clearly more bad jokes are needed. All of you who read the forum will have seen (almost all of) these. And if you're feeling healthy and sharp and brainy you are permitted to skip. The rest of you will enjoy seeing them again.
blondviolinist:
A piece of string walks into a bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender looks him up and down and says "We don't serve your kind in here." The string walks back outside, stomps around, and ties himself all up. He then walks back into the bar, and asks for a beer. The bartender says "Aren't you the piece of string that was just in here a moment ago?" "Nope," the string replies. "I'm a frayed knot."
Us old married women are allowed to laugh and laugh at the following. The rest of you have to pretend to be stern and poker-faced. Mrrrnghmph.
LRK:
"Mrs Svensson, why did you shoot your husband with a bow and arrow?"
"Because I didn't want to wake the children."
Or another:
"My husband is a sailor – he's only home one month a year."
"That's awful! I'd never stand for that!"
"Oh, I don't know… a month passes so quickly…" †
And here's a joke from me. I can't remember where it comes from, except that I picked it up somewhere in the last few months of cramming physics and maths, probably several times:
"We don't serve your kind here," said the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.††
* * *
* This, I admit, may be as much blessing as curse. Not my favourite bells in the universe, especially not in January when even nice bells may be dyspeptic. But having not rung tower bells in seven days I'm starting to twitch.
** You have dogs, they have to go out. If you're incapacitated, you stuff a broomstick down your spine, tie the leads to your hands, and go out anyway. (My dog minder, bless her, took them out yesterday.) Next time, I'm adopting an elderly, three-legged Chihuahua. Or maybe I'll go the amphibians in tanks route. No, probably not. I think the wingless fruit flies in the refrigerator would creep me out. I have enough trouble with the mealworms for the robins.
Ajlr
Oh, Robin, that ring… *haz a envy*
It's good, isn't it? ::Preens:: It provides a little cheering-up in the present dark days uggggh. I tell myself that winter is the logical time to have flu: flu in the summer feels really unjust. But I'm ready to notice that the days are literally getting longer. Any time now guys, Apollo, Helios, Surya, whoever.
My fabulous ring has one fairly fabulous drawback however, as some of you with jewellery fetishes will have already twigged, which is that it's a ratbag to keep clean—all that surface area, those big flat facets—and the backs are worse, as they always are, because you have to fight your way through the setting, but if you don't clean the backs the fronts look dull. I've been doing the job with one of those soft mini toothbrushes that I can poke into the back, but it's a fiddly business. Do any of you have any personal experience and/or recommendations about the ultrasonic jewellery cleaners? I know they get mixed reviews, but I've been the noxious chemicals route and I really don't want to do that again.
. . . but what else is there that sings in the middle of the frelling night? They can't all be robins.
I'm not sure if you have street lights anywhere near you, but it's quite common for some birds – blackbirds, particularly – to sit near the lights at night and sing. And as blackbirds are also among the first to nest each year, so they're pairing-up now, that may well be a male blackbird starting to proclaim his territory that you're hearing in the early hours.
Blackbirds. Thank you. That's it. I even thought it sounded rather like blackbirds, but I can just about tell an eagle from a dodo on a good day^ and blackbirds at night? But there is a streetlight at the end of my little cul de sac^^ as well as several down on the main road.^^^
Mrs Redboots
I envy you your husband in his lovely choices of presents. Mine has to be told what to buy me (but then, to be fair, he does!). A lovely ring.
Thank you! Peter takes direction very well. In this case he didn't have to—he had the idea and then it was the jeweller's problem. But it was Peter who found this jeweller-who-listens twenty years ago, so the points are still all his.
And I would assume a blackbird – we are having them here in London, too.
I want to say, good for them, and I suppose I do still mean good for them. But the critters that manage most successfully to colonise human towns tend to be the thugs—blackbirds, foxes. Rats. Cockroaches. Doesn't speak well of us, although we knew that. At least blackbirds have a pretty song. But I barely see my robin any more because the blackbirds have taken over. I'd rather have my robin.
But the other night I was staying with my parents, in Sussex, and I heard an owl. I was almost sure it was an owl . . . I haven't heard one there since my childhood . . . But when we went out to the car to come home to London, the owl swooped overhead.
What kind of owl? Little owls are dead common around here, and we have tawny owls pretty much by the yard as well. Occasionally if you're very very good you'll see a barn owl at twilight, if you're out wandering the countryside. Absolute magic. No mere Harry Potter snowy owls need apply. They're also amazingly huge—you have that adrenaline rush at first sight which is both the thrill of it and a faint atavistic memory of pterosaurs or something when you think it might be coming for you. Or at least a hellhound. One of the things I'm not going to get around to, this life, is keeping a bird of prey.
I'm currently having a fantasy about quail, though. A tall thin tiered cage so they can fly and perch. Nice little eggs. This comes of faithfully reading COUNTRY SMALLHOLDING http://www.countrysmallholding.co.uk/ I should get out more.
^ If it's alive, it's probably an eagle. Unless we're in a Thursday Next novel.
^^ Which is approximately the only way in which I've done better than my semi-detached neighbour, who has a cellar, despite being farther up the hill than I am, as well as an attic, four bedrooms, a dining room and two sitting rooms, a larger garden, room to park three or four cars and a chunk out of my tiny sitting room and equally tiny office to run his frelling plumbing. But he has the streetlight.
Of course I have the hyperactive security light belonging to Mr Military and family immediately across the road from me, which is apparently carefully aimed to dazzle into my windows and make sure I'm not trading world secrets with Martians or anything.+ Yes, there are very likely hellhounds on the bed/sofa. Sue me.
+ No, just handbell ringers.
^^^ I've never caught him at it, but I swear there's one that sits on the wall six feet from my bedroom window and serenades the security light.
^^^^ I rescued a small fluffy baby owl something a few years ago, sitting in the main road at the end of the mews' drive, waiting for something to happen. What happened was that I got out of Wolfgang and moved it. What I remember is blogging that I'd pulled my sleeves down over my hands to pick it up and someone who knows more than I do posted to the forum that its mum wouldn't have minded human smell on her offspring the way us mostly-clueless vague tree-hugging nature-lovers would expect.
*** I don't know what their excuse is. They have cats. They can't possibly subscribe to the fallacy about fresh air being good for you? In an English winter when you have the lurgy?
† Negotiating acceptable comic rudeness is always a ratbag. There's something in the rule of thumb that says you're only allowed to be gratuitously horrible about something you have personal experience of, so LRK and I can be rude about husbands. It's not the only rule of thumb, but it's somewhere to start. As I've told you before I was gobsmacked when I first started going out into the world as a published writer—a single published writer—and was accused of being a man-hater. What? Yes. I have uppity heroines. Siiiiigh. I still get mail to this effect. Hey, some of my best friends, etc, aside from being married to one. For twenty years.
I think these jokes are funny. But I also think 'I'm a natural blonde, please speak slowly' is funny. And I've only ever seen it on women's t shirts, not men's. I was also a natural blonde through my twenties.
†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly
You see it both ways—my way, and 'we don't serve faster than light neutrinos here' said the bartender. I realise my way requires that your auditor has been cramming on maths and physics lately too, but this way spoils the joke, I think. I'd rather undergo the humiliation of having it explained.
January 7, 2012
World Premiere Opera, Guest Post by Diane_in_MN
The Minnesota Opera has a history of performing new operas, and this year its New Works Initiative program premiered Silent Night, composed by Kevin Puts with a libretto by Mark Campbell. The opera is based on the French film Joyeux Noel, which takes place during the Christmas truce of 1914, at the beginning of World War I. MN Opera's artistic director Dale Johnson commissioned the work after seeing the film. The fact that two central characters are opera singers may have made the story seem even more suitable for an operatic setting.
I was entirely unfamiliar with Kevin Puts's music*—a fairly substantial list of orchestral and chamber works; Silent Night is his first opera—and really didn't know what to expect of this piece. The last commissioned premiere by MN Opera was Ricky Ian Gordon's The Grapes of Wrath in 2007**. It was a good production and very well reviewed, but Gordon incorporated enough period popular styles in some scenes that it struck me as a mélange of The Met and Broadway***. Given the potential for incorporating plucky WWI –era songs, never mind Christmas carols, into the Silent Night scenario, and given the often-loose meaning of "based upon" when applied to a source, it seemed to me that this opera could go off in any of several different directions.
As it turned out, Puts features neither Christmas carols nor patriotic songs in his opera. The opera singers—a German tenor and his Danish soprano lover—are in the midst of a performance when war is declared, and the tenor is called into the army. A young Scot and his brother enlist, under the then-prevailing common impression that the war will be short, exciting, and glorious; their priest follows them as an ambulance driver. A French lieutenant is called up, leaving his pregnant wife on the verge of giving birth. Months later, their respective companies are positioned across no-man's land from each other, following a battle near a French city. The rest of the work centers on the interaction between the three companies that leads to the Christmas truce, followed by the outraged reactions of each country's military authorities when they learn about it later.
As one might expect, the cast is entirely male with the exception of the Danish soprano, who arranges to be with her lover for a Christmas Eve concert for the Army brass, and then accompanies him back to his company, where he has promised to sing for his fellow soldiers. (The singing, of course, is what leads to the truce.) There's enough variation in the men's voices, plus some good choral writing, to keep this interesting, and of course the soprano's voice stands out entirely. The libretto is written in English, French, and German, and Puts recognizes that different rhythms and, to some extent, styles, apply when setting each of the three languages. The opera is sung through, with the relatively short arias incorporated into the dialog. This is effective dramatically, although it doesn't necessarily make for memorable tunes. Puts and Campbell let the material speak for itself without sentimentalizing it, a plus in my book, although there's an O. Henry twist at the end that struck me as being a little heavy-handed and that I could have done without. The libretto is said to be very close to the screenplay of the film, which I have not seen, so I won't blame it on the librettist.
All five performances of Silent Night were sold out, and the audience at the performance I attended (the last matinee) was very appreciative of the music, the singing, and the production. Reviews have been good, and this combined with the warm reception by the audience must be encouraging to both the composer and the New Works Initiative. Opera as an art form has a four-hundred-year history, and people who love it should not want that history to stop in the mid-twentieth century.
Overall, I think this is a good opera, but not a great one. It seems to me that it works really well as staged music drama, but the music is tied closely enough to the action that it would be less rewarding as a purely listening experience.+ I hope it gets more productions, and I hope Kevin Puts sees his way to write more operas, as his first attempt came off so well.
A selection of brief scenes from Silent Night can be found here, on the Minnesota Opera web site.
**************************
* I've now heard a few snippets on YouTube. Why don't our orchestras program and our radio stations play more new classical music? It's out there and we rarely get to hear it. Grrrr!
** I dislike Steinbeck and think that Grapes received its only necessary musical treatment in Woody Guthrie's Ballad of Tom Joad, but I was prepared to be open-minded about it.
*** In fact, I think Gordon's opera is a good piece of work and deserves a place on stage. I don't know its performance history; it has a fairly large cast, which may make it less attractive to small companies.
+ I've noticed this about several of the new or new-ish productions I've seen. I wonder if this is because we've become such a visual culture that some opera composers think in terms of stagings rather than recordings? Opera was conceived as a form that would unify all the arts, but I think it's fair to say that for most of its history, music was the dominant art and hearing the dominant sense in the mix.
January 6, 2012
Flu, hellhounds, SHADOWS and Jodi Meadows
Okay, that's not your average mixture. Let's have the good news first:
http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525
YAAAAAAAAAAAY. It's alive!
* * *
. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope. I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it's always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.* Unfortunately not so in this case. I nearly didn't get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds. And SHADOWS. Which is still due the end of the month. I can't frelling believe I'm ILL again. I was ill in October, for pity's sake**. I'm not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it's going to insist on the full panoply of flu. At the moment the jury is still out. But I feel like stale death on toast. AND CRANKY.
So I got out of bed at about . . . noon. I barely fell down at all. There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.
I got dressed. I don't guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares? It's covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.*** I hurtled hounds. Yes. I did.† Twice.††
And I worked on SHADOWS. I did.
. . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.††† Good night. May you sleep better than I'm likely to.
* * *
* Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL: It's all maths. I don't know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics. You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke. It's all maths.^
What is true is something else he said in the introduction however: that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it. And you're supposed to read the equations. What's different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words. The equations are still there. You still have to deal with equations. They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations. But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^
If you're up for it . . . it's pretty fascinating. It's so insane. It's so not Newtonian.^^^ I also just love that most of it you can't know exactly. HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. HA HA HA HA HA. Granted I still don't get it, but I'm a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can't be nailed down. This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^ And as he says, approximate doesn't mean wrong: it means . . . approximate.
Anyway. It's fascinating. But it's probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness.
^ Now that I'm committed, which is to say I've bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We've Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners. There are two scientists and a lawyer. I'm sure he's a very hard-line lawyer. And probably the author's best friend since childhood. I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life.
+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only. If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible's reader gets a medal. But you're still going to have to have the hard copy. For the equations. If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you'll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end. Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . .
^^ I do wish he'd stay away from real-world examples. Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it's left the field and is busy arcing over the stands. Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 I don't know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics.
^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being. It's because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.
^^^^ Look at human nature. Look at hellhound nature.
** I think it was October. Autumn anyway. A few months ago. And my stupid throat hasn't recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name. ARRRRRRRGH. And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you're made of boiling aluminium. I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES. RARELY. Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH.
*** One right foot. One left foot.
† I also deserve a medal. But so do they. At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside. I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won't do in a pinch. They probably just think I'm having a bad ME day. Multi-application hellhound training.
†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow. Another medal.
††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes. So she's taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul. Here's my favourite:
It's the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there's a big crowd gathered in the town square. So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what's going on.
"It's a hanging," says the newsman. "They're hanging Brown Paper Pete today."
"Brown Paper Pete? Why do they call him that?" asks the visitor.
"Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel," says the newsman.
"Wow," says the visitor, "What are they hanging him for?"
"Rustling."
She's just sent me this one, but she says that I'm sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny.
Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. While he's drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, "Hey mister! I like your tie!" He looks around, but doesn't see anybody. A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, "Hey mister! Nice shirt!" Again, he looks around, but there's no one around except him and the bartender. A little while later, the voice says, "Hey mister! You look like you've lost some weight!" So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what's going on. The bartender says, "Oh, that's the peanuts. They're complimentary."
January 5, 2012
The Tourmaline Ring
So it's twenty and a half years ago. Peter and I have decided to get married.* All the important stuff has already been decided, like that I'm going to emigrate.** But that means we have to get married: the fiancée's visa only lasts for six months. That's not a problem: we're both old-fashioned: we want to get married, and I'm the kind of old-fashioned that furthermore wants a proper ring to go with the deal. Hey. I like jewellery.
I'd originally assumed we'd find one suitably old and hoary and glamorous and possibly mad in an antique shop somewhere for an engagement ring; wedding rings to be practical need to be plain and could be dealt with separately when we knew what the flashy one looked like. We spent some time in this pursuit*** but we were finding nothing nearly unique and fabulous enough, I had to finish DEERSKIN and we wanted to get on with the moving and the new life and so on.
I can't now remember who recommended this jewellery designer to us. But we went to see him and explained we wanted something definitively Maine for me to wear in England. He suggested Maine tourmalines—I think I didn't know about Maine tourmalines at that point—and we eventually agreed that he'd design and make not only an engagement ring with the tourmalines, but wedding rings that would all fit together as part of the same design. Peter felt this was mostly my show† and I did try to tell the bloke the sort of thing I liked: flowing lines, mainly, swirly or woven or floral. Maybe sort of art nouveau. I liked the stuff in his shop. And I liked the idea of the Maine designer working with the Maine tourmalines.
We went back to see the stones when they arrived. I don't know if the designer bloke asked for triangular, or if that was what he could get. Okay. This would make it unusual. And pink and green are excellent.
We never saw any designs. We saw the rings themselves when they'd already been cast (if cast is what I mean) and although they weren't finished yet it wasn't like we could go backward and say, uh, no, I meant Charles Rennie Macintosh, not Cecil Balmond.†† The wedding rings had these little hooks in the middle like the two ends of a twist tie bent together—and with the squared-off ends sticking out up and down your finger. Can you say CATCHES THE FRELL ON EVERYTHING? My tourmaline engagement ring fit down over the top ensnaring bend of my wedding ring, but that still left the sharp bottom edge to cause havoc and mayhem. They were certainly . . . different. But they were not sensible, and while many of the details of that whole era of the beginning of my life with Peter are blurry with exhilaration and terror, I do remember Peter telling the bloke that he works with his hands a lot, he spends hours every day in the garden, doing carpentry and cooking and he needs a ring that won't get in the way.
The man smiled and nodded. These creative types. They're so in their own little world.†††
But part of the swoop and breathtakingness of a runaway romance like ours is that you do kind of want it to glide as far as it can before it founders on some ineluctable aspect of ratbagging reality. The wife in the attic. The outstanding warrant. The gerbil fetish. The chocolate addiction . . . And I don't think the designer bloke was cheating us in any overt way: I think we paid an honest amount for his time and his materials. He just didn't listen.
Almost the first thing we did after the wedding was over was . . . run to the nearest ordinary jeweller and buy two utterly plain smooth gold rings and wear them. The barbed designer versions came out for fancy occasions and the rest of the time lived in my jewellery drawer. Sigh. This had not been the plan . . . and while the plain gold ones worked fine as wedding rings‡ I was rather wistful about my Maine tourmalines wasting their glory in a drawer.
I think it was around our tenth anniversary that Peter said, for our twentieth, we'll have the tourmalines reset.
So that's what we did. And this time we went to a jeweller we've been going to for . . . twenty years. He listens. He made my fabulous silver whippet belt buckle.‡‡ And we saw designs. We saw several designs. I wanted my new ring to look like it fit next to the plaited-gold-with-tiny-diamond-chips ring that was my fiftieth birthday present‡‡‡ and which I now wear as my wedding ring. And it does, doesn't it?
This time it worked.
Mmmmmm. ::Beams::
* * *
* And our friends and family are all going, what? Well, it was a somewhat precipitate decision. We'd known each other maybe sixty hours in total.^
^ I've told you how we met, haven't I? I was on a Literary Tour of England and he was one of the speakers.
** Somebody had to. Peter originally suggested we divide our time, but I knew—and I'm sure I was right—we'd both hate it. And Peter had lived in this area of Hampshire over forty years at that point, had four kids, the first two grandchildren, three brothers and their families, eight first cousins and . . . I had a whippet, and a background as a peripatetic military brat.
*** This was the occasion of one of our most important Bonding Moments. THELMA AND LOUISE had been bigger than god, Spacelab and Boris Yeltzin for months, and it was playing at a theatre in Portland, Maine, where we'd gone to cruise antique jewellery shops. I've told you this too, haven't I? We walked out. We walked right after the dumb one spends the night with Brad Pitt the robber on the lam AND THE MONEY IN THE FRELLING DRAWER while the smart (!!?!??) one goes off to have a deep, sensitive evening with her supportive boyfriend.
† He's got a much better eye for jewellery than he thinks he does—see: silver whippet belt buckle, below—but it's true that this was my Big Symbolic Thing about leaving Maine to live in England with him.
†† http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-14027083 Okay, I don't know what Balmond was doing twenty years ago. Designing engagement rings, possibly.
††† I do wonder if Designer Bloke already had this idea in his mind and he wanted to use it, whether the triangular stones inspired it, or what. But he sure wasn't too interested in the interface with his clients.
‡ Anybody aware of the standard behaviour about such things of English gentlemen of Peter's vintage will be gobsmacked that Peter wears a wedding ring at all. Well. Yes. I don't think it ever occurred to me that he wouldn't—I wanted us both to wear them—and that's what happened. It wasn't till later that I realised that Peter was humouring me about this too.^
^ I tell myself that if I have to choose I'd rather he wore a wedding ring than remembered to shut the door behind him.+ I perhaps tell myself this rather often. But romance over practicality? Sure. Why do I have sixty rose-bushes in a garden the size of a large ping-pong table?
+ This includes refrigerator doors. Just by the way.
‡‡ I hope I've told you this story. I told Peter I wanted something significant and wearable for my fortieth birthday.
‡‡‡ Also bought in Maine. Hmm. My sixtieth is next year . . .
January 4, 2012
The Middle of the Night Again
It is already the middle of the night* and I have barely considered the blog. I'm also tired, and this is only going to get worse as the days plod relentlessly on to the end of the month.** I always do start dreaming my books as the writing and the coming-together accelerates toward being finished, but it's a crazier than usual process this time. Also, since this is a Things Are Coming to Get You story*** and Maggie spends a lot of the book wired out of her tiny mind†, the dreams are more YAAAAAAAAAAH than, you know, exciting in the standard having-adventures mode. And I still have no idea where I'm going to be by the end of January. I still need a miracle. But the main thing—which is what I keep telling myself when I've managed to get to bed before dawn but not asleep before dawn—is that the book is going. It's a book. It will be a book. It's there and it's GOING. Yaay. A lot of last year with PEG II was pretty gruesome.
Anyway. Last night I told you there would be photos of the event.†† But I seem to have done my waffling-on about nothing in particular enough for one night, so I will leave you merely with this:
I love presents. I love SPARKLY presents.
And I'll tell you the story of the three Maine tourmalines in my twentieth-anniversary ring tomorrow. Unless, of course, I get distracted again.
* * *
* Or, more accurately, past the middle of the night. But approaching what even I consider to be the middle of my night.
It occurs to me that it's a good thing that the epic super-hurtle of SHADOWS is happening in the deeps of winter when you kind of want to stay indoors anyway^ and the nights are long enough that dawn isn't awfully importunate. If this were June I'd be getting to bed well past dawn. Of course this also means that by the time I get up I have about two and a half hours of daylight before sunset, but hey, that gives the three of us long enough for a good hellhound sprint. And I know robins—ahem!—are known to sing after dark, but what else is there that sings in the middle of the frelling night? They can't all be robins. And you don't get nightingales in town. But I've got the Wee Hours Chorus going like gangbusters back at the cottage every night as we arrive home at increasingly insane hours.
^ Even if you'd rather be curled up with hellhounds and someone else's good book rather than writing your own.
** Meanwhile in the Additional Blergs I Don't Need Right Now department . . . I got asked to do a short thing for someone else's book last summer and originally I said yes. Then the whole PEG II disaster crashed and burned, and in August, when the Short Thing was due I was frantically starting SHADOWS.
They're nice people. They gave me an extension. Never give me an extension. I am a fiend from hell. When I miss your deadline say, nice knowing you, I'll get someone else. They gave me another extension. Merrilee finally said, look, you have enough going on. Just tell them no: it's okay. So I told them no. Through Merrilee, because I am craven slime, and this is why craven slime have agents.
That was about a month ago.
Today Merrilee said, Remember those people you were supposed to do the Short Thing for? This is not your fault, but somehow the message didn't get through, and you're still scheduled and they're really hoping you might . . . although of course they need it yesterday. . . .
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Under other circumstances I would gladly tell them to kiss my ancient laptop, but the thing is, I have not behaved well. I should have said no back in August—or anyway September when my editor said, a new novel called SHADOWS? Great. I need it the end of January. —But I'd already said yes to the Short Thing, and . . .
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
PS: I'd actually done about half of it. But because I was feeling like such a jerk about the whole thing after Merrilee said 'no' for me last month I deleted that file. So I didn't have it sitting around staring at me reproachfully. Altogether now:
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
*** Arguably all my stories—or all stories—are Things Coming to Get You stories. It's called 'plot tension'. And without it you're either dead boring or mmrrglglrrrp. . . . I was going to make an unkind remark about the genre known as literary, of which there is an unnecessarily large subgenre of Life Is Miserable So Why Bother stories where the whole point is that nothing happens. I don't read them, however, and I sure as Things Coming to Get You don't write them.
† For some reason I find this aspect of her character very easy to get alongside. Long-time readers will remember my saying that my way in with Jake, my first male narrator, was when I found out he was a worrier.
†† And thank you for all the encouragement to continue^ with WOLF GHOSTS ANNIVERSARY MOON. Please do remember that it's a kind of fictional blog entry though, you know? It's not supposed to be fabulous.^^ It's supposed to be a bit of fun of a sort I don't usually run here. It's maybe a branching-out from what I said the other night about reviving Ask Robin: It's dumb that I'm a writer and I never talk about writing.^^^
^ Jabenami
I thought story ideas all came from the Electroplasmic hydrocephalic genre fiction generator 2000?
http://wondermark.com/554/
THANK YOU. I tried to find this link last night, but I was by then ninety percent asleep and more than a trifle sloshed+, and failed. I was going to have another look today . . . but I don't have to because you've already done it.
Yes. Absolutely. 100% of universal literature is to be found here. It's just a question of pulling the right levers.
+ Please note that I am not hung over today. Three litres of water and twelve pots of peppermint tea will do the job, not to mention the superfluous brisk bracing mini-hurtle from cottage to mews and back again. Although the crucial thing really is the getting out of bed for another pee every twenty minutes. This keeps the blood moving expeditiously and the liver and kidneys awake to keep processing.
^^Although Hannah thinks Merrilee is still going to have my ass on a plate when she reads it.
^^^ It's also a way of getting a guest blog out of my husband who hasn't written me one in YEARS.
January 3, 2012
Anniversary
IT'S PETER'S AND MY TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY TODAY.*
We went out to dinner. I took my knapsack computer, and when its battery died** Peter hit up reception for some, you know, paper, and we kept going.
We're writing a story. This was my idea. Usually we do crossword puzzles. But this is our TWENTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY. So let's do something else. I know! Let's . . . write a story.
We got off to a slightly rough start. Peter's title was Wolf Moon and the first sentence was: 'The child looked up at the big shiny moon and said, "There ought to be wolves."' My title was Anniversary Ghosts and my first sentence was, '"Oh, thank you," I said, showing all of my teeth in a smile.'
We compromised.***
* * *
Ellie looked up at the moon and said, "There ought to be wolves."
Outside the window half a mile away on the other side of the park the lights of the M6 traffic made a swirly, dancing sort of pattern under the bright moon. I couldn't decide if the headlamp beams seemed to be plaiting and unplaiting themselves, or merely changing partners in some long, elaborate line dance. But the pattern began to change, slowing . . . and slowing . . . and slowing. I watched it, confused. Not that this was the first slightly odd thing that had happened in the last few days.
And then the lights ceased to move altogether.
Even through the glass I could hear the police sirens. Blue lights flashed.
"Accident?" I said. But wouldn't the lights have come to an abrupt halt, rather than gradually slowing, like machinery winding down? Wouldn't there have been some noise, however faint?
The duke went to the window and threw up the sash.
Something howled. "That isn't a siren," the duke said.
"No," said Ellie. "That's one of my wolves."
I tried not to sigh. Ellie was rather a trial. I reminded myself (again) that children of previous marriages were always a trial and what my sister Manfreda put up with was far worse. But then Erntgard had been married three times before he married Manfreda and his children might be forgiven for being a little unsettled. Garren had only been married the once before me, and Ellie was no worse than dreamy. But wolves, for pity's sake!
"Wolves?" said the duke. "What about my deer?"
He sounded perfectly serious. And there were deer in the park: you saw them if you went out walking or riding.
"Oh, they'll be all right," said Ellie. "It's only people."
"Only people what?" said Garren.
"Who've got to watch out for them," said Ellie.
"Well, that's all right then," said the duke, and shut the window.
"What about the solstice carollers?" I asked, trying to make a joke.
Ellie thought about it. Her earnest little face became pinched with the effort of so much concentration. "I think the carollers will be all right," she said. "I think the moon will protect them. As long as they know to stay in the open, where the moon can see them."
The child had no sense of humour. Perhaps it is inevitable that you lose your sense of humour if your mother runs off with an under-gardener before you are quite four years old. I glanced out the window. The sky was clear and the moon was near full, and reflected dazzlingly off the snow. Ellie was right that the carollers would be able to see any wolves coming at any rate. I frowned. The M6 seemed still to be paralysed; it must be quite an accident. The sirens had died away but . . . there was that howl again. The duke was right—whatever it was, it wasn't a siren.
"You'd better stop them, Ellie," said the duke.
Stop them? I thought. Ellie?
Two sets of blue lights came bashing up the drive and braked, scattering the gravel in front of the door.
The duke seemed to be listening to something other than the police running up the steps and Fulsome the butler answering the door. "Good," said the duke. "That should do it. Well done, Ellie. I'll cope with this." He left the room, shutting the door behind him.
I looked at Ellie. She looked at the floor.
The rest of us waited in silence, the silence growing more and more awkward as the minutes crept by. The huge old clock in the corner going tick tock made it worse. It seemed to me that everyone was deliberately not looking at me. What have I done wrong now? I thought.
The duke returned just in time to stop me from blurting out something regrettable. "Apparently there's been an accident on the slip road onto the M6," said the duke. "No one hurt, but a truck taking animals to Cheswell Zoo skidded and ran off the road and some wolves got loose. They're not letting anyone into the park till they've got it sorted out. So your carollers should be all right, Hedda; they aren't due here for at least another hour, and the police are stopping everyone at the gate."
Everyone made a rather counterproductive effort to relax. I looked out the window again and blinked. The M6 was moving normally. Of course I'd imagined there was anything odd about what had happened before; it had been the result of a perfectly straightforward traffic accident, and fortunately the only damage was a few escaped wolves. The police would catch them quickly. We'd probably even have our carollers on time.
"I'm sorry, my darling," said Garren. "This has rather ruined the moment. Happy anniversary," and he pulled a small box out of his pocket and offered it to me.
"Thank you," I said, smiling determinedly. I opened the box. In the background I heard my father-in-law pulling the cork on the champagne. At least there would be champagne.
The box itself looked hundreds of years old. It was made of leather, but it was so rubbed and gouged it was almost difficult to tell. I stifled a sigh. This was what life in this family was like; everything was old, and frequently rather peculiar. My first anniversary gift was no exception. It was a ring—that much I could identify—but both the metal and the stone were very dark. I didn't know what to say. It was not your traditional sparkly trinket. "It's—er—old," I said hesitantly. "It's been in the family a long time?" I paused but no one said anything. Casting around for something else nonjudgmental to say I asked, "What is the stone?"
"Call it a good-luck charm," said my husband.
Rather doubtfully I slid it on my finger. It was unexpectedly the right size. It felt surprisingly comfortable, as if it belonged there. "Thank you," I said. I waited, not very hopefully, for him to tell me something about it, but he didn't.
There was a knock and a policeman put his head round the door. "We're all set," he said. "The driver said he was missing four wolves, and we've caught four wolves. Funny," he added. "They seemed happy to be caught."
"Indeed," said the duke. "Thank you." The policeman nodded around to the rest of us—of course I was imagining that his gaze lingered a moment on me, the stranger—and withdrew.
The duke moved back to the table and poured the champagne. He offered me the first glass, and bowed, I thought, somewhat sardonically. I risked a glance at him. His eyes were as dark as the mystery stone in my ring. I looked at my husband. He was looking at me worriedly. He had been looking at me worriedly since we'd arrived at his father's altogether too large and too grand house three days ago. Didn't most couples have a quiet romantic dinner for two on their first anniversary? But then most couples weren't the Duke of Blitheringdale's second son and his hapless second wife.
TO BE CONTINUED
* * *
* Slight sense of whew, made it.
** I think I have a Laptop Battery gremlin. All three of my laptops presently have duff batteries.
*** Please remember this is what might kindly be called first draft. There was champagne. There was claret. There was Muscat.^ And after the taxi dropped me off at the cottage so I could fetch poor starving hellhounds, I figured we'd better walk back to the mews.
^ There was chocolate. Details tomorrow.
January 2, 2012
Resuscitated Ask Robin Aftermath
Mismatched Socks
How do you convert ideas for stories you have into believable plots?
I start with about 4 cups of good flour, 5 cups of warm water, a tablespoonful of dry yeast and another tablespoonful of honey . . .
And then you stir it all together, cover, place in a warm, draft-free spot, and leave it alone for a while, right?
That's right. But story-yeast can be rather slow. Sometimes it's years before the sponge has bulked up enough. You just want to keep it warm and comfy and add a little more flour and honey from time to time. It will of course suddenly start raging out of its bowl when you're fully occupied whacking the gorblimey out of some other dough.*
Also, this made me laugh.
Oh good. That was the plan. Because this question also illustrates one of what are probably the two main reasons why I let Ask Robin slip. Reason one: Impossible questions. What on earth was this person expecting? The Chinese menu web site for writers?** There isn't an answer. If there were there would be even more books out there . . . but they'd also be better books.
I don't object summarily or comprehensively to impossible questions per se—most of writing is about what might magnanimously be called guided floundering and it can be reassuring to compare scars with other people who have slammed into submerged objects in the murk—but I do rather object to the impossible question being plonked down in front of me like a dead fish on a slab. The entirety of the email that bore this question was exactly . . . the twelve words of this question. I grant that email is different from other written forms of communication, and I don't usually bother with salutations either . . . but to a stranger I'm asking the favour of free professional expertise/attention of? Um, yes. I'd stick a salutation in. I think a 'Dear Robin McKinley, Would you be willing to talk a little about . . . .' would be nice. Plus your name at the bottom. This is big steaming pet peeve of mine. Put YOUR NAME at the bottom of your email. Cheez. You don't have to tell me I'm your favourite author, or even your favourite author this week and next week it's going to be E. M. Hull***. But a quick genuflection at the altar of old-fashioned politeness?
Yes. Damn it.
Quats
THANK YOU for validating the way I write. I spent much of junior high and half of high school traumatized by English teachers who insisted that you absolutely could not write anything worth reading, much less grading, unless you wrote an outline first, and then plodded through sticking exactly to that outline stage by stage; and required that you turn in the outline to prove you'd done it, then a thesis and topic sentence for each paragraph, then….
And this illustrates the second reason† I have let Ask Robin lapse . . . and how I was wrong to do so. I've answered the 'how I write' question before. Many times. It's almost as common as the much-dreaded Where Do You Get Your Ideas? †† It's another one I have nothing against rambling on about but I'm a bit conscious that I've said it all before (many times). So I'm relieved that it's new and interesting to someone.
I am not a consistent human being. On the one hand I don't expect anyone to read this blog every night or to have memorised my FAQ and Author as Bitch from Hell on the web site. I'm also extremely conscious that certain, ahem, themes appear regularly in this blog. On the other hand I'm reluctant to recycle too blatantly. One of the reasons I decided to drag Ask Robin out from under the bed and dust her off however is the awareness that after four (?) years of blogging pretty much everything is recycled to a greater or lesser extent and it's a bit daft that I'm a writer and never talk about writing.
Blogmom
To submit a question for Ask Robin, email askrobin@robinmckinleysblog.com
Ask Robinses are archived in the Ask Robin Archives, a veritable treasure trove of… Ask Robinses!
You can also wander over to Robin's Web site and peruse the most excellent FAQ
– Blogmom, who doesn't do New Year's Resolutions either (except for one-word themes for the year)††† but will try to keep Ask Robin Archives updated regularly
Diane in MN
I saw a sign at a colleague's work station years ago: If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk the sign of? Hah! Guess what MY desk looks like.
We be of one blood, thou and I. So, is this a genuine quote by Albert Einstein? Because if it is it so goes in the Quote Thingy. But the last time I tried to add an excellent Einstein quote that someone had posted to the forum—"But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid"—it turned out to be an urban myth.
It's still a good remark. Maybe we should put it, or both of them, up as 'anonymous.'
Horsehair Braider
You mentioned doodles and I got mine! YES! It's totally gorgeous and I love it. I'll probably put it in my will.‡ . . . To any who are waiting, it is SO worth the wait. My book is a treasure, and if I ever have the opportunity to have one done again I will leap at the chance, even if I have to sell a goat to afford it.
Oh good. ::Relief. Relief:: Hmm. Maybe there's a future bribery opportunity here: any guest post used on Days in the Life eligible for free doodle.‡‡ But surely you'd only have to sell a few extra cheeses for the book?? I'd hate to be responsible for a goat being sold that didn't want to be sold.
EMoon
Quats: I was taught that way too, but evaded it: wrote the paper, then the outline, then the first draft, etc. and handed them in at the right times–in reverse order.
Emphasis mine. You are so ooooooooorganised Whimper. I can't even begin to imagine being—or ever having been—enough ahead of the game to do this. AAAAUGH. I will now carry this picture of Superemoon indelibly etched in my frazzled mind as I labour back and forth between doodle-desk and writing desk. . . .
And speaking of the latter, I bet I could get at least another paragraph or two of SHADOWS down before I terminally fall out of my chair tonight.
* * *
* Nooooooo! Not the Seventeenth Third Damar Novel! Nooooooo!
** Column A: Heroine. Column B: Hero/2nd Heroine/Other Romantic Interest Not Covered by the Foregoing. Column C: Heroine's Best Friend. Column C(a) If Column A is human, than Column C is Nonhuman. These may be reversed if desired. Column C(a)(1) animal (2) alien (3) Supernatural/paranormal/fey (4) Other.^ Column D: Villain. Column E: Secondary Characters Who Move the Plot Along. Column F: Secondary Characters Who Screw Things Up More. . . .
This could be fun.
^ Special considerations: these categories may be suitably adjusted if either (A) or (B) is nonhuman. It is however in the highest degree desirable that at least one of (A) (B) or (C) is not human.+
+ Oh, did I mention this is the Fantasy Writers' Chinese Menu?
*** In which case I will be compelled to hunt you down and force you to memorize The Complete Works of Shakespeare and of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. I discuss E M Hull and THE SHEIK with some emphasis on my web site.
† All right, three main reasons. Third reason: indolence.
†† It's also another impossible question. How I write also depends on the particular story. But the beginning-to-end-three-times-in-succession is pretty much my basic bottom line. With story-specific curlicues. The minutiae of how and where I keep notes, when or if I ever pause or go back to edit or change something in the current draft . . . feh. I have a strong, Don't you have something better you could be doing than asking silly questions? reaction, but I tend to be all over the details of other people's jobs because they're not mine and I'm an inquisitive dork^. So, okay, fine, but remember that if you're another writer what I say about how I write has nothing to do with you.
^ And also I may be able to put them in a story some day
††† I like this idea a lot, except for the fact that the words that keep occurring to me are things like 'multimillionaire' and 'thirtysixhourday'.
‡ Snork.
‡‡ All of you who liked Horsehair Braider's first guest post and are waiting hopefully for the next one . . . she's sent me one^ and I'm such a mess I keep failing to get back to her about it. Given how I keep whining about guest blogs, this should give you some clue what a basketcase I am at the moment.
^ And it's funny
January 1, 2012
New Year's Resolutions
I don't do New Year's resolutions. I gave them up decades ago. If they work for you, then great for you, and no doubt your desk is tidy, your accounts and bank statements are tidier, your bathroom scales hold no terrors, and your sock drawer is the wonder of seven counties. My sock drawer might possibly be the wonder of seven counties, but not in a good way. Anyway. I don't do resolutions. For someone like me they're just an excuse to shake my own finger in my own face and say, Bad girl. Go stand in that corner and no Tolkien, Kipling, Georgette Heyer, Diana Wynne Jones or Peter Dickinson until you have paid for being a shiftless weeny and once again failing to write three bestsellers in six months, solve world hunger, or remember where you ran out of composted manure when you were feeding your rose bushes and had to stop till you went to the farm shop and bought some more. *
I got tired of standing in the corner with nothing to read. The solution seemed obvious. I gave up making resolutions.
But I forget that this excellent form of self-management is not general, so every year at this time I'm startled at all the people turning over new leaves and blogging about it. Oh. Um. So I thought I'd make one New Year's Resolution, just for variety. It's good not to be too attached to your own prejudices.**
In 2012 I am going to resuscitate Ask Robin. ***
I have only one question for you – what is hilliehoolie? You referred to it in Chalice, and I understand it's something made with milk, but nobody seems to know exactly what it is, at least so far as the internet is concerned.
Heh. I'd be very disappointed if Google scoured alternate realities till it triumphantly produced a recipe. It's a CHALICE-world thing. And yes, it's milk, and it's fermented milk, but beyond that I don't know.
I'm wondering, were you at all inspired and/or influenced by Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast film in writing either of your Beauty and the Beast retellings?
No.
I didn't see the film till I'd written BEAUTY and had, in fact, sent it in to Harper & Row (as it then was) and was waiting agonizedly for them to send it back. (Which they didn't. The rest is history.) This may have warped my attitude, but I didn't like the film much (bad me). I don't find either Josette Day or Jean Marais particularly beautiful, and the stylised posturing which, it seemed to me, was based on the audience finding them beautiful, irritated me: and I hated the whole business of Marais also playing Day's venal creep of a real-world would-be boyfriend.
This is in the FAQ somewhere: the one image I took away with me is the disembodied arms along the walls holding candelabra, and sweeping back and forth to 'follow' Day as she paces. I thought that was deeply cool. And it does appear in ROSE DAUGHTER. So an itty-bitty fraction of 'yes' to the second part of your question. But then I've read—or seen—about forty six gajillion Beauty and the Beasts, including a lot that don't bear that title, like JANE EYRE.
What do you consider your writing strengths? Weaknesses?
I don't think in those terms. I can't afford to, or my superego would shut me down. (See: why I don't make New Year's resolutions.) I tell stories. The stories come to me and say, Write me! WRITE ME! And I try to write them. I try really, really hard to write them. It's a narrow, intense focus and I try to stay out of the swamp that in my case passes for my sense of competence and self-worth.
Have you ever written a scene and thought, "By gods, this is utter crap!"?
Of course. Granted I'm at the oh-gods-I-suck end of the self-confidence spectrum, but I would still hazard that any writer who hasn't . . . isn't a very good writer. The moment any dust mote of complacency sets in, you're dead meat.
What do you do then? (ie, tear it out, crumple it into a ball for hellkittens to play with, only to rescue it hours later and smooth it out, reread it, and think, "Well, it's not THAT bad." ……)
Keep going. Shut the superego off, turn the story-tap on, and keep writing. Don't reread. Not yet. Keep going. You can edit later.
How often do you edit your own work in progress? Do you start from a basic outline and go from there, or just have a general idea of a plot, plop it down onto paper, and then let it take shape? When do you reread your own stuff… in the middle, when it's ready to go to the editor, or constantly? Where do you keep your notes (if you have any)?
I start at the beginning and keep going to the end. And stop. Then I do it again. I start over at the beginning, write through to the end. And stop again. Then I do it a third time. Usually at that point I'm done. Usually. But I think about the whole process as little as possible, except for the paragraph or the chapter immediately under my fingers on the keyboard at that moment. The mantra is: Keep writing.
What does your writing space (if you have one) look like?
Messy.
How much do you feel your characters portray you in your novels?
This is so in the FAQ on my web site.
How many novels (finished or unfinished) did you practice on before finally finishing Beauty? . . .
I wrote one honest to goodness complete novel the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in college. (Just before I dropped out. Ahem. We will not speculate on causality.) It was enormously useful in terms of learning some of the nuts and bolts of the writing process and I feel it was a summer well spent. As a novel it is bulgy-eyed, gibbering, pernicious dreck. I think I still have a copy of it around somewhere. I hope I don't stumble across it unexpectedly some day when current novel-in-progress is biting me and I'm feeling fragile or I might retrain as an accountant.†
How do you convert ideas for stories you have into believable plots?
I start with about 4 cups of good flour, 5 cups of warm water, a tablespoonful of dry yeast and another tablespoonful of honey . . .
* * *
* Or give up abyss-black tea, similarly dark chocolate, or champagne. I have given up both chocolate and tea twice each, on separate occasions. During each of these four harrowing experiences I maintained the self-torture for over a year, so my frelling superego can't say I didn't give it a fair trial.
But wasn't worth it. It was like banishing the colour pink or not talking to Hannah for over a year. So I welcomed them back into my life. Everyone needs some outlet for excess. And silliness.
I admit I've never tried to give up champagne. Shudder. But I started on champagne comparatively late. I had a traumatic virgin experience with a bottle of cheap rosé which put me off the stuff for years. Which is just as well since I had trouble paying the rent into my thirties. Even cheap nasty champagne was about half the week's grocery budget.
** Usually. Some of them—for example the misuse of may/might, lay/lie and 'between him and I'—I cling to with unchecked ferocity.
*** For those of you wondering (a) what I thought I was doing last night and/or (b) where the frell I am on all the doodles and special projects I still owe to too many of you:
(a) Castles in the air are not resolutions. They're fantasies. Although I'd better be somewhere on PEG II^ by this time next year.
(b) These are not about making resolutions, except in the resolute doing sense. Getting the auction/sale stuff finished is just there, like hurtling hellhounds is there. It goes (more or less) like this: Fall out of bed in (something like) morning. Moan. Ingest tea.^^ Doodle. Hurtle. SHADOWS. More hurtle. More doodle. (More tea.) Possibly, if it's been either a very good or a very bad day, more SHADOWS. Ring some bells. Blog. Sing. Go to bed.
Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. . . .
^ Other than under the bed.
^^ See previous footnote.
† Okay, probably not an accountant.
December 31, 2011
I'm not ready for January
I have turkey gravy on my bright green solid coloured shirt. It shows.
We finished the gravy* last night.
This is a clean shirt, put on gravy-free this morning.**
Do you suppose quantum physics can answer this one?
* * *
It's December 31st, for about an hour and a half longer, as I write this. So, what have I done with my 2011?
FAILED to write PEG II. Sigh.
2012 is going to be better. Starting with getting some relatively readable the-end-is-in-sight form of SHADOWS sent in by the end of January.***
So, other prognostications?
By this time next year I will be halfway through the NEW PEG II.
I will also be ringing touches ofCambridge minor.†
And on handbells.††
And, this time next year, the New Arcadia Singers will be hurling impassioned emails at each other about the spring concert, because (after our unexpected success earlier in the year) we haven't quite nailed the playlist yet and practise starts again the first week of January.
Fantasy, much? Oh . . . well . . .
HAPPY NEW YEAR
* * *
The woman wants her CHAMPAGNE.
1. And gods don't they stare.
2. I left my jumper on. No one knows.††† And a good thing too. I was introduced to someone who reads me.
3. Those are my Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse All Stars. It seemed suitable.
4. I am now drinking my champagne.
5. I have to ring more bells in seven hours. Feh.
* * *
* Peter had to make more, of course. Next on the list: More brandy butter. Next on the list: living on lettuce for the entire month of January. Oh, well, in the circumstances I'd better have some protein too. Fried liver of rival publisher. Incompetent copyeditor roast.
** And I have to go ring bells in a few minutes^, and it's so warm I'm going to have to take my jumper off and stand revealed as a slob. It's also so warm that I didn't have tricky winter weather as an excuse not to go ring bells at midnight. Which is to say yes, when I rang Felicity back this morning, having still not quite decided what I was going to say to her, she was so delighted to hear from me I heard myself agreeing to come along tonight. It's now sheeting. Ugh. Also very unseasonable of it. But maybe all the staring villagers will stay home and watch Singin' in the Rain or something. Much better value.
^ And sulking, since I want my champagne now.
*** AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.
† With what band and in what tower, I have no idea. I'll worry about that next year. In an hour and a half.
†† HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
††† Except you, of course.
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