Robin McKinley's Blog, page 125

Epic fantasy and a night off

 

I'm not sure when this went live;  I'd thought we'd all get a heads up, but apparently not.    Anyway, here is part one of an extremely well populated discussion of what epic fantasy is by a lot of people who write it.  And a few of us who don't.   A lot of it is interesting, and you'll want to read more than just me;  I've contributed answers to the first two questions (What is/what is at the heart of epic fantasy and why do you write it), but you do have to keep scrolling.    

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/epic_interview1/

How Many Ways Can a Single Day Go Wrong?

 

. . . Starting with bats.  Of course. 

            It hasn't rained again in about a week, I'm watering my plant pots again, and I've also started to twitch at small noises (again) because of the suspected possible link between drought and indoor bats.  I heard it the moment I turned my light out last night*:  little scritching noises, little whirring noises and little chittering noises.  Oh gods.   I've now got a corner of the windowscreen in the bedroom bent back so that any invisible-hole-emerging bats can take a direct exit without going to the trouble of finding the bathroom or the attic, but I don't care how many times my intellect tells me that my tiny pipistrelles** are harmless I find it VERY DIFFICULT to sleep with them zapping around the bedroom.***

            When I finally got up this morning . . . I could still frelling hear them.  Scritch scritch.  Cheep cheep.  Whirrrr.  Noooooo. . . .  Some of you may remember last year when I found out I had bats, that I stood in the corner of the attic next to the bat nursery on the other side of the ceiling and listened to them rustling and chirping.  The noise was one of the reasons it never occurred to me I had bats.  I assumed it was some kind of birds—I also assumed it was fewer, whatever it was.  I didn't know bats chatted.  All of them at once, and at the tops of their tiny human-hearing-range voices.  And what I realised this morning, staring in deepest dread and dismay at the ceiling in my bedroom, is that they've expanded the nursery.  They're now also colonizing the wall below and running forward from their original attic corner.  The Bat Lady said that bat nursery numbers tend to stay stable and that new generations of bats go off and found new nurseries.  I dunno.  Maybe they elected a new prime minister with new ideas.  It sure looks like population pressure to me—population pressure and drought. 

            I was thinking about the drought too.  We have a perfectly good river† at the bottom of Market Street—and it's had water in it right along.  Why don't they go start the biggest pipistrelle nursery in Hampshire in one of the houses on the frelling river?††  And since I found out I have bats  I've been keeping a big plastic plant-pot-saucer of water in the garden†††.  I was staring at it this afternoon and wondering why it was (apparently) not fulfilling its function. . . . maybe it's not clean enough?  The bat-prostration-prevention saucers of water indoors are, you know, dishes.  So I scrubbed the wretched thing out . . . and then tucked it under the honeysuckle, in case it's been too out in the open for their frelling highnesses.‡   I will have to remember to offload any future evacuees to the other side of the honeysuckle.

            I was driving Peter to the bus this morning and then going on to the farmers' market for olives.  I think I have never quite entered upon the epic that is our Olive Quest.  We are olive junkies, and it's a hard jones to maintain, especially when our chief dealer is a nightmare of unreliability and creative dysfunction.  The Wednesday farmers' market has begun to enable some regularity in our olive-dependent lives . . . and they were out of the little black olives that, with chocolate and tea, are the daily bastions of my food—er—stronghold.  I mean, there's so much I can't eat:  I cherish the things I can afford to be addicted to twofold, not merely for their inherent thrillingness but for the fact that they don't make me swell up or turn green or anything. 

            I came home and flung myself at my computer.  But I'm too brainblasted to do any work, so after a few really embarrassing paragraphs I gave it up as a bad job and decided to heed one of Nadia's pieces of advice this week:  To cut myself some slack and stop listening to fabulous, electrifying, soul-stirring solo sopranos for a while ‡‡ and to listen to more choral music . . . so I went on line to research choir CDs.  And ran so afoul of website surreality that it would make a blog post all by itself, except you'd never believe me.

            It was at some point when I had been so overwhelmed by eleven-dimensionality and parallel universes where black was white and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote operas‡‡‡ that I was beginning to believe that choirs and choir music do not exist when I noticed that . . . neither hellhound had touched his lunch. 

            It was at about that point that Peter rang me to say that he'd missed his bus home, or his bus had missed him, or possibly the return bus wasn't running today.  He said he'd call me again from the train station.  Okay, I said, and applied myself to the hellhound problem. §

            Peter rang back from the station and told me what train to meet in Mauncester.

            About thirty seconds before I needed to bundle hellhounds into the car to go pick up Peter . . . Chaos started on his lunch.§§  You know how dogs (usually) eat?  Now you see it, now you don't?  Usually my guys, if they're going to eat at all, get on with it.  Not today.  And Peter had forgotten his mobile, so I couldn't ring him and tell him we'd be late.  And given what a fruit loop Chaos is I was not going to take his food away from him.  If he was going to eat it one crumb at a time Peter would have to get a taxi home. 

            It was also rush hour.  I got half a square knitted at a whole series of traffic jams and stoplights on our way to the train station.  Finally got to the train station, couldn't find Peter. . . .

            We were supposed to go see Simon Boccanegra tonight—a Met Opera Live rerun.  I forget when that got scrubbed.  But there was totally no way.

            We're all home.  We all ate dinner.  Is this day over yet?  I want to go to bed . . . oh.

            Whimper.

 * * *

* Note that it was still dark which was very exciting.  Although the truth is that less than a month after midsummer you can begin to see the days drawing in again.

** Susan in Melbourne posted a photo of a treeful of roosting fruit bats, and Angelia responded 'Golly—I'd hate to have those enormous critters invade my house!'  Me too.  When we were in Melbourne we saw a lot of them.  There are several different kinds but the ones we saw were all BIG.  And as they amble around their tree or their cage^ or whatever and, as bats do, occasionally stretch a wing out, the wing goes on for quite a while.^^  http://www.outbackwildliferescue.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58:black-flying-fox-fruit-bat&catid=41:mammals&Itemid=66

Wingspan of more than a METRE!  Eeeeeek!  . . . Although something with a three-foot-plus wingspan probably couldn't get through invisible cracks in your ceiling either.

^ http://www.zoo.org.au/HealesvilleSanctuary

^^ Also those little furry fox or fawn-like faces are disconcerting on a bat.  Or I find them so.  Bat anatomy is odd, the way they walk or creep is odd because of their odd assortment of limbs—and those wings are naked skin stretched between very long finger-bones.  I'd rather they had faces like bats than like foxes or fawns.

*** And the mosquito-netting situation in the UK, as demonstrated on google, is decidedly shambolic.  I may have to go all retro and use the telephone.  I'm not looking forward to the conversation:  my bed is a four-poster with a frame.  All I need is the netting, please.  No, not mosquitoes.  Bats.  Yes.  Bats.

† Stream.  The British call any channel of diameter equal to or greater than your average chopstick and containing water at least two hours a year a river.  

†† Word has just suggested I change this to 'Frelling River'.  Snork.  

††† When it was just for the birds it was smaller.  

‡ I bet they'd feel peas at the bottom of a large heap of mattresses too. 

‡‡ It's a real head-kicker that I even know that I'm never going to be Joyce DiDonato or Deborah Voigt and I still can't quite shut the little voice in the back of my head up that says 'It's not that you're not professional quality it's that you're crap'.  Sigh. 

‡‡‡ shudder   

§ This was actually pretty interesting, and pretty much the one thing that has gone right today.  I'd already decided on the homeopathic remedy I was going to try the next time Darkness didn't eat.  They'd both been sitting there staring resentfully at their food for better than an hour at this point.  I gave Darkness his remedy and I had barely straightened up and turned away when he was wolfing his food down.  Oh.  Golly.  Chaos of course was harder;  while they both have genuine physical problems (!!!!!!!!) Chaos is also just nuts, whereas there's usually some physical contribution to Darkness' deciding not to eat.  So, Darkness had eaten and was looking smug, and Chaos was still glaring like a sulky teenager.  I eventually chose a remedy for him too, and I could see his face relax even though he still wasn't eating . . . 

§§ This was about ten minutes after he'd had his remedy.  Yes, I should have figured this out in advance too . . . but I didn't.  Chaos, as I say, is harder.  And there's no guarantee that either of these remedies will work the next time.  Homeopathy is brilliant.  It's also a ratbag.

Summer fruit and squishiness

 

Before I forget:  here's the definitive photo record of the signing at Forbidden Planet last week from our forum's CathyR:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/marmitelover/sets/72157627054561095/

She's also @CambridgeMinor on Twitter, so if anyone wants to ask her for a copy of any of the photos, please tweet or DM.  

Shattered again.  How boring.  Today's excuse is that I took Peter and me to see Tabitha, my Bowen massage lady, and I always come out of one of these sessions feeling like overcooked oatmeal.*  Happy, peaceful overcooked oatmeal, but still, speaking/blogging in complete sentences and walking upright and all that is a strain, and I keep wanting to subside gently into a nice bowl-shaped piece of furniture.  A hot bath, say.   An American friend said to me dubiously, presumably you feel like a million dollars** the next day or something?  There has to be a reason you keep going back?  No, I just like pain . . . It's nothing as spectacular as being able to leap tall buildings with a single bound or drive the horses of the sun across the sky***.  It's more like having fewer pebbles in your shoes or fewer unmitigated morons giving you blood-pressure headaches.   Over the course of the next few days you realise that your shoes are comfy again and most of the morons are only morons and you can ignore them.  It's subtle enough that I periodically fall out of the habit of going, and it's not till I rack myself up again and have to go back so she can tease my spine out of its granny knots and level my pelvis till my legs start behaving like they're more or less the same length again—or the ME starts shoving me back on the sofa—that I remember why I go even when I'm not crippled.

            I've off and on tried to persuade Peter to go to Tabitha too but he belongs to the Stoic No Fuss category of British male—but I got him while his defenses were down a few months ago after that bad fall he had.  For a while I took him along oftener than I needed to go, and lately we've settled into a nice monthly double act.  The last two appointments I've brought hellhounds too and we are exploring a fresh new piece of Hampshire countryside I've previously only driven through while Peter is on Tabitha's table.  And then if she's running late I knit.  Mmm.  What a pity this only happens once a month. 

Meanwhile it's high summer, and the fabulous, paradisal, dizzying glut of high-summer fruit is upon us.  I'm eating handfuls of cherries, nectarines and peaches for breakfast every day and it makes getting out of bed WORTH it.  Which is saying a lot.  I mean, caffeine is crucial, but the joy it occasions is a rather grim, real-world variety.  Summer sweet cherries . . . convince me that the Elysian Fields and Valhalla and so on do exist.  Nothing to do with swords and willing virgins though—but it's a lot about food.  Some of you may or may not remember that when I first started posting recipes I said that this was going to be a good opportunity to dust off old once-loved recipes of things I can no longer eat . . . but in fact I almost never do post any of these because as I'm leafing through my books and notebooks I get all cranky and resentful about my limitations.  Also, summer fruit is so amazing fresh off the tree or the bush or the wings of the angel that it's mostly criminal or at least superfluous to mess with it.  But I did use occasionally to make cherry ice cream and I'm feeling so mellow after a dose of Tabitha that I thought I'd post the recipe.†

Cherry (Almond) Ice Cream

2/3 c milk

1 egg plus one extra yolk

½ c granulated sugar

¼ tsp vanilla

1 lb sweet cherries

1 ounce slivered almonds

2/3 c whipping cream

Scald milk, set aside to cool.  Mix the egg and the yolk in the top of a double boiler/bain marie with the sugar and beat like mad, till it turns pale and ribbons off the spoon.  (Your electric mixer is your friend.)    Pour on the slightly cooled milk;  place over gently simmering water and stir till thick.  Stir in the vanilla and leave to cool.

            Stone your cherries.  Ugh.  This is the worst bit.  You will need more than a pound, of course, because you'll eat some of them to sustain morale.  I'm not sure how to allow for this, since the original weight includes the stones, which you are discarding.  Make your best guess.  The original recipe tells you to put the stoned bits in a food processor and buzz them to puree, but I think this is unsporting.  I just kind of rip them up some in the stoning process.  You do want enough pulp to turn your ice cream red, but I don't think you can avoid this with dark expoding-sweet high-summer cherries.  Stir them, in whatever form, into the custard.  Whip the cream till it forms soft peaks.  Fold into the cherry mixture.  Pour the lot into your ice cream maker and do what it tells you to do to produce ice cream.

            While your custard is becoming ice cream, toast your almonds.  The original recipe tells you to fold them into the finished ice cream, but unless you're going to eat it all in one go, I wouldn't;  the almonds will go soft.  I sprinkle them on per serving.  This will, I admit, probably mean that you need more almonds, but hey. 

* * *

* She looked back in her big fat McKinley folder today and we realised I've been coming to see her for ten years.  Intellectually I know this;  someone had recommended her as a straightforward physical massage therapist when I was having repetitive-strain trouble with my hands as a result of the ME.^  But—ten years!  I know there are people who live their entire lives within a few miles of where they were born, but I'm a Navy brat and my reincarnation as a middle-aged stay-at-home still regularly amazes me.  And I'm coming up on my twenty year anniversary here—with Peter as of 26th of this month, with England the end of October—and our 20th wedding anniversary is the 3rd of January.  I actually do love looking out at the same landscape year after year—groundedness, what a concept, I like it—but it's one more thing that makes me feel that my life before the age of 38 happened to someone else.  

^ Not only am I extremely relieved that my ME has turned out to be the negotiable-with variety but I'm very glad not to have to go through that early learning-to-negotiate phase again.  A lot of you, unfortunately, will know what I'm talking about:  that first really harsh running-into-a-wall experience.  I went from being someone who ran 25-30 miles a week, rode horses, hurtled hounds, rang bells, and dug up old tree stumps in order to put more rose-beds in, to someone who couldn't get off the godsblasted sofa.  Dear heavens.  The shock and bewilderment are almost as bad as the fact.  And with the zero energy comes a whole lorryload of other nonsense, which in my case included aching hands.

** That would be £631,592.12, which doesn't quite have the ring to it.  But then a million dollars doesn't really have the ring to it any more either.  A trillion dollars.  £631,592,128.80:  Feel like six hundred thirty-one million, five hundred ninety-two thousand, one hundred twenty-eight pounds and eighty pence. . . . No, it'll never catch on. 

*** I have hellhounds.  I'd do a better job than that vainglorious wuss Phaethon.  

† I have a chocolate cherry ice cream recipe somewhere.  Although it may not be suitable for a family blog.

Aftermath, continued

 

Life is trying to slither back into its usual current.*  I had some out-of-schedule handbells yesterday which were unnecessarily exciting both because I haven't handbelled properly in a fortnight or so and because Niall and I were ringing with Titus, who is the one who rings both his bells in one hand because a stroke crippled his other side.  This is horribly confusing to us other ringers anyway, plus that for reasons of size and weight** Titus usually rings the treble and the two—and one of your crucial clues in handbells is when the frelling treble leads, and by the time you've figured out if that ding was the treble or the two it's too late.  Gah.  But it was fun in a kind of climbing-K2-without-ropes way.  And at today's voice lesson, because I am mindless twit, I'd forgotten the accompanist's copy of The Ash Grove and Nadia made me sing it without the piano.  With her sitting there looking at me and listening.   ARRRRGH.  Mostly at my voice lessons I'm so wound up with what Nadia says that I don't have time for thoughts of my own—which is a good thing—but in this case, before I went into free form meltdown I laser-beamed at myself a reminder that one of the great things about my brush with the Muddlehamptons*** has been finding out that I'm not actually that fussed about singing with other people around, and surely then I can frelling translate this to singing unaccompanied for my very own voice teacher who has never said a mean thing yet (and is very good at keeping a straight face†)?!?  She kept me busy enough that I nearly wasn't thinking about her just sitting there . . . and at the end she said, one of the things you came in here less than six months ago wanting to change was to make your singing less timid.  That is not a timid sound you're making. 

            I think that was meant to be a compliment. . . .

 * * *

Angelia wrote in response to my:  I suppose I could have a separate category of Invisible Costumes. . . .

 This is a scary idea–invisible costumes would mean lots of naked pictures!

Nonsense.  You're forgetting one of the basic rules of the competition—that this is a (more or less) family friendly blog and only costumes that would NOT get you arrested if you wore them on the street were acceptable.  Invisible costumes would either be worn over street clothes or draped tactfully over furniture.  Or compliant domestic fauna.  Or flora.  I'd quite like to see an aspidistra carrying a sword to go with the weightless invisible armour. 

EMoon 

You acquire Merit in all universes for not having ripped the throat from the "Sunshine sequel" questioner. And Ajlr has a crown of stars for coming up with the best way to intervene to save the situation.

Ajlr certainly has a crown of stars coming†† but . . . several of you have commented on the surprising lack of blood on the floor†††.  But I tend (reluctantly) to think that the rules are different for live gigs.‡  If you're going to write to me—including posting a comment to the forum and, because I'm a rabid cow, I would include if you're going to post to Facebook or Twitter too—then it FRELLING WELL BEHOVES YOU TO DO YOUR FRELLING HOMEWORK FIRST.  This means you have a cruise through the Q&A on my web site, and you do a search on the blog.  You could search 'SUNSHINE sequel' for example, and what you wanted to know would come up pretty quickly.  You're sitting at your computer anyway, I don't think you have much excuse.‡‡ 

            I think greater leeway may have to be allowed at live gigs.  Live gigs exist as little real-time and real-life windows to allow contact between an author and her readers—and also to sell books, although this is more the window-frame than the numbers on the balance sheet:  it's a rare author appearance that genuinely pays its way.  But your passport is still your wallet—witness that Forbidden Planet asked that you also buy a book if you wanted me to sign other books you'd bought elsewhere—and the fact that you've made the effort to be there.  That's your time and energy, you know?  And this counts, in great big letters of fire.  There is NOTHING WORSE than a live gig WHERE NO ONE COMES.  Don't ask me how [well] I know this.  And the time and energy someone uses to go to a gig is (usually) a lot more than the average punter needs to use sitting in front of their computer hitting the 'search' button.  So I don't think we can expect everyone who turns up at an author gig to have a clue.  The thing is they came. 

Vikki K

Oh goodness! I wish someone had told me my horns were crooked!  

I wish someone had told me the part in my hair was crooked.  Having said that, my hair parts itself.  Hannah has just been trying to tell me that I should part it farther over to one side or the other.  Yes, I daresay.  But it won't stay there.  My hair is just curly enough to be ungovernable.  If I part it farther over I would have to wet it down and brush it flat for weeks, it would still stand up like an incipient Mohawk and it would flop back the way it wanted the moment I stopped.

            I'm afraid I thought the crookedness of the horns was deliberate.  All part of the, uh, atmosphere.

HorsehairBraider 

I LOVE the sparkly tights and shoes. You know, I have this Elvis jacket that would really go well with those… and I don't think the shipping is TOO much from here to there… and I have a nice box it would fit in…

Wait a minute . . . Elvis?  I want the glitter jacket in the silly signing competition!

            I was doing laundry this morning and pulled the tights out of the laundry bag and threw them into the bathtub—I think they may be ex-tights anyway, they just don't make glitter like they used to—but I'm going to try handwashing them, and this will force me to remember.  But I'd already forgotten the tights were there when I got back to the cottage this afternoon and when I went hastily into the bathroom—a known bat vector—and saw the huddle of black tights in the middle of the tub, I had a brief but dramatic nervous collapse.  They could have been another assemblage of lost frightened baby bats—about eight of them.  Or twelve . . . aaaugh.  

EMoon 

. . . a male friend to whom I mentioned the (unspeakable) question emailed this: "Well, next time you correspond with Ms. McKinley you may tell her at least one fan adores her work and hasn't a single stupid question to ask… and if he did have a stupid question, he would be petrified to ask it, for fear of having karma bite his butt." 

My bark is much worse than my bite (usually).  On the other hand, if he has sensitive eardrums. . . .

* * *

* Slop.  Splash.

** Niall's handbells are little and light, but even so if you have weak hands or are trying to ring two in one hand, the difference between the front pair and the back end pair is considerable.

*** I had to miss the Muddlehamptons' concert at the last minute for reasons beyond my control, and we've now broken up till September.  But the start date is now in my diary and I should be able to defend Thursday evenings better with a run at it this time.  

† Keeping a Straight Face Whatever Your Student Does is a required course in Singing Teacher College. 

†† It's probably being sworn at by a celestial jeweller even as we speak.

††† I didn't want to embarrass the Nice Man.

‡ Which may help explain my lack of enthusiasm for live gigs.

‡‡ I don't get a lot of street mail any more.  I don't know what I think about the occasional handwritten letter that says, Where do you get your ideas?  And, You should/have to write a sequel to SUNSHINE!, beyond arrrrrgh.  But the 'do your homework' reflex engages as soon as anyone (a) sends me a self addressed stamped envelope with an American stamp on it (b) writes/emails Hi!  I'm a teacher/librarian/random grownup at x school in Maine/New England, will you please come to our school since travel expenses will be CHEAP?

            And on the subject of unreasonable expectations:  I do not donate books to unknown and fortuitous charity auctions.  Bottom line?  I can't afford it.  There's the book itself, the postage, the packing, and the time all of this takes—several dozen times a year.  Or would, except I don't.  I've said this a number of times on a number of occasions and in a number of places—including here and the web site.  The requests keep rolling in.  And most of them are so obviously written by the yard—Your Name Here at the top of the standard begging letter.  I daresay organising a charity auction is difficult and frustrating—but possibly one of the reasons it's difficult and frustrating is because whoever is running it hasn't thought through how they're going to acquire the stuff to auction.  Maybe I'm the only author on the planet who deletes robot solicitations on sight.  But I kind of doubt it.

Silly Signing Clothing Contest results (. . . finally)

 

Because I am a whimsical hellgoddess, I am giving away three copies of the UK PEGASUS.*  First I did the one that I was supposed to be doing.  This involved counting up all the entries**, applying to the random number generator, and then counting up over again to the number it produced.

            I don't entirely believe in random, I think.  It bothers me.  It's like 'there are no coincidences'.  There is no random either.  And it always feels unfair to the fewer Twitter and FB entries.  So I did it again.  The first count was from the top of the forum, with the few FBs and Twitters at the end.  The second count started at the end . . . and I feel vindicated, which is as dumb as not believing in random, because while the first count put me well into the middle of the list, which would have meant the forum somewhere, whichever end I put FB and Twitter on, the second count was just a handful in—so one of the Twitters won. 

            And then the third one is me diverting myself again.  I did a shorter list of about twenty that were my favourites (including the inflatable cow, the dwarven whatsit, and the yarn fairy).  And drew a third time.

And the winners are:

heather.dawn from the forum as Top Snowflake

@bridgetlittle from Twitter for the PINK costume

Julia from the forum as Thing 1.

If you'd please email me (nuraddin at robinmckinley dot com) with street addresses and whether you'd like me to write 'to . . . .' above my signature (you do want it signed, don't you?).  And any of you who may have been entering to show willing rather than because you wanted a second, British-ed copy, I'm happy to sign it to someone else. 

* * *

Skating librarian

Listening to the news from London last night on BBC World, the only semi-literary news was the premier of the Deathly Hallows II, so I assumed that all was well at Forbidden Planet and that a Pegasus had not swooped down to carry Robin off to Olympus.

As a few of us were walking across the pedestrian bridge from Waterloo we were accosted by two young women with American accents.  Where is Trafalgar Square? they said.  My—English—friends instantly deferred to me.  Trafalgar Square I can do, so I gave directions.  The one who had asked the question said, Where are you from?  Maine, I said.  We're from California! she said, and ran ahead, obviously in a hurry to get to Trafalgar Square.  I would not have registered this except that one of my companions said, that'll be for the Deathly Hallows premiere.  And as we were crossing that tangle of streets in front of the Charing Cross station we looked interestedly to our left—toward Trafalgar Square—and saw a Raised Knobbly Landscape of Solid Standing Humanity.  I can't even imagine wanting to see/be at something that involved standing half-crushed in a crowd of thousands.  And just as we disappeared behind the railings of the little slip road that drops you in St Martin's Lane there was an Enormous Roar.  It was one of those moments when I am reminded that I like not being monumentally famous.  I don't know if every writer (possibly even including J K Rowling) thinks it would be nice to sell just a few more books, but I'm fairly sure that in my case I mean a few. 

            One of the minor entertainments of the evening was that I morphed mysteriously into our Native Guide.  Since Waterloo is my train station and I like to walk, this is my end of London—and it is a confusing end of London, all those mad little Soho streets—but it was still pretty funny. 

EMoon

I wasn't imagining Robin & friends getting drunk [when I fell off the air for a day]…but I was imagining humongous storms, muggings, train wrecks, trains held for hours in pouring rain miles from any station, falls, sprained or broken joints, sick hellhounds, sick people, burglars, the Mother of All Bats crashing through the ceiling and explaining in high, batty squeaks why blocking up bat access was wrong, car stuck in mud…etc.

(Yes, I'm good at this. It's called being a writer who has to put characters in peril. I can imagine more kinds of peril than exist.)

YES!  YES!  YES!  I commented on the forum ('I am so there') about this already, but 'I can imagine more kinds of peril than exist' keeps rolling around in my head.  Yes.  Rocs.  Evil magicians.  Taralians.  Vampires.  Hellgoddesses.  No, wait . . . I'm a nice hellgoddess.  I just gave away three copies of PEGASUS!

[in answer to Knitronomicon saying her photos weren't that good] I said:

Yes, situations like that are a ratbag to photograph as I know from experience. You get better photos if you don't use the flash–but then you have to be made of iron bolts to hold the camera steady enough. And no one can whap into you as you're pressing the trigger.

            . . . And what I should have added is that I hate having random flashes going off in my face, so thank you very much everyone who turned their flash OFF in deference to my maintaining my train of thought.***  Someone who brandishes a camera at me and says 'May I?', and particularly anyone buying a book for me to sign who wants to take a photo too, that's perfectly fine, flash or no flash, because I've been warned.  But people hanging around taking photos of the proceedings generally, those flashes need to be off. 

Sally W

"A signed book is a sold book." (as in, it can't be returned).

This isn't the hard and fast rule that it was when we were young.  My old publisher, Greenwillow, would take back signed books long before anyone else was doing this, and there are quite a few publishers now who will.  I'm pretty sure Penguin USA will.  It never did make much sense, you know?   How can the author signing the book count as defacing it?  But I know that was the industry-wide default for a long time. 

ichimunki

i'm jealous. massively jealous. i would have come to the signing if i was in london. but alas, i am in new york. perhaps there might be an upcoming signing in new york???

Black Bear replied:

Robin doesn't generally travel overseas these days due to health reasons (see posts re: ME) but if she ever does plan a signing for NY I'm sure we'll be first to know!! 

Sadly this is an aggrieved subject.  Most publishers do still think in terms of dragging the live bodies of their authors around to a variety of three-dimensional venues . . . and it's come up with me for every book I've written since . . . er . . . well, more or less since I stopped touring and/or going to conventions.  First I moved to England and then I developed ME.  I've never been a good traveller—I'm an introvert, social stuff, including professional social stuff, wears me out, it doesn't charge me up—but I used to enjoy seeing new bits of countryside, and, crucially, I used to bounce back a lot faster than I do now.  The ME means not only do they send me home in a soup tureen but it takes me several eons to re-evolve lungs and opposable thumbs. †   It's just not worth it.  Which is not to say that we won't have the same conversation over PEG II, nor that some day I probably will have a signing in NYC again.  Just don't hold your breath.

jrsygrl626

Wow Robin!! That skirt looks AWESOME!! You look young enough to be my older sister. (I'm 30.) 

It is a good skirt.  I'd forgotten what a good skirt it is.  I'm glad I was having an attack of the Do Not Go Gentles.  But . . . I don't, actually.  Look young enough to be your older sister.  (Unless your mother had us really far apart.)  Cameras lie.  As I've previously noted.  The thing that amuses the frellbangers out of me, the last few years, since the blog and comparatively regular photos of yours truly—yours truly who has hated being on the business end of cameras with a red-eyed sweat-drenched passion all her life—is that I take much better photos now than I did when I was younger, because I just don't care that much any more.  One of the perks of getting old—as I've also said—I care a whole lot less about a lot of dumb stuff that used to wind me up something fierce—and for you regular readers who have some concept about how many things there still are that wind me up something fierce, well:  yes.  You don't want to linger on this thought very long.  It's also true that I still don't like bad or misleading photos of me, and I'll delete them if I can, but they don't keep me awake nights the way they used to.

            But I don't look 35, or even 40, whatever the photos say.  I maybe look 50 rather than sixteen months off 60.  But I don't look young.  I look well preserved, that awful phrase.  I'm just robustly moving the goal posts about what constitutes acceptable behaviour in the almost-60.  'Wears black leather miniskirt' is now inside the lines.

Stephanie

I'm sorry to hear that the local computer system went all wonky, you don't need that kind of stress after a public appearance. Thank you for your heroic effort to get blog and pictures up, I enjoy them terribly much but feel guilty that you had to fight with your computer to make it all happen!

I did NOT need that kind of stress immediately after a public appearance.  But the blog is one of the things I now do:  Don't feel guilty.  The blog and I are one of the infinity of re-enactments of the irresistable force and the immovable object.  It would be like feeling guilty for the hellhounds not eating.  Wait . . . that's not you, is it?  I keep thinking there must be a reason. . . .

            More tomorrow.  I need more sleep. 

* * *

* Fortunately my author's copies arrived on Friday.  It would be harder to give them away if I didn't have them yet.  And I confess I would object to giving away my single advance copy if I had stayed within my own rules and only gave one away. 

** Which was pretty funny:  I'd said that if you were wearing your costume you'd go in the draw twice, and empty clothing laid over a chair would only count once.  Almost everyone was a twosie.  The final count therefore was like, wow!  What a great turnout! 

*** such as it is 

† See:  SUNSHINE tour.  Which I still survived massively better than I expected. 

†† It's probably being sworn at by a celestial jeweller even as we speak.

Photos. Lots of photos. AMAZING NUMBERS of photos.

 

These are all from CathyR.  Who has a hot trigger finger.  Thank you, CathyR!

They're also (nearly) in the order she took them, so you are advancing through the evening.  Keep scrolling:  there are three separate posts, in the hope of preventing WordPress from going off in the screaming abdabs. *

Sparkly tights. The shoes are sparkly too but they don't show up as well. Take my word for it . . . the shoes are covered in tiny sparkly sequins.

Books. Also sparkly. In spirit anyway.

Pink and sparkly. Ajlr demonstrates she wasn't kidding.

See? It DOES say DOCTOR POOH.

Stunned. This may not have been the sequel-to-SUNSHINE moment, but it might have been.

Scheherazade. Or possibly The Last Stand.

Happy reader. I like happy readers.

Head down attending to business. Listen, I LIKE signing books. It means people have BOUGHT them.

Look! That rare sighting to the left is a BLOKE! (He's probably buying it for his mother/sister/sweetheart. Yes, I know, men do read my books. But not very many men.)

Continued in next window. . . .

* This was partially successful.

AMAZING NUMBERS of photos, continued 2

That woman with the pen DOES know how to smile. What a relief.

I appear to be staring at the one that got away.

Our Vikki K. With wings. And horns. And I want that dress.

Red. Wings. And horns. Yes. And something else? WordPress keeps refusing to load the red wings and the horns. There has been Language.

Red wings/black wings.

The famous dwarven whatsit! And the t shirt says, more or less, It's All Loki's Fault. Probably including Star Trek.

The dwarven whatsit nearly has its own thread on the forum. You can see why. (Yes. She knitted it.)

SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS ABOUT KNITTING IN PUBLIC. (This is Mrs Redboots.)

Mrs Redboots has just given me this FABULOUS PINK KNITTED BAG. But the crucial fact is that it has CHOCOLATE in it.

Continued in the third and final frame.  And just by the way, I am getting a lot of knitting done waiting for frelling WordPress to frelling* load the frelling photos.

* Even I split infinitives under duress.

AMAZING NUMBERS of photos, continued 3rd and last

 

Mrs Redboots takes a bow for her fabulous pink knitting.

So, is it Kent or is it Cambridge? Arrrgh. I'll get my method book out here one of these days and FIGURE. IT. OUT.

And yes, I DID remember my favourite pen.

In which the hellgoddess demonstrates that she too brought knitting.

Cathy said, don't worry, you're EASY to follow.

London. From the pedestrian bridge over the Thames to Waterloo station.

There are REASONS why I'm carrying so much luggage for half a day in London. I had my jeans with me in case the sparkly tights became TOO MUCH. I'm also carrying a pair of serious platform sandals I never quite pulled out, which I will have to demonstrate on some other occasion. Plus fresh ill-gotten gains from the shelves of Forbidden Planet.

Cathy took several photos of just the shoes. For some reason.

I thank you all for your patience and interest, and at this point anyone who wants to hang EVEN MORE photos of this event, please feel free.

Signing, illustrated.

 

I can do without days like this one.  What I know to try when a computer disputes me is pathetic, but it does take a little while to run through.  Rather like running through my pathetic repertoire of things to try to make hellhounds eat.  Also, there's the adrenaline factor.  Crashing off the internet when you're trying to organise and then post your nightly blog provokes a rather substantial fury spike, which is slow to drain away again.*

            Especially when hellhounds decide not to eat their supper.

            At least there weren't any bats.

            I'm still very, very short of sleep and very, very, VERY grateful that I HAVE PHOTOS FOR TONIGHT.  These are Vikki's;  I'll put some of Cathy's up tomorrow.

Grim.

The Nice Man had asked me if I'd do a reading or a Q&A or a presentation of any kind and I said that I'd be happy to do a Q&A as a lead in to the getting out of the favourite fountain pen.  The very first question was whether I was going to write a sequel to SUNSHINE.  I'm out of practise.  I did not immediately laugh lightly and answer some other question, which is what, when I'm in practise, I do, when someone says something punishable by instant death.  I could hear the Blog Contingent going very still on the other side of the audience** and then Ajlr, BLESSHERATHOUSANDTIMES, not only asked a question, but asked an interesting question about what it's like being a writer writing about a lot of different imaginary countries, and do they feel different–the answer to which is yes, they do.   I dream about them, and I always know which one I'm in before I see the pegasus or the sashed, bridleless riders or the guy with the long teeth.

talking

I was sufficiently unnerved by Question One that I spent most of the rest of the evening talking to the floor.  This is something else I'm better at not doing when I'm in practise being an author in public.  Make eye contact!  I don't want to make eye contact!

The relentless march of the grocer's apostrophe.

A very nice poster.  Although there may be something just a little bit WRONG with the top line. 

Yes! The famous dwarven whatsit!

Cathy got a more comprehensive shot of it which I'll post tomorrow.  And I apologise for my look of total disbelief, but . . .  

Not so random members of the audience.

One intrepid photographer and one smiling bull terrier.  Oh . . . well, the last time I saw that pink feather boa a bull terrier was wearing it.***

Intrepid photographer and hellgoddess.

And book.  And chocolate.#  And a lovely pink knitted bag courtesy Mrs Redboots.   The cables are bits of (ringing methods) Kent and Cambridge.  Cathy and I were trying to figure out which was which.  This should be embarrassingly easy, but somehow it isn't, when it's pink knitting.

Asssembly line.

That's asssssembly line.  At the end I signed all the stock that was left.##  The Nice Man pulled it off the table in stacks, opened each to the title page, I scrawled, and my official Penguin minder was waiting to slap on the 'signed by the author' sticker### and put the completed trophy in the book cart.

More photos tomorrow.  I'm going to bed.  But first let me just say THANK YOU VERY MUCH to everyone who came to Forbidden Planet last night and bought book(s), both blog readers and–er–non-blog-readers, and friends and readers known and unknown, and who generally made this not one of those occasions when I go home declaring I'm giving up this writing scam and getting a job stocking shelves at Sainsbury's.   It was good energy last night, you guys.  Thanks. 

* * *

* It turns out to have been the exchange.  It was peculiar that both Peter and I were off the air—we're at opposite ends of this tiny town but we're also on different servers.  I did of course ring Computer Men today, who were booked solid, it being a Friday and all, but being angelic, one might almost say seraphic, as they are^, Raphael did his remote-meddling trick after I'd wasted forty-five minutes on the phone to my server who clearly had no more clue than I did.^^   Meanwhile I'd gone off for my Friday cup of t—I mean, my music lesson, with Oisin, and he was off the air too.  He was busy swearing at his server^^^ who did, however, have more of a clue than mine did, and then BT finally got its finger out, and Raphael twisted the pipe cleaners back together and . . . 

^ Hey.  I wonder if either of them sings? 

^^ When I rang Raphael back he was positively testy.  He rarely gets testy, except when other computer professionals are being morons. 

^^^ Relatively speaking.  Oisin does not swear the way I swear.  You can still hear what he's not saying.

** As one of them commented drily later, Not a blog reader.

*** Anyone who came to my last London signing will remember this clearly.  PS:  Her t shirt says Doctor Pooh. 

# Several people gave me chocolate.  I have no idea why.

## One of the things Forbidden Planet gets enormous points from this author for is that they made a real effort to rake in a good selection of my backlist.  This is good anyway and enormously in their favour when I'm mostly as rare as hen's teeth and reliably eating hellhounds over here.  And it's a good thing, not a bad thing, that they had a lot of stock left over to sign.  It means they think they can sell it.^  I hope they're right. 

^ They do have several stores to share the burden.

### Very carefully designed to have glue that peels OFF again.

Signing. Survived.

 

I AM SPECTACULARLY OFF LINE.  SPECTACULARLY.  I CRASHED AND BURNED WITH DAZZLING, NAY, EPIC GRANDEUR LAST NIGHT, AT BOTH THE MEWS AND THE COTTAGE, WHEN I TRIED TO POST WHAT FOLLOWS HERE NOW, AND I CAN'T GET BACK ON.  THIS COMES TO YOU BY WAY OF A FRIEND'S MOBILE TOGGLE, AND WHEN I'VE POSTED THIS I WILL DISAPPEAR FOREV . . . I MEAN, UNTIL COMPUTER MEN CAN COME AND SORT ME OUT WHICH, SINCE THIS IS A FRIDAY, BECAUSE ALL DISASTERS HAPPEN ON FRIDAYS, MAY NOT BE TILL NEXT WEEK.~  HAVE A NICE SOMETHING OR OTHER.  GAAAAAAH.

OH FRELL'S BELLS.  You're going to have to wait at least till tomorrow for some photos, I'm afraid.  Cathy R took lots, as per my request, and she's even loaned me her camera's memory card and . . . it won't fit in my computer.  I thought I had an extra super-sized slot*, but . . . no.  And Mrs Redboots, while eight of us were sitting around at the café afterward waiting for our food,** emailed me the ones she took, but Outlook has managed to lose them.***

So.  There was a signing.  I think it went pretty well.  The nice man at the shop was smiling when we left, but that could of course be because we were leaving.

There were no bats last night either, and I'm pretty sure there really weren't, because I was sleeping badly enough that I'd've noticed if there were.†  Got out of bed finally in a weary, resigned sort of way and stared owlishly at the heap of pink leotard, lacy blouse, black leather mini, sparkly silver tights and sequinned leopard print All Stars.

It was sheeting rain.  Okay, that's fine, it means I don't have to worry about watering my pots, and it may mean I get to sleep tonight due to the signing being over plus a continued absence of bats.††

Hurtled hellhounds.

Put on the pink leotard, lacy blouse, black leather mini, sparkly silver tights††† and sequinned leopard print All Stars.

It stopped raining.  Perhaps this was a good omen.

I went to train station.

Got on train.‡

Knitted, somewhat frantically, all the way to Waterloo.  Golly, the blood-pressure headaches and tension stomachaches I might have avoided, all those early years when I did do a certain amount of business travelling, if I had discovered knitting.  It's not like it makes all the anxiety go away, but it is like managing to run just fast enough to stay ahead of the ravening monster chasing you.  Or like sometimes, when you've taken a painkiller, and it's worked, but you can still feel the thing with teeth trying to get in and bite you:  the drugs can hold it off but can't make it go away.   Knitting on the way to a public author thing is a bit like that.‡‡  And in this case frelling PEG II has been messing with my head again, and so I was thinking irritably about the amount of ratbaggery I'm putting up with over this thing-I-said-I'd-never-do, a more-than-one-book story, as I was on my way to sign copies of its elder sibling. . . .

* * *

There are dramas unfolding even now, after I'm home again.  First I found out I wasn't going to be able to get at Cathy R's photos, and then I discovered that Mrs Redboots' took a left turn when they should have taken a right and are now in Heilongjiang Province.  I emailed Vikki K, who has a slight parallel tendency not to go to bed early, and she promised to email her photos.  This was going swimmingly . . . always a bad sign . . . when the last few photos refused to open.  Oh, frell, I said, and was about to email Vikki again and ask if she could resend, when I had a sudden attack of paranoia . . . at which point I discovered that the earlier ones, which had been opening, weren't opening any more.

None of the photos that Vikki had just saved my day/night/blog post/credibility with by sending tonight was now available.

And then I crashed off line.

And I have spent the last hour trying to get back on line again, and screaming.‡‡‡   My computer is performing acts of aggravated iniquity I have never seen before.

And I'm now writing this wondering if I'm going to manage to post anything tonight.  There will be a nice irony in the night of my signing being the one I bomb off the air, right?  You'll all think we all went out and got spectacularly drunk and danced on tables and were chased through the streets by the Met's finest and then reeled home so late I barely made it to my piano lesson.§  Unfortunately . . .

So I'm now going back to the cottage, and I'm going to try to sign on there, and . . . And then I'm going to bed.  Some day I will finish telling you about the signing.  Some day there will even be photos. . . .

* * *

~ It might amuse you to know that my first thought, as I reeled from the overwhelming implications of being off line, was, well, I have lots to read.  Oh, and knit.

* In fact I remember it.  It's directly under the smaller one.  Clearly on some other computer.  Possibly in some other life.

** And waiting . . . and waiting . . . and

*** I can hear that crackling static that passes for its laughter.^

^ And that was before everything else went wrong.  Predictive crackly laughter.  Arrrgh.

† I dreamt, among other things, about the Muddlehamptons' concert^.  I dreamed that they were actually putting on CARMEN, and that I was singing Carmen. I have a really mean subconscious.  Really mean.

^ Which, it now being after midnight, is TOMORROW.

†† Tomorrow night, of course, I'll be awake from worrying about the frelling concert.  If I wake up Saturday morning humming the Habanera I may run away.

††† I had forgotten how ITCHY the flaming things are.  It is one of the great failures of modern science, that they appear not to have yet developed a non-itchy sparkly fibre.

‡ With ticket helpful Penguin minder had preordered and sent to me.  How's that for efficient minding.  And the train was on time.  Penguin apparently also has pull with the travel gods.

‡‡ One thing that can be said in favour of doing public things a little oftener than I do is that then they're less eeep-making.  A bit like ringing quarter peals.  A quarter peal feels like a harrowing major event.  Then if you do a few in a row it's like, oh, a quarter peal.  I can do that.

‡‡‡ What a good thing I'm not singing Carmen tomorrow.

§ At 3 pm.