Robin McKinley's Blog, page 172

Slow Theatre*

 

I have a thing to say.

            Birds are overrated.

            They're endangered, their habitat is being destroyed, the agrotoxins are mounting up in their blood, their eggshells are too thin to grow babies in, their populations are plummeting, they're really unhappy.

            Great.  Bring on the gigantic oil slick.  I have a birdbath I want to put it in.**

            I am frelling knee deep in blackbird fledglings at the cottage, and they're driving me nuts.   Endangered?  Feh. ...

PEGASUS ARC contest!

Special Announcement by Black Bear

HEY THERE!

Want to win an autographed Advance Reader Copy of Robin's new book, PEGASUS*?   Of course you do!

We're running three contests: on Twitter, Facebook, and on our blog Forum.  So that's up to three chances for you to win a book, and entering couldn't be easier.  Well, OK, yes it could… We're making you work for it a very little bit.

To enter the PEGASUS ARC contest, all you have to do is pick your favorite line from one of Robin's books–could be a...

At last

 

So I was hanging out this morning with the hellhounds.  In my underwear.  Not a lot of underwear.  If I lean against the Aga in the cottage kitchen and am well draped with hellhounds, I can pretend that it's MAY and WARM.  I'm in a getting-going-slowly* in the mornings phase.  And the hellhounds are always up/down for some supernumerary lying in drifts.  I had Radio Three going.  There was sunlight.  There was tea.  Mmmmm.

            And someone knocked on the door.  GAAAAH.  Scramble into n...

Why PEGASUS Needs to Sell Really Well*

 

I went to the dentist again today.  This was the tactical meeting.  I didn't have to sit in the Official Chair of Torture.**  He has other, subtler methods of rendering a vict—client into a small pile of bone chips and burnt hair.  Wide screen photos of my teeth, for example.  AAAAAAAUGH.  Enough to scare anybody into self immolation.

            Okay, here's the deal:  over the next two years, I'm going to be spending approximately the entry level salary of an editorial assistant in New...

colorado spring, guest blog by bonniebythepeak

 

I'm a bit jealous of Robin's pictures of flowers and ducklings.  The world in those images is green.  I live at the point where the Rocky Mountains meet the Great Plains, and breathtaking grandeur is the norm.  I'm in awe of the ruggedness, but what I miss is the green.

There are these rocky bluffs near my house, and if you climb one and look out over the city, the landscape's quite yellow and punctuated with bundles of brown sticks. (They can't be trees, these naked, budless things.)  Over t...

Respite

 

It appears to be midnight.  Bing!*  Bing!  Bing!  Bing! Bing!  —all right all right, I get it.

            I am very tired.

            The ME is being a total frelling ratbag bastard.

            . . . And I went ringing tonight.  And . . . er . . . last night also.** 

            I was talking to Merrilee this afternoon and she said, your ME is biting you and you did what?  You're going to do what?

            It's a tricky call, as anyone with an auto-immune complaint—or, I imagine, any...

New blog feature: Q&A

 

Blah blah blah blah blah, okay, okay.  People keep pointing out to me that I'm a WRITER (yes, I'm with you so far) and that I keep CLAIMING that the reason I run this blog (on Merrilee's strong recommendation) is for SELF PROMOTION.  And then I almost never talk about writing or my books or any of that salient professional stuff*.  Credibility Dysfunction.  Yes, well, I don't feel there's all that much to say about writing.  It's mostly just you and the blank piece of paper/computer...

In Defense of Pollyanna

 

I imagine quite a few of you have seen this: 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-mccarry/faking-nice-in-the-blogos_b_551217.html

 In which the writer suggests that the woman-dominated area of the blogosphere given over to reading and discussing YA fiction is suffering from a pathological excess of niceness.  PW* tweeted it, and I follow PW.  I promptly retweeted, since that's what you do on Twitter**.

            I don't get around enough of the blogosphere to be in a position to guess, let...

Memorizing Music, guest blog by Bratsche

 

For some people the idea of memorizing something for a performance (musical or otherwise), can be a very daunting prospect.  So, why memorize music?  In some cases it's pretty much mandatory (ex. soloist with big orchestra or opera singer or entrant in certain music competitions).  In other situations, it is personal choice (ex. my up-coming viola recital).  The main reason I memorize music is that playing from memory takes another "distraction" (known as the black marks on the page) out of ...

Hail and farewell

 

Did you know that Peter Porter died?  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/23/peter-porter-obituary

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1709

I am nowhere near as good on modern poetry—hell, on poetry, full stop—as an unrepentant English major* who dotes on, oh, say, Yeats, Auden and Frost, to name the first three that drift to the surface, should be.  And an awful lot of Porter is, well, hard.  But I think either of these ought to make you want to read more: