Robin McKinley's Blog, page 19

URGENT NEWS FLASH

 

Barring miracles this week’s KES will go up Sunday, not Saturday.  This week has got away from me* and I’m Street Pastoring tomorrow night—Saturday—to cover for Eleanor, who covered my Friday for me last month when I had Sam training Saturday morning about five hours after I would have signed off Street Pastors.  Meanwhile the Black Tower stuff came zapping in on me more or less from nowhere—I’ve told you the story of how Narknon didn’t turn up till the final freaking draft of SWORD, and what a gonzofest that was trying to stuff her into the story where she belonged, despite the fact that I’d been aware that there were little fuzzy places, as it turned out Narknon-shaped gaps in the story as it stood before her arrival—and tomorrow night’s KES needs more whacking into its Black Tower enhanced shape than I’m liable to be able to give it.  I thought I was going to have some time off tomorrow afternoon, but Nina and Ignatius are coming down to help us get on with this moving house thing and I certainly don’t want to discourage them by any apparent lack of interest.

Oh and I’m singing on Sunday.  Oops.  I didn’t notice I had a late Sam shift on Thursday and Street Pastors on Saturday when I plugged in my usual fortnight on the rota.  So it may be late Sunday.  But not to worry.  KES will appear.

* * *

* I’m a Sam!  I’m a Sam!  I’m a real working Samaritan!  I had FOUR CALLS last night on my second duty shift!!  FOUR!  And since my mentor did not turn pale and saucer-eyed as she listened to my ends of the conversations^ nor, when I spoke to my day leader this morning^^, was she speaking in low carefully soothing tones about how perhaps I was not cut out to be a Samaritan and perhaps I would like to think about exercising my desire to do good in the world by knitting critter coats for the Battersea Dogs and Cats Rescue, which I can do quietly at home without disturbing anyone . . . I think I passed.^^^  Yaaaaaaay.^^^^

^ Conversations!  Yessssssss!  It’s what I’m there for!+

+ As a dedicated life-long phone hater, this is all very amusing.#

# Yes, well, this doesn’t count.  Talking on the phone as a Samaritan is different.~

~ Also, I hear God laughing.  Again.

^^ I was on the late shift last night.  Usually you talk to your day leader at the end of your shift, but not when it would involve getting her+ out of bed, supposing she keeps what most of the world would call normal hours.

+ Or him, as the case may be

^^^ I admit I haven’t checked that I haven’t been disappeared off the Samaritan database.  Me?  Paranoid?  Convinced of my inherent incompetence and worthlessness?  Naaaaaah.

^^^^ And for my next trick I have to learn not to go home and worry about the people I’ve been talking to.  Which is totally an occupational hazard, and is one of the reasons there’s all this support structure.  It’s not a nice idea that you debrief/unload to both your colleague and your day leader, it’s REQUIRED.

Have I really not done a KES-comment post in . . .

 

 

. . . forever?  Bad me.  House move, worrying about husband’s health and well-being, Samaritan training, hellhounds giving up eating etc . . . are NO EXCUSE.  And now it’s been so long I can’t find/remember where I left off.  ARRRGH.  Well, if I miss/repeat anything . . . I’LL BLAME YOU.*  YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID, HEY, YOU HAVEN’T DONE A KES COMMENT ROUND UP IN TOO LONG.

Blondviolinist

Random thoughts: I like Watermelon Shoulders much better than Torpedo Shoulders.

I would guess so do we all.  I do anyway.  I will say that Torpedo Shoulders will prove to be a little more okay than you think.  Like Murac, drat him.  I had no intention of Murac becoming anything like either an important character or almost a hero sort of person.  Or, you know, attractive, other than in a ramshackle sort of way that would appeal to deranged 11-to-15-year-olds.  Arrrrrrgh.  You see here an author hoist by her own petard.  This happens regularly—right, EMoon?—in my case pretty much every frelling story about something or someone**, but it doesn’t usually happen in public.  By the time the story hits print I’m kind of over my crisis about it/him/her/them and can pretend, or at least pretend to pretend or make a good story out of it, that this was the plan all along.***

I’m very glad we had so much time to get to know Kes in the ordinary, everyday world before she got tossed into the Defender role. It’s not that her personality doesn’t come through in the battle & just-before-or-after-battle sequences, but I like knowing that she likes muffins & is fairly good at making friends with good ordinary people. (I’m not sure I’m expressing myself well here.)

Well, you’re expressing well enough for me to agree with you and to say I’m glad that this is how you’re reading what I’m writing.  Yes.  It depends on the story, of course, but in this case Kes needed to be really clearly and emphatically a more or less normal modern woman—okay, a New Yorker and a fantasy writer, not absolutely normal†—for the high fantasy stuff to work the way I wanted it to work.  It’s not like what I’m doing is original—LEST DARKNESS FALL is the book that pops first into my head, and probably a lot of other people’s heads for modern people dropped in ye olde time††, and you could go back another generation or two to THE TIME MACHINE if you wanted to, and there have been gazillions since—and Kes isn’t trying to invent a printing press or alter any courses of history††† or make sweeping political statements in allegorical form‡ she’s just having an adventure.  But for the adventure to go ping whap YIPE in the way I hoped the two worlds have to be vividly incompatible.

At least Flowerhair was still alive. Yes. I was keeping her alive. What—or who—was keeping me alive? Hello?

::giggle:: And suddenly the story gets a bit meta.

This is me having some fun.  There’s a lot in KES, starting with Kes herself as a fantasy writer, that I would NEVER EVER have put in a book that started life as something I was expecting a publisher to pay me for.

. . . SOMEWHERE someone asked me if the colonel of the Falcons might by any chance be Flowerhair.  Have I answered this?  I can’t remember/find answering this.  If I did, this is what I would already have said:  What a great idea.  No.  Rats.  The thing is, Flowerhair has stayed alive partly by keeping a low profile.  I’ve told you, haven’t I, that I’m going to give you the first chapter of the first FLOWERHAIR book, one of these days?  I know what happens‡‡ and I know how she got started on this mercenary thing, and why, and also why she distrusts the formal military.  She’d also hate being in command although privately, as her author’s author, I think she’d be good at it.  She’s put temporary gangs together occasionally to bring off some feat she couldn’t pull alone.  Eh.  Maybe while Kes is resting up after Part One finally comes to an end I’ll mess with Flowerhair a little more.‡‡‡

I’m glad Silverheart seems to be determined to help Kes out both with being Defender & convincing other people that Kes has some small right to inhabit her heroic role.

Well . . . this is also just McKinley’s preoccupation with ordinary people rising to extraordinary occasions.  Kes is a bit more tongue in cheek than, say, Harry, but it’s the same story arc, from  MEEEEEEEP, to . . . Oh, well, if I have to. . . .

Springlight

Eowyn had never been a satisfactory heroine because of that whole seeking-death-because-of-unrequited-love thing to which I had had a strong ‘spare me’ reaction

But Eowyn faced the ring wraith lord when all around her had fallen and for that I loved her. Besides, there was really only her and Galadriel who could possibly be role models for a 10 year old girl reading LOTR, and Galadriel did a lot of standing around looking stately while doing not a lot, which had no appeal at all. Get out there and DO something woman!  

I agree, except for the fact that it’s not enough.  I went through the tortures of the damned as only an introverted book-mad ten, or, in my case, eleven-year-old girl who WANTS HER OWN ADVENTURES can go through if she’s of a Previous Generation and when she was eleven years old LOTR was what there was, full stop.  Robin McKinley, Elizabeth Moon, Patricia McKillip, Tamora Pierce, Diane Duane, Patricia Wrede etc hadn’t been invented yet.  Eowyn does beg to accompany Aragorn into battle because she’s a shield maiden not a wet nurse, and in fact that scene rings very true to me and it interests me that Tolkien—manifestly not a bloke who gets it about women—could write it.  But he then, as if horrified at his own ability to understand a woman’s desire for action, undermines the flapdoodle out of her for that famous scene with the Nazgul captain:  she doesn’t kill him.  Merry does.  Which is probably why, when my eleven-year-old mind had to have a GIRL in there somewhere, decided that Merry was a girl really.

And Galadriel is a wet.  Just by the way.  The most interesting thing about her is that she’s a bigger deal than her husband, which is another of those oopsies from Tolkien the Bloke.  Hey, pack her off to the Grey Havens before she spreads.  And for utter iconic girlie uselessness I give you Galadriel’s granddaughter . . . Arwen.§

 

 

* * *

 

* Readers are great.  I love my readers.^

^ Mostly.  Except the ones who think they and I are twin souls and/or want me to collaborate with them on their great novel.

** NOOO. NOOOOOOOOOO.  —Author.

Oh, do shut up and write.  —Story.

*** ::muffled gurgling noises::

† All my New York friends are going HEY!

†† Anyone wants to suggest there’s no magic in LEST DARKNESS FALL . . . um.  No overt magic.  But one dorky little guy TOTALLY TOTALLY TOTALLY CHANGES HISTORY I MEAN TOTALLY?  Uh huh.  De Camp just decided not to mention the magic wand.

††† And since 1939 when LEST came out they’ve kind of decided the Dark Ages weren’t all that dark after all.

‡ Uggh.  The Story Council sends me one of those and after I set fire to it I’ll start lobbing plastic bags of dog crap through their windows.

‡‡ I think I know what happens.^

^ Murac.  Grrrrrrrrrrr.

‡‡‡ Mainly I have to get on with PEG II a little more briskly.^

^ Although, speaking of messing around, I’d like to know a little more about Aldetruda.  And Kes, in a bit of wish fulfilment, writes a lot faster than I do and has at least one other serial heroine and some one offs lurking, any of which might make an interesting digression or digressions.

§ And no, I cut Peter Jackson no slack for trying to jazz her up a little.

Chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp chirp*

 

It was going to be a really bad day.**  The ME is using me as a punching-bag again*** and I got out of bed in stages, saying, it is Monday, and I am going to my voice lesson.  I am going to my voice lesson.  All I have to do is crawl to the car, unlock the door, and put the key in the little hole.  Wolfgang knows the way.

It has been a really bad week for—not for singing, see previous about singing for sanity, but for attentive practise, so that I don’t feel a total fool going to sing for Nadia.†  After my voice slammed shut on me last Monday—which was actually rather alarming—I gave it two days off anything but folk songs and Leonard Cohen†† . . . and then I had stomach flu and all those deep breaths and gut-disturbing diaphragm action for singing seemed like a pretty bad idea, although I could (maybe) stop worrying about the slamming shut, which was probably germ related. †††

I did sing over the weekend—a little—and I noticed at church last night that I was making a noise.‡  But this morning, warming up, I felt like I’d Never Seen Any of This Music Before in My Life‡‡ and did not set out for my lesson in a very positive frame of mind.‡‡‡

But fate and body parts are often perverse little creatures.  I don’t even know how to explain what happened;  if I try it’ll sound like gibberish to non-singers and will probably make those of you who would understand what I was talking about if I could explain it properly fall down laughing.  The point is I made what Nadia herself called a Technical Leap Forward having to do with waking up the ‘mask’ sinuses and persuading all the various bits and pieces—tongue and soft palate in particular—to clear out of the way and let the sound resonate.   Gleep.  And she took me up to the high B-flat I need for both Batti, Batti§ and I Want to Be a Prima Donna—I didn’t know it, of course, although I knew we were getting up there—and which I do erratically have at home when I’m focussed on not paying attention and shutting myself down because I Can’t Possibly Do That, so I know the frelling thing exists.  And as she pointed out, grinning, I sang it with no strain and no muscle tension.  It’s the lack of tension that was so astonishing—she said, yes, your support has come a little adrift, but we can fix that.§§  You’ve made real progress today.

And . . . golly . . .  you know . . . I may yet make a singer.

* * *

* Although everything is relative.  See next footnote.

** It’s been a bad hellhound day for weeks.  With the very, very occasional exception, Darkness more often than Chaos, neither of them is eating.  The only reason they haven’t starved themselves to death by now is because I keep force feeding them.  They haven’t eaten a scrap of anything today, voluntarily, for example.  This is utterly demoralising for me even when the ME isn’t bad.  It’s not the taste of the drug;  they get three meals and only two of them are dosed.  If they are having a unique nauseous reaction to this stuff—nausea which lasts through the third meal—that would explain it, but I doubt it’s that simple, and neither the vet nor I can ask them how they feel or why they’ve decided food is the enemy.^  Meanwhile although their output is improved it’s still far from . . . um . . . a neat pick-up so we persevere.  Wearily.

^ Although if it were that simple, anorexia in humans would be less scary and less difficult to treat.  I remind myself of this sometimes, on my knees beside the dog bed, stuffing cold sticky food down recoiling hellhounds.

*** I did survive^ my first official Samaritan duty shift, thank you for asking.  It was a relatively quiet night which given that I was not at my best is probably just as well,^^ although I need some demanding shifts to get through the list of things your mentor has to support you through before you’re turned loose to function mentor-less.  I did write a few texts^^^—and I hope you eventually get over that initial shock of, oh, you poor thing, let me give you a cup of tea and a biscuit.#

The next fortnight is going to be a little unnecessarily exciting however since I’m still at the tremulous beginning of learning Sam weekly duty-shift stamina and I’ve got Street Pastor shifts two weeks in a row too.  This is from the swap with Eleanor—she took my Friday night before a Saturday-morning Sam training in June and I’m taking her Saturday in July while she’s touring great swathes of America with her husband.  Meanwhile the ME needs to clear off.

^ . . . I’m here.  I’m writing a blog entry.  This is not the new Zombie McKinley.  Breath on the mirror and everything.

^^ And I’m going to assume that hang-ups are not in response to my American accent.

^^^ My mentor, whom we will call Pythia, has a very good line:  if you had written what this person has written, is this the response you’d want to read?  —Since ‘I have a magic wand and I’m about to make it all go away’ is ineligible, like the cup of tea, if for different reasons.

# Tricky, of course, since they could be texting you from anywhere.  New Guinea.  Mars.+

+ A CUP OF TEA AND A BISCUIT??  I’M SO BRITISH.~

~ I have no idea what the cup-of-tea-and-a-biscuit equivalent is in either New Guinea or Mars.

† Although I continue to be tempted to take . . . probably Matty Groves in to Nadia.  Some folk song with drama.  I told you, didn’t I, that I asked her how you sing a maddened nobleman who is about to off both his wife and her lover when you’re a soprano?  And she said it’s all in how you release the consonants.  And.  Glory.  Yes.^

I may not have told you since I don’t remember admitting that I’m not a big Sandy Denny fan^^.  I know.  Heresy.  I am, indeed, so lost to all finer feelings that I wonder if the Sandy Denny cult might be somewhat based on the fact that she died young.  Nice enough voice but . . . eh.  Give me Maddy Prior or June Tabor or Norma Waterson.  The Matty Groves take that makes my blood beat hard and my hair stand on end is Fairport Convention after Sandy Denny, with the blokes singing.  And they can roar, which is not an option available to a soprano.

But I think I’m still not quite up to eating the scenery for Nadia.  Maybe a few more weeks.  Months.  Years. . . .

^ ‘ . . . And I shall Strike the very next blow, and I will Kill you if I Can.’

^^ But when the ME is this bad I don’t have any memory either.

†† Famous on twenty-three continents^ for having a vocal range of two and a half notes, and tends to write songs accordingly.

^ This includes Mars

††† Your Body Is Your Instrument.  Why didn’t I stick with the piano?

‡ I mean . . . singing.  Melodic.  More or less.  Probably.  I wasn’t in the band this week so it didn’t matter.

‡‡ Mozart?  And he was—?

‡‡‡ Although the presence of non-eating hellhounds in the back seat, looking forward to their Monday afternoon post-lesson walk somewhere interesting, probably was not helping.  They like me wrecked by ME:  I’m much more willing to noodle along while they investigate every clump of grass for the recent presence of other dogs and/or fascinating pieces of litter.

§ Oh—that Mozart

§§ She also said that if I can’t do this free resonating thing at home this week—don’t panic.  But that I should only sing new music—stuff I’m working on for the first time now—if I break out Che Faro, for example, which is absolutely my longing and desire, I’ll just revert to old habits.  Wait a little now, she said.  We’ll go back to Che Faro later, I promise.

Weather drama – guest postlet by Blogmom

Fuzzy weather drama photo courtesy of our neighbor’s iPhone. Fortunately it wasn’t as close as it looks.

Prairie weather is never boring. We call it the Sky Show.

KES, 137

ONE THIRTY SEVEN

 

If you google ‘fainting’ you’ll get a lot of stuff about blood pressure and dehydration and low blood sugar.  Nobody seems interested in whether your visual-pathway neurons are still firing or not, or, if they are, what your brain thinks it’s seeing, even if your eyes have rolled up in your head and your body is doing an excellent wet-cardboard imitation.  I haven’t fainted often, but the few times have been memorable.  My cerebral cortex apparently says, Hey!  We’re free of stupid reality!  Let’s party!

There was a scrubby grey wilderness and a little hissing wind.  This wasn’t the uncanny desert of the black thing and its behemothic sword;  there were trees, and a path through the trees, but the trees were grey and tired and the path looked like it was kept open only because it was being regularly used;  it was rough and crooked as if whoever had first knocked a hole in the undergrowth had been stumbling in the dark and nobody following had had the time or the concentration to make better choices.  It wasn’t a path or a landscape that anyone would be on or in if they didn’t have to be.

Your POV when you’ve fainted and your parietal lobe is doing the hokey pokey with your cerebellum and your Brodmann areas is kind of peculiar.  Or mine is anyway.  It’s not wholly unlike the mind frame I get in when I’m deep in a story, and I’m wherever the story wants me to be, which may be several places at once:  Character A is avoiding getting hacked to death on the battlefield (very funny my mind producing that image just now ha ha ha), Character B is frantically trying to come up with a bribe that will make the evil magician release his sweetheart, the evil magician isn’t terribly interested in any bribes Character B is likely to have on offer because he’s preoccupied with how the battle is going and the sweetheart is gnawing through her manacles having first sung the guard dragon to sleep, because the poor helpless fragile little virgin thing is all an act, and Character B may have a shock coming.  This is rather more than the standard 360-degree view, trust me.  And if the story drops you in it and you’re not absolutely on form, writing your way out of all the flap and fluster may get a little ragtag.  This is why rewrites were invented.

I could see the trees and the path, and I could feel that they were out in the middle of nowhere although I had a sense of farms and towns over . . . there, somewhere.  And as the farms and towns drew closer together, and the towns grew larger and larger till a few enterprising businesspersons discovered it was worth their while to start haulage companies, there was a castle.  And in a room high in a tower at one end of the castle there was a gorgeously-dressed woman sitting at a desk, writing.  At her feet was a silky golden sighthound.  She was writing as if her life depended on it.  I hoped she was on form.

I was not sorry not to be writing whatever story was causing her such anxiety and apprehension, but if it had meant I could sit at a desk instead of being passed out in the arms of a middle-aged mercenary of dubious reliability while some torturer repeatedly sank a dagger-sized needle in my leg, I’d have a go.  Although the goose quill and inkwell were outside my skill set.

Her castle looked like it might have been designed by the same architect who had designed the tower in the middle of the tired grey forest, although if it was the same architect, he or she hadn’t been getting enough sleep and had been hitting the illegal substances a little too hard while the tower had been on the drafting table.  There was something ever so slightly wrong about its proportions, although that might have been the oppressive effect of the dull sooty-black stone it was made of, a dullness so determinedly nonreflective that the tower gave the impression that it was sucking up the light around it;  as if it was the tower’s fault that the landscape was grey, that the trees were grey rather than green and brown, that where the crooked path had worn deep into the ground the exposed tree-roots and shoulders of stone and bare earth were grey.

The black tower was huge.  Why had it been built out here in a wilderness?  The narrow bumpy path that led to it now would never have taken carts big enough to carry the stones it was made out of, so unless there was some grisly yoked slave transport involved, or a four-lane highway on the far side that I’d missed, the tower was old enough for some pretty serious trees to have grown up to crowd in on the path.

I did something that if I’d been in my body would have counted as squinting.  There was a bird flying—no, soaring—no, hovering—over the black tower.  It had that raptor look to it.

And if it was hovering it might be a kestrel.

Ever new vistas of arrrrrrrgh

 

You were due to get a blog post tonight and I have stomach flu.  As these things go it’s mild* but it’s knocked my energy level over and squashed it flat, because that’s what happens when you have ME and some blasted interfering ‘acute’ comes along and joins the party.

Meanwhile I had my observation duty at the Samaritans last night—and was aware of feeling a little peaky** but that might have been tension level***—and I have my first official duty shift tomorrow.  And I’m going.  So let’s hope I can sit in a chair and speak in complete sentences, okay?  I want to do this.  And I don’t want my mentor to have to do it for me because I’m convulsing on the floor.  Arrrrrrrgh.†

* * *

* May it stay mild, thank you very much

** I’ve actually been peaky most of this week, the kind of peaky that makes me think ‘oh help the ME is getting worse I’m not going to be able to keep on floundering through as much stuff as I do if this is settling in to be the new system’—also PAIN.  Golly.  I really do not like pain and it makes me CRANKY^ and at my age it also makes me feel dangerously old.  Having the intensification of the ME coalesce into something like stomach flu, which can reasonably be presumed will go away again, is actually a relief.^^

^ I would have been such a bad martyr.  I wouldn’t have forgiven anybody.

^^ This is how acutes tend to manifest with me, that the ME gets worse and then as if spits out the acute.+  But of course during the run up I don’t think ‘oh I must be coming down with something’ I think OH WOE MY LIFE IS OVER.

+ Not everyone with ME follows this pattern but it is a common one.

*** There weren’t any ordinary people who just wanted a chat last night—yes the Sams get those although that’s not what they’re for—YEEEEP.  The Sams really are the sharp end.  Yeeeeeep.  I was there mid-shift so I could watch the handover, the point being that there’s always someone available to answer a ringing phone and there’s always a debrief every shift with the admin^, so I had a chance to speak to four duty-shift Sams plus my mentor^^ plus yesterday’s admin head and I was saying yeeeeep and they were all saying sympathetically, well, yes.  That’s what we do.

It has come up constantly from the first information evening when you’re still deciding whether to apply or not that the Sams support their people.  What the Samaritans do is rough.  And you can’t take it home with you or you won’t be able to do the job for long.  Hence constant, structured checking from admin and colleagues that you’re okay.

The other crucial aspect of this is the Sams’ rule of ABSOLUTE CONFIDENTIALITY.  The only people you’re allowed to discuss Sams’ callers with is other Sams.  And I had a little taste of what this is going to mean in practise last night.  Intellectually I totally get it and totally agree with it too—that’s what makes the Sams such a great resource.  Have something that’s eating holes in you that you either have no one to discuss it with or you just can’t discuss it with friends and family?  Ring the Sams.  You can tell them anything, they’ll not only listen, it won’t go any farther.  Terminally ill and want to talk about death but your family are all in denial?  Ring the Sams.  Suicidal from the break-up that everyone thinks is your fault because they won’t hear the truth about your ex-partner?  Ring the Sams.  Your dog died and nobody gets it that it matters?  Ring the Sams.

But to engage, to empathise, as a Sam you do have to get alongside whoever you’re talking to.  And you also have to put it down again when you put the phone down.

I’ll learn to do this—as I told my mentor I’m reasonably confident about the long term:  short term is the yeeeeeep—but the new skill is not being able to talk about it.  I’m a girl.  When stuff gets to me I find a friend to talk it through with.  It’s what girls do.  I wrote a couple of emails to friends last night and I probably sounded pretty distracted because what I was chiefly thinking about was what I couldn’t say. ^^^  Grim stuff is undoubtedly more of a burden when you can’t ask a trusted friend to help you lever it off and lay it down.

^ The admin are all practising Sams too.  They know what you’re doing, what life on the, ahem, line is.

^^ Whom I like a lot, by the way.  I feel in safe hands with her:  that she’ll catch me if I screw up but she won’t make me feel like a retarded liver fluke for screwing up.

^^^ It’ll be easier once I’ve made some friends in the Sams.  The Street Pastors keep schtum too but since most of what we do happens in public and out on the street the lockdown isn’t as absolute.  And I went into the SPs as one of four from St Margaret’s, the other three of whom were already my friends by the time I started doing duty shifts.  Clearly I need to send that email to the other five trainees of my Sams intake saying, so what about meeting up for that beer then?

† What you guys really want to be hoping/praying/dancing around bonfires for however is that I’m sufficiently alive and functioning to tweak another chapter of KES and release her to the world Saturday night.

Missed photo ops and other critter interactions

 

So my pale blue and white floral cotton jeans are in the washing machine.  Today I’m wearing a pair of pale khaki light cotton jeans.  Why do clothing manufacturers seem to think that small children stop being sticky and dogs stop having muddy feet and we all stop being clumsy just because it’s SUMMER?  Pastels are overrated.  At least below the waist.  I even used a proper mop on the kitchen floor this morning before I let the menagerie out on the theory that at least I won’t get dirty knees from kneeling on it.  Until everybody has gone out into the courtyard and tramped what they find there indoors again which is why kneeling on my kitchen floor generally produces dirty knees.  I was playing our standard morning maniacal tug of war with the hellterror* AND DISCOVERED A SPOT OF BLOOD ON MY PALE KHAKI LEG.  . . . And could find no trace of bloodshed on either the hellterror** or me.  So clearly it was just a random drop of blood coalescing out of nothingness by the irresistible attraction of a pair of clean pale khaki trousers.  Sigh.  Washing machine and spot remover.

Then while I was chopping veg for the hellterror’s breakfast*** I was gazing out the window while the hellterror in question twined around my ankles like a cat, hoping for dropsies.  And lo and behold there was daddy robin and two fledglings variously perched on the suet feeder.  Daddy robin can just stretch his neck through the squirrel-discouraging wiring to reach the fat-with-dead-bugs slab, yum—I think I’ve told you before that the wire cage is supposed to let small birds through but my resident robin is about half the size of a hellterror.  Of course by the time I got the hellterror fed—once you are clearly getting a hellterror meal you had better not stop till this task is completed†—and could fetch my camera the robins had left the feeder and were sprinting about the garden, but I’m glad to see that there was some baby-robin action here this year, and the way they were behaving I suspect the nest is tucked into my jungle somewhere.  The parents scorned my greenhouse after all the excitement last year with the wall falling down and the weeks of strange men and barrowfuls of mortar.  Enough to put any reproductively-minded robin off I’m sure.  Maybe next year.  I have a bit of greenhouse shelf permanently sacrificed to the possibility of a bird’s nest.

But the truly tragic photo op miss was a couple of days ago at the mews.  Wolfgang and I drove in to discover Peter’s next door neighbours staring fixedly at the brick wall the mews, and Peter’s cottage as number one, is built against and out of, and which is covered in roses.  Wolves? I inquired hopefully.  No, no, they said, a song thrush is shepherding her just-fledged babies on an excursion.

Sure enough there were three little floppy-fluttery things and mum having a shrieking meltdown.  And as I stopped to watch, one of them took waveringly to the air, zigzagged vaguely for a second or two, decided that I had a safe, tree-like look about me . . . and landed on my butt.  A baby bird weighs zilch but I felt its wings, and I could feel the faint scrabbling as it got at least one foot in my hip pocket.††  Mum was having a total heart attack in the shrubbery and the neighbours were going off in conniptions.  Har de har har.  The fledgling got its breath back and decided a spot of mountaineering was in order and started clambering up my back.  I bent over because I’m a very nice, cooperative tree.  It was a hot day and I was wearing a very thin cotton tee shirt and the tiny claws prickle.  Peter heard the commotion and opened the door, Fledgling A launched a dive off my back . . . and Fledgling B, not to be outdone, took to the air in its turn and flew through Peter’s door.

Whereupon we had shrieking mum in the shrubbery and shrieking baby frantically boomeranging around the front hall and trying to cram itself into nonexistent cracks in the stairs.  You know how you’re always afraid of hurting them?†††  So it took me several tries to get hold of it in a way I thought wouldn’t damage the little idiot—and I remember Penelope, who was a bird ringer in her day, saying that if you get them gently but firmly around the body with their wings trapped and just their heads sticking out, they’ll quiet down.  WHY?  But this one did just that—teeny heart going so fast it was nearly a buzz—and I’m muttering, Don’t die of shock!  Don’t die of shock!, and I put it carefully down on the top of the water butt, which is quite a substantial space if you’re not much bigger than a bumblebee, and mum yelled at it to stop messing about and come home, and it did.  The third fledgling had spent all this time staying obediently put in the shrubbery and it’s not going to have any stories to tell its grandchildren.

However nobody whipped out their smartphone and took a picture.  But I can at least tell you about it.

* * *

* Speaking of photo ops.  I should figure out a miner’s-helmet camera deal so as to get a close-up shot of bull terrier playing tug of war, with the little pointed ears flat back in intensity, the little forehead furrowed in concentration, the little evil eyes gleaming and the jaws of death clamped for glory around the Yellow Rubber Thing.  It is an awesome sight.

** Who was of course happy to be rolled around for examination.  All rolling and rubbing is good to a hellterror.

*** She gets veg in her meals because it means more food.  If I was just giving her wet food and kibble there would be less food.  More food is always good, like rolling and rubbing is always good.  Rules of life if you’re a hellterror are blissfully simple.

† Hellhounds of course would be saying, mount an expedition to the Antarctic before we get fed?  Great.  Don’t hurry back.

†† Usefully pre-flattened by hellterror hind feet.

††† I’ve told you about trying to catch an escaped lamb, haven’t I?  This was out in the wilderness with no obvious farmer to apply to.  I tied the hellhounds up at one end of the fence and started driving it toward them, assuming that it would not want to go that way and I could get hold of it.  I did get hold of it—mum on the other side of the fence having an ovine heart attack, which seems to be the fate of mums—but lamb skin is vastly bigger than the lamb, like puppy skin, I was afraid of hurting it . . . and it got away.  I did find a farmer to tell however.

Yes we are

 

. . . moving house.  Removal men with rippling muscles and a large lorry are coming 1 August.  Yessssssss.  Any of you of a praying persuasion please pray it goes no more catastrophically than these things usually do.  And more important that Peter finds he positively likes it there at Third House once he’s in.  Any of you not of a praying persuasion are nonetheless welcome to dance supplicatorily around bonfires dedicated to minor deities who ease tiresome mortal rites of passage like house moves.  I personally prefer Jesus, but I’ll take any good will on offer.

And minions of British Telecom, that delightfully efficient and customer-oriented corporation, are coming the day before to install necessary wiring because, as regular blog readers may recall, BT declares that there are no lines to Third House, that eighty or ninety year old cottage in the centre of town and with a phone jack in the kitchen which you might think BT would find a little embarrassing.  HOWEVER we have got round my bootless fury on this topic first by the fact that we’re going to want wireless broadband and the connections for that probably do need to be updated from whenever . . . and second I just caved when the very loud, relentlessly cheerful woman who was brokering the deal rushed past the part about how they’d do all this for free if we bought their broadband.  So we’re buying their broadband.  And I am a weak, cringing worm.  Yes.  I just want it over with.

Eleanor finished cleaning Third House’s kitchen today.*

Jonas, who is a builder by trade and can do anything, is plumbing in the dishwasher because all the local plumbers are booked until Christmas 2017.

Atlas is getting on with carving out the Desk Aperture.**

Nina and Ignatius are coming twice this week to do anything someone else hasn’t got to first.  They may make a start on clearing the space for my shed.  And I may ask Ignatius to put up some shelves, since there is only one of Atlas and he only has two hands.  Fie.  You’d think someone who works in three dimensions for a living would have at least four.

And the hellhounds ate lunch for the first time in weeks.***

But too much stuff working might go to my head.  So the ME gallantly stepped in at this point and slapped me down.†  ARRRRRRGH.††  Therefore I think I’ll make one of my hilarious attempts to go to bed early.††† Night night.‡

* * *

* She has been giving me a very hard time about all the things I won’t let her throw away.  That’s a perfectly usable jar!  Leave it alone!  She even thinks I have too many books.  Friendships have been lost over comments like these.  But not when someone is cleaning your kitchen for free.

** I’m failing to get on with finding somewhere to put all the books thus made homeless.  See previous footnote.

*** Don’t get too excited.  They didn’t eat dinner.

† Do I really need the ME too?  It’s not like the next few weeks are going to be arid with ease and perfection.   In the first place I still have 1,000,000 phone calls to make to/about various which will be quite lowering enough when 60% or so produce the equivalent of all the local plumbers being booked till Christmas 2017.  I’m reminding myself we already own the house, no one can gazump us, that medieval torture device that has somehow been allowed to live on in the laws of England, Third House is in the same town and only half of us are moving anyway.  Hey, my piano is moving!  That counts!  Also the hellhounds are sure to Faint in Coils which will fail to be edifying.   But it could be a lot worse.  Hold that thought.

†† It’s The Little Things.  My last clean white shirt this morning had a big black spot at the centre of the neckline WHAAAAAAT??  I got the worst of it out with a sponge and wore it anyway.  Then I put on my pale blue white floral cotton jeans which are automatically a calamity magnet because of the colour.  And I was out in the garden this morning examining something or other while Pav had her morning pee and she galloped up to me and sprang . . . leaving giant muddy footprints all over my pale blue with white flowers jeans ARRRRRRRRGH.  There was language.  Pav ignored this, of course, because it had nothing to do with her.  She usually does jump on me first thing in the morning . . . but this usually happens indoors, I’ve never taught her not to^, and the only reason the garden was muddy is because I’ve been WATERING because we haven’t had any rain in yonks.^^  ARRRRRRRRGH.  Well I’m wearing the blotched up jeans anyway too, but everything goes in the washing machine tonight.

^ Theoretically she knows ‘off’.  She doesn’t know ‘don’t jump up in the first place you muddy-footed monster’.  Usually I find being jumped on by a thrilled-I-exist bull terrier ridiculously charming.

^^ It’s been long enough that a few Souvenir de la Malmaison roses have been unable to contain themselves to wait to go brown and mouldy in the next major downpour and have popped out properly.  It only takes a few to make my entire tiny walled garden smell divine.

††† HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  I kill myself, I really do.

‡ It’s too hot to sleep anyway.  It’s not hot hot but it’s that kind of hot that sits on your chest like an incubus and won’t let you breathe.

 

Creating DreamWorld, Part II – guest post by Sarah Allegra

 

To call DreamWorld my obsession would be doing it a great disservice. Almost all my creative energy went toward it. It quickly grew from the core cast of characters who came to me into a deep, lush, endless world of possibilities. DreamWorld became the vast land we visit in our sleep.

Some of the people and creatures who reside there have roles to play in your sleep. There is the Dream Purveyor, something between a classic gypsy and fairy,^ from whom you can buy particular kinds of dreams. Also, the Sentinel, an angelic being who watches over you while you dream.# We have a Queen (the first character who came to me that restless night long ago) and a King. There are dryads, magical animals (so many animals!) and even a few dark characters who reign over nightmares.

Prayer For The Frail

More than its individual parts, DreamWorld is a place. It has its own customs, rules, traditions and races. It’s lousy with magic, and there’s a strong theme of the sentient creatures living in harmony with nature. Nature herself plays an important role, bringing beauty, awe and a sense of grounding its other-worldliness a little bit in reality.

One of the things that is very important to me as I slowly work through the series is to put as much effort as the photos need into it. Sometimes it’s quite simple; take your model out to a pretty part of nature, pose her a little and you’re done. Most of the photographs are not like that though. Almost all of them require huge amounts of work beforehand, sometimes months of work. Every detail is hand-made by myself, both because I’m working with an extremely frugal ME-hampered budget and because I have such a specific design in mind. I’m the only one who can bring it to life. And I won’t lie, it’s incredibly rewarding when months and months of effort pay off by giving you the exact photo you wanted.

Potion

It really takes a certain kind of model to work with me. Because of that, I try and stick with my regular models as often as possible, but occasionally a new one slips in. Generally someone new enters either because I need a very specific look, or I’ve come across someone I feel I absolutely must photograph, usually through a model/photographer networking site called Model Mayhem.

There’s a lot of trust required of the models. Often, the things I give them to wear and do will end up looking drastically different in the finished photo. Plus there’s that whole photographers-being-obsessed-with-good-light thing, which means if you’re shooting outside (which I almost always am for DreamWorld) you have three choices. A) sunrise, B) sunset, or best of all, but hardest to predict, C) a cloudy day.§ Nothing ruins the magical mood I’m trying to set up like harsh, nasty twelve o’clock noon light. Because I’m also contending with physical pain most days, and because my pain meds prevent me from driving anywhere or even being in a car ±, this means sunrise is easier for me than sunset. If I go for sunset, I have to wait until the shoot is all over and done to take any pills, and that can make for a VERY LONG day.

April Grace as a shaman retrieving a piece of a soul.

When you consider how my models have to trust me, bearing inhumanely early call times, being out in the cold while flimsily clad, if not outright nude, gracefully holding very uncomfortable poses, often hiking long ways to get to our location, and rarely getting paid¤ it takes a special breed. They have to be as passionate about the final product as I am, as well as believe that I’ll be able to pull it off and make the craziness worth it. They have to be actresses as well as models; sitting there and just looking pretty is never enough. There’s always something to convey, a character to inhabit, a story to tell. While there are a few exceptions, modeling is much harder than most people realize.¥

I usually start each shoot by going over each concept with the model beforehand. On average, I photograph about 3-4 different concepts at each shoot. I explain each idea in great detail before the shoot, usually in an email as we’re nailing down a date and time. Sometimes I include music, videos or quotes from literature to help get my concept across. For me, this is one of the trickiest parts; I never feel like I’ve conveyed the story adequately, but again, my models are wonderful. The ones I’ve worked longest with are familiar with what I usually want out of them which helps a great deal. We develop a bit of a shorthand; if I tell them to ‘look ethereal,’� they know what that very vague-sounding request means.

The Shepherdess

It’s truly a bonding experience, and the models I work with frequently become dear friends as well. There are a few I consider my go-to girls, and I am deeply grateful for them. My work would not be the same without their talents in front of the lens.

While I often use compositing## in my images to bend reality, I try to make as much authentic as possible. Take my photo ‘The Court Of The Dryad Queen’� for example.

This is one of the longest costumes I’ve ever spent time on, but every single thing she’s wearing was hand-made and exactly how you see here. For her crown, I gathered sticks and branches from around my yard, used light wire to hold them in place, spray-painted it, decorated it with pine cones and lace leaves. The central ‘crowniest’� part of her headdress was a little decorative pot I got at Ikea for about $2, also spray painted. Her dress was constructed from many yards of muslin, about half of which I already had, and tea-dyed to become gradually darker at the bottom.^^ The cuffs and collar were made from hundreds of individual leaf shapes I cut out of lace, stiffened, hot-glued in place and painted. The dark green underskirt was just two yards of fabric I’d bought for some project which I’ve now forgotten, but it made the perfect finishing touch to her outfit.

For those interested, you can read a much more in-depth account of creating the costume at my blog, with plenty of behind-the-scenes photos.

The Court Of The Dryad Queen

Having thoroughly ground my fantasy in reality with all the work that went into the costume, now the fantasy came in. I spent months stalking the birds at the feeder in my yard, building up a store of images to pull from for this photo. All the animals, songbirds, squirrels and crows, were added in Photoshop and carefully blended in to make them look like they really had been there. I also had ended up with a background a bit more distracting than I wanted; it was competing with the crown for attention. I ended up having to replace the entire sky (not an easy task in this case) and add in the large branch above her head for all the animals to rest on it, which was from a photo I took of a completely different tree months before. A little sweetening of the colors and tweaking the light and shadows and it was done!

Orb

Months of preparation, weeks of editing… it’s a great deal of work, but I absolutely love it. Many people ask about how I edit photos, and I finally made a short video of the process. It isn’t so detailed as a step-by-step instructional manual, but it helps give people an idea of what goes into some of the wilder edits I do. If you’d like to get a glimpse behind the curtain, you can here!

Where Earth Meets The Sky

Especially as the ME seems to be slowly gaining ground in my body, DreamWorld is more than my escape. It lifts my spirits in a way that goes beyond simply being distracting, or wistfulness, or making pretty things… it actually helps heal my soul to bring it to life. It feels like my true home.

And who knows, if I spend enough time there making the impossible possible, maybe, just maybe, a little magic will rub of into my real life.

Katie’s World

Sarah Allegra is a fine art photographer and self portrait artists in Los Angeles. Read her own blog if you don’t mind occasional artistic nudity: http://sarahallegra.wordpress.com/

—

^Fairy: see Spindle’s End. That’s the kind I mean here; ones who can perform bits of magic, sell charms and are mostly benevolent.

#Played by actor Paul Telfer, who looks exactly like the kind of person you’d want watching over your sleep. He has to be at least 8′ 15″,� broad-shouldered, square-jawed and muscular like your typical Marvel superhero. Actually, he probably looks quite a lot like I imagine Watermelon Shoulders. That may just be my conditioning projecting his image onto the character though; the hellgoddess may disagree with me.

±If I get in a car on the meds, I do what I imagine is probably a very good imitation of Darkness or Chaos geysering. No one wants to see that.

§The sun and I are not friends. I would be so, so happy to live somewhere like Seattle, Portland or England where it’s cloudy more than sunny. I would LOVE that. I know most people come to California for the sunshine, but to me the sun’s rays are just nasty, abrasive deviants who live to ruin an otherwise great photograph.

¤Believe me, I would love to be able to pay them. On the occasions when I’m getting paid for what we’re shooting, they do too. One of the things I look forward to once I’m at a place of actually making money from my art is being able to financially reward these wonderful girls who have stuck with me this whole time.

¥I’d like to publicly thank Sandy Moore, Dedeker Winston, Aly Darling and Katie Johnson for their years of helping me bring my visions to life. These girls are not just astonishing models, but truly wonderful human beings as well.

##Merging two or more* photos together in Photoshop to form one finished piece.

*In my case it’s usually more like several hundred than like two

^^ After such intense tea-dying, the dress SMELLED for days. I had to email the model, a very easy-going girl I work with often named Dedeker Winston, and warn her that while her dress would be beautiful, it was stinky. I couldn’t even bring it inside the house the first day, it had to rest in one of our porch chairs. After that it could live in the bathroom until it aired out a little more.

KES, 136

 

ONE THIRTY SIX:  The Black Tower III

Then the wind blew the clouds in again, dark and heavy and low, and the wild-haired half-naked war goddess on her huge powerful horse disappeared behind them.  There was a murmur of dismay from more throats than yours and you wondered how many of your companions had the same brief, mad desire that you had, to raise your sword and stab it upward, as if the clouds were a curtain you could cut apart, and see the Defender again, and go to her.

“All here, Colonel,” said Barolin.  “All present and ready for your orders.”  And he cast his usual glare over everyone, daring anyone not to be ready, but you thought it wasn’t his usual glare at all, and that he was worried, more worried than you’d ever seen him, Barolin, who was as tough and clever and fearless as the colonel.

The colonel nodded, and then raised her hand and shouted out suddenly:  Canaluma nur frimeh-lec sen falconi dlin tuloom!

You stiffened, and your mare shook her head and sidled, but yours was not the only horse and you were not the only rider to react to the colonel’s words, so no one need know that you could smell the magic her words had released.  But the rest of your company were probably only responding to the magic’s kick, the disturbance in the aether.  You didn’t have to be able to recognise magic to feel its strength.

The colonel wasn’t a magic user;  soldiers rarely were.  It was one of the reasons why, when you ran away from the village where you’d lived all your life, you went straight to the Lady’s army headquarters and enlisted as fast as you could ink your thumbprint and press it where the captain told you to.  Therefore what the colonel had just shouted wasn’t a spell or anything she had to work herself;  it was probably some kind of key. . . .

“Is this the only way?” said Barolin.

“It’s the only way I know,” said the colonel.  “It’s not like this happens every duty shift, is it?”

You could feel the ripple of unease curling through the company.  The colonel didn’t talk like this in front of the people she led. She turned her horse so she was facing her company.  “Listen, you green dogs,” she said, which made everyone smile a little:  green dogs were either the newest, stupidest recruits or the legendary heroes who saved the country or the queen against impossible odds.   Dornag had swum leagues in stormy seas to bring critical news;  Eenarloc had fatally stabbed the enemy general in the eye with the shaft of a feather pulled out of her horse’s tail after the general had broken her sword in battle.  Eenarloc had been a Falcon, and the feather woven into her horse’s tail had been a falcon feather.

“I’ve heard most of the stories you lot tell each other,” the colonel said briskly.  “I’ve told some of them myself.  But I don’t think I’ve heard you tell the one that says a company that goes to support the Defender of the Gate probably won’t come home again?”

It was a tribute to what her people thought of their colonel that no one looked away.

“I confess that generations of officers have tried very hard to prevent that story from becoming commonly known.”

Magic, you thought.  Soldiers are the worst gossips in the world.  They’d’ve had to put a spell on it to keep it quiet.

“Partly because no one knows if it’s true or not.  If you’re going to lose sleep over something at least let it be real.  And the Black Tower is an uncomfortable enough posting;  it doesn’t need help from ghost stories.

“But”—she looked at Lamos, but he bowed his head and stared at his horse’s withers—“personally I think there’s something a bit odd about the Black Tower duty—aside from the amount of sleep you lose over nothing.  The Lady’s regimental histories go back hundreds of years.  You can look up how many sheaves of corn were stolen eight hundred years ago from a farm called Bright Harvest a quarter league west of the village of Rillbrook, or how many folk from Bagshire, and their names, ages and date of contract, enlisted in the Lady’s army seven hundred and eighty three years ago.  But there’s almost nothing, ever, about the Black Tower aside from the fact that duty there was already long established when records began to be taken.

“So I’m thinking that I want to send word back to base about what’s happened to us.”  She paused while the implications of what she was saying sank in.  “Coros.  Your wife’s expecting your first child, isn’t she?”

The whole company knew.  Coros could talk of little else.  And his face lit up every time he did.

“No ma’am,” said Coros.  “I mean, yes ma’am.  But Dora is a Raven herself, ma’am, and she’s the wife of a soldier and a daughter of a soldier.  And I’m a Falcon.  Ma’am.”

“Hmm,” said the colonel.  “Mol, you’re the last child your mother has left, aren’t you?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Mol promptly.  “But she loves her horses more, and the rents from her farm easily support her and her current lover.  Or lovers.”

“Oh?” said the colonel.  And so it went on:  Dumain’s old father didn’t need him, nor did Susalla’s crippled sister—“She’s scarier than a pod of dragons.  That she can’t walk is beside the point”—until the colonel laughed, perhaps a little painfully, and said, “All right, all right.  We’ll leave whoever comes after us a note.”

She paused again as if listening.  But you’d been aware of the change trembling in the air since very shortly after the colonel had shouted out the words of the key.  A key was as good a way of explaining it to yourself as any.  A kind of key that opened a kind of door.

You could feel the Black Tower . . . waking up.