Robin McKinley's Blog, page 192

Tales of a Strangled Cat

 

It's late again*;  I've been working late;  it's now one lousy cramped poky short fortnight before PEGASUS goes in for my editor's final judgement—I'm still assuming that it's on for publication next autumn but we won't know for sure till my editor reads it again and inexorably points out that oh, hmmm, let's see . . . the plot doesn't work.  My plots never work.  If you want to hurt my feelings, tell me that my heroines are weak and passive.**

            But the good news, speaking of my...

The inauguration of lo-text Monday

 

It's not lo-text at all, it's just I'm not writing very much of it.*  But any of you who don't already follow Patrick Rothfuss, and are even the slightest and slenderest bit interested in The Author's relationship with his/her world (and if you're reading this blog, you are), dooooo read this*: 

http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/blog/2009/10/everyone-hates-their-job-sometimes.html 

It's very funny.  And it's all truuuuuuUUUuuuuue.**   I became hysterical over the letter from the librarian.*** ...

Night Adventures

 

They've built a new piece of public footpath through the school playing fields near here, the idea being to encourage more people to walk downtown.*  And I mean built:  hard core** footing and proper hard paving overtop, kerbs, even streetlights.  It was fun watching the process of it going in, including all the bits and pieces, the landscaping, the wheelchair-friendly slope from the playing-ground level to the road . . . no zebra crossing though, drat it;  you still have to play chicken...

Guest post by Bratsche

My August Home Away from Home

Every August, I drive from my home in southwestern Washington to southern Oregon to play in the Britt Festival Orchestra.  It's a festival that was started over 40 years ago (this year was the 47th season) as a classical music festival.  Over the years, it has grown to last several months (June-Sept.) and has lots of different kinds of music.  The first three weeks of August, however, are solely classical music.  The orchestra is made up of approximately 100...

Coherence Not Guaranteed

 

Due to one or two little recent events which I may have mentioned here, I haven't been sleeping to call, you know, sleep.  There's the semi-horizontal-in-the-bed thing* which goes on for a few hours in the wee smalls, but sleep is an inaccurate description.  I'd like to say I'm at least catching up with the last eighty-four years of the London Review of Books but . . . I'm not.  Every time I nod awake again I'm rereading the same blasted paragraph**.

            So quality of anything at the ...

Help update

Amazon has (finally) joined the modern world.

Barnes & Noble and Borders are still showing the old WATER.

Are we having fun yet?

Here's my next unwelcome question:  is anyone seeing either FIRE or the new WATER on real live three dimensional shelves?  Possibly in clandestine, inscrutable places like libraries and bookshops?  Have the books made it out of the warehouse?   Someone posted to the forum that she'd ordered the old WATER, not realising there was anything else on offer, because how...

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Become a fan on Facebook and leave a comment to enter a drawing for autographed copies of Fire and Water! Drawing will be held November 15th.

And, needless to say, tell your friends!

Help

 Any of you booksellers or librarians or other book-professionals out there know a live body at Amazon—or for that matter Barnes & Noble or Borders—you can actually talk to and get human words from?  Preferably words that make sense? 

It is now official publication day for FIRE ELEMENTALS.  The six-year-old WATER ELEMENTALS has been given a new jacket (as you can see to the left of your screen here) and a new little story-intro and reissued with FIRE.

And Amazon—and Barnes & Noble and Borders a...

Pupdate – First Day of School

by B-Twin

The pups are now five months old.  Gee whiz they grow fast! LOL

It seems like yesterday that they looked like this:

Pups - Day 1

Now I can barely get a picture of them they are so fast!

Was-a-puppy

Yesterday Brighid and Bramble had their first real sheepy-experience.  I've been holding off because I didn't think they were quite ready.  Starting dogs on sheep is fraught with risks – mostly that the pups will have a negative experience (a dominant sheep, for instance, that charges at...

Publication day

 

. . . is tomorrow.   

            I know I should now go all gung ho* and rah-rah and . . . 

            And I do think it's a good book.  And I do think Peter and I have written some pretty nifty stories for it (five, to be precise).  I even think the jacket art is pretty cool.**  But we're having a few little technical difficulties.  Like that I've been begging, beseeching, imploring, supplicating for a second copy of FIRE so that Peter and I can send them off to FIRE's two individual...