Robin McKinley's Blog, page 28

KES, 120

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY

Oh good.  Thanks so much.  That was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to hear.  Especially while sitting on an elephant-sized horse in my nightgown surrounded by grim, weary, beat-up looking mercenaries well furnished with the paraphernalia of hacking and hewing.  Living next door to an orc farm was beginning to sound bland and tranquil.  And compared to the black thing Yog-Sothoth was a small-time gremlin.  The sort of gremlin that makes a spot appear as if by magic on your only clean businesslike-ish shirt on the day you’re having lunch with your new editor, or inspires your printer to print only gibberish in sixty decorator colors and nine hundred and twelve ever-more-dazzling fonts.  Which is only life-threatening when you’re a writer under deadline who needs hard copy to mark up for draft revisions:  but then it’s very life-threatening.  As well as hard on the eyes.  I blinked.

I hadn’t realised before this moment how much I liked that kind of life-threatening. I knew what to do about spots on my only clean shirt:  I had an assortment of rhinestone pins for all occasions.  And in my experience editors meeting authors of supernatural-bashing heroines, the sword-wielding leather-cuirass and/or the modern urban leather-miniskirt varieties, tend to be grateful when it turns out you speak in complete sentences and use the restaurant tableware in the usual manner instead of demonstrating your throwing skills at the wall opposite, and that the most bizarre aspect of your appearance is the strange location and arrangement of rhinestone pins.   I mostly enjoy lunches with my editors.  I also knew what to do, at home, with my printer panting from renewed effort, on my knees on the floor surrounded by piles of fresh manuscript pages rapidly becoming studded with cryptic notes scribbled on the second sides of ripped up manuscript pages of previous attempts to tell a story.  And the bleeding involved, barring stabbing yourself with the spot-disguising-pin backs or stapling your fingers together, tended to be metaphorical.

‘Out of my depth’ didn’t begin to describe it.  Monster’s long thick mane brushing my hands as he nodded his head seemed at least as strange as aliens landing their flying Airstreams in your back yard.  Or large black forsoothly guys waving swords in your kitchen.

I blinked again.  I waited for Monster and the mercenaries to dwindle back into my imagination where they belonged.  They didn’t.  I was going to blink once more, positively and with intention,  and when I opened my eyes, I would be kneeling on the floor in my old penthouse office . . . Flowerhair and Aldetruda and the others had variously been known to go into battle significantly underprepared and inappropriately dressed but I’d never been so unkind as to send anyone out to meet a ghastly destiny wearing a flimsy cotton nightgown covered in little pink roses.  There was a lump in my throat and my bruises were doing a sort of choral fantasy of pain.  The bass notes were especially impressive.  It was harder to pretend I was making all of this up with all the throbbing going on.

My heroines also usually had some skills applicable to their situation.  Aldetruda had excellent aim with a variety of hurling weapons, including crossbows and holy water.  Doomblade hadn’t got Flowerhair killed yet partly because it bore her some grudging respect, and she’d pulled off a few jobs that should have killed her because it decided to pretend that she was its master.  An enchanted sword is an excellent ally, so long as it is an ally.  Although unless it had more sorcery hammered into its steel than Flowerhair or I had discovered, I was pretty sure even Doomblade wouldn’t be able to take on the black thing.  Supposing, you know, I had Flowerhair’s cell number and could ask her to come along and help me out.  Bring some friends, I could say.

The black thing.  I hadn’t survived that encounter through any virtue of my own;  Silverheart and Glosinda had done what they could, but what had saved me was one of those Mr-Spock-develops-another-mysterious-skill-just-before/after-the-commercial-break scenes.  Some door between worlds had opened at just the wrong moment and shoved me into that situation;  some other door between worlds had opened at just the right moment and let me escape.

It was still out there, the black thing.  I had no idea what it was, or where it was, or why it had wanted to kill me.  Because I was there?  Because I was—however inadvertently and totally uselessly—this Defender person?  And I had no idea if I might get sent or thrown or dropped back to face it again.  My bruises thundered in counterpoint.  I wouldn’t survive the next confrontation.  If there was one.

For a moment this murky and dangerous place—wherever it was—paled and flickered, and that geographic-feature-length black sword was about to smash me into the dirt again.  Involuntarily I raised the arm with the rose wristlet on it while my other hand groped for the hilt of my sword:  that awful little dusty wind was in my face again, and a smothering silence fell. . . .

Book rec: THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES by Edmund de Waal

 

I’m usually late to the party with big books, even big books that interest me;  generally speaking I’m ploughing a furrow in some literary field no one’s ever heard of and probably lost besides.  But I noticed this book because it’s about netsuke (sort of), and netsuke is/are one of the things I came back from five years in Japan as an American military brat loving—and missing.  I can’t even remember where I saw them in Japan*;  my memory cuts in with seeing them in American museums and longing to pick them up.  They’re tactile.  They’re meant to be handled.  But museums of necessity keep them locked up in glass cases.

So I clocked the HARE, and I also clocked that it became a Very Big Deal, a best seller, winner of the 2010 Costa Biography Award.  When it came out in paperback I bought it.  And put it on a shelf.  And . . .

It turned up on Audible;  I bought it and put it on another shelf. . . .

Two suggestions:  Read it.**  And don’t read any of the reviews first.  I cannot BELIEVE the spoilers reviewers throw out there—I think it may be worse with nonfiction??  Because it’s, you know, facts?***  I think I did read a few of the reviews when the book was new and for once I am proud of my terrible memory because I didn’t remember a single salient story-harming fact.

I loved the beginning, when the young (English) de Waal is given a grant to go to Japan for two years, and while he is there he takes the opportunity to get to know his great-uncle Iggy, raised in Vienna, who now lives in Tokyo—with his impressive collection of netsuke (including the hare of the title).  When he dies, the netsuke comes to de Waal, who decides to research its history;  it has been in his family for several generations.

Now Pollyanna is tapping her foot at me here, because I want to warn you that I personally found this first section, after the introduction about how de Waal came to have the netsuke, heavy going.  The branch of the family it belonged to were very, very, very wealthy Jewish bankers and there is rather a lot of description of clothing and furniture and the way the aesthetes of the family spent their time (and money)†.  There’s an uncomfortable thread of anti-Semitism through all of it††;  but the Ephrussi clan can afford to ignore it—or to insulate themselves from it.

And then the First World War.

And then the Second World War.

It is with de Waal’s great-uncle’s generation and their parents that the story comes horrifyingly, unbelievably, appallingly to life.  I’ve read about the fate of the European Jews before, of course—my father fought in WWII, my best friend is Jewish, I can’t not be interested in that history—but somehow my very lack of empathy with these beyond-the-dreams-of-avarice wealthy people makes their ruin and despair more shocking because ruin and despair I can understand.  They’re human at last, human like the rest of us are human, poor things.  I cried kind of a lot during these chapters.††† And when Iggy’s sister Elizabeth‡ goes back to Vienna after the war and meets her mother’s Gentile maid, Anna, who by Hitler’s government hadn’t been allowed to go on working for the family she’d been with since she was fourteen . . . I cried most of all.

I recommend it very highly.  Slog through the first section, if you find it needs slogging.  Keep going.  And don’t read the reviews.

* * *

* I thought old people are supposed to remember their childhoods vividly.  Hmmph.

** Or listen to it.  Michael Maloney does a great job.  I tend to listen and reread, listen and reread.

*** Like cheap genre tricks like suspense and empathy have no place in nonfiction????

† De Waal is a very stylish and elegant writer;  I’m not sure but what this does him a disservice in this section when everyone is so frelling exquisite.  But the grace and refinement totally come into their own later on when he’s describing things that are the antithesis of grace and refinement.

†† Which ironically is the only time the—for me—rather crazy-making preciousness of this section comes alive.  With the reminder that all is not perfection in silk and satin and furbelows.

††† Mostly while pruning rose-bushes at one-quarter speed because I was too absorbed in what I was listening to.

‡ Elizabeth, by the way, Edmund’s grandmother, is a heroine to conjure with.  He doesn’t make a big issue of her, any more than she made a big issue of herself, but she shines.

Yarn Porn, continued

 

It turns out that I have fewer truly lascivious yarn photos than I hoped;  it’s the fault of the frelling light.  Outdoor light is fine.  Frelling frelling frelling fluorescent light is never fine and while my brain- and finger-numbingly over-specified camera probably has a fluorescent light setting it takes about twenty seconds every time you want to reset anything due to the profligate nature of both the available menus and the items on the menus, and the menus of each individual item, all of them shrouded in impenetrable and unguessable icons which you need to be at home reading the CD on your computer to decipher because of course the paper instructions that you might keep in your knapsack are a feeble pamphlet with a lot of white space that tells you how to insert the battery and turn the thing on and then suggests you read the CD.*  So there you are at a fabulous yarn show scowling at the lighting, which is a diabolical, and unpredictable, mixture of fluorescent and outdoor and even if I could find the Nasty Glaring Indoor Light button on my camera it wouldn’t be the right answer either.  So, for example, although I took photos of all of these, I can’t show you the amazing knitted layer cake complete with (knitted) candles—knitted lit knitted candles—that a local knitting society had made for their own 35th anniversary.  Nor can I show you the astonishing crochet blankets the Natural Dye Studio** had hanging on their walls, or Tilly Flop Designs’*** silly greeting cards or Injabulo’s† gorgeous buttons.  Or a number more knitted shawls††, speaking of shawls.

But we’ll do what we can.

Get. Me. Out. Of. This. Thing.

This is not a good photo, and the original photo probably wasn’t all that great before they blew it up, framed it and put glass over it.  But it’s totally worthwhile because the look on this dog’s face is priceless.††† 

MORE YAAAAAAAARN.

 

EVEN MORE YAAAAAAAAAAARN.

I had promised Fiona to fondle every skein of pink, purple or pink-purple yarn I saw.  I was quite a while at this booth.

I love Eden Cottage yarn. I can’t afford it, but I love it.

They’re one of the many little indie producers out there.  But not only is their yarn seriously smoosh-worthy but they’re nice.

I think you need to be a laird or a laird’s wife or husband to get away with this.

I actually looked at the pattern—being GOH at Boskone might do as a laird-substitute—and fell on the floor laughing.  Um.  No.

SPARKLY yaaaaaaaaaarn

 

Definitely GOH garb. Sigh.

 

 

Wild yarn. Golly.

 

EVEN EVEN MORE MORE YAAAAAAAAAAAAARN.

There.  You don’t feel cheated or short-changed do you?

* * *

* You might think that there might be a short cut menu for the stuff that ORDINARY people use and adjust the most often, but clearly this camera was not made for ordinary people.

** http://www.thenaturaldyestudio.com/  Hint:  they sell the patterns.  I already knew I have to learn to crochet some time because there are a lot of crochet roses out there.  But I may have to crochet a blanket.

*** http://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/tillyflopdesigns  Keep Calm and Finish It for Next Christmas.  There was also one at the show I don’t see on her Etsy page, which goes, more or less:  I told you I’d have it done for your birthday, but I didn’t tell you which birthday

† http://www.injabulo.com/acatalog/Buttons_and_Beads.html

†† http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/stars-in-the-sky for example.  None of these photos BEGINS to do it justice.  And I have about as much chance of knitting it as I do the Unnamed Item with Roses from the first Yarn Porn instalment.  A girl can drool.

††† I am reminded of Sarahallegra’s Calantha in her bunny ears.  Oh, this is http://www.redhoundfordogs.com/  Clearly they are a good place by the high percentage of sighthounds.

. . . I’m leaving you to look up any more web sites.  I think the labels on the rest of the photos are legible.  Anything you’re dying for that doesn’t have a visible label, post to the forum, I can probably figure it out.

 

We interrupt (again) . . .

SPRING!

SUNLIGHT!*  WE HAD SUNLIGHT TODAY!!**  I admit there have been random sightings lately, including this weekend, but today it was SUNNY when I crawled out of bed, it was SUNNY when I let Pav out in the little back courtyard to relieve any overnight build-up of pressure***, it was SUNNY when I ran outdoors with my camera because of course it would rain later, it was SUNNY when I hurtled first one and then the other shift and it was SUNNY when I went out yea verily a third time to buy a newspaper.  I admit it did start raining just as I’d got my gardening kit on and had my hand on the kitchen door to go outside . . . but I went anyway.  I just spent longer in the greenhouse (muttering) than I’d planned.

 

Double primroses. They look like tiny roses. Sue me.

 

PINK tiny double (prim)roses.

 

I adore hellebores and they do really well in this area. I could have had a hellebore-only post.

 

Have I mentioned how much WordPress hates me?  Even with Blogmom’s templates to take the risk out I STILL can’t hang photos.  Okay, late breaking caption:  This particular clump of double whites are trying to take over the universe.  Go for it.  –And I have no idea where the italic came from.

This goofy abutilon has been flowering ALL WINTER. It shouldn’t. But it is. I’ve just given it a very good spring feed.

 

Single fawn-maroon-purple hellebore. They’re all beautiful.

 

Speckly hellebore. ::Happy sigh::

 And WHY did THIS caption become DETACHED from its photo??  No, no, don’t tell me, I’m not strong enough, it’s been a long winter.

First camellia. Jingle Bells, as usual. Terrific camellia, healthy, prolific and trouble free however badly I treat her. Pity about the flowers. . . .

 

 

How to have a REALLY bad hair day. Spend a few hours in the garden. Especially if it’s a garden full of evil roses and low-hanging apple tree branches.

* * *

* Crocuses will only open in sunlight.  So if you think you’re hallucinating . . . check your crocuses.

** I was so demented with joy and daylight that I moved a bumblebee by PICKING HER UP IN MY FINGERS.  I’ve seen one or two recently and am glad they haven’t all drowned.  But this one was snuggled up between the kitchen doorframe and the sill and the hellpack would get her if I didn’t tread on her and I was thinking that she was probably liking the warmth of the house so without thinking at all I picked her up and put her behind the plant pots on the kitchen window shelf.  It didn’t occur to me what I was doing till she started buzzing.  EEEEEP.  I may have put her down somewhat hastily.  But she was slow and sleepy with winter and it’s easy to be STUPID because bumblebees are, you know, fuzzy and cute.

*** She is now old enough to have the control to decide not to relieve pressure till she goes on her first hurtle later.  Yaay.  I don’t know if this is the tiny size of the space available or what;  the hellhounds stopped using the back garden too, except when things were very bad, although it took them longer, being boys, about two years.  But this is the first time I’ve had dogs with a small enclosed garden and don’t know if this is common behaviour or not.  But it’s very nice not to have a patio latrine that needs disinfecting, especially with spring and summer and sitting-outdoors thoughts in prospect.  Not that I’m very good at sitting outdoors but the thought counts for something.

Yarn Porn, Part One

 

Katinseattle

No, no, said Nina, I’ve only just got here myself; I misread the bus   schedule and. . . .     TO BE CONTINUED.

A certain renowned author and GOH at 2015 Boskone is getting entirely too fond of cliffhangers!

Snork.  It wasn’t meant to be a cliffhanger.  It was ‘okay, that’s 1000 words, I can get at least a second post out of all the photos, YAAAAAAAY.’  No, I found my way out of the car park without happening across more than one or two bottomless ravines and/or person-eating tigers . . . and having stood at a total loss on the pavement outside the exit for about thirty seconds while the traffic swirled by* the very first passing pedestrian I applied to pointed over his shoulder and said, your Ancient Building—and your yarn show—is that way.

And it was.  And Nina was waiting in the entrance.**  And we spent the next three hours in a daze of colour, texture and naked desire.***

The Welcome Pigeon. And it doesn’t eat your seedlings or crap on your windscreen.

 

 

SOME DAY I am going to buy one of those amazingly long skeins of laceweight and knit a shawl on big needles so it’s all, you know, lacy, without having to learn a frelling lace pattern. But not today.

And it won’t be nearly as droolworthy as any of these.  But it’ll be a shawl.

YAAAAAAAAAARN

 

TO BE CONTINUED.  Again.  Hey, it worked last time. . . . †

* * *

* And I’m sure I saw that stricken look of No!  Not Sainsbury’s again! on several of the drivers’ faces

** Having had a slightly fascinating time watching all the painstakingly handmade knitwear marching through the doorway.  This reminds me more than a trifle of costuming at cons.  The majority of it is pretty fabulous and you think if all that love, care, creativity and skill could be more widely applied we’d have the world’s problems sorted instanter.  Unfortunately there tend to be governments and special-interest groups in the way.

And then there’s a little of it that, ahem, isn’t fabulous.  At least not on this planet.   There were a few items in this category at the yarn show.

*** Well, I did.  Nina is made of sterner stuff, although she admitted she began to feel a trifle overwhelmed.  But she came for a project and she found a project, and she bought a pattern and took advice about suitable yarn and bought that AND THAT’S ALL SHE BOUGHT.  Gaaaaaaah.  I bought an ENTIRELY UNSUITABLE VERY LARGE BOOK OF PATTERNS for the extremely pathetic reason that I fell wildly, hopelessly in love with one of the knitted-up samples.  I have about as much chance of knitting the freller^ for myself as I do of riding dressage in the next Olympics—in fact I have a better chance at the Olympics—but maybe I can turn the book into a coffee table.  It’s big enough.^^

Now most of this is just my embarrassing lack of self-control.  But it’s also because the stall-holders were nice.  I could imagine ringing them up and saying WHAT DO I DO NOW?  I can even imagine them answering.^^^  Most of the stall-holders made a point of saying that they were happy to take phone calls and offer advice, and pressed their business cards on you, and most of these are small independents producing their own yarn and/or their own patterns.   Although there were a few franchises there, they were friendly too.  Knitting seems to be a pretty welcoming world.

However there was one stall where I would certainly have bought one and probably two patterns, both of which were really interesting and looked more clever than complicated . . . but a little complicated.  And I looked at the proprietors and thought, well, no, I can’t imagine ringing these people up and asking for advice.#  So I didn’t buy the patterns.  Sigh.  Not like I don’t have 467,912 patterns already.

^ No I’m not telling you what it is.  It’s an item of clothing and it has roses on it.

^^ Speaking of large books full of gorgeous patterns I have no hope of knitting:  http://americanmuseum.org/2013/09/the-colourful-world-of-kaffe-fassett-22-march-to-2-november-2014/

I even have a Kaffe Fassett book from another, similar occasion of tragic longing.  It’s an art book, okay?  Never mind those pattern instructions in the back.

^^^ The likelihood of my being able to follow their instructions however. . . .

# Nina, by the way, in her calm, clear, rational manner, had the same reaction to them that I did.  So it’s not just me being the raging loony faction.  She also liked the patterns.  Maybe I’ll buy one on line and ask Fiona to help me.

†  I’ve also just spent fifteen minutes frelling arguing with this laptop, which may be moving toward retirement^, about posting that last photo, which it insisted was Fully Occupied Having Illicit Relations with Another Programme.  IT FRELLING ISN’T YOU FRELLING FRELLING.  I don’t want to do that any more tonight and I have no idea what it might have in mind for my next attempt at loading a photo.  The yarn porn is obviously disturbing its moral and professional values.

^ I can’t AFFORD a new computer!  I need to BUY MORE YARN!!

 

Behind the headlines it was an exciting weekend

 

So there’s this major yarn and stuff to do with it, stuff to do it with and accessories like buttons and ribbons show that is not so far from here I can’t toy with the idea of going to it . . . especially if Fiona was driving.

But this is now the second year that Fiona has declined to go on the flimsy grounds that she had to WORK that weekend.*  And I was feeling obstinate and cantankerous.  And I happened to mention that there was going to be a fabulous yarn show with lots of STUFF to Nina, who said, oh, that sounds like fun.  I’ll come.

Now Nina, once you bash past her British self-deprecation, is good at kind of a lot of stuff;  she plays the violin, she cooks, she gardens, she sews, she embroiders, she does long-distance bicycling, and her end of the charity she works for runs very well.  But I didn’t know she knitted.

I used to, she said.  But a friend has started me crocheting, and I’ve been thinking about picking up knitting again.  What I need is a project to inspire me.

So we arranged to meet at the venue, which is one of these Ancient Buildings Repurposed, and half the experience is about going the wrong way through the wrong end of the wrong aggregation of corridors and small crooked well-raftered rooms, and seeing the proud civic collection of sealing-wax stamps and the sepia photos of Prince Edward at the opening of the new railroad in 1887, but failing to find what you were looking for. 

Which was a lot like my experience of getting there at all.

There was actual sunlight [sic] that morning [sic] and I set off in a hopeful and positive manner/deeply guilty that I wasn’t staying home and working in the garden**, and about the first third of the way is pretty familiar and the last two-thirds used to be pretty familiar before age, decrepitude and ME set in.  I had my Google map print-out taped to the dashboard and just before the stoplight where I was going to have to turn off the modern roads, built for fast-moving fossil-fuel-propelled vehicles, and into the frelling medieval frelling maze . . . they changed the road layout.  AAAAAAAAAUGH.***

So I made one of those hasty decisions, the way you do at fifty miles an hour with lorries the size of WWII blockhouses bearing down on you, and shot off toward the centre of town a lot sooner than I meant to and I was now in the wrong end of town† without a clue how to get to the right end.  Whimper.

I think I saw the small town-centre Sainsburys six times as the one-way system kept chewing me up and spitting me out and I kept stubbornly turning around and coming back for more pinballing, ka-chung, ka-chung!  There was ONE sign for the dratblasted yarn show with one of those ambiguous directional arrows that could have meant anything including finding a flagpole to climb and looking around from the top of it;  and one overhead banner stretched from one side of the (narrow medieval) street to the other proclaiming the existence of the yarn show but failing to say anything about where to find it.  Some of the surrounding melee was, in fact, on my Google map, but Google does not feel the need to include any street names but the ones immediately relevant to your journey.  Haven’t these people ever driven anywhere?††  Have they no sense of the clue, the hint, the landmark, the burning need for the adjacent street sign?†††

By the time I got to a car park somewhere near the centre of town, feeling that if I couldn’t find the yarn show I could at least go to Sainsburys and bury my sorrows in chocolate, which said car park would actually let me in rather than telling me that the apparent gate-like aperture with a clear view of parked cars beyond it was nothing of the kind and I had to enter by another gate-like aperture that a car could not, in fact, approach on account of the cemented-in bollards in the way . . . the car park was full of cars driven by people who had sacrificed virgin black goats to the appropriate gods earlier in the day.

But—!  There was a brief lapse in the forces of anarchy and bedlam!  THERE WAS A PARKING SPACE!!!!  I hurtled into it, had only just bought my ticket and displayed it prominently on the dashboard‡ and was beginning to worry about where, exactly, Ancient Building Repurposed was in relation to Car Park that Will Let Cars In, when Pooka started barking at me‡‡.  I knew it was Nina:  I was thirty-five minutes late.  I’m sorry, I said . . . No, no, said Nina, I’ve only just got here myself;  I misread the bus schedule and. . . .

TO BE CONTINUED.

* * *

* She says she’s blocking out that weekend in her diary for next year NOW.^

^ Like all you Americans—at least all you east coast Americans, and there’d better be a few schlepping in from at least the Midwest and the southeast or I’ll feel underappreciated—are blocking out 13-15 February for Boskone next year.  There will be a certain irony if Fiona has to go alone next year because I’m in Boston.

** The hellpack would also have preferred this latter option

*** I didn’t even have Fiona’s satnav to abuse.

† I would start seeing sepia photos of Prince Edward at any moment

†† No they were born with a silver computer in their mouths and the only time they venture outside is to go jogging, well wired up to their iPods and wearing dark glasses, or to pick up Chinese food/pizza when the delivery Vespa is broken.

††† Or the not so adjacent.  At one point I found myself passing the hospital, which meant that I had gone from the wrong end of town to the right end of town but hadn’t noticed, and instead barrelled on through and out the other side and was now approaching . . . Wales.

‡ Ever had your Pay and Display ticket blow off the dash in the backdraft (presumably) of you closing the car door and be found several hours later in the footwell upon your return?  I have.  I am very happy to say that the Parking Enforcement Officer didn’t come to my end of the garage that day.  Either that, or PEOs are specially trained to see through the dark of footwells to the honestly obtained ticket that may be lying there.

‡‡ Er.  New Blog Reader Alert:  my iPhone’s name is Pooka, and her default ring tone is a barking dog.

GREAT BIG FAT HAIRY DROOLING WE-INTERRUPT-OUR-REGULARLY-SCHEDULED-PROGRAMME-TO-BRING-YOU-THIS-IMPORTANT-ANNOUNCEMENT NEWS

 

Tra la la la la la la . . .

I’m going to be Guest of Honor at Boskone next year.

Boskone, I hear some of you saying?  I think it’s one of the oldest and most regularly annual of the (American) SF&F conventions* but I’m afraid I don’t pay any more attention to the fan-run end of the book world than I do to the professional publisher end** so I could be wrong.  But it was my first big SF&F con, back when BEAUTY was new, and I was living next door in Boston.  I attended sporadically for some years before I got kind of burnt out about the public-author thing generally*** but I’ve retained a soft spot for Boskone.

I had an email from next year’s chairperson about a fortnight ago inviting me to be next year’s GOH and I thought BOSKONE?  I WOULD LOVE TO BE GUEST OF HONOR AT BOSKONE . . . and have since been in agonies not so much of indecision but of trying to figure out what the frell I could do about the hellpack if I said yes.†  Pav isn’t a problem;  given the basic facts of bull terriers she’s, you know, normal.  The hellhounds, now. . . .

But a friend dropped round for a cup of tea this afternoon and in the process of trying to force said hellhounds to eat their lunch I found myself moaning to her about the situation.  She, having extracted the salient facts that (a) YES I WOULD LIKE TO BE GOH AT BOSKONE NEXT YEAR and (b) no I haven’t been anywhere in the last seven years because I have these bizarrely-constituted hellhounds†† . . . said, FOR PITY’S SAKE SAY YES.  GO.  GO.  You’ve got a year:  we’ll figure something out.†††

So I said yes.  ::Beams::

I asked the chair to let me know when they announced it so I could time it to go up more or less simultaneously on this blog.  That was about seven hours ago and she answered by return electron that they were going to be putting it up on NESFA’s web site by the end of the day and I could go ahead as soon as I liked.  I don’t think it’s up yet—although as I say Google does not love me—I’ll add a link when it does.

BUT HERE’S YOUR OPPORTUNITY.  SEE AND HEAR MCKINLEY LIVE IN PERSON.  Although you want to remember that I’ll be sixty-two by next February, so don’t expect much:  I’m old, wizened and EVEN CRANKIER THAN YOU REALIZE.  But I’ll be there.  Smiling in a dangerous manner.

BE THERE OR BE SQUARE.

* * *

* Here’s Wiki’s stub about it:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskone  The New England Science Fiction Association has a web site but it’s kind of full of this year’s Boskone at the moment, which is only just over and also, I am stupid, and Google doesn’t love me.

** That sound you hear is Merrilee banging her head against a wall

*** That sound you hear is Merrilee banging her head against a wall harder

† I’ve spent a fair portion of the last fortnight making phone calls toward this end.

†† Remember that in my life this isn’t as appalling as it sounds.  I like staying home and hurtling and ringing bells and planting rose-bushes and so on.  But it would be nice to go back to America SOME TIME and not be a foreigner the minute I open my mouth^, and while day to day I don’t think about it, and year to year the idea of author touring is about as appealing as going into battle in your nightgown^^ . . . the invitation from Boskone made me fall over the edge immediately.

^ Except that I will be because while my accent hasn’t drifted east much my usage sure has

^^ Now I wonder why that image occurs to me

††† Peter said exactly the same thing, only faster.  And his kids will keep an eye on him in my absence.

KES, 119

 

ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN

Gah.  Well, I suppose if you survived long enough to be a middle-aged mercenary (whatever middle-aged meant here) you were probably ipso facto strong and tough.   And in my willowy urban way and present state of dishabille I probably didn’t weigh that much, even including Silverheart.  I managed to get my right foot over Monster’s back, so when I landed with a thump I was facing in the right direction.  I looked down.  I was still clutching Silverheart and Murac—and Monster—didn’t seem to be bleeding.  I looked up, and ahead.  About half a mile of long, lavishly-maned neck away, Monster’s small fine ears were tipped back in my direction.

And if I moved even a fraction of an inch I would split straight up the middle.  This wasn’t a horse I was trying to get my legs around, this was a two-car garage or a mountain range or a small city.  Monster shifted his weight and I managed not to squeal.  The various indignities attendant upon sitting on a saddle in your nightgown were not helping the situation either.  At least the nightgown skirt was fairly generous.  With my free hand I managed, I hoped surreptitiously, to tuck a fold of it under me.  That left an awful lot of pale bare leg but there was nothing I could do about that.

Gingerly I lifted Silverheart over Monster’s neck and slid her into what was either a scabbard or the Neiman Marcus Super Giant Tent Pole Holder.  My feet found the stirrups.  Although I was cold, sitting on Monster was like sitting on a radiator turned on full blast, and the cool metal of the stirrups was soothing against my sore feet.  My hands found the reins.  They weren’t smooth, factory-die-cut reins, but my fingers recognised them, and when I picked them up I could feel Monster’s mouth on his bit.  Evidently he found this interaction reassuring because his ears relaxed.  I tried to let my legs go limp and my seat soften but since I felt like I was being drawn and quartered from the waist down this was not entirely successful.  But Monster gave me points for trying.  And when he relaxed . . . suddenly my legs slid into a slightly more possible position.  There was a lot more front and back to this saddle than the modern dressage and jumping saddles I was used to so within the limits of the total brain-snapping absurdity of my position I felt almost secure.  Monster and I both sighed.

The scuttling noises had stopped when Silverheart exploded, and when the silence filled up with motion again it had become a more purposeful sound.  There was a lot of rustly something-or-other happening behind me but I didn’t feel like testing my precarious sense of having arrived somewhere by finding out what was next on the to-do list.  Monster wasn’t bothered and therefore neither was I.  For a second or two.   Maybe three.

I was thinking about all those stories you read where the hero gets beaten up by a gang of thugs with tire-irons or the heroine is pushed out of a fourth-story window by the chief villain’s chief minion but it’s okay because she hits the shop awning on the first floor and it breaks her fall.  And they moan for a bit and they may even go home and have a hot bath and a shot or half a bottle of Scotch—or aspirin—and then they’re if not good as new, at least fully functional again, and totally pumped up to go after thugs, minions, villains, whatever.  After recent events I would have wanted to lie down, possibly forever, except that I was so comprehensively sore it wouldn’t have done any good.

By the end of three seconds I was growing increasingly aware that I couldn’t afford to sit here idly thinking because of the appalling directions my mind wanted to run off in.  (It, at least, could still run.)  What, where, when, why, how . . . what if . . .

A horse-nose became visible in my peripheral vision.  I was higher up, sitting on Monster, than I’d been sitting in the driver’s seat of Merry, and I told myself I didn’t really recognise the brown-black head and non-standard-to-my-eyes bridle;  but I still wasn’t surprised when I turned my head and Murac was in the saddle.  Another horse came up on my other side and I could assume that the thud-crunch-rustle noises were more horses and riders forming up.  Behind me.  Behind me.  I wondered who had been riding Monster when I’d seen the others earlier.  Whatever earlier meant.  My adrenals were so tapped out they couldn’t zap me for accepting that this was the troop I’d seen . . . for accepting that any of this was happening at all.  My bruises made me accept that something had, but my mind was still objecting to what.  And what if.

“Gate’s beyond,” said Murac, gesturing.

“Gate,” I said.

“Tha’s Defender,” said Murac.  “Tha stand by Gate.  Tha should not be here;  we’ll get tha back if we can, for all”—he said with what seemed to me ghoulish and unnecessary relish—“will die if tha’s lost this side of Gate.”

How to ruin my day

 

Merrilee will want to try to make a book out of it at some point

We’ve all mentioned how thrilled we’d be to have this in book form at some point and that touches on another thing I’m really looking forward to. I’m under the impression that you’re ‘writing without a net’ right now; in other words, I’m thinking that we’re getting to see what a first pass through a story looks like. I assume that in the process of turning this into a book, you’ll go through your normal re-read and ‘oh *that’s* why that was important – I’d better add this detail in, in light of that’ process of re-writing and editing. I’m looking to and hoping to see who/what gets emphasized/de-emphasized/deleted/added as part of the process. This is potentially a fascinating sneak peek behind the curtain and I’m really enjoying it.

I don’t even know where to begin to respond to this one.

Do you realise that by calling KES as she appears on the blog a ‘first pass’ and assuming that I’m going to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning when Merrilee and I turn it into a book-like object, you are implying that it, you know, needs it?  Unless you’re Anthony Trollope, first versions of a story are rough.  You rewrite because you have to.  Because the story doesn’t make sense after the villain turns out only to be misunderstood, because the main character doesn’t come into focus till page four hundred and twelve because you were trying to write about an enchanted lemur and it turns out she’s a fruit bat.  Because you fell in love with the word crepuscular and used it forty-seven times in the first chapter and, as anyone who has done any serious writing knows, you can rarely merely swap one word out for another, usually you have to change the phrase or the sentence which then bodges up the paragraph or the scene and you have to rewrite that . . .  because on page two you thought Bathsheba was going to stick David with a hat-pin, steal his second-best armour, and run off to battle to fight at her husband’s side.  Oops.

You rewrite in the hope that you will eventually produce something that you could give strangers to read.

At what point you start soliciting other people’s opinions varies.  I hear terrifying rumours that some writers hang rough drafts on line and invite comments.  I’d become a ditchdigger or a linesperson before I did that—and I don’t think they hire sixty-one-year old women to dig ditches, and retraining to be a linesperson wouldn’t be a good choice since I left my head for heights somewhere back in my thirties.  Before I married Peter—who does now see early drafts of my stories—NOBODY saw ANYTHING till I’d got as close to finished with a story as I could.  Even I acknowledge that you need an outside eye eventually, to tell you the elisions that don’t work because nobody else knows the story as well as you do, and Gibbervig and Sorfrella got up to what together*, or because you so can’t see the forest for the trees any more that while (ahem) you may just be a prone-to-tangents storyteller, the chapter about the history of interspecies harness** really slows the action down.  My current editor prefers to see things a little sooner rather than a little later—although I think this has a lot to do with the fact that I’m almost always laaaaaaate turning stuff in and she wants some reassurance that the story exists and she’s not trying to hold a place on the next list but twelve for a will-o-the-wisp—and I acknowledge her right, as the woman whose butt is on the publishing line on my behalf.  But I don’t like it.

Once I’d got properly into KES I let myself acknowledge that it was a real story—as real as any of the ones that were first read by strangers in paper covers in their entirety—or that existed in their entirety before they were excerpted on line.  I’m writing without a net, yes, because I’m hanging bits of the story for strangers to read before I’ve got to the end of writing it.  But I’m writing it as well as I can as I go.  I rewrite the individual eps before I post them.  What I post is NOT first pass.

Yes.  I’m giving away for free what is just as much work as what I write for money.  But it’s a slightly different kind of work;  different harness—speaking of comparative tack—different pressure points.  I wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to invent a genre-fantasy-writing heroine who gets embroiled in offcuts from her own stories for a book I was expecting Merrilee to pitch to my—or any other—editor.  I’m aware that messing around with the boundaries between reality-reality and book-reality is very popular just now*** but KES is not something I would have risked doing.  Except as a kind-of-joke-but-then-again-not-a-joke on my blog.  And yes, I’m hoping to recoup some of that writing time by turning KES into a book that people will pay money for a copy of, hard or e-.†  But . . .

But I’m not going to rewrite her.  Bottom line:  I can’t.  The story arc is very very very VERY VERY VERY VERY different, doing it in 800-900 words a shot and usually ending with something more or less cliffhangery.  The story is the story:  but KES has let me mould her into 800-900 word chunks, and you—or anyway I, this writer, Robin McKinley—doesn’t get a second chance.  If I tried, I’d wreck her.  I’m not going to try.

I’ll fix errors, when I shuffle her together into one file to send to Merrilee.  And I will scream and hurl myself out windows and so on when I discover the howlers I know are there even if I don’t at present know what they are—and I just hope there aren’t any I can’t fix without tearing up the foundations.  I’ve silently fixed I think three easily-tweaked ones already;  I keep notes—inadequate notes and always of the wrong things—but I mostly don’t reread, except specific snippets (when I can find them) for specific purposes of stumbling accuracy.  I’ll try to swap out the superfluous uses of crepuscular without rewriting any scenes.  But that’s all.  Tidy up—although there will be more of this, and it will be more of a struggle, than I’m going to like.  But I am not going to rewrite.  Not.

And as for a sneak peek behind the curtain—that’s not what you’re getting.  That’s not anything you’ll ever get from me.  There’s a reason I don’t blog much about my writing process.  I’m a privacy fetishist.  And it’s a lot easier to do the smoke and mirrors thing about my life than about my writing.

* * *

* And furthermore when did they have the opportunity to do it?  Didn’t the Siege of Mormormorungal crack up straight into the Battle for the Nineteen Dozyhazes and the Sentient Orchid?  —I’ve never been good at time, in reality or out of it.

** Horse tack was a relatively late invention;  domestic horses were a doddle after dragons and flurdlelumps.  Horses are smaller and more persuadable than dragons, and at least you can sit on a horse;  there’s the whole suspended-cage business with flurdlelumps because of all those legs.

*** Thank you, Jasper Fforde.  He may not have started the trend single-handed, but he’s where I first met it.

† KES does tap into my real writing energy.  The blog doesn’t.  The problem with the blog is time.  I’m a slow writer, even of the blog.  But I don’t come away from the blog thinking MUST HAVE BREAK FROM WRITING STUFF.  The main reason I’ve cut KES back to once a week is because if I spend any more time on her she will cut into . . . well, PEG II, for example.

Not answering your KES questions

 

Anne_d

sputter sputter sputter… eeep.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

That’s the cliffiest cliffhanger yet.  Eeep.

Now this interests me.  This is in response to Kes #15, “Keep it together, tha useless mare”.  I thought the cliffiest cliffhanger was #14, the ep before, “By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you shall have neither the Ring nor me”.  Granted my view is a trifle different than readers’.

It is also interesting—to me anyway—that plucking Kes up and plonking her down In Another Part of the Forest when the reader is getting the story only in 800-900 word snatches with looooong gaps between, must produce a much bigger HUH? factor than it would if the reader could turn/fingersweep the page and keep going.  Yes?  Or am I over-interpreting?  I was thinking that you could, not unreasonably, suspect me of cheating.  I’m not—or I don’t think I am—by the somewhat elastic rules of storytelling—and the somewhat differently elastic rules of fantasy storytelling*—it’s allowed, not to tell your readers stuff.  Till you feel like getting around to it.  Till the story insists.

Springlight

I look forward to Sunday mornings – make a pot of green tea, settle down with my tablet, check Kes’s latest predicament. But these blog posts need to be much longer if they’re to last 2 cups of tea.

I have a great idea!  Only read KES every fortnight!  Then you’ll have an ep per cup!  That works!

So thank you for today’s episode. And thank you for a heroine who is only 10-plus-some years older than me. I read and enjoy YA fantasy but I do occasionally wish for more stories with protagonists who have a little more life experience.

You’re welcome.  And also thank you.  The apparent near take-over of YA in this end of fantasy storytelling does discourage me a trifle sometimes, despite the fact that I have substantially contributed to it.**  Some day I am going to write a story with a kick-ass heroine who is over sixty.  We can still kick ass, you know.  It just hurts more afterward.***

Blondviolinist

. . . if I were in Kes’s place I’d just get furiously angry. Look, it’s not my fault no one told me to go into heroine training!!!

Shalea

Furiously angry keeps you moving forward, though, and so is very probably a useful reaction.

Yep.  Adrenaline-rage, which allows slender willowy people to sling large sacks of (wet) compost around.  For example.  It’s a very useful tool and I wouldn’t want to be without it but I possibly overuse it a trifle.  If what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Kes does adrenaline-rage too.  For better and worse.

Blondviolinist

Three thoughts:

1) Everyone in Kes’s world(s), stop being mean to her already & give her a freaking break!!!

Everyone?  We need a few villains and persons of dubious motives for story tension.

2) Her horse!!!! There’s a horse for her!!!! Yaaayyyy!!!! . . .

Of course there is a horse for her.  There was always going to be a horse for her.  Remember she’s an even-more-blatant-than-usual wish-fulfilment for me.

3) (And not to be forgotten): HOW ON EARTH DID KES ESCAPE THE BLACK GIGANTIC SWORD-WIELDING THING??????

Well . . . escape is maybe putting it a little strongly.  She side-slipped worlds at a very good moment.  As to why she side-slipped worlds at that moment. . . . ::whistles::

EMoon

But…where’s Sid? Is this Sid morphed into a horse?

Nope.  Very different personality.

(No, Kes needs Sid as Sid, the faithful hound. This has to be the faithful steed, yhight…Star? Socks? Brownie? Bay..um…Bayeux? Bayberry? Eli?)

Snork.  I like Bayeux.

Horse. Horse is good. Good horse is good. Evil horse…I don’t even want to think about it.

No, no!  Good horse!  Very good horse!  Brave noble patient horse!†   Cheez.  These frelling supple professional-fiction-producing minds.

Rainycity1

Yay, the horse. I’m wondering if this is Merry? Otherwise, how will Merry fit into this? or has the story council let that slip out yet?

Hmm.  This might be the moment to warn you all that I’m not a big fan of the parallel worlds thing.  Connected overlapping similar-in-weird-ways containing-confusing-parallels worlds, yes.  Parallel worlds, no.  Nothing—except frelling algebra—is x = y in this world;  why should reason and logic suddenly reign just because we’ve breached a few walls between one messed-up and inconsistent world and a few more of the same?  Although it wouldn’t surprise me if Monster and Merry became very good friends.

Also, I will be very relieved when Sid shows back up in the picture.

Sid’s okay.  Although she may be having her own adventures.  And she has a very important part to play in the coming . . . ::whistles some more:: . . . well, whatever.

Midget

Didn’t the kitchen table start making horse-like motions a few episodes ago?

Yup.  But remember what I said about parallel.  Here’s another suggestion for how not to make yourselves crazy trying to figure out how the pieces fit together:  you can dye your hair orange this week and purple next week.  It’s sunny today†† but it will rain tomorrow.†††  A table that stamps its feet today may be a table next week.  And an octopus the week after that.

I too am curious what happened to the big black monster. And everything else.

You’d better also remember that I don’t tie things up neatly or give full, exquisite explanations.  Curiosity is good.  It keeps you awake.  You’ll know more about most things before END OF PART ONE scrolls up on your computer screens.

Mirba

I’m thinking some hybrid between

[photo of Shire horse—or anyway it should be a Shire and it could be a Shire]

And

[photo of Andalusian horse—and I know it is an Andalusian because it’s on the Wiki page for Andalusian horse, although I keep wondering if the lad is a midget or the horse is standing on a box, because Andalusians are not huge]

what’s your image of the biggest horse? 

I’ve had an enormous [sic] crush on Andalusians forever.  Talat, although somewhat inspired‡ by an Arab stallion I used to know, is really more an Andalusian.  The only heavy horses I’ve had a chance to know up close and personal are Shires and Clydesdales—and Suffolk Punches to a very limited extent—and Shires win hands down.  I adore Shires.  I know it’s not as easy to get a good cross as to take one Andalusian stallion and put him to one Shire mare‡‡, but it’s like Sid being (probably) Saluki/Deerhound.  Monster is probably Andalusian/Shire.  And they’re each a really excellent cross with only the BEST features of both bloodlines.  Hey.  I write fantasy.

Even if for a newyorker that has never seen a cow any horse in that stressful situation and while not standing properly would look big or bigger.

Ahem.  Kes doesn’t know from cows, true, but she went to horse camp for several years in her teens.  She’s not totally clueless.‡‡‡  We’re going to say it was a good horse camp too, which I realise is pushing the reality connection pretty hard—but Kes does know the basics of how to ride.  Probably not to battle in her nightgown however.

Bratsche

Two of my all-time favorite fantasy novels   featured a cavalry that rode without either bridle or stirrups.

Haven’t even finished reading the episode…had to come say I LOVE that grin at a couple of my favorite fantasy novels too! (Go Aerin & Hari!!)

I’ve known from the beginning that Kes must have read McKinley.  I was going to have to refer to this some time.

I looked back at Monster.

I know I asked for a name, but now I’m hoping there is a chance he gets renamed along the way; although Monster will be an affectionate name before long, I suppose.

Well hmmph.  Personally I think Monster is a very good name for a huge horse, but in fact I think it’s like Sid is also the Phantom.  Give poor Kes some slack here:  she’s a bit pressed.  She’ll name Monster when things quiet down a little.§  No one was trying to kill her when she gave Sid a name.

* * *

* Insert standard rant here about how you do get to make up your own rules, writing fantasy, but then you have to follow them.  No Mr-Spock-reveals-new-skill-after-the-commercial-break.^  Also no all-powerful mages throwing lightning-bolts of awesome power at one another while making mean faces.

^ Spock ex machina, one might almost say.

** When I first told Hannah what I was doing, a year and a half ago, after she stopped laughing, she said, Make her younger.  Merrilee will want to try to make a book out of it at some point^.  It’ll sell better if she’s younger.

I remind myself that at least there are quite a few strong heroines in fantasy around now.  Some of the books they’re in even receive a certain amount of advertising.  EMoon and I can remember when this was not the case.  Especially the advertising part.

^ Great publishing minds think alike

*** Ow!  My foot!

† This is still a McKinley story, after all.

†† Wrong.  No.

††† TRUE.

‡ ‘Inspired’ isn’t quite right;  it’s like as Talat blooms into his own self, it turns out some of Binni’s tack fits.

‡‡ And the stallion would have to stand on a box.  But I’d be afraid to do it the other way around:  she might break.

‡‡‡ Another pet peeve is characters in books who never learn to ride, they just get on a horse and hey presto.  It’s not like that.

§ Unless it turns out he’s already got a—er—Abernathy’s Elegant Mythology by Abernathy’s Hyperborean Mystique out of Plutonium Farms Bethany-by-Night name already.  In which case we’ll have to shorten it.  To Abe.  Or Myth.  Or Pluto.  Or Fred.