Robin McKinley's Blog, page 37

KES comments continued. . . .

 

Prologue:

I hv hellterror in lap that is 2 say sharing chair WHICH IS NOT BIG ENUF 4 BOTH OF US & I am so uncomfortbl I cld die

* * *

. . . I may be crippled for life.  No, I think the blood is beginning to flow in the right direction(s) again.  When I’ve thought ahead I’ve brought the piano stool in and set it next to my chair so she has something to spill onto and I get to keep my butt ON THE CHAIR.  She’s too small and square to have useful staying-on-chair inertia:  if she slides she’s gone.  I am long and lanky and quite a bit of me can hang off something like a chair quite securely . . . barring the intense pain this causes.  THE THINGS WE DO FOR OUR CRITTERS.   I still haven’t got the lying-together-in-a-heap system right;  the hellhounds think the sofa is theirs and while I CAN trap her in such a manner that she is prevented from molesting them it’s not like I can lie there enjoying my book while I’m on constant Suppression Alert not to mention crisping slightly under the burning accusatory glare from the two pairs of hellhound eyes.*  Arrrrgh.    Hellterror laptime at the cottage is even more death defying—for both of us.  I’m usually on a stool, a, what’s more tall stool, and she has to cling to me like a young monkey grasping its treetop-swinging mum.  She’s fine with this.**  Me, not so much.

She is now the size she should remain and likes laps.  I’d better figure something out.

LHurst

I was reading your author website today, Robin, when I was supposed to be doing something else, and I loved the comment about characters in LOTR speaking “High Forsoothly.”

It’s not original I’m afraid.  It’s been around quite a while;  I can’t remember where I first read/heard it—I assume I already didn’t remember when I was writing that bit and so didn’t identify it there?—although it was in a Tolkien context.  But I bagged it instantly and have used it ever since.  Kes too.  Kes was also crucially shaped by reading LOTR young but the twenty-year difference in Kes’ and my ages*** means that when she got to the end of RETURN OF THE KING she had other options than going back to page one of FELLOWSHIP.†  You may have noticed she seems to have read some McKinley.

Katinseattle

Although it strains my patience to get the chapters only once a week, I like the opportunity to talk back to the author at the end of each one. I’ve often wanted to do that.

‘Talk back’ used, perhaps, advisedly.††  Although may I just offer my forum a compliment here:  thank you all for being so polite.†††  Which means I get to enjoy the process too.‡  I hope it’s not just that my mods’ delete fingers are smokin’ hot.  But along with merely relishing giving you a hard time—by definition, you know:  it’s still all about turning pages, even when the pages are virtual and only happen once a week—I’m fascinated by what all of you pick up and what you don’t, or at least what you don’t feel is worth commenting on.

Morrigan

I have to wonder if Sid will be curious enough to taste the new gooey floor covering… And then how poor Kes will react to that.

Probably not.  In the first place Sid is also going to be busy and in the second place . . . not all dogs find the same truly disgusting substances delightful, and sighthounds are even more bonkers than the usual run [sic] of canine peculiarity.  This is an occasion where I can’t see that, in this case, Sid licking the floor is going to further the plot . . . and therefore I get to say it doesn’t happen.  The Story Council grants me these small decisions now and then to keep me cheerful and writing.

Given that Kes has already seen one face she overtly recognized – I am also wondering how intertwined the current dimensional meld is with her writing. And if they are at all – which is the chicken, and which the egg? Does she think these people and places, therefore they are? Or does she write them because they already exist, and it is the knowledge of them that slips through dimensional cracks into her skull?

Remember that I say (a) there’s a crack in my skull where the stories come through (b) the stories exist, I don’t make them up, I only write them down, and never well enough and (c) . . . I am often in the position of trying to write them down by being there, wherever there is, frantically waving my notebook and pen‡‡ in the air and saying Wait!  Wait for me!, and . . . that where I am (wherever it is) is very, very vivid.

Climbingivy

Don’t forget the Hob! I’m sure his dinner counts for something!

Yep.  Does.

Sheerasmom

Can’t wait for her horse to show up.

I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY I HAVE ALL THESE HORSE CRAZIES ON MY BLOG.  I CAN’T IMAGINE.

Rainycity1

Speaking of names, I’m expecting that we’ll finally find out Mr. W.Shoulder’s ????

Yes.  But not next Saturday.  Or even the Saturday after that.  Or . . .

Leeanne

I’m still asking Santa-Robin for an additional episode at Christmas…I’ve been a good girl, I promise

I’ll think about it.  I promise NOTHING.

Thewoobdog

*gnash gnash gnash*

Why, thank you.

WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN TO COMMENT ON THAT?!

Wherever you like.

Okay, well, at the beginning, I suppose.

Sounds like a plan.

I bet Kes is glad she doesn’t sleep in the altogether – a nightgown is bad enough in this situation, but stark raving naked would be so much worse.

In such an extremity if the Story Council didn’t allow me to throw her a dressing-gown I would have done it anyway.

. . . I love how Kes is so focused on the sheer quantity of blood, like any normal person would be, but so significantly unlike most unwitting hero/ines in 95.8% of fiction.

Thank you.  Certainly there are too many supposedly ordinary characters who are not freaked out by—er—calamitous events.  Or so I as reader feel.  This is what I was talking about last night:  secrets to writing plausible fiction, including fantasy fiction:  how would you feel if, etc.  Stop and frelling THINK about it.  As someone who’s been writing stories for over half a century (eeeeeep) I do this automatically—but I also sometimes STOP and try and make sure I’m paying enough attention to the ordinary-person-in-extraordinary-situation aspect.

The blood almost becomes a featured character in this little episode . . .

Snork.

Not letting the reader forget about it, pulling one further into that sense of actually being there . . .

Oh good.  That’s the idea.

. . . Same with the way Kes’s mind keeps jumping around to random inconsequentials (floor cleaning, security deposit, HA).

Which is often what you do when you’re freaked out by something, isn’t it?  Well, it’s often what I do.  HELP.  I’M OUT OF CONTROL.  And so you/I scrabble for little bits of things to have opinions about.  ‡‡‡

. . . I can’t stand not knowing who the “we” is WS keeps mentioning. Do we get to meet them in the next ep? Do we, do we, huh? Do we, huh, huh?

NEXT ep?  No way.  Take a few deep breaths and make yourself some nice hot chocolate.

I’m guessing Kes’s dinner plans for the following day are shot now, huh?

Shot?  Not at all.  Why would they be?  In the first place, tomorrow night is a long way away§ and in the second place . . . um . . . Hayley has already been surprising, hasn’t she?

* * *

* On rare occasions I do find them all three in the hellhound bed—either here or at the cottage—but she usually gets too excited at her own (nearly) unprecedented success and they roll their eyes and turf her out.^

^ Which reminds me of the New Dog Bed photo essay I keep meaning to organise. . . .

** Most dogs, in my experience, are more than happy to put their paws on your shoulders or even around your neck, probably the better to lick your face, but in whatever friendly companionable manner.  I’m not used to a dog, especially something whose legs are only about three inches long, who without prompting puts her forelegs around your body and hugs you.^

^ Although she’s probably destroying the thighs of your jeans with her hind legs at the same time.  This is not fear, mind you, this is, Hey!  We’re having FUN!  I think I told you, my first official Street Pastor night, I realised that the clean jeans I had put on just before coming out, the clean dog-hair-muddy-pawprints-and-dog-food-fleck-free jeans, were pretty tatty.  I apologised to Fearless Leader and said I’d do better next time.  Next time, which is to say last Friday, I discovered I HAVEN’T GOT any tough denim jeans that aren’t tatty any more.  I have some lightweight ones . . . but the ones that will withstand a hard (cold) night on the town or a hellterror all look like they’ve done more hellterror-withstanding than is good for them.

*** Which is going to keep stretching alarmingly in real time.  I was approaching my sixtieth birthday when I started KES and while she still is approaching her fortieth birthday I’ve turned sixty-one.  Once I’ve got her settled I hope I can SKIP FORWARD a bit.  I have plans for her fortieth birthday and I don’t want to die of extreme old age before she’s paid her second month’s rent on Rose Manor.

† Or THE HOBBIT, but I don’t think I’ve read that as many as half the number of times I’ve read LOTR. ^

^ That’s still quite a few.

†† YOU DID WHAT?  SHE’S WHAT?  IT’S WHAT?  Blondviolinist covered this well.

††† . . . mostly.

‡ . . . MOSTLY.

‡‡ Or, lately, possibly iPad.  Although if I’m going to go wandering multi-dimensionally I should buy a second battery in case the local power source is incompatible.

‡‡‡ Not, perhaps, wholly unlike a hellterror scrabbling to stay in a lap.

§ Especially in terms of likely number of eps.  Gah.

KES . . .

 

Blondviolinist

(And now I have only about a thousand questions, some of which are from earlier but are more pressing now that someone has tried to KILL Kes & Sid in their own (brand new) home. For starters, why on earth is Kes a target?

Some of us have a gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And what she does for a living has perhaps a slight focusing-the-sun’s-rays-through-a-magnifying-glass effect.  Since I don’t think I’d react well to dead guys in the front hall either, I’m happy to say that the influence my career has had on my life has been a trifle more subtle.*

And why NOW, when she’s moved to a new place?

She was married to a Tech Master.  Tech has a dampening effect on guys with swords from other dimensions.  Now she’s OUT THERE ALL BY HERSELF.**

If she’d stayed in NYC, would mysterious armed men have broken into the penthouse?

Probably not.  All that tech would have confused them.  They would have burst through their dimensional gateway and found themselves chasing reindeer in Lapland.

If any of you have a sudden influx of guys with swords you might want to ask Blogmom what she’d charge you to camp in her back garden for a few weeks till they’re all safely misdirected to Lapland.  Those reindeer can really take care of themselves.

And who’s Bossy Voice and how did he manage to show up in the nick of time?)

Well you’ve now read the next instalment so you know who Bossy Voice is . . . sort of.  Hee hee hee hee hee.

Rainycity1

—I can’t wait to find out who the owner of the “strangely familiar voice” is! I suspect that the person has already appeared to Kes in Normal Townsperson incarnation and I’m very curious.

—OK, I had just assumed it was Mr. Watermelon Shoulders from parts 49-50?

—Watermelon Shoulders was my guess as well, but I’d like proof. Plus, him being WS doesn’t rule out him also being Caedmon or something/someone else as well, right?

Nope.  It doesn’t.  Hee hee hee hee, con’t.

[Forgive me, copying from the forum and pasting into Word is fraught with translation difficulties.  Those descending box things for people to carry on a conversation don’t transfer AT ALL and trying to attach who said what to whom is a freller.  You can always go look it up, right?  I’m just giving you the context for me to hang an unhelpful, hellgoddessy comment on.]

Well, Ron Driscoll’s got to enter back into this story one way or the other… although I can’t necessarily picture him switching into ‘ye olde speake’ just because we’ve morphed realities…

::grovels and throws dust over her head::  Speaking of other dimensions, I’m afraid poor Ron has got lost in one.  When I started KES I was planning on taking it less seriously than it has decided to take me*** and asked Black Bear before I ever got properly going with it if she’d play with me and do her gamesmaster thing to spur me on.  And then KES ran away with me.†

I’m still hoping Ron might have a look-in during the post-immediate-climactic mop-up, so to speak, in a you-don’t-think-this-is-over-do-you louring and suggestive manner.  Black Bear and I have discussed the possibility of parallel KES stories for the future which makes the best sense to me—like Peter and me finally getting at least two of our joint elemental spirits books out by the simple expedient of writing separate stories.††  But it’ll mostly depend on Black Bear’s patience.  I’m not . . . a wonderful person to work with.  Sigh.

BUT I WANT TO MEET RON’S DOG.

Blondviolinist

Pre-emptive “create your own” comment in preparation for tomorrow’s forum outage.  †††              

Inarticulate exclamation:______

A. Noooooooooo!!!!!!!

B. Aaaaaarrrgghhh!!!

C. Aaaauuuuuggghhh!!!!

Dramatic consequence of reading post:________

A. I can’t breathe!!!

B. How am I supposed to sleep tonight???

C. My heart nearly stopped!!! I’m going to need a pacemaker!!!

Obligatory name-calling:______

A. You evil woman, you!!!

B. Why do you TORTURE us like this!!!!!

C. Evil, horrible hellgoddess!!!

Delighted response to ________’s action, or sympathy for the same character’s predicament.

A. Kes

B. Sid

C. The hob

D. Mr. Watermelon Shoulders

E. Caedmon

Ending statement:______

A. Can’t you PRETTY PLEASE post another episode tomorrow?

B. Where’s my time machine???

C. How are we supposed to wait a WHOLE WEEK after that cliffhanger???

This had me so falling down laughing you’ll have to forgive me (again) for hanging it in its scintillating entirety out here on the blog.  I do have an excuse, because I know that some of my friends who only read the blog to keep an eye on me never penetrate into the depths of the forum and it would be a pity if they—and any of the rest of you—missed it.

I’ll also just add here that while forum members don’t rank in the millions or anything, if I posted a birthday KES for every forum member who had a birthday . . . I WOULD BE VERY BUSY WRITING KES.‡

Ajlr

Pre-emptive “create your own” comment in   preparation for tomorrow’s forum outage.     

  …

‘It can be seen that with this prose the forum member ‘Blondviolinist’ has made a significant and insightful contribution to the forum reading experience, adding to the dynamic expressivity created by forum members engaged with the weekly posting of KES’

‘And causing the top of the hellgoddess’ head to disengage with the rest of her skull just long enough for her to recall in VIVID DETAIL why she bailed on the academic life the moment she escaped her undergrad college with her BA in her teeth and plunged into a sordid life of genre fiction.’

Katinseattle

“Lady Kestrel.” Sounds suitably heroic, doesn’t it?

Yes.  Poor Kes.

 But will all that blood just disappear at dawn the way things just appeared after dark?

No.  Next question.

Jmeadows

bethanynash

. . . is anyone else tempted to pour five quarts of viscous fluid onto the   floor to see how much it is?

I thought about it, then thought about how much I don’t want to clean that. Should have been a visual aid in middle school science class though. Imagine the angry notes parents could have sent!

All of this.  I was just thinking about it again yesterday when I bled about a pint all over the landscape from a glancing blow with a tiny pointy wire end near the cuticle of my left forefinger.  BLOOD.  Really a very little lot of it is a lot lot.  Also, in quantity, it pongs.‡‡  And if you’ve ever cleaned up after critter birth, I know it’s not the same stuff‡‡‡, and it’s full of smelly hormones, but it contains blood, and it’s thick and icky and slithery and . . . and that’s even in a good cause, you know?  Birth.

I’m feeling really anxious about Kes’s books, too. I want to help her move them out of the way.

YES.  THIS.  Although this is also an example of the occasional weirdness of doing a serial in tiny chunks like this.§  This ep originally did not have Kes worrying about her books—worrying about her books originally came in the next ep.  But I realised that all you book fetishists out there would be freaked out—I would be freaked out in your position:  it would be the first thing I thought of—so I figured I’d better register the question immediately.  As to what happens, well . . .

bethanynash

blondviolinist

Well, if you’ve ever accidentally dropped an entire gallon of milk on the   floor…. (Not that I would ever have done such a thing, and a gallon is one   quart too few.)

I thought about that, but milk doesn’t coagulate, and I’m enough of a nerd that I would want the fluid to have that feature.

Yes.  Viscous.  Your word for it the first time.  The meniscus, if that’s still what you call it on blood, is a lot more, um, turgid.  And the thought of it—this thick wave of the stuff much taller than thin milk can achieve—spreading out and spreading out till it starts getting all crusty at the edges. . . . ewwwwwww. . . . .

EMoon

Loved Watermelon Shoulders wiping his sword on the dead guy (he would, of course)

Oh good.  That’s what I thought.  And an awful lot of successful fiction writing (say I, dangerously giving away trade secrets) is declaring, okay, you’re an ordinary person in this situation, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING AND FEELING?  And doing.  And if you’re a swordsperson with a bloody sword, especially if you’re a polite swordsperson in someone’s house, you need to (a) wipe your sword (b) wipe it on something the householder won’t mind you wiping it on.  But I yield to your greater knowledge of hand to hand combat.  So I’m glad you think so too.

and knowing the name of Kes’s sword…though if he knows her, why wouldn’t he?

Well, you’re never sure about these cross-dimensional bozos.  They often have surprising lapses in their info.

Am thinking “Would I be worrying about the blood getting on my books…or my air mattress and blankets? Because bloodstained books are one thing, but sleeping under bloodstained blankets–not that Kes is going to sleep anytime soon, I can tell (I think I can tell. Maybe)–is not going to be pleasant for her at all.

Unless the floor lists in the wrong direction—and I will put in a special petition that it doesn’t—the bedding is okay.  The dead guy is in the front hall, not the kitchen, and Caedmon’s niche is off the kitchen.

But you’re right that sleep isn’t coming up in Kes’ schedule any time soon. . . .

Mwa hahahahahahaha.

* * *

* Mostly.  So far.  There’s still time for everything to go dimensionally skew-whiff.  And most of my friends thought Peter had kidnapped me.

** Except for Sid.

*** There’s going to be a dead guy and a large yucky pool of blood, okay?  And Kes has a sword with a name.  Are you taking notes carefully?  Are we making ourselves clear?

† I have a very long history of failing to collaborate.  Peter could tell you about the last twenty-two years.  But I can remember starting to illustrate [sic] the story a friend wrote about a mare and her foal when we were both nine, and my deciding that the story would go better like this and my friend taking exception.

I just didn’t think, to begin with, that KES was quite, um, real and therefore at such high risk of my Anti-Collaboration Gremlin.

†† Even if some of them have had the distressing habit of morphing into novels, trilogies, etc.

†††  WHICH DIDN’T HAPPEN BECAUSE BLOGMOM IS A STAR.  HIP, HIP, HOOOORAY.  HIP, HIP, HOOOORAY.  HIP, HIP, HOOOOOOOOORAY!!!!!!!!

‡ Hey.  Stop that.  You do want me to finish PEGS II and III, don’t you?  And hellcritters would pine if we never went hurtling any more.

‡‡ Aside from other bodily functions that may occur involuntarily as a result of sudden death.

‡‡‡ Does human blood smell any better or worse than other mammalian sanguineous fluid?  Discuss.

§ And no I’m NOT going to make them any longer.  See previous footnote †††.

A Day Not Like Any Other

 

 

I had what passes in my case for a terrific voice lesson.

AND THE REMOVAL BLOKES GOT IT ALL IN.

These two large dazzling items totally outshine the rest which is a good thing because it was very nearly a disaster of a day.

. . . Starting with not getting to bed early enough last night, partly because I really needed to sing and one song leads to another. . . .  Staggered out of bed this morning making hopeless croaking noises like an installation of rusty hinges* and started lubricating with caffeine.  Took the poor hellterror for the fastest sprint she was capable of** and locked her up again with an extra kong to comfort her in our absence.***

I took hellhounds-of-the-touchy-digestion for a minimal get-it-over-with scamper around the churchyard.  Darkness refused to comply with the purpose of this exercise.  Arrrgh.

Hellhounds and I were on the road with twenty-five minutes to spare:  five minutes to bolt up to Third House and ask Atlas to clear out drawers and move ill-placed piles of [book] boxes in anticipation of removal-men arrival this afternoon and twenty minutes for hurtling at the far end before my lesson.

Atlas wasn’t there.

I could feel my throat closing.

Well, nothing I could do about it;  I couldn’t even ask Peter if he knew anything, since, in the first place, he wouldn’t, because he’s been in Gloucestershire all weekend, and in the second place because he was on a train somewhere and I guarantee his phone had no signal, because that’s the way it goes.

So we thundered on to our next scheduled activity.

Frelling Mauncester was backed up from halfway up the hill into town.  Stop go (but not very far) stop go stop go stop go stop go stopgostopgostop.  Chiefly stop.  It was like this all the way through town.

I could feel my throat closing harder.

We arrived at Nadia’s with THREE MINUTES to spare.  I took hellhounds for a three minute scuttle and . . . Darkness continued to fail to comply.  ARRRGH.

I was pretty nearly barking by the time I burst through Nadia’s door. . . She did make me do some breathing and loosening up exercises before I sang anything, but my throat said, Ooooh!  We’re at Nadia’s!  We like it here!  —And promptly warmed up a dream.†

WE GOT THROUGH THREE SONGS.  THREE.  IT’S A RECORD.  We usually bog down on the first one because I’m doing so many things wrong, not that Nadia would put it that way, but I would.  We may occasionally galumph through bits of more than one—indeed even three—but only because I have a specific technical question†† or they’re folk songs I’m singing at home and want a little general input—or scraping back from the brink.  But THREE REAL SONGS?  It doesn’t happen.  And furthermore the third—Vedrai carino from Don Giovanni—I’d only brought because I wanted to go over the frelling Italian before I started really working on it.  We’d had a stab††† at it a while ago and it got set aside, but it’s been on my mind and since I now more or less suddenly have more voice it’s one of the ones I snatched back from oblivion.

Oh, go on, let’s just sing it, said Nadia.  So I did.  Eeeeep.  And she made one or two painless comments and told me to go home and work on it.

Then Un moto de gioja and we spent some time on that one.  Here’s an example of why I adore Nadia.  There’s a place in the middle of Un moto where you hold a note for a very long time and then come off it again with a wordless twiddle before you start the next verse.  I hadn’t even registered that you’re supposed to sing the twiddle—when I started work on this song Nadia had told me to hold the note only as long as was comfortable, but to keep time and come in correctly on the new ‘un moto’.  Then I ACCIDENTALLY heard Danielle de Niese singing it and she sings the twiddle.  Oh.  It ties the two halves together better, the twiddle.  I can’t sing it up to proper twiddle speed at the end of a long note—which is the part I can do—and as I hurl myself into the next verse.  So I sing it at half speed.  Nadia said gravely, if you were preparing this for public performance I think I would take issue with your singing it so slowly, but for your purposes at present it works very well.  —She takes you seriously.  Even when you’re screwing up Do Re Mi or tackling something like someone with a flint axe trying to produce a knock-off of the Sphinx.

Finally we assailed the nightclub proprietress.  This is such a fabulous song.  There are no fully satisfactory performances of it on YouTube—that I can find anyway—but here’s the poem:  http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.co.uk/2006/05/song-of-nightclub-proprietress-john.html ‡

It needs Lotte Lenya—who may have died before Dring composed it, in which case I excuse her for having failed to record it—or someone else who can put over age and despair.  I don’t say you have to be old (despair optional) because in fairness I would then have to give up singing Voi che sapete, say, which is sung by a teenage boy, or Vedrai carino, which is sung by a bouncy village maiden (to her thick plank of a fiancé).  But you have to put old and hagged over.  I have a chance of this, with lived experience on my side.  But the thing that is Very Exciting is that I can hear me beginning to sound like a mezzo:  not just the range‡‡ but the resonance.  And this is a very resonant song.

. . . I then took hellhounds for another hustle and FINALLY.  A CERTAIN PARTY EXCRETED.  We then belted back to Third House and arrived with three minutes to spare . . . and the removal blokes were already there.  NEVER MIND.  I WASN’T LATE.  I let them in, pointed out all the Large Objects that had to go, apologised for lack of pre-clearance . . . and bolted back to the cottage to feed hellcritters‡‡‡ and take the hellterror for another mini-hurtle while hellhounds contemplated their bowls with disfavour.  I was on my way out the door to flee back to Third House when the phone rang and it was Removal Men saying they were ready. . . .

I looked at their lorry before they shut the gate and my heart plummeted.  There was no way they were going to get that lot in.  I had the hellhounds with me again—no one had got any kind of a real hurtle thus far today—and we took off across some countryside§ behind the storage warehouse while Valiant Removal Men wrestled with the standard three dimensions of the space-time continuum and when we returned . . .

THEY HAD GOT IT ALL IN.§§

Oh, and did I mention that tonight was the first night of the Alpha course—?

* * *

* On this day that the Turner Prize is announced, this seems like a perfectly valid idea

** All right, the fastest sprint I was capable of

*** I’m sure, if asked, she would prefer the kong

† Please remember, when I say silly things like this that IT’S ALL RELATIVE.  I have made a giant leap forward in the last few weeks but it’s still an 11-hand Shetland pony qualifying for prelim at the county show against the odds, not the branded warmblood insured for a gazillion pounds qualifying for the Olympics, okay?

†† Huh, whuh, um, bleaugh?

††† Way too vivid a metaphor, stab.  Or maybe I’m just hallucinating KES.

‡ Baby ’pollies is not a mystery:  they’re little bottles of a kind of mineral water popular at the time.

‡‡ I’m still putting in petitions to get my high C back.  Lots of mezzos have high Cs.

‡‡‡ ‘Feed’ used loosely, which is to say the hellterror eats and the hellhounds do not.

§ And I managed to cut myself on some barbed wire.  Frell.  There was a normal gate to get in, and then at the other end one of those horrible temporary gate things that anyone who has spent any time wandering over English agricultural landscape will know to their detriment:  several strands of barbed wire stretched between two light posts and held apart horizontally by being nailed to a series of short loose lathes.  This contraption is usually held at either end by a loop at ground level where you stick the bottom of your post and then at the top by another loop which you have to shove it under, around the post of the real fence it’s being attached to.  These things are a menace anyway, and if you lose your hold they collapse on the ground in a grisly tangle of barbed wire.  But in this case . . . the frelling loops were made of barbed wire.  WHY?  Anyone trying either to open or close the evil thing is going to have to handle the loops.  I managed to nick a finger and it bled and bled and bled and bled and bled and bled and bled and bled and bled and it was very boring and there are probably a whole series of predators out there tonight hopefully following my blood spoor.  Sorry guys.

§§ Of course I still have ninety-six million books to do something with—I don’t mean Peter’s and my backlist, that’s already in its own storage unit—and a few odds and ends.  Maybe a few more than a few.

Urgent Monday

 

YAAAAAAAH.  I got to bed at . . . a little short of 7 am Friday night/Saturday morning.*  The rest of the weekend is a bit of a blur.  I’ve kind of lost track of when daylight happens, it is so easy to mislay this time of year.**  Meanwhile I’ve been playing phone tag with my removal man about getting the big stuff from Third House that Atlas and I can’t shift in his trailer up to the storage warehouse place;  I missed Mr Removal Man on Friday and assumed that was it till Monday, but I got a phone message from him today that I picked up on my way out the door to go to church, arrrgh arrrgh arrrgh arrrgh arrrgh . . . phoned him as requested when I got home again*** AND HE WANTS TO COME TOMORROW AFTERNOON.  I HAVE A FRELLING VOICE LESSON MONDAY AFTERNOON.  EXCEPT TOMORROW I’M HAVING IT EARLY.  VERY EARLY.†  AND THEN I HAVE TO COME HOME AND DEAL WITH REMOVAL MEN?††

I need to sing††† and then go to bed.  Fast.

* * *

* It was a slightly odd night out on the street.^  I would have put it down to the fact that it was only my second official night and I still don’t have a clue, but several of the others on the team, including Fearless Leader, mentioned it, that there was a restless unease in the (cold) air that was unusual.  I was home by four a.m. but the adrenaline aftermath was bad;  the only two at all really tricky incidents were near the end of our watch, and I was actually engaged in one of them—yeeeeeeeep—and came out of it having done the right thing but jangling.  And . . . it’s going to take me a while to get used to seeing real live very drunk and/or drugged up people doing the kinds of things real live very drunk and/or drugged up people do, both the hostile and the happy, and also the mere absolutely absolutely legless.  It happens on TV.  It doesn’t happen, you know, here.  Oh yes it does.

^ Although my HEATED WAISTCOAT worked brilliantly, I only turned it on after the break.  Ah yes, the break, during which the weather apparently yanks the rug out from under the temperature which, obviously, plunges dramatically, like a keystone kop engaging with a banana skin.  So when you come outside again, full of hot tea and a warm glow of self-satisfaction+, it’s like walking into the Yukon in January.  I noticed this last time.  I think we must snap a trip wire or something and the ice gods all leap to their feet and shout NOW!, and then bang their icicles of office together in solidarity before dashing out to do their worst.

Anyway.  I didn’t turn my waistcoat on till after the break when I figured I’d need it worse and it did brilliantly.  Except that it was so brilliant that I had it turned up only a third of the way . . . and it was dead in three hours.  It’s supposed to last up to six hours depending on how high you set it, and it only lasted for three at one third power??  I may ask the seller a polite question.

I have a set of neoprene toe-socks—they only cover the front half of your foot, which is clever, because your feet don’t sweat that way—that were sent to me by a very nice person++ and I decided to use them Friday night.  Another couple of degrees in the wrong direction and I’m changing over to the heated socks, but they worked a treat this time—while I was moving, tramping those mean streets and trying to look like I had the faintest idea what I was doing.+++  What’s interesting is that they don’t work a FILBERT sitting still in the monks’ chapel.++++  Next Saturday night prayer with the monks:  heated socks.

+ I’m doing WHAT?  And it’s WHAT time of night/morning?

++ You Know Who You Are

+++ Although I’ve now heard my more experienced colleagues answer that—er—diabolical question, Street Pastors?  What are you?, often enough that I’m beginning to stop hyperventilating about what I’ll say# the first time someone asks me this in a way I can’t hastily pass on to one of said more experienced colleagues.   One of our first training lectures had us trying to come up with an answer and . . . none of us covered ourselves with glory.

#Besides er—er—er—er—um

I haven’t entirely stopped hyperventilating.  But I’m hyperventilating less.  But there is also the first time I’m going to have to PRAY ALOUD to worry about.  Noooooooooooooo.  Usually you can give prayer requests to the Prayer Pastors back at base, it’s what they’re for.  But occasionally someone you’ve been talking to asks you to pray for/with them, right there.  Right now.  Eeeeeep.  I’m still in the early hyperventilating stage about praying out loud.  I tell myself that I don’t radiate the kind of centredness and authority that would inspire anyone to ask me to pray over them.  Reasons Not to Acquire Authority.  I wouldn’t mind a little centredness though.

++++ The monks’ chapel is sooooooo cooooooold.  By the time I’ve sat there an hour, muffled up in my heavy winter kit and a blanket, in contemplation,# when the abbot finally does his rapping thing and we’re all supposed to climb to our feet . . . I can’t.  Although trying to find my way out of my excellent, steadfast blanket does not assist this awkward process.

# Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, I’m so cold, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, I’m so cold. . . .

** Three weeks till the shortest day and then we start climbing back OUT of this pit.

*** And note that Peter is away till tomorrow afternoon so I’m having to do things like steam my own broccoli and cut up my own carrots.^

^ And Pav’s.  Very fond of a nice carrot, is Pav.

† Way too frelling early.  Just by the way.  For someone who doesn’t expect to speak in complete sentences till after noon.  Let alone frelling Italian complete sentences.  The things one does just because one’s voice teacher is now a slave to the school schedule.

†† Hellcritters aren’t going to like it either.  Hellhounds, who are in the 90 mile an hour couch potato category after all, are somewhat placated by Rides in the Car with the Hellgoddess but Pav eventually gets bored with yet another kong and wants to climb the walls and practise her trapeze artist routines for a while.

††† I’ve been having a fabulous time with the [Song of the] Nightclub Proprietress this week.  Who is at least in English.  For better or worse.

KES, 107

 

ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

Watermelon Shoulders pulled his sword out of the prone body of his victim with no more difficulty or distress than if he were buttering his toast with a table knife, stepped over what I had to assume was a corpse—and grabbed me before I had a chance to run away.  He pulled me to my feet as easily as he’d yanked his sword out of the dead guy.  One shovel-sized hand per activity.  He was still holding his (bloody) sword with his right hand.  His left wrapped around my upper arm.  Several times, probably.  He was a big guy.  His hand seemed strangely hot through the sleeve of my nightgown.  Nightgown.  This was all happening to me while I was barefoot and wearing a nightgown. With little pink rosebuds on it.  Let us not forget the little pink rosebuds.

“Listen,” he said.  “Thy first kill is always hard.”

I wanted to say I didn’t kill him!  You killed him!  But he was still dead and I was certainly crucially involved.

“But he is only the first.”

The first?  The first of what?  No, don’t answer that. . . .

Watermelon Shoulders sounded almost as if he were talking to himself as he went on:  “We had almost given up hope, and yet we knew that this way would not be forgotten;  and much calamity would come of this place being long left unprotected—as it hath been left.  Calamity approaches near.  We remained, of course;  some beguilement we can lay for the confusion of those arrayed against us.  But we can do little else unless there is someone from this domain to make a stand with us.”

Stand?  Domain? What?  And who’s ‘we’?  No, don’t tell me.  Whoever they were, they probably had swords.  I didn’t want any more dead guys around.  I didn’t want this dead guy around.

They keep telling you that life in the city is dangerous.  There had never been any dead guys in Gelasio’s penthouse.  I wanted to say some of this—I wanted to yell it and I wanted to hit something—preferably myself in the head so I would wake up and all of this would go away.  But my throat had closed as if it had been nailed shut and my muscles were seized solid with post-almost-dying adrenaline backlash.

Watermelon Shoulders seemed to have taken paralysis for a conscious decision to stay where I was.  He let go of me.  He turned back to the dead guy.  He wiped his bloody sword on the dead guy’s back.  He had some difficulty finding a big enough patch of unbloody back to do it on.

OH.  GOD.

There was so much blood.  Some faint memory from high school biology class or too many hours spent poking around on line for weird stuff and factoids that might be useful to the genre fiction writer produced the information that the human body had about five quarts of blood in it.  But nobody had poured five quarts of blood on the science lab floor to demonstrate how much five quarts really was.  How long did it take a freshly-killed human to bleed out?  Did all of the blood come out?  I couldn’t remember that high school biology had covered this, or maybe I’d been home with flu that day.  CSI probably mentioned it regularly but I had never given any of the CSIs my full attention:  the way no one ever got dirty used to distract me.

There was so much blood.  I wanted to shift a few of my more hazardously-placed books but I couldn’t move that far.  Or that accurately.  Bending over and picking up a book would involve complex muscular coordination.

There was also an increasingly awful smell.

Watermelon Shoulders said, “We shall make a better stand this first night with our new defender at the back of this house.”  I could hear in his voice that he was trying to be gentle.  It wasn’t working.  The only thing that would work was waking up and finding this was all a really bad dream.

Wait a minute.  What had he said?  Better stand?  I doubt he meant of whooshing pine trees.  And I wasn’t sure I could stand at all.  I managed an inarticulate croak.  My muscles were beginning to thaw into uncontrollable trembling.

What was the other thing he’d said?  Defender?  Some small forsoothly joke?

“Come.”  He paused long enough to glance at the sword I was still holding, only because I’d forgotten to unclench my fingers and drop it.  It was providing a useful prop however.  Although canes have ferrules.  I might not get my security deposit back if my sword gouged a hole in the floor.

A swordpoint-sized notch out of the floor was going to be the least of my problems.  I wondered if there was a professional cleaning service anywhere in the area who knew how to get bloodstains out of a hardwood floor.  Major bloodstains.  Although if sinking into the floor would keep it away from my books it would be worth signing a 1,000,000-book contract to pay for a new floor.

“My spirit lifts to see thee again, Silverheart,” he said . . . to the sword?  “Come then, Lady Kestrel,” he said to me. “We have need of thee.”

Street Pastors, continued

 

I’m out on the street again tonight—Street Pastors.  The weather has warmed up a little—which is why we could handbell at the cottage yesterday evening, because the sitting room was not full of plants—and it’s GOING TO RAIN.  Either that or turn cold again.  Depends on who/what you read/listen to.*  I have my new battery-pack-operated heated waistcoat charged up and ready to go, and ordinary batteries for the socks and gloves poised for action . . . so it will probably rain.  I haven’t ordered my waterproof trousers yet.**

And . . . I think it’s going to become official that I don’t write a proper blog on SP nights.***  Maybe I’ll use it as an excuse to post the links I never get around to posting, because they’re too wonderful and I want to celebrate them properly, like this one, which most of you author-blog-following readers will have already seen, but for anyone who hasn’t†:

http://pcwrede.com/blog/my-writing-life-an-adventure/

. . . or because they’re too infuriatingly CONFIRMATORY of what you’ve known forever:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/06/sexism-swedish-cinemas-films-women

ARRRRRRRGH.  LOTR fails?  Am I surprised?  I am not surprised.††  But I’m not sure you can rate SHAWSHANK REBELLION down:  It’s laid in a men’s prison, for pity’s sake.  On the other hand, I’m appalled that all but one of the HARRY POTTERs fails.†††  What was Hermione doing all that time?  Not talking to girls, evidently.

Right.  Okay.  I have to go put a pair of dry jeans in a bag to take with me in case I need a change during the break.‡  Night-night.  Those of you so inclined, please pray for me.  We’re supposed to go out there radiating the Armour of God or what-have-you.  Also I can use all the help I can get chatting to strangers, even if I’m wearing the Armour of God.

* * *

* One of my favourite things about the BBC weather site, which I have bookmarked, is the way the graphic at the top often says something different than the text at the bottom.  This feels like the real experience of English weather.

** Chiefly due to a failure to find enough info on line to be sure of trousers that are long enough in the inseam AND don’t make horrible slushing noises with every step.  You know they don’t give you any help with these crucial outfitting questions during the lengthy and arduous Street Pastors training.

*** Of which I have another one only next Friday, due to the inevitable stupidities of clashing schedules and the occasional inconvenient fifth Friday in a month.

† Thank you, b_twin

†† Yo, Jackson, you gonna mess with the story, how about you messed with that?

††† I know, I know.  I didn’t see them past the first one which nearly bored me to death.  But you know I’m hopeless.  I didn’t see RETURN OF THE KING either.

‡ You’ll have seen Blogmom’s post about her taking the forum off line to wrestle with elderly technology.  THIS MEANS THERE WILL BE NO FORUM TOMORROW FOR KES.  I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I LIVE FOR FORUM COMMENTS, ESPECIALLY FOR KES, SO WHILE I AM GOING TO BE A BIG PERSON AND POST IT ANYWAY^ PLEEEEEEEEASE SAVE ALL THOSE COMMENTS YOU WOULD HAVE MADE TILL THE FORUM GOES UP AGAIN.  ::wipes fevered brow::

^ Also, I assume if I didn’t, some of you would hunt me down and kill me.  You don’t want to do that, you know, I’m not quite finished at the far end where things are still Very Bad.

Blog and forum status

Saturday, November 30, 1:30pm CST:  the forum is back online.  Blog should be back to normal.  Please report any oddities to blogmom@robinmckinleysblog.com.

Forum upgrade scheduled

A forum upgrade is scheduled for this weekend, November 30-31.  The forum will be unavailable during the upgrade. I will post status updates here. — Blogmom

McKinley FAIL [again]

 

Yarrrrrggggh.  I promised Blogmom a doodle update today.  And I’ve had my head down over stuff today* SECURE in the knowledge that I had a dozen doodle photos to choose from as illustration for the unwelcome news that . . . yes, I’m still turning the poor neglected things out.  I mean, no I’m not done, no, I didn’t put the final load in the post today.   At the moment Third House is getting in the way of [ever snail-like] doodle production:  the sad truth is that doodles are the first thing to be shoved back in a corner when life starts whapping me up longside the head again.**

I know.  It’s been two years.  Two years.  In fact OVER two years.

I’m sorry.  Which with £3 or so will buy you a Starbucks Gooey-o-rama with chocolate sprinkles and a paper parasol.

As I have said on more than one occasion on these virtual pages I WILL NEVER, EVER, EVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THIS AGAIN.  But I will still ask Blogmom to set up a Doodle Shop when—and only WHEN—I get this ancient hoary backlog cleared.  It’s not the doodles that are the problem:  doodling, when I’m actually sitting there doing it, is fun.  The problem is the doodler’s lack of a sense of time.  Or lack of sense full stop.

So . . . I had twelve*** photos from which I would choose eight or ten to DEMONSTRATE that to the extent there was ever any touch to this silly business I haven’t lost it.†  And when I stuck my memory card into my computer I discovered that I had had one of my UNUSUALLY CLUELESS MOMENTS, although I admit I have them rather a lot with this camera, and all but two of said doodle photos are dark grey and blurry.  AAAAAAAAAUGH.

All right.  That leaves two.

Gonturan

 

Several people asked for cats and books. This one’s the most recent.

Oh.  And Happy Thanksgiving.

 

I don’t think the muffins have fangs.

 * * *

* Well, and handbells.  One of the many dumb things I feel guilty about is handbells, change ringing on handbells being one of the difficult frelling skills I have no frelling gift for that I’ve somehow managed to let myself get tangled up with.^  Having no (frelling) gift for it means I should spend more time studying and I, um, don’t.  I don’t have time or I don’t have brain energy or I have too many dogs or [other explanations insert HERE].  But I like ringing handbells, except that it makes me feel even stupider than usual.   So when Niall rings up and is insinuating my brain starts to explode.  No!  Yes!  No!  Yes!  Noyesnoyesnoyesnoyes!!!!  Niall, being Niall, only hears the yes part.

Niall rang up and was insinuating and heard ‘yes’.  So we were going to ring handbells tonight.  And then Colin’s builder discovered that the dumbleg trumwale^^ had morveldinky, and had to be FORKLED.  RIGHT NOW.  Which meant Colin wasn’t going to be able to get away early enough for handbells.  OH THAT’S REALLY TOO BAD [I had no sleep last night and feel like death not at all well warmed over] I said, trying not to hiccup with delight.

And then I took Pav out for a supernumerary hurtle.  She’s so self motivated that it’s rather too easy, when circumstances oppress, to decide that she expends enough energy in a relatively short space of time that merely getting underfoot counts to some extent.^^^

Pooka started barking at me as we were making our zigzag way home from Old Eden.  Curses.  Who invented mobile phones anyway.

It was Colin.  The forkling had gone with unwonted dispatch.  He was free for handbells after all.

Oh.

So we rang handbells.  THEY MADE ME CONDUCT.  THEY MADE ME CALL THE FRELLING BOBS.  AND THE EQUALLY FRELLING SINGLES.

^ Niall, you ratbag.

^^ It’s a particularly large and valuable dumbleg trumwale I believe.

^^^ No you may not eat my slippers.  You may nest in the dirty laundry, you may not shred it.  No you may not chew the corners of the furniture.  No you may not chew any of the corners of any of the furniture.  No you may not excavate the Ancient Magazine Pile under the kitchen table.+  No you may not wedge yourself under the tallboy++ to retrieve+++ the dustpan, the assortment of brushes, and Peter’s spare slippers.#  No you may not torture hellhounds.  No you may not torture me.

. . . At this point I frequently find myself thinking that it would be a lot simpler just to take her for an official hurtle and then feel justified in making her long down for a while.

+ This is a scary one.

++ I was HOPING she would get too big to do this.

+++ Retrieve, cough cough.  Retrieve.  Well, it starts with the retrieve.

# This list pertains to mayhem at the cottage.

** I know.  It should be handbells.  Although one of the reasons I don’t do my handbell homework is that if I have a few brain cells left at an unexpected time of day I don’t whip out a handbell method line, I whip out a pencil for a doodle.

*** No.  Actually I had sixteen.

† Another way of saying this is that you can’t lose what you didn’t have.

On the intricacies and atrocities of playing the French Horn – guest post by Midget

 

My very favorite joke* about the french horn is “How do you know the horn is a divine instrument?……Man plays it, but only God knows what comes out.**”

I love this because it is the Gospel Truth. Even after playing the horn for more than half of my life (at this point, a good deal more than half), there are some days in which the sounds that come out of my bell are as mysterious as the dark side of the moon. Or a hellhound’s inclination towards food.

“But why?” you may ask. “The thing only has three buttons, surely it can’t be that hard.” Ah, if only it were that simple. All instruments operate on one basic principle: they use vibration to produce sound. For a piano, a hammer strikes a string when you press a key. For a violin, the friction between the bow and the string causes that string to vibrate. For a wind instrument, you rely on a vibrating column of air. For brass instruments in particular, you make the air vibrate with your face. Basically you blow a controlled raspberry into your horn. Classy, right?

The fundamental problem of the air-vibrating method of sound production is that a specific length of air column will only vibrate at one set of specific pitches, called a harmonic series. These pitches are the products of the intersections of sound waves in the air column (my understanding of acoustic physics starts to break down at this point, so I can’t tell you exactly how to visualize this). So for one specific length of vibrating air you get around 16 pitches unevenly spaced over a span of 4 octaves, although only about 8 are usable and most of the pitches are crowded together in the highest octave (see visual here). This is why hunting horns and bugle calls have such an iconic sound: they only have a few notes to work with, so they make the most of ‘em.

The french horn originated as a hunting horn. Baroque and Classical composers took it out of the fields and into the symphony, mostly for the purpose of having horn calls in their programmatic music. You can hear some of them in Mozart*** and Beethoven. For a long time the horn was just a length of tube with a mouthpiece and a bell, and if a composer wanted a song with horns in a specific key, the hornist just swapped out one length of horn for another to get the eight notes the composer wanted in the right key. Eventually, they realized that if you could add length to your basic horn with extra bits of tubing you wouldn’t have to have ten or a dozen horns, and thus the idea of slides (or crooks, as they were called) was born. So when a piece came up in, say, G major, the hornist would just pop the correct crooks into his horn and be ready to go.

By and by some smart person developed valves, which let the crooks become a permanent part of the horn. By depressing a valve you open up the corresponding slides (crooks) and thus lengthen the available tubing, which changes the series of pitches you can play. So basically, you use your valves (singly or in combination) to pick your series of available pitches, and then choose the specific pitch you want to play by blowing a highly controlled raspberry into the horn. The smaller the raspberry, the higher the pitch, and visa versa.

This whole arrangement of valves and crooks lets you play chromatically, which is a great improvement on the eight-pitch scheme, but there’s a catch. The french horn’s “normal” range is set quite high in the harmonic series, where all the notes are smushed together. This means that for any one note there are at least two valve combinations (furthermore to be known as fingerings) that will let that note play^. The higher you go, the more fingerings there are for any given note. So it’s not uncommon that you come in on what you think is the right note and can play merrily along for several measures before you hit a note that will not work with the fingerings you are trying to use–and then discover that you’ve been a third lower than you should the entire time.^^ As I said, only God knows what comes out!

(Other adventures include: High Notes {and shattering them like clay pigeons in skeet shooting}, Transposing, Hand Stopping, and the Invidious Gurgle. And playing Wagner {and Holst/Mahler/Reed} really, really, REALLY loud.)

* * *

*and I know loads of terrible instrument jokes

**Incidentally, my horn is named Amadeus, which means “Gift of God”. He’s a beauty. Well, actually, he looks like he’s one step short of scrap metal–old, big, and unlacquered, which means nothing I can do will keep him from tarnishing–but dang, that boy can SING.

***Mozart wrote four horn concertos and all of them have at least one movement (usually the third) that’s based on a hunting horn call. This is the third movement of the third concerto: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpuzxotToNQ

^This whole harmonic series/extra fingering thing is further complicated by the fact that the modern standard horn is a double horn. It has TWO sets of slides/crooks (in the keys of F and B flat) attached to the valves, and comes equipped with a trigger to swap between the sets of slides. The reason for this is that some parts of the horn’s range are easier to play and/or better in tune on each set of slides. But it quadruples the amount of fingerings you can use, which can be extremely confusing.

^^This phenomenon makes sight reading a (bigger than usual) ratbag on days when my sense of pitch is off. Come in on the right pitch? Ha, forget it. And when the whole horn section is having an off day, we all just kind of glance shiftily at each other as our entrance approaches, hoping someone will A) have counted their rests correctly so we know when to come in, and B) get somewhere within a fifth of the correct pitch. In Classical or Romantic pieces you can often use the harmony to make an educated guess about the correct pitch, but if it’s a contemporary piece, you just wing it and hope it fits into some chord some where.

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe