Robin McKinley's Blog, page 4

Excuses, excuses

The big problem about living with ME—all right, one of the big problems, but for me they’re all kind of organised around this one—is that you have no slack.  None.  Zero.  Or sub zero.  −459.67 °F , say, it’s cold down here.   & that short chain you’re on burns in the cold. 

Another definition for ‘slack’ might be ‘mortal life’.   The bungie cord as philosophical principle.   This last fortnight I’ve sent the slightly tweaked DIARY* back to Merrilee for it to be read by strangers for the first time.  I’ve not quite come down with, but been made a little extra flimsy by, some wandering virus.  (WANGO!  —that’s the noise a snapped bungie cord makes.)   I’ve had two friends in hospital.  (WANGO WANGO!)  One is out & doing fine, although the graphic details of her ordeal are enough to keep you awake at night.**  The other one is out too but . . . well, let’s say worry is tiring & stressful.   & I have a third friend*** who has glandular fever, & I have been reading him the riot act about RESTING & TAKING IT EASY so he does not end up with ME.  He is someone who has to look up ‘resting’ & ‘taking it easy’ in a dictionary & then can’t get his head around these alien concepts.  Especially not when he’s befuddled by glandular fever.

Wango, wango, wango, etc.

Also, we’re having what passes for summer here.  No one but someone who lives in Scotland would dare call it hot, but I’m a wuss who lives in Scotland, & I’m going to call it hot.†  The blasted sun is relentless.  Which I would put up with better if it didn’t mean I’m out there watering the garden every day.  I HATE watering.  I honestly like weeding†† & all the fussing & pottering & dirty & sweating kinds of things that go with gardening‡, but WATERING uggggh. The hosepipe kinks & gets caught in things & knocks over the plants you’re trying to soothe & assuage & it sprays all over you while it’s at it, the cans are heavy & also knock things over when they’re not banging into your shins & they (also) spill most of their contents all over you so you have to go back & refill the beggars, & it’s all boring boring boring BORING.  Rain.  We want rain.†††

&, meanwhile, lack of slack.  Repeatedly reaching the end of one’s maddeningly short tether & going thud.  Not wango.  Splat, possibly.

So yeah.  Excuses, excuses.  I’m still failing to grapple the blog into some kind of schedule because by the end of most days I’ve hit the end of that blasted tether hours ago & I’m about as lively & nimble as a brick.  The crumbly mortar bits are brain cells.  Ex brain cells.  ONE OF THESE WEEKS.  One of these weeks when the ME has at least briefly run out of excuses to bounce on my stomach & stick its elbow in my eye.  No, wait, that’s Genghis.   Some week when the ME has let itself be briefly distracted by, I don’t know, seals or seagulls or bagpipers‡‡ in the town square.   Something that gives me the chance to tuck laptop under one arm & Genghis under the other (!!!!!!) & get away for a bit, like buying a false passport from that shifty bloke on the corner & running for the border because the bad guys are after you . . . ‡‡‡

***

*I have told you that book-in-progress is, at least at the moment, called ONE YEAR DIARY?

** I’m interested, is the thing.  I’m not being polite.  I really do want to hear.  & if I’m offered photos I want to see them too.  I just go home after & think AAAAAAUGH.  But when it happens to someone else—because I doubt my friends & I are going to spend the rest of our lives in a padded bubble—I’ll want to hear about that, too, & if there are photos I will want to see them.  I’m not sure what kind of insanity this is, but it probably feeds into why I’m an introvert.  I don’t process stuff very fast & I distress easily.

*** FANCY THAT.  THE CRANKIEST OLD WOMAN IN THE WORLD HAS MORE THAN THREE FRIENDS.  Hey, all you guys, stop having accidents & falling ill, will you please?

† Also, the Aga.  I don’t want to turn off the Aga.  It’s true that it’s—she’s—the only cooker I’ve got^ but my real resistance is that I feel like I’m being mean to a friend.  A turned-off Aga is a sad giant lump of steel occupying too much space in your kitchen.  A turned-on Aga is the friendly centre of your home. 

^ Somewhere in some cupboard or other I have a two-burner electric thingy & a tiny electric oven.  I knew which cupboard back at the cottage in Hampshire.  Here I haven’t a clue.  & I have a big kitchen, a utility room & a pantry# to lose stuff in.

# A pantry.  & an ocean view.  It doesn’t get better than this.

†† You would be forgiven for raising your eyebrows a little if you looked at this garden, but that’s a time & energy thing, sigh, which is kind of where I started this post.  Oh, & the long grass is deliberate.  I HAVE SOMEONE WHO CUTS GRASS.  Or strims paths around the edges.  THE LONG GRASS REALLY IS DELIBERATE.  Wildflower meadows & butterflies & all that.^  The problem with wildflower meadows is the way they start colonising your borders, & I don’t want wildflowers in my borders, I want rosebushes in my borders.  The fiercer roses can jolly well see off wildflowers, sabre-toothed tigers & whatever else may be around, but some of the wimpier ones will go under if not defended.  One of the drawbacks to starting yet another new garden is the way you get all re-enchanted looking at the flower photos in the rose catalogues & forget what fainting heroines some of the plants are. 

^ Not many bees.  There must be bees in Scotland?  I mean, we have bees, but I would have expected more of them.  One of the things on the list to investigate in the copious free time that will magically appear some day in future when I have my no-longer-that-new-what-am-I-doing-with-my-time-don’t-answer–that life here sorted.#

We do have wasps though.  ::Shudder::  I know they’re all a part of the great plan of nature, but I would prefer that particular subheading of the plan to be pursued elsewhere.

# HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA~

~ You saw that coming, right?

††† So, all this sunny weather, I’ve got all the dog bedding washed & hung OUTSIDE^, right?  No.  I keep forgetting.^^  Maybe if I left myself a note & therefore got it done^^^ & hung it out, it would RAIN?

^ I’ve told you this story, yes?  Dog bedding hangs OUTSIDE to dry because the house is already ankle deep in dog hair & there are limits, even to my housekeeping negligence.  Not many, but a few. 

^^ Also, see:  life with ME

^^^ Nah.  I’d just lose the note.  Or forget to read it, because I didn’t think I needed a note about anything.#

# I do this with my diary all the time.  I never go anywhere, do anything except the stuff I’m always doing, talk to or meet up with anyone, so why do I need to look at my diary??  Why does someone this old, cranky & solitary have so many notes & appointments in her frelling diary?

‡ Excepting the blood & shouting when the clumsy gardener has again managed to stick herself with the fork or whack herself with the spade or trip over the bucket full of painfully-extracted brambles, nettles, etc.  It won’t surprise you that brambles continue to gouge & slash even after they’ve been uprooted, but note that nettles go on stinging you into a bright red flaming rash long after they should be frelling humus.  Be careful turning your compost heap.  Which of course you haven’t put the brambles in—they go to the dump with old light bulbs & Styrofoam & cement mixers & other things that never rot or decay ever.  But nettles make GREAT compost.  When they finally get around to it.  A month or two before the cement mixers.

‡‡  THERE SHOULD BE MORE BAGPIPERS IN THE TOWN SQUARE.  Or anywhere else around here for that matter.  This is SCOTLAND.  There are supposed to be BAGPIPERS.  I’m sure it’s in the contract.

‡‡‡ Yes, I read too many murder mysteries.  Also, I’m not running anywhere with Genghis tucked under my arm.

Yes. It’s a flying piano.

& you thought it was just a ridiculous, off the wall name, didn’t you?  The kind that a slightly off-the-wall herself fantasy writer who has maybe had an unwise second glass of champagne & is sitting in a pleasant haze of bubbles might come up with?  As suitable for her new blog?  No.  My piano really did fly.  I’ll tell you the full story LATER. 

The short form is, I think I’ve told you this house is on a steep hill?  My front garden is (nearly) flat, but it’s a full flight of stairs, cut into the hillside, up from street level.  &, that day, when All My Worldly Goods were arriving in Scotland from storage in Hampshire, I was standing at the top of those stairs, watching the flying-piano story as it were unfold, with my heart in my mouth, thinking, if I get the blog going again, I’m going to name it The Flying Piano.

Meanwhile, real live new permanent blog!  Yes!!!  Yaaaay!  & assuming that poor noble Blogdad can beat me through the basics of using the dangerous snorting technological beast* the first thing I will do** will be to POST SOME PHOTOS OF GENGHIS.  I mean, that’s why you’re reading this, right?

* * *

* Yes, true, I managed to learn to use the old one, but everything keeps getting more complicated, see:  Microdirtbag 365, or how about banking details??  I nearly failed to become a supporter of the RNLI^ just this morning because we couldn’t figure out how to get enough of our respective bank details to talk to each other safely.

^Royal National Lifeboat Institution.  I now live in a house with an ocean view, it seems rude not to contribute.   The bottom line is that there are far too many honest upright doing-good charities out there & you could smother in the come ons, & if you want to keep eating, you & your dog, you have to harden your heart.  Not surprisingly I tend to specialise in animals, but . . . #

# & then there’s the more-or-less-guaranteed-true story of the GWHP–not Genghis, but one of the same intake of GWHPs from a street-dog-rescue in eastern Europe who wound up in NE Scotland–who jumped into the ocean one afternoon & . . . just kept going.  She had to be rescued, & while I think it was the Coast Guard rather than the RNLI, there’s a sort of wet-recovery principle here.  The fellow who sponsored Genghis when he first arrived is one of the several people who have told me this story & apparently this is just something a GWHP may just do?  Choose a direction & go, even if there’s several hundred miles of cold North Sea ahead of you?  This is the same dog, by the way, who used to climb an 8 foot wall to go walkabout.   The idea that I am in the shallow end of GWHP madness with Genghis is pretty horrifying.

** or maybe nearly the first thing, she says nervously

Questions with answers which do not necessarily answer the questions asked, or, when have I ever stayed on topic?

Communications with SFWA have unfortunately & for some unknown reason broken down; my default suspicion is technology but it could also be that, as SFWA is a volunteer organisation, all the admin who had been busting themselves senseless to make the actual (& virtual) convention come off are now exhaustedly catching up on life, paid work & sleep, & not answering SFWA mail. Meanwhile I have no idea where my first wodge of question-answering is hiding on the SFWA site, & I’ve had no acknowledgement whatsoever of my second wodge, so, since I’ve been NEGLECTING THE BLOG AGAIN partly because my trying-to-engage-with-readers energy has been going toward SFWA questions, I thought I’d hang both wodges here, so at least they’re not being wasted. Wasted perhaps being a somewhat dramatic verb in this instance since I’m doing my usual public-persona thing of reading a perfectly reasonable question & then grabbing the bit in my teeth & disappearing over the horizon in a wild tangent-tagging zigzag gallop. But that’s usually how I write the blog, so hey. 

I’ve emboldened the queries to make them stand out.

First, I want to thank Robin for both The Blue Sword and for Beauty. Each arrived at critical moment for my own writing, and helped me decide on direction. My question is about The Blue Sword. How far were you intentionally challenging aspects of the standard stories we all held dear to that point? Did any other writer influence you to create that challenge, the way your work influenced mine?

Lol. ‘ . . . intentionally challenging aspects of the standard stories . . . ‘ You aren’t by any chance deliberately waving a red flag at a bu—I mean, a snorting, ground-pawing, matriarchal cow, are you? YES. When I was growing up, long long long ago, all the good stories were about boys. Boys got to do stuff. Girls didn’t. Jo March marries that boring old professor (like Marianne marries the horrible colonel with his flannel waistcoat), the girls in E Nesbit are always worrying about getting home in time for tea & have you ever stopped to think about the fact that while Dorothy speaks like anyone else in the WIZARD she suddenly starts lisping in the later books? ‘B’lieve’ & ‘s’pose’ & ‘’em’ & ‘’spect’ & so on & on. Now what the screaming doodah is that about? Can’t have a little girl going on having adventures can we? Let’s make her look like a twit. & that scene in Caddie Woodlawn—Caddie having been presented to us as a total tomboy—when only she is scolded for playing tricks on the stuck-up Annabelle because she’s the girl & girls have to grow up to keep the world sweet & beautiful because men can’t. KILL. ME. NOW. When I was first writing books that were published (!) & therefore first being interviewed, my war cry was Girls Who Do Things! I have lots of company now. Hurrah. To whatever extent that I’m partly responsible, both as writer & as example, for more Girls Doing Things in books, I’m delighted. 

I’m a LOTR writer, pure & simple. I’m fond of saying (or possibly ranting) that every fantasy writer of my generation is a descendent of JRR Tolkien whether they want to be or not. I worshipped LOTR, & it totally shaped the writer I grew up to be—both for good & maybe not so good. I was endlessly depressed & angry & frustrated by the role, or lack thereof, of women, but because this was the world I was born into I also kind of thought, drearily, maybe that’s just the way it is for women? (I said in my speech that I didn’t look too hard for women SF&F writers because I at least half believed the redolent nonsense that women can’t write.) 

PS: don’t talk to me about the films, I am not sane on the subject. I thought FELLOWSHIP was an honourable failure, I hated TT, & that’s as far as I got.

I’d like to ask Robin about “Chalice.” You’ve written a couple of versions of the “Beauty and the Beast” story, and I wondered to what degree you see “Chalice” as another retelling of the story? Particularly one that incorporates community and the environment.  (I love “Chalice,” BTW, I reread it often.)

Thank you.  

I’ve been thinking about this—retelling Beauty & the Beast—in the few days since I read your question. Have I ever written a story that includes a more or less standard love story, where one character falls in love with one other character, that doesn’t include them being from wildly different backgrounds, rather often that one or the other of them isn’t quite human, or that at least one of them has non-standard-human powers & skills? I said in the afterword to ROSE DAUGHTER, my second official Beauty & the Beast retelling, that someone once said that every writer has only one story to tell, & their life (& their royalties) depends on whether they can continue to find interesting ways to retell that one story. CHALICE isn’t an official Beauty & Beast retelling, to me, but it’s certainly another of my finding-each-other-across-what-should-be-insurmountable-differences stories. I’ve always felt like a misfit in human society—not that this is unusual; I would guess both most creative people of whatever colours & stripes & most of their audience, whatever their colours & stripes, would say the same, which must be just about everyone—& in my case this is the way it manifests itself in my stories. Hey, I’m a romantic. I believe in love across great divides. (I didn’t manage to marry a purple seven-limbed Betelgeuse-ian, but Peter was 25 years older than I & from another country, which counts for something.)

I am increasingly interested in community as I get older, of connections between & among people, not just one-on-one. Beauty & the Beast is basically a two-person (sic) story. Beauty’s family is critical but minor. I’m an only child from a (dysfunctional) military family that moved posting to posting every year or two. I came to even the idea of community later than many people. I, ahem, like it. CHALICE can be read as a close cousin to Beauty & the Beast, with the organising principle or motivation of CHALICE being community & the necessity of community. & community inevitably includes environment. People, human or otherwise, are rooted in their landscape; trouble comes if they don’t know this or don’t respect it. As for the bees specifically, well, I’m an animal nerd, although mostly I stick to standard critters like dogs, horses, cats. I’m aware that Mirasol’s bees are a lot more like dogs, horses & cats than standard this-world beekeeper’s honeybees. But CHALICE’s bees, I hope, underscore the community aspect. How exactly honeybee community works has fascinated beekeepers—& people who just like reading about beekeeping—since someone twisted the first skep together.

We’ve had a whole raft of not good — actually really bad — Robin Hood movies the last few years, or decades, and after the most recent one I went back and re-read “Outlaws” as a palate cleanser because I think it’s one of the best Robin Hood retellings… and it really got me thinking about what makes a good Robin Hood story. So — what are your thoughts about what makes a good Robin Hood story verses ones that aren’t successful?

(And I’m another one who loves “The Blue Sword.” When I found it I was a horse crazy misfit teenager who had just moved across country, and I think it was a perfect book for that moment.)

Thank you.

I think what I said in my afterword to OUTLAWS remains true—that Robin Hood works best as what its current teller wants to tell & its current audience wants to hear. (One hopes that these two perspectives will align.) Human society is likely to go on enduring upheavals between the haves & the have nots, including sneaky outliers who stealthily take from the haves & give to the have nots, while the major action or lack of it about social & material inequality is going on elsewhere. So the possibility of future Robin Hood retellings should remain pretty robust.

This also gets me out of having to acknowledge that the list of Robin Hood films I’ve seen is very, very short & the list of Robin Hood films I haven’t seen is very, very long. I haven’t even seen Prince of Thieves because I’m AHEM not a Kevin Costner fan AHEM although I do get a little starry eyed & wistful at the thought of Alan Rickman eating the scenery as the Sheriff of Nottingham. I never saw Robin & Marian because someone told me the plot & I was FURIOUS. (Audrey, how could you? You can’t have needed the money??) 

Even I’ve seen The Adventures of Robin Hood. I’d take Basil Rathbone over Errol Flynn any day—& I believe Rathbone could have de-sworded Flynn with his eyes closed; I like to think that’s what you’re really seeing in his face as he lets Flynn win. Veering into feminist territory, as I am wont to do, I was fascinated many years later to find out that Olivia de Havilland was a fire-breather off screen. I only saw her early films where she played revoltingly swoony girls, never more so than in Robin Hood. (She’s quoted as having had a crush on Flynn. What is it with him anyway? His nose is too long & his eyes are too close together. Also I am resistant to the kind of charm based on adoring oneself so much one expects to sluice everyone else along into a vast quivering mass ejaculation of adoration. No thanks. I’d rather read a good book.) The Flynn-Rathbone is the classic Robin Hood of my childhood, although my enduring memory is the TV series with Richard Greene & that theme song. 

But what provoked my OUTLAWS most was flaming-doodah Howard Pyle, which was the print Robin of my young impressionable years. The women are worse than Tolkien’s, & what’s with the murderous nun booming in out of nowhere as a particularly unpleasant plot device? Robin can’t just die, it has to involve treachery by a woman. Go Girl Power. What I wanted, as will come as no surprise to anyone reading the 2023 SFWA Grand Matriarch’s answers to questions, is a Robin Hood containing WOMEN WITH THEIR OWN FREAKING HONOUR & RESPONSIBILITY & AGENCY THANK YOU VERY BLASTED MUCH. & oh, my, didn’t I take some ferocious kicking for providing it! I was MESSING WITH A CLASSIC! I was inserting a bunch of girls into a boys’ own adventure which had done very well as such for centuries! Well, yes. I’m afraid that was the point . . . 

& if there isn’t a multiracial LGBTQ+ retelling soon, I’ll be surprised—& a little disappointed, because it would suggest to me that Robin Hood is no longer live in people’s imaginations, & that would seem to me enormously too bad . . . pause . . . I’m sitting here staring into the middle distance & roughing up an outline. But the story would probably come better from someone who isn’t white, cis, middle-class & over 70. Although I don’t know where the lines are, & I have a lot of trouble with narrow definitions of ‘write what you know’ which, as the the opening salvo, eliminates all F&SF. We’re all in it together, & the more we can imaginatively step over each other’s lines & begin to comprehend each other’s realities, the better. But this isn’t easy. & some of us have better imaginations than others, & people who have been repeatedly bashed may be quite reactive if the bruises are bumped, & most if not all of us—probably all of us—have prejudices & habitual ways of thinking we’re not even aware of. Sigh. Good intentions are a start, but then the hard graft begins.

Perhaps there already is a nonbinary Robin out there with purple hair & a bad attitude & I haven’t happened across them.* I don’t keep up. (See: how many films I haven’t seen.) In which case please send title & author. (See: how many films I haven’t seen, & if it’s a film, don’t bother.)

Oh yeah, horse crazy teens. Greatheart, Sungold, Talat. Fast saves Rosie (& everybody else), but theirs isn’t a horse-crazy-teen relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still a horse-crazy-teen story waiting for me to tell it, but meanwhile there is a cranky old mare in a story that’s comparatively speaking on the short list of what I write next. Next-ish. Oh, for readers of the old blog, I did finish KES—well, part one; it’s one of my annoying semi-cliffhangers, I’ll go on with it if I can—that’ll appear some day, somehow, complete with Monster. & Sid of course.

* (Yes, it’s true, I can’t live without footnotes. Any poor confused person who tries to read my blog^ is well aware of this.)

I hate ‘they’ for someone who doesn’t identify as either male or female. The nonbinary is fine; ‘they’ is not. To my ear, & yes, I am het cis female & old with it, it is dehumanizing. We need more pronouns. & as soon as we get a nonspecific one I am going to start using it. Long before LGBTQ+ was a visible thing, I hated that you couldn’t be identified as ‘she’ without specifying your blasted marital status: what flaming business is it of anyone’s but yours & your husband’s if any? (I’m also trying to remember when lesbian couples started calling each other ‘wife’? Or for that matter gay men calling each other husband, but they aren’t outed by ‘Mr’.) Says the woman who couldn’t get a mortgage for her first house unless her (nonexistent) husband or her father cosigned. KISS. MY. ASS. I did eventually find a bank who would take me (possibly with tongs) but they were strange & indie-fringey. But when I was a girl growing up, ‘Miss’ was pathetic & spinstery, & spinster was a bad word; ‘Mrs’ meant you were officially owned by a member of the patriarchy. This may not make any sense to anyone else, but to me, ‘they’ for nonbinary has a similar sort of feel: people, individuals, are being jammed into a language that was created by the ruling class & they don’t fit. I love the complicated insanity of the English language; one of the additional reasons why I’m a slow writer is because I keep falling down word-choice rabbit holes, I have reference books all over the floor & a zillion tabs open in my browser. But English is not great about certain aspects of defining, or allowing not to be defined, what it is to be a human being.^^

PS: I have a friend with DID. They call themselves ‘they’. I get this. But being gender fluid or nonlinear sexually doesn’t make you a THEY. Well, unless you say it does. In which case please explain.

^ Yes it’s been another bad week, but I have a post in progress

^^ Really I’m being very good about footnotes. Blog readers will appreciate that this many words in a blog post would have racked up DOZENS of footnotes by now. (Well. Several. Trailing even more sub-footnotes.) But with reference to the whole freaking if you’re a woman you’re defined by your marital status: I use [NO TITLE] R McKinley Dickinson in my private life. Yes, I took Peter’s name when I married him: along with being a savage, head-tearing-off feminist, I’m also a romantic (see: all of my books) & I wanted to share a name with my husband. He would have taken McKinley on—& he called himself Mr Robin McKinley when we went to the States, frequently to the confusion of his listeners but it made me feel all warm & fuzzy—but I find that keeping up the savage-feminist thing is a real energy drain, & making him adopt McKinley seemed to me a principle too far. Keeping your own name too is, & was even thirty-plus years ago, a little lower profile for a married woman, so I became McKinley Dickinson, which goes on too long when you’re spelling it for someone over the phone. Living in the UK as a Robin confuses things further because here the default for the name is masculine; if I sign something Robin McKinley Dickinson the answer is inevitably addressed to Mr McKinley Dickinson. One of my pet peeves is web sites that DEMAND you choose a title; when so obliged, I do take Mrs. I’ve never liked Ms; it seems to me too clearly stuffed into use to plug a social gulf, & wielding it always felt like starting an argument. (I worry that our new nongenderspecific pronouns are going to have to run this gauntlet.) There was a web site very recently that offered, at the bottom of the title list, ‘Other’. So I ticked Other. & when my address popped up on the ‘review your order’ screen my name was Other R McKinley Dickinson. Hilarity. This may be my new default. 

I’d love to ask what Robin’s reading and if she has book recommendations for us.

Golly. How long have you got? I’m not a very good book reccer however because I’m an absent-minded dilettante who is usually reading about 1,000,000 books simultaneously & all over the genre map. 

I’ve often told the story of the (male) professor where I graduated from college (Bowdoin, where coeds as we were repulsively called back then, were a recent & mostly unwelcome innovation) saying condescendingly that all us English lit majors would find ourselves reading increasing amounts of nonfiction as we got older & (implied) wiser, although whether that included girls was perhaps unclear, since of course girls couldn’t think rationally anyway & the only wisdom we were liable to accrue would be about cake-baking techniques & house-plant care. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but not all that much. Being recognized as intelligent may have been a little more Augean for those of us who weren’t built for for the Socratic method; flights of fancy have always been my strong point, which doesn’t go over well with the patriarchy. I was a black-leather-motorcycle-jacket, Frye-boots wearing bitch in those days, & while I wince at my excesses, I’m still sympathetic to the feelings that produced them.

ANYWAY. It’s true, I read more nonfiction now than I did a few decades ago. There are seasons in my life when I read very nearly exclusively nonfiction, although it tends to be the soft end, animals & archaeology & psychology & history-of-the-common-people, what the yokels back on the farm were doing while the kings & princes [sic] were out slamming each other on the battlefield or over the [non]negotiating table. So if you’re expecting F&SF, um. Two fantasy novels I’ve actually read recently which I liked a lot however are LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS by Ryka Aoki& THE MAGICIAN’S DAUGHTER by HG Parry. I spent most of STARS thinking ‘she can’t possibly bring this off.’ She did. I was leaping around punching the air at the end. If you need any further reason to read it, how about this quote:

‘Ever wonder why . . . if there is intelligent life out there, the universe isn’t teeming with activity?’

‘Maybe the universe is filled with introverts?’

::falls down laughing:: I bet every (other) introvert who’s read it copied that carefully into their commonplace book too. 

The thing I liked enormously about DAUGHTER is how good she is with both magical world-building & this-world recognisable emotional reality. In my experience you too often get only one or the other. If you’re going to write about people like rabbit familiars & crippled half-ravens, you need not only the imagination to come up with these creatures but the insight to make them real for a reader. 

Ordinary fiction: to my surprise I really liked LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus. I never like hot, talked-about books; also its tongue in cheek style is very in your face & takes some getting used to. Or it did for me. It’s probably the talking dog (well, the thinking dog) that won me over; that & the delicious & frequently painfully funny collision of the—here we go again—patriarchal world our heroine lives in & her obstinate, humourless placing of one foot after the other in the direction she wants to go. Which is inevitably the long, frustrating way around because she is, after all, a woman in a man’s world. DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver. This is another one the author couldn’t possibly bring off, except she did. That voice.  Wow. I don’t even know where to start. & yes, okay, DAVID COPPERFIELD, but never mind. I forgot about David for chapters & chapters; & maybe it’s because I live now & not in Dickens’ Victorian London I found Kingsolver’s social scalpel sharper than Dickens’, & I’m a big Dickens fan. (I am NOT starting about Dickens’ women, & how he can only write the bad & crazy ones. I am NOT.)

Nonfiction: I got started on forensic psychology by hearing an interview with Gwen Ashead, who wrote (with a ghost writer) THE DEVIL YOU KNOW. On the radio she sounded thoughtful & interesting, & her book is still the best of the bunch in my opinion. The worst thing about it to my eye is the stupid title; maybe it works for other people but it looks like a publisher’s fever dream to me, & I would never have picked it up if I hadn’t heard the interview. THE FIVE by Hallie Rubenhold. This is another one I only picked up because I heard the author being interviewed. I obsessively avoid everything about Jack the Ripper, & am creeped out by the enduring & what seems to me salacious fascination of this story about how five poor women died horribly. Jack is nearly a genre all by itself. Ugh. This however is about the five poor women, who they actually were—human beings! Fancy that! &, you know, they had lives & everything? Sad lives with very sad endings, but the book is a brilliant piece of history, & brings both the women & their world to grim & vivid life. Even though you know how it ends you’re sitting there watching these women’s lives unravelling & muttering, Don’t do it! Don’t do it! Underlining that this is about the women, Rubenhold doesn’t tell you a thing about the murders themselves. 

I seem to have given you six books all with women authors . . . 

Please let Robin know how much we appreciate this!

 

Thoughts on what writers of fiction can learn from writing in other mediums? (film, etc)

::falls down laughing::* Pass. I haven’t a clue. I’ve earned about $2.37 on film & TV rights in the last forty-plus years because I don’t like the contracts, which tend to say that the producer owns everything you’ve ever done or ever will do, & they’ve never offered me enough money to make me wonder if it might be worth it, & they’re not going ever to offer me enough money because I’m not Big & Famous or Screen Worthy enough. I have occasionally thought of trying to write a script—there’s this vampire idea that keeps stubbornly presenting itself much more in visuals than in words on a page, WHY??? Whereupon I attempt to translate it into words on a page & next time it storms through my mind, there it is, all freaking scenery again. Like I have the remotest idea what film people are looking for. 

But I don’t think I want to learn to write scripts, which is a particular craft & skill set to the story-telling art, & some of that craft & skill is about being a team player, which I am not. I have friends who do script work & it sounds like way much harder work than my kind of story telling. Granted I’m lucky because my stories have tended to sell to book publishers more or less in the shape that I hand them over, but given that enormous piece of good fortune, it means that I don’t have anyone leaning over my shoulder & saying, cut the sensitivity we need another car chase. Or dragon slaying. Or, we’ve signed up X & X wants another dragon slaying, & no sensitivity at all, he/she/it/they don’t do sensitivity.

* Again. I am a silly person. As well as a frequently humorless curmudgeon about, for example, equal rights for human beings of all abilities, outlooks & persuasions. I could get into animal rights here too, & that plants are also living creatures . . . but I won’t.

Ordinary life stuff & UPDATE ON GRAND MATRIARCHY SFWA CONFERENCE

I am sitting here staring out the (back) window where the dog blankets are flapping in the rain* on the laundry line whirligig thing—the wind, even in the small walled back garden, spins it around exuberantly, which would dry them quickly if it weren’t for the, you know, rain . . . & wondering why ordinary stupid life upkeep takes so much time? 

If I need another reason, besides the everlasting hellfire of technology**, why I am still failing to find & keep a rhythm to posting to my poor stumbling new blog, that’s it. Fifteen, I think plus, years ago, when I started the old blog, life was—a little—simpler. 

For example, my hellhounds, beloved & still much missed fruitcakes-with-added-Drambuie-soaked-raisins that they were, were nothing on the insanity level of a several-times-rehomed German Wire Haired Pointer, sweetheart that he is in many ways that don’t have to do with two & a half hours a day of FULL FREAKING TURBO THROTTLE IN AT LEAST NINE DIMENSIONS SIMULTANEOUSLY. The hellhounds got as much time on the ground as he does but they learnt some lead manners which Genghis has signally failed to do in the last nearly-three years, arrrrrrrgh, which means that our two & a half hours are a lot more tiring than the hellhounds’ for the little old lady pelting along behind*** & allow no time or brain focus whatsoever for plotting, which is one of the purposes of having a dog(s) to take you, which is to say me, for long walks.† So I come home both whackeder & crosser, although looking into two large bright brown eyes & listening to the tail swishing across the floor†† as a certain hairy member of the family sits waiting for his we’re-home-&-you’re-taking-my-collar-off-&-I-get-a-BISCUIT-for-sitting-here-so-nicely, cheers me up pretty reliably.††† Still. Twenty one & a half hours a day Genghis is a delightful companion. Two & a half hours a day he is a demon from nine simultaneous hells. Arrrrgh.

. . . & I have now rattled on, with the noble assistance of my footnote pathology, about essentially nothing for quite long enough. More About Ordinary Stupid Life Upkeep in future unbearably thrilling blog posts. Meanwhile

YOU ARE ALL AWARE THAT THE 2023 NEBULA AWARDS WEEKEND EPIC STARTS THIS FRIDAY.  

The 2023 SFWA Nebula Conference

ALSO:

Grandmaster Q&A: Once you’ve joined the Discord, find the #ask-the-grandmaster channel and post any questions that you’d love for our newest SFWA Grand Master Robin McKinley to answer. We will be collecting the questions and sending them on to her to respond to after the conference. 

I was originally hoping to have one or two questions before the convention, but that’s apparently not going to happen. I’ll be linking my answers either here or on the also-as-yet-unorganised-&-underused new web site, so anyone who has despaired of getting an answer to questions sent to my Ask Robin McKinley contact form, this is another possibility. Mind you I will make up a list of questions asked through the blog & either pin them to the new FAQ, whenever I get the new FAQ written‡, or turn them into a blog post. Or, conceivably, answer them privately, but until I can afford to hire full-time staff‡‡ everything that isn’t story-writing, dog, organic food prep, rose bushes‡‡‡ . . . & a few other time-expensive things that will probably make it onto the blog some day or other‡‡‡‡ . . . tends to get shoved kind of far down the list. Where it collects dust & dog hair. 

* * *

* which isn’t all that bad a thing. I hang my clothes on the indoor overhead airer—have I yet maudlinly praised the great British indoor airer, which you crank up & down on a rope?^ I assume America used to have something like, but so far as I know they died out with the advent of the tumble dryer; over here, where Tradition Is All^^, the overhead airer is perhaps a niche item, but it’s available. I’m probably getting into deep water full of sharks with this comment, but when I moved over here (more than) 30 years ago^^^ part of my culture shock was that ordinary cost of living stuff was, or anyway seemed to be, a lot higher in England. Utilities for example. Peter wouldn’t have an electric dryer, they were too expensive to run. Oh.^^^^ We pegged stuff out on washing lines back at the old house, where we had garden space for a flotilla of laundry lines#. I discovered the reality of the British indoor airer at the cottage in Hampshire where the small back garden was soon wedged ten foot high with untidy rose bushes, which made laundry lines impractical. 

ANYWAY.## I hang my own clothing indoors on the overhead airer that wafts gently against the ceiling at the back end of the kitchen.###  But while I used to hang dog blankets indoors in Hampshire, it turns out that German Wire Haired Pointers shed in measurable gigalitres, & the kitchen soon had drifts of grey- & liver-coloured medium-length hair, said drifts in size not unlike accumulated snow at the edges of your driveway in Maine in January. Whereupon outside whirligig airer; the back garden is too small & the wrong shape for standard lines. However dog hair is clingy.  It works itself diabolically into the weave of the fabric it has been so liberally bestowed upon. I have discovered the hard way that merely hanging out freshly washed dog blankets to dry= is inadequate. They need to be out there several DAYS, preferably pounded by the elements, before I want to risk bringing them indoors again. I’m sure I have a terrible reputation among the occupants of the four?, I think, houses that can see over my back walls, for slovenly housekeeping. They’re right, but not about why my dog blankets spend so much time on the line.

^ Probably. But it’s one of my favourite pieces of Ordinary Life Stuff so I’m going to praise it again.

^^ don’t get me started on the coronation. I used to think the royals were fun to watch when I still lived in the States. When it’s my tax pounds which are going to help fund their outrageous life style, not so much. 

^^^ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!+

+ & the British are still a mystery to me

^^^^ This was perhaps more of an earth-underfoot-agitator to me than to someone whose belief system did not include that you know you’re finally a real grown-up when you stop going to laundromats & have your own washer. & dryer.

# or for the laundry generated by their personnel 

## I’ve never been able to stick to a point, & this is one of the things that gets worse as you get older. 

### This is more exciting than it was in Hampshire because the rails are twice as long & a trifle skittish. Oh good. Material for another totally silly & pointless blog post about Ordinary Life Stuff. Hanging your laundry as jousting match. 

= & then trudging back indoors to start de-clogging the washing machine 

** Young Beowulf MAY that’s MAAAAY have found a way around some of the worst of it, but because I scare easily I’m putting him off twiddling with the inside of my laptop till I get the latest round of draggles & snatches^ on DIARY done. Stay tuned. Maybe.

^ You know, minor rewrites

*** YELLING^

^ Granted I was also younger then, you know, by fifteen years or so+. What I remember now with great hilarity is that when they as puppies had just pulled me over for the 1,000,000th time I used to wonder—& out loud on the old blog—if they were my last puppies. Several years later I brought eight-week-old Pav home. BUT A MANIC FIVE YEAR OLD GERMAN WIRE HAIRED POINTER HAS NO RIVAL IN MAYHEM. Now I’m like, puppies? Sure. Bring ’em on. I’ve learned not to count my bruises. If Genghis ever gets old enough to settle down we will go in search of the next generation of hellhounds, which had been the plan with poor Pav, who was unkind enough to die very young. I figure if I have it/them from PUPPIES again they’ll learn to go on a long extending lead, right? Like all my dogs before Genghis have done.

+ I’m not very good with arithmetic

† I assume other people with other jobs walk their dogs for the stimulated-by-blood-flowing-briskly brain time too, even if plotting isn’t exactly how they’d describe it. Unless they’re inventing creative ways to get rid of a boss they loathe or figuring out how to juggle cash flow to be able to hire a fabulous new employee who can leap tall buildings with a single bound, balance spread sheets with one hand tied behind her back & invent weird tech gizmos that everybody on Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, TikTok, Grinchify, Shurglump & Doodahwhatsit will find themselves immediately forced by the zeitgeist to purchase^ which will be great till she leaves to start her own business & then you’ll be out there walking the dog & frantically plotting ways to prevent her from driving you out of business. 

^ Since I follow none of these pleasing & exquisite on line life enhancements, I shall be spared. But I’ll spend the money on more hard copy books I don’t have shelf space for &/or pair(s) of Converse All Stars, so it’s not like I’ve saved anything.+

+ Although speaking of tech gizmos remind me to tell you about my new Walkperson. Or possibly don’t remind me.

†† This has become one of my favourite noises. Life with a food-obsessed GWHP means I hear it a lot. Not only for the official moments when he knows he has to have his butt on the ground if he’s going to get what he wants, which is to say a thing that is edible, but for all those unofficial moments of hopefulness when I’m messing around in a space where he’s used to dog victuals emerging from, especially when there’s a whiff of something he may not be entirely wrong is sometimes offered at dog-nose level, like cheese rind. I now save even cheese rind I’d be perfectly happy to eat myself for Genghis because I would feel GUILTY if I ate it.^ 

^ In his favour he knows that if cheese is on a plate on the table—even if he’s sharing the chair with me, which he usually is—it’s MINE. Dog intrusions in these circumstances do not end well for the dog. 

††† Unless he’s taken my arm off at the shoulder more often than usual. I HATE SEAGULLS.  I HAAAAAAAAAAATE SEAGULLS. I’ve ranted this rant to you already, right?^ According to Natural Idiocy Scotland they’re ENDANGERED & the licenses for town councils to sweep the nests—which is the only legal control presently available—are now so spectacularly expensive & complicated^^ that the hallowed Craigmacaire Town Council which I have the less-than-honour to live in the jurisdiction of^^^, has thrown up its tiny hands & said, Not our problem! —Well thanks ever so. May I have the opportunity to vote you out of existence in the near future.

So I’m in sympathy with Genghis’ attitude^^^^ but I’m not crazy about living with the consequences.  

^ As well as mooning about overhead airers

^^1,000,000 pages in triplicate per nest 

^^^ LET ME TELL YOU STORIES ABOUT DUSTBINS 

^^^^ Along with his attitude toward, let’s say, cats+ which seem to think the pavement belongs to them & rather than moving off to whichever garden they emerged from, do the It’s All About Me!!! cat thing & arch up & fluff out & wave a paw in a threatening manner & say Make Me. Well, I’m not a nice human being & I’m still stronger than Genghis as long as I have my hand through his collar before he sees his legitimate prey++, & I believe that pavements are public rights of way, & we process on & the cat can freaking well move it.+++ 

+ Any cat lovers out there may wish to brace themselves at this point

++ See: take my arm off at the shoulder

+++ Note that my basic problem with cats is that they’re allowed outdoors without any restraint whatsoever & I sodding well object to cat crap in my garden borders. This makes me cranky about cats generally.

‡ Siiiiiiiiiiiigh. See title of this post.

‡‡ I would hate having full-time staff, so that’s not going to happen either

‡‡‡ & increasingly house plants. There are drawbacks to a four-bedroom house with big windows.

‡‡‡‡ So maybe I should stop wondering why I never have any free time??

SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY

BEFORE I FORGET (HAVING ALREADY FORGOTTEN, BECAUSE I’M WRITING THIS HEADING HAVING ALREADY WRITTEN THE REST OF THE POST) I AM NOT REPEAT NOT GOING TO THE SFWA CONVENTION WHERE THEY WILL GONG ME IN ABSENTIA WITH THE GRAND MATRIARCHY THINGUMMY.

. . . Because I am a little old lady with ME who furthermore is fairly freaked out by the viral fug out there & may never go anywhere again—which suits me pretty well, I have too much to do at home—& I also presently have a dog that needs two & a half hours a day walking, if you want to call frantically scrambling after him yelling his name walking. Yes, I know, there are dog walkers for hire, but your dog is supposed to take you for walks & GWHPs . . . well, one of his intake (I’ve told you he’s a rescue) was BANNED from the local best-value best-run dog walking & day care establishment for being too boisterous, & by what I’ve seen of her Genghis would leave her standing at the gate in the boisterousness championships. 

So anyway, back to where I started . . .

. . . SORRY. I stopped even reading the Robin McKinley’s Blog messages, I’m afraid, from all you people saying, What happened??? You only just STARTED the blog again & you’ve ALREADY re-disappeared? 

Yes. True. Sorrrrrrry. Bottom line? Technology. That’s why I haven’t been posting. Very much hammered home ow ow ow by the fact that I’ve been stressing my ME-addled brain to FINISH THE BOOOOOOK I’ve been working on . . . well, approximately since Peter died, which is 2015. Although it took me till about two years ago to settle back into writing steadily.  When did SHADOWS come out? No, don’t tell me. I know, it’s been a while. Life gets in the way. But right now Microbloodystupid 365 continues to be the bane of my existence & around the time I stopped posting here again I realised it was because I couldn’t be funny about it any more. I hated it too much. It is the worst piece of software dreck I have ever had the misfortune to encounter . . . while at the same time my Rotten Apple iPhone 13 mini is the worst piece of hardware dreck I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, & it was all overfrellingwhelmingly too much.  My blog posts are mostly based on, first, what is happening now & second, what is happening now that I can be funny about—or at least honest. I didn’t want to have ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANY OF MY TECH* & spending the extra hour(s) to write blog posts when I could be sitting ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM/HOUSE/TOWN with a piece of hard copy in my hands, you know, a book—a book written by somebody else—was the clear winner.**  What brain I have had available for interfacing with disgusting repulsive technology really had to go to finishing the book. Young Beowulf has perhaps found ways around the worst of the disgusting-repulsive which is hope for the future but meanwhile . . . 

THE NEWS IS I HAVE SENT THE BOOK TO MERRILEE. YESSSSSSSSSSS. & while all the Difficult Conversations are still to come, she, my highly professional in all the ways I’m not including a few I’ve never heard of & would run screaming if I did, agent of over 40 years, confirms that it’s a book, which is the main thing. The yes perhaps I could re-learn to sleep at night?? main thing. 

Whereupon the ME slammed me to the floor & sat on me & is still sitting on me. Humming a little tune & filing its nails.  & making hilarious little jokes about having a GWHP to keep up with.

Sigh.

But there is a new McKinley book in some kind of prospect. I’m not sure what to tell you about it yet, however, because to start with it is waaaaaaay out of my usual territory. It’s not fantasy, for example, & if you’re reading this post in proper order, which means reading the footnotes where they are MARKED & not where they are on the literal/virtual page***, you’ll already know it’s laid in some kind of as-real-as-I-can-make-it real-time this-world 1969.  Most of you will also know that the whole publishing process takes FOREVER & because this is a departure for me this book will probably take more of a forever than usual. For now I’ll give you the working title: ONE YEAR DIARY.

More later. But I hope I’m back blogging. Again. & now I’ll finish reading the Robin McKinley’s Blog emails. Blushing in shame as required.

* * *

* which as of yesterday includes my washing machine ARRRRRRRGH. I should be grateful that it almost drained its last load & left only a puddle in the bottom of the drum, rather than gallons of water all over the utility room floor. But I put it on ‘spin only’ in an experimental manner & there was a slightly larger puddle after it finished spinning. Uh oh. Now I get points for this, I have (almost) all those mostly useless How To Use This Expensive Thing You’ve Just Bought Which Is Specified Way Over Anything You Want, It’s Just That’s How Everything Is These Days & In This Interconnected Era+ pamphlets & I HAVE the one that applies to this washing machine. Yay me. & ‘troubleshooting’ says, Check that the drainpipe is not twisted before you start phoning 1,000,000 plumbers until you finally find one who agrees to come, & may or may not do so in fact, by which time you have run out of clean underwear. Okay. I managed to drag said washing machine out from under its stainless-steel countertop++ & . . . the flexy drainpipe that I can see disappears behind the sink & the second washing machine [sic]+++ . . . & I cannot freaking BUDGE said second washing machine ARRRRRRRRRGH. Angelic stepson is stopping round tonight to see if being longer-limbed, male, & 20 years younger can shift the freller.++++ & then I get to start phoning plumbers. 

+ A friend recently said, Why do I WANT to pull out my iPhone while I’m sitting in my office & tell my washing machine to turn on? 

++ Have I told you yet about going up a shirt size after a couple of years of wrangling a German Wire Haired Pointer?~ Who needs a gym membership? Go adopt a large unruly dog. 

~ & if I have, apologies. But one of the many, many, many= things that makes me CRANKY is the whole hushed-sympathetic-pity that seems to be the standard good-guys attitude toward us oldies. Yes, some of us are luckier than others & some of us learned early that we had to work at this whole health & functionality thing== but I’d say more of us are not going gentle into that good night than are & a few more bracing articles on doing really dumb stuff like adopting GWHPs after retirement age would be a pleasing counterbalance to being constantly reminded that We Are Not As Young As We Used to Be. WE KNOW THAT. FRELLING GLORY DOODAH WE KNOW THAT. & if we find ourselves needing a chairlift some day, we will address the question.

There will be more on this general subject in The Flying Piano. There probably already has been more. If you have a chip-on-shoulder personality, you just change &/or refresh your chips occasionally.

= many many many manymanymanymany etc

== I really object to being grateful for several million allergies & the drooling ME monster, but I acknowledge a certain resentful recognition that some of the educational value has had a positive effect.

+++ Yes. I have no dishwasher & no tumble dryer but I have two washing machines. I don’t know how other people with hairy pets cope. I bought the second washer when I had two mere medium-sized hellhounds, although that was as much about the size of the bedding as the hairiness. A two-dog bed will not fit in your normal washing machine.  & even sighthounds shed & I liked not having to run about three ‘refresh’ cycles to get rid of the blasted dog hair so it didn’t mat all over my t shirts~. I had NO IDEA about true hairiness however. Pav’s fur was super short—shorter than the hellhounds’, which had a little leftover deerhound-DNA length here & there though it was all silky—but she was plushy, & I remember vividly that when I was living with my stepson & his wife & sweeping the front hall every day~~ I not only had a half full dust pan every day~~~ but it was nine-tenths mini bull terrier hair & only one-tenth Cocker Spaniel hair from their dog.  If you look at a curly Cocker & a sleek bull, which one would you think sheds more??

& ONE German Wire Haired Pointer can shed for England. Or Scotland, in this case. Good grief. 

~ A dog-hair matted t shirt PRICKLES when you try & wear it. I don’t care if it’s clean freshly laundered dog hair.

~~This demands its own footnote, since anyone who knows me knows I don’t sweep floors, let alone every day. The nine months I lived with them= they were busy being gentle & kind to this whacked out foreigner that their nearest & dearest had married & then thoughtlessly left a widow, so they refused to give me any, you know, chores. So I, flailing rather, took on sweeping the long hall. It’s a long thin house—another typical Scottish Victorian, although mine is the double-front detached style & theirs is the goes-back-forever terrace style. Theirs, BTW, is a lot grander than mine, with etched glass & fancy fireplace surrounds & frilly bits in the corners, which I may also have already told you?—& the front hall is a trifle epic. 

= & I’m sure I haven’t reiterated sufficiently that YES WE’RE ALL STILL SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER.

~~~ Yes all right I did sweep back in Hampshire. But not every day.

++++ I do try to acknowledge my physical limits when I must.

** Except that it isn’t. Genghis is now used to the idea that anywhere I sit down, he can sit there with me. I think I’ve told you?, I’ve bungie-corded two of the kitchen-table chairs together so we can share, although sharing in practise means he gets to stretch out comfortably & I get to wedge my butt in the small gap left by his tucked-up belly, since apparently pointers have a common ancestor with sighthounds & display a similar under-line. If he were bull-terrier shaped I’d be in trouble.+ But the point is if I want to get up from the kitchen table, which is where the laptop & several tottering piles of reference books are++ & go somewhere else, he will wait a reasonable-by-GWHP-standards time & then come after me. If I am, for example, sitting in what is supposed to be my office, & may yet become such some day+++, experimenting with software the patient Young Beowulf has provided me with temporary samples of, he will stand there in OUTRAGE because my old desk chair was not acquired with a future GWHP in mind & there isn’t actually room for a second chair even if I could find one of the same general shape & height. & I don’t know if this is GWHP or almost-five-year-old-rescue-when-I-got-him lack of a common language but the only way I’ve convinced him to stay off the sofa(s) is by sitting on the floor with him. Which begins to feel a little silly . . . 

+ Pav was a mini. She & I fit on ONE chair. Although it had arms she could drape herself over when she was so inclined.

++ Not always reference books as you might expect to define them. MR James Collected Ghost Stories is top of the nearest heap at the moment. HOWEVER. LET ME SAY THAT I WILL NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER WRITE A HISTORICAL NOVEL AGAIN. EVER.# I don’t know how any writer stands the flipping strain.## It is also not a historical-novel as you know it, any more than my reference books are standard, but it is laid in 1969 & that was seriously another world. 

# I should so take this sentence out. I mean, tempting fate, what? Yeah. How DESPERATE am I to get a blog post written? If I put in a few more EVERs I’m there. & I can save the rest of this over-long one for another day & post.

## I mean the ones who bother to try & get it right. Ahem. I’ve always been CRANKY about people in the 1800s saying things like ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ in chapter 3 but this reaction has become pathological in the last two years & there may be a smudge on my beautiful wallpaper from the number of books thrown across the room.  & before anyone brings up THE OUTLAWS OF SHERWOOD I did say in the afterword that it wasn’t meant to be historical, merely historically unembarrassing if possible, because Robin Hood is a tale that is & has been told & retold & rerereretold down through the centuries, & the whole retold for current audiences thing is not only the purpose but it gives you the reteller a lot of slack.~ But if you’re trying to write a book GENUINELY in a given time period then you’d better flipping well have giant tottering piles of reference books looming at you everywhere. ~~ I’m not sure if it’s better or worse to be able to remember the historical period in question.~~~ It’s probably worse in my case because I’ve always had a flaky memory—I said 45 years ago when BEAUTY came out that I’ve never been good at facts. The boring ones I want to run away from & the interesting ones I want to use as springboards to tell stories—& some time around then I also confessed that I could not bend, at least not without snapping bits off, my flaky mind around the concept of the, you know, non-mutability of the passage of time.  Neither of these stalwart pillars of my la-la-la personality has changed, & the more time I’ve lived through, the more mutable the whole mess seems to me to get.

~ This is the basis of most of my arguments about how to read the Bible. I don’t think I would have got on very well with any of the patriarchal thugs who wrote most of it.

~~ & if you’re lucky an obsessive librarian friend who LIVES to do goofy bits of arcane research. I probably OWE her another historical novel. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. 

~~~ Aside from making you feel even older than you manifestly are.

### & then again, maybe not. Aside from dog seating issues, if you have an Aga & you live in Scotland, you like to stay near it. Although I have a very nice WOODSTOVE in my office, & it’s a small room. Um. Stay tuned. If you can stand it. This blog may get very very boring with me staying at home all the time.

*** AHEM

Somewhat on Getting Old

To remind me of the full panoply of joy blanketing dog ownership, the day after the seal encounter at the end of a week of digestive indelicacy, we had fireworks.  On the whatsit of February?  WHY??  There aren’t even any particularly exciting saints in February, I don’t think, okay, Brigid, but she’s Irish & I don’t think a small town in northeast Scotland is likely to be blasting off fireworks for her?  Unless we have an enclave of loyal Irish whom I’m not aware of, but I’m not aware of a lot, especially while trying to finish a book.  I find myself walking into walls & forgetting my dog’s name* & thinking vaguely, why do I feel so odd?  Oh . . . hunger.  Food.  Yeah.  Little old ladies with ME & German Wire Haired Pointers really can’t afford to get careless about eating.  PLEASE PASS THE CHOCOLATE.**

You may remember an earlier post about the abyssal dreadfulness that is New Year’s because Genghis is fireworks-phobic phobic PHOOOOOOOOOOBIC.   If this were happening to someone else it might be interesting.***  The way he still looks like Genghis—except for the mad bulging eyes & the way there seem to be more teeth than usual around the gaping oral orifice—but he is not Genghis.  & when this hairy demonically-possessed creature starts baying like some member of a pack of the unfriendly sort of hellhounds—kind of Ghost Riders in the Sky only with dogs;  Herne the Hunter in a really bad mood—there’s not a lot to do except try to keep him from destroying the house & hope that the fireworks-letters-off either don’t have many†, or their next-door neighbour is a policeman & arrests them quickly.  I was just telling you Genghis gets BIGGER when he goes nuts?  Yes.  Seals, seagulls, fireworks, what-have-you. 

Unfortunately it’s not happening to someone else.  I do not find it interesting.

I’ve said this before too.  Little old ladies with ME should not have German Wire Haired Pointers.  But it’s a funny thing about this getting old shtick.  We were out again early, for us, this morning†† because we had an electrician coming††† at a time any normal person‡ should still be at home staring fuzzily at a computer screen & mainlining (green) tea.‡‡  So I was in my Morning Garments again, in this case including one of those shift dresses that is about six yards around at the hemline which is entertaining but dangerous on a day with wind so what a good thing I was wearing Peter’s old falling-apart winter coat over it, which holds it down to just above knee level so on a windy day there’s a kind of permanent frill but at least this shows off the flowered leggings nicely, & the plaid All Stars.  & of course I hadn’t combed my hair or tied it back because it was still MORNING, okay?, & what thought processes I possess at such hours do not include the public presentational.  But the point is that I looked like a well-fed bag lady.  & coming toward us on the pavement, Genghis of course rampant out in front & me at the fullest extent of the long lead scampering to keep up with him, was a lady lady.  She was beautifully turned out, with perfectly coifed, well cut silver-grey hair, a nice hat that matched her flattering, well-fitting coat & she was wearing perfectly judged & applied make up & carrying a neat clean tote bag full of what I assume was the day’s shopping.  As we passed she gave me a big sympathetic-dog-person grin & I attempted to smile through my panting breaths, & as we charged away from her, I was thinking, that’s exactly the kind of lady who has always intimidated the doodah out of me, whom I’ve always looked up to, she’s not only focussed & in control she’s nice, & I’ve always thought, wouldn’t it be fabulous to grow up to be someone like—?

Except, now, looking at her, at someone like her . . . she’s my age.  Oops.  

Well, you use what you have, right?  She probably has an immaculate house & gives fabulous dinner parties & is a retired ligation lawyer.‡‡‡  I write stories.

* * *

* Attila?  Vlad?  Cthulhu?^

^ Okay, yes, I mean no.  But I do catch myself calling him by the name of the dog in the book I’m trying to finish.  The interesting thing there is that fictional-dog’s+ personality was already set long before Genghis++ entered my life, but the two of them were clearly Separated at Birth despite lack of aligned reality.  They’re not even the same breed. 

+ & no of course I’m not going to tell you his name

++ Ashoka?  Tamerlane?  Conan the Barbarian?

** I think I’ve told you I’m Entirely Sugar Free?  & that includes all the bulltiddly nonsense about organic coconut nectar & golden agave syrup & other advertising blah^?  I’m still a chocolate fanatic.  But when I yanked the sugar plug & was kind of limply casting around for fun food I glommed onto 100% (organic!!!) chocolate with barely a backward-looking quiver.  The 100% chocolate HIT is intense. 

Six or eight years ago when I was first putting myself through this, as I first feared, sugar-free purgatory, 100% organic chocolate was seriously hard to find.  Now . . . it’s turned into the latest snob accessory with a lot of pompous blooie written about it—like wine tasting, you know?  With notes of citrus, lilac & boot polish, & a heady after-aroma of rattlesnake poison, if rattlesnake poison smells, but I’m sure it would, to a wine-tasting swank.  However, one can IGNORE the flapdoodle & wallow in the increasingly lavish variety of small artisan producers of 100% chocolate.  They’re not wrong, by the way, about small happy powerful differentiation of flavours, just as they’re not wrong about the complexity of good wine.  But calm down, you know?^^

^ There is a special circle in hell, speaking of saints, for food manufacturers & I mean manufacturers, who emblazon their products with banners declaring SUGAR FREE!!! & then you look at the ingredients & the second or third one on the list is corn syrup.  There’s an organic soup maker who did this for a while.  They’d been making a perfectly acceptable tinned vegetable soup that I bought occasionally to have on hand for emergencies+ & when the SUGAR FREE!!!! started I rechecked the ingredients & . . .   I assume they were avalanched with protests from purist-heads like me.  Yes I certainly unleashed my best brutal verbs on them.  They removed the banner, dropped the corn syrup . . . & started putting sugar in their thrice-frelled soup.  &, you know, WHY?  So much for that back-up plan.   

+ ARRRRRGH I’ve just tripped over a dog & spilled my last jar of stock . . . at least it was vegetable stock, the time that this happened.  I don’t want to think about what clean up would have been like with bone broth, even with the enthusiastic assistance of said dog(s).  The hellhounds, in their old age, got to the point that the only thing they would reliably eat/drink was home-made super-concentrated chicken stock.  Which would at least fall to the floor with a squishy thud because it had JELLED but . . .

Also, this happened back at the cottage in Hampshire, with the nice leakproof lino in the kitchen, before I moved to this lovely old Scottish Victorian . . . with the gaping cracks between the original Victorian floorboards.  

^^ I’M SO GOOD AT CALMING DOWN MYSELF.  

*** I’m a bit deaf.  My idea of hell, which seems to be today’s theme, includes call centres personned by people who don’t speak English, & while it’s true that the centres farmed out to Mars & Betelgeuse, when you can’t necessarily hear that the phone has been picked up at all, & you may be listening to further clicks & clacks from the robot system that wastes your time while a human or human-equivalent is not available???,  are not as common as they used to be, the awful truth in my case is that a thick Irish^ or Geordie accent accompanied by loud large-common-call-centre-room background noise, are just as bad, & sometimes worse, because they understand me & I can’t understand their answer.  BUT I CAN HEAR FIREWORKS. 

^ speaking of Irish

† Hey!  I have an idea!  Let’s make fireworks REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY expensive, give it all to the government, & LOWER TAXES!!

†† Yes!  MORNING!!!

††† Prepare yourselves for the Saga of the Doorbell.  But not tonight.

‡ Normal here is to include crazy free lance people who work from home & may not get to bed till silly o’clock.  Very silly o’clock.  &, speaking of arrested, the English Usage Police are coming after me for the injurious misuse of the humble & law-abiding adjective normal. 

‡‡ One of green tea’s few faults^ is that it’s very low on caffeine.

^ Green tea is GOOD for you.  Yes, I’m obsessed.  I’m a little old lady with ME.  & a GWHP.

‡‡‡ I wonder if successful litigation lawyers ever wear All Stars.  I could maybe learn to go to bed earlier.  The All Stars are non-negotiable.

Remind me why I thought I wanted a dog

Genghis has not been having a good week. Therefore I have not been having a good week. Last Saturday when I was taking my visiting friend* for a fabulous cliffside walk, he decided without warning or explanation to excrete a rushing stream of squish along the narrow clifftop path . . . just in front of a group of foreign visitors with an accent even more alien than mine. Welcome to Scotland. Sorry! I said, probably with gobbling noises & waving of arms.**

That evening, having put my friend on the train & gone up to my stepson’s as is the standard drill on Saturday nights, Genghis, who had seemed to be FINE all the rest of the day . . . threw up.

On the sofa.

VOLUMINOUSLY.

Also on the floor, as I was hysterically trying to DRAG HIM OFF THE SOFA.

Did I say VOLUMINOUSLY? We were all therefore UNPREPARED FOR HIM TO DO IT AGAIN A FEW MINUTES LATER. EQUALLY VOLUMINOUSLY.

What a very, very, very, very good thing it is that my stepson & his wife are dog people. 

I took the beast home & gave him the standard having-eaten-something-you-shouldn’t-have homeopathic remedy, which usually works pretty well.*** Next morning: small, perfect excretion. Yaay. Heave sigh of relief. Will keep him off raw veg—he likes carrots—for a while, but we’re obviously fine . . . 

That afternoon: STREAMING SQUISH. Nooooooooooo.

This went on a while, & my homeopathic vet is in Hampshire. I’m out of my depth pretty quickly so I started him on the superglue-plus-probiotic that you can get from your ordinary vet, or on amazon. Since I am now the nonplussed owner of a dog that will SWALLOW ANYTHING I keep a tube of it on hand. 

Yesterday was good. Today looked like being good . . . 

Do I start breathing easier & sleeping through the night?†

Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with his gut at the minute. I hope.

HOWEVER. 

We don’t get seals on our local shoreline,†† or only rarely. The irony is that my stepson mentioned over the current jigsaw that they were going off to Mumblemumble Point††† today, to look at seals, Mumblemumble Point being where you go around here if you want to see seals. In four years I’ve not seen one on the town shore; twice, I think, in walking distance when you start getting out of town. Never with Genghis.

There was a seal on the shore today. Slap in front of the pedestrian alley from the main street. Not a little cute one. A GREAT BIG MUTHA. & if you know anything about seals, you’ll know to never mind those huge beautiful melting-brown eyes: they have teeth & they use them. 

I realised about two-thirds of a second before Genghis did that that giant pale treetrunk that had washed up on the shingle WASN’T A TREETRUNK WHEN IT LIFTED ITS HEAD & LOOKED IN OUR DIRECTION. THAT’S A FLAMING-DOODAH FRELLING SEAL. 

The two-thirds of a second gave my thumb just long enough to smash convulsively on the long-lead brake. Genghis went MENTAL, even by Genghis’ standards of going-mental, which are, um, SPECTACULAR, especially when you’re the poor wretch on the other end of the lead. When he goes mental after a seagull, which he does, the worst that happens is that he kills another seagull, & while in the great scheme of things I think one fewer seagull is GREAT & DESIRABLE, I don’t like being responsible. I also don’t like the seagull-blood-everywhere aspect, or the corpse. I try VERY HARD TO STOP HIM. I also can’t remember not to scream imprecations at my flaming-doodah frelling dog during these skirmishes, which probably amuses the locals no end. Most of our worst contretemps occur in public. Of course. 

But I usually succeed¸ & the blasted seagull flaps away for another day, to crap on someone else’s head & divebomb someone else trying to walk their crazed-prey-drive seagull-munching dog.

I couldn’t afford to lose today’s struggle. It wouldn’t only be seal blood decorating me & the landscape if Genghis got away from me. The long lead was about half extended when I hit the brake, & the longer the lead is the harder he is to crank in. Plus we were on sand, sand generously mined by stones, seaweed, driftwood & miscellaneous rubbish. Stepping on a plastic bottle when you’re trying to prevent your dog from committing suicide is not helpful. I couldn’t keep my feet under me. 

So I’m hauling & jerking & being jerked—he’s a good sized dog anyway & he gets bigger when he goes nuts—& yelling & he’s doing cartwheels & leaping amazingly high off the ground & just in CASE anyone was missing the show BARKING & BARKING & BARKING in this demented berserk way, I hope some of the seaside flats had time to ring their friends & sell tickets. 

Because this went on for several minutes.‡ 

I eventually got my feet dug into what traction there was‡‡ & started backing, with agonising slowness, uphill toward the town & pavement. The fact that I’m WRITING this means I won. Otherwise I’d be sitting outside the vet’s office waiting for the surgical team to tell me how he was, or possibly at A&E being stitched up myself. :: INSERT WHATEVER YOUR IDEA OF VERY BAD LANGUAGE IS HERE :: Maybe we’ll move to Wyoming. Very few seals there. No, wait, grizzly bears. Not Wyoming then. ‡‡‡

When I finally got him cranked in & could get my hand through his COLLAR I knew we were okay, although I was streaming with adrenaline & starting to shake AND the bloody dog still wouldn’t let that seal go, he was twisting in my hands & climbing me, I may have mentioned this little habit of his before, when he GETS VERY EXCITED, as he turns himself inside out, all those very long legs & giant whirling paws get between my legs & while I can hold him, I can’t move. §

I was right, two & a half years ago, when I was discussing what kind of dogs we each wanted with my also recently dogless next door neighbours. I wouldn’t touch a German Wire Haired Pointer with a BARGE POLE. THEY ARE MANIACS. 

We stormed back up the steep hill to our home eyrie & once we were out of sight of the ginormous, pointy-fanged seal, Genghis dropped back to being his usual cheerful boisterous happy go lucky self. ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.

Remind me why I wanted a dog. 

[Beat]

Because they’re such good blog material. 

* * *

* Yes I know, EVERYONE needs a name. Readers of the old blog will remember that nearly everyone had a blog-specific alias.^ I will be doing this again, but my brain seems kind of frozen at the wheel about it at present. Possibly aggravated by technology. When I started the new blog I wanted to look at the old blog’s dramatis personae. I’ll undoubtedly reuse some of the names^^ but I don’t want to outrage anyone’s finer feelings, which is to say mine, so I want to see who wore a given name before I launch it at anyone else.

Micro******** couldn’t find it. Refused to find it. Wouldn’t look for it. Sulked. Polished its fingernails on its lapel & hummed a little tune. I tried everything I could think of & quite a few things I couldn’t^^^, & then I tried searching various names that I knew were on the list. BLOG POSTS CONTAINING THESE NAMES CAME UP. THE MASTER LIST OF NAMES DID NOT. & I am way too stupid to have tried to save it in some other clever way. I would have hit SAVE like I do with every other document, given it a name & a date, & expected it to store itself with the other 1,000,000,000 documents I’ve accumulated in the last thirty years.~ 

So, where did I finally find it, because I did finally find it, NO THANKS TO MICROBLEEP? On the desktop/wallpaper/opening screen of my elderly rarely-used desktop. Hanging out with a lot of other icons-indicating-something-or-other that I’ve never got round to tidying away. REINFORCEMENT FOR BAD BEHAVIOUR. DON’T TIDY THAT THING AWAY, YOU’LL NEVER SEE IT AGAIN.~~

^ Barring Peter. Sigh. & Merrilee, my agent. & the dogs, sort of. All my dogs have call names & nicknames. I read in a dog book somewhere that since you want your dog to REACT when you say his or her name, give them a nickname they don’t know, that you use when you’re talking aboutthem. My dogs’ names in the blog are their real nicknames.

^^ Here’s one of those regrets-for-the-past I bet you don’t hear very often. I’m sorry not to have southern English towns to rename in a sober & sympathetic manner any more. Southern England town names are often delicious. Nether Wallop? Preston Candover? Odiham?+ Scottish towns are different. At the moment I’m in the early stages of leafing through a variety of Scottish language & folklore books & cackling.

+ Yes. Pronounced odium. 

^^^ Yeah. Work that one out.

~ Yes. Owner attitude to the contents & furnishings of my computer strongly resemble owner attitude toward contents & furnishings of this house. But if there are any other no-newspapers-or-dead-mice hoarders out there, I assume you will recognise this: if you do convince yourself to throw something out, six months or ten years later you will be SURE to regret it. I mean, books, well. But I’ve been approximately the same body size+ for over forty years++ & there are items of apparel I regret from college. Which I graduated from in 1974.+++

+ although trying to track yourself through the minefield of clothing sizes is almost as mentally damaging as trying to make Microbleep do anything.# ALMOST.

# Erm. Anything you want it to do.

++ AAAAAAUGH. ::Bangs head on table. Gently. It’s a very old head:: I have friends who are one third my age. I mean, grown-up friends. They haven’t been grown up very long but they are out there having informed opinions & earning a living. 

+++ I think. The memory is not what it used to be.# All that head banging perhaps.

# & FURTHERMORE IT NEVER WAS

~~ The only thing that may finally persuade me to clear off the desktop desktop, so to speak, is that all those little stamp-sized computer-significant thingys are blocking the backdrop photo of hellhound puppies being adorable. The only thing really wrong with dogs is that they don’t live long enough. 

** Arm. The other one would have been holding onto Genghis. Firmly. He likes people.

*** on both of us. I, however, do not voluntarily eat unidentifiable decomposing matter. I only eat holy perfect organic food. But my gastrointestinal system periodically decides it’s BORED & has a tantrum just for something to do.

† SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT?? ARE YOU KIDDING?? However when Genghis is not at his best just the usual dog thing of getting up & spinning around in his bed once or twice & settling down again with a sigh WILL WAKE ME OUT OF MY ERRATIC DOZE WITH AN ADRENALINE SPIKE THAT NAILS ME TO THE CEILING. 

If this post is less recognisably in English than usual, well, I’m shorter of sleep than usual.

†† Yes! This TOWN needs a name!! I KNOW!

††† YES! ANOTHER NAME NEEDED!

‡ Several minutes of frantic prayer that the lead doesn’t snap. 

‡‡ Yaay All Stars. Just by the way.

‡‡‡ Note that there were other dogs on the shore today. If there had been a circus of frenzied raging dogs all being effortfully dragged away from the thing I was assuming was a treetrunk, I’d’ve been quicker off the mark, or on the lead button-brake. But no. There were even off lead dogs meandering around different areas of the shore. None of the others were GWHPs however. 

It’s off lead dogs I’m always clocking first, you know? They’re what I’m used to being a problem. They’re what my head spins like an owl’s to check out. Hollow laughter. ARRRRRRRRRGH. 

§ There is a tactic for this too, although any professional dog trainers who have got this far, look away now. I lift him up on his hind legs with a death grip on his collar, wrap my non-lead-holding arm around his chest, & limp along, clumsily propping my thrashing, vertically-extended dog against that side of my body like a kind of nightmare crutch. It is not pretty, but it gets the job done.  It’s even less pretty if the adventure we’re frelling trying to escape is some irresponsible bozo’s off lead out of control dog who runs after us.

Crankily yours

Young Beowulf has given me a tappable icon on the task bar at the top of the Word screen so I can get the frell out of the—whatever it is—I think it’s web view? I want DRAFT VIEW. I am old & I like the illusion of a piece of paper, or anyway something more nearly resembling a blank screen. The point is, why do I need a blasted icon?? Why can’t I* find some drop down menu where I can choose to open in frelling draft as default? But nooooooo. So every time I open a new document the first thing that happens is that my eyes turn red & I yell imprecations at Microsquelch. Then I hit the ‘draft’ button & start, having just wasted an ME-expensive energy spike on technological helplessness. Unless I need to make myself a fresh cup of tea to calm down first. Yes, I do.

The main reason I’m still only posting occasionally** is because I’m an absent-minded*** twit with too much to do, including an insane number of time-suck, what anyone who wasn’t an obsessive would call optionalactivities,† but a not insignificant portion of my reluctance continues to be the Nightmare that is Microstupidjerk. It’s like the general go-blooie level rocketed out of human comprehension†† with the forced update after my email server went into meltdown however many weeks ago now, it feels like an EON. Including stuff that shouldn’t have anything to do with Microloathsome, like random on line freezing & crashing, although I suppose if MicroBorg has sufficiently frelled up my computer, my computer may well be having dizzy spells & panic attacks. ARRRRRRRRRRGH.†††

* * *

* or rather Young Beowulf. Let’s get real here.

** I’ve already said, LOUDLY, that I am not that’s NOT going to post daily again.^ In terms of hammering it into my (absent minded) life, daily works really well, I don’t forget to eat or walk dog or dogs either, which is why I fell into daily blogging the first time. There Must Be a Better Way. Perhaps I’ll find it.

^ I’m talking to myself here. I’m very well aware that some readers of the old blog thought I should shut up occasionally. My skill set about most things is patchy, including blogging. Eh. I can feel a blog about ‘one can only do what on can do’ coming on, but not tonight.

*** when you’re young & absent-minded it’s cute^ & funny & after all you’re a creative, fully-engaged person in whatever it is you’re creative & fully engaged about^^ so losing a few stupid details is not a big deal. When you get old . . . well, it’s no longer early onset dementia, you know? 

^ except for the part about worrying that it’s early-onset dementia

^^ note that in my hierarchy almost anything honestly & positively engaged with is ipso facto creative+. So this includes accountancy & bicycle repair & grocery store shelf restocking, although I admit the last is probably more inspirational than hands-on creative.++ I never restocked store shelves when I was young & had no income, but that’s because I could TYPE, which was a very marketable skill in those distant days. But I want to believe you can get a lot of plotting or personal equivalent done while you’re restocking shelves.

+ the ‘honestly & positively’ therefore eliminates serial murder, cutting down rainforests, fracking etc.

++ Also, generally speaking, one doesn’t want one’s accountants to be too creative. Unless you’re an ex president with orange hair.

† This is indeed one of the drawbacks of a big house.^ You have too much space to leave unfinished projects around. Since it’s not a truly big house, however^^, there’s not actually enough space to accommodate all the unfinished projects & the kit that goes with them. It’s true, for example, that almost every wool-related item I own has moth holes in it^^^. & let’s not discuss how many of my jeans need patching, since I don’t go for the torn-jeans look, possibly because I’m too old to be cool (true) but also because the tears in my jeans are clearly not fashion, they’re the result of being pulled over by a German Wire Haired Pointer or similar. Similar tends to be that I’m walking as fast as I can which means I’m way too likely to hit one of my big feet on a pavement protuberance, of which there are many in this town.~  But I have enough yarn, fabric, thread, embroidery floss & many, many assorted extras & accessories to last me to Methuselahian lengths. Except that the minute I have chosen something to mend,  I don’t have the colours I need. Of course.

^ I keep saying! It’s not a BIG house, but it’s big for one person! The one person in question just happens to have a HOARDING problem!+

+ The past weekend’s visitor, who appears to have escaped with life & sanity intact#, said that when she thinks of HOARDING she thinks of tottering piles of old dusty disintegrating newspapers, possibly adorned by a few desiccated mouse corpses. Okay, I don’t have the tottering piles of newspapers.## & I regularly refresh my mouse traps. Also I have a German Wire Haired Pointer with a strong prey drive. & yeah. He points.

# Maybe the deleterious effects of visiting me take a little while to manifest?

## Um. But magazines . . . 

^^ See previous footnote

^^^ I’ve been struggling with moths since I went down with ME & was no longer willing to use fierce chemicals, plus questions of contributing to poisoning the planet. The nine months all my gear was in storage in Hampshire while I moved up here+ gave the moths the opportunity to go for broke & didn’t they just. Glory glory not hallelujah. I’m gaining ground on them again but I will be surrounded by baskets of things-to-be-mended for the rest of my life, even if I outlast Methuselah. 

Cedar oil, which, yeah, is a poison, but it comes out of a tree, & I’m NOT willing to sit here & be a moth buffet, works pretty well to discourage the little ratbags, but you have to keep reapplying it & have I mentioned that I’m absent-minded? Not to mention having a lot of stuff made out of wool, because I tend (a) to be cold blooded & (b) to like living in places where winter takes itself seriously. OH FRELLING FRELL I FORGOT ABOUT THAT BOX ON THAT SHELF. OH, & THAT BOX IN THAT CORNER. AND . . . 

+ This house wasn’t even close to being habitable at that point. The builders had to move a lot of boxes around.# I daresay this may be partly why the price of renovations was a gazillion per cent over what I was expecting. Yes, there will be stories. I think the local work force—& yes I try very hard to hire local—is honest enough, but I sometimes think they are maybe not great at warning you what may go wrong. Maybe it’s just that the list is 1,000,000,000 items long, & where does a builder who wants to be hired begin? & you’d be paying about forty-seven hours for the explanation. 

Still. There will probably be stories about that too.

# The arrival & unloading of sixty-seven lorry loads of crucial possessions to this hilltop house is where the name of the new blog comes from. Yes, there will be photos. Some day.

~Although the day the vet told me Pav’s lab results, which were that she was going to die young & soon, I went out wildly for a walk because I didn’t know what else to do with myself, ran pretty much full-tilt into a kerb, achieved liftoff, & when I returned to earth WHAM ripped the CRAP out of an almost new pair of jeans. Also a few elbows as I recall. Sigh.

†† All right, this human comprehension, which is about .0005% of Young Beowulf’s, but even he acknowledges that the Borg seem to have stepped up their malign activities. Although he doesn’t express it in quite those terms.^

^ He may also be humouring me. No, wait, he absolutely is humouring me. 

††† & just by the way I WILL BE VERY VERY VERY VERY GLAD when I sign on to amazon, which I am embarrassed to admit I do rather a lot^, & no longer have to look at Prince Harry’s sulky clueless entitled face at the bottom of every single page, usually several times because for this ONE already-best-ever-selling-book-in-the-history-of-the-world^^, we have to be REMINDED that we have a CHOICE of publication medium, on the cover of what I have no doubt is a sulky clueless entitled book.^^^ Not all of us give a flaming doodah, & I wouldn’t buy the thing if it were the only book on offer. I’d rather read cereal packets. & I don’t eat cereal.

^  Yes. I belong to Kindle Daily Deal & First Reads. How often do I find something I actually want to read? On the monthly first reads, almost freaking never. On the Daily Deals . . . well. . . . +

+ & no it’s not usually the occasional piece of Great Literature that I buy. Ahem.

^^ Gutenberg, you purblind idiot

^^^ I find it easy to believe that the Buckingham Palace crew have treated Harry & his wife with a gaping lack of human tact & understanding. That doesn’t make me like any of them any better.

La la la yes everything is totally fine yes totally la la la

The working day got off to a really good start* when I somehow managed not to notice that I hadn’t put the top on the blender properly before I hit autoclean. ARRRRGH. Well that’s one way to get the utility room back wall sluiced down. It’s probably not going to happen any other way. I do most of the food prep in the utility room** which contains certain disasters by being small & mostly either tiled or stainless steel.*** The big kitchen-dining space has a lot more scope for open-ended catastrophe, including the overhead airer where clean laundry is hanging, & there would absolutely be language if the soapy, food-residue-rich contents of a blender on autoclean went all over it. The irony of the situation is that this incontestably advantageous use of available accommodation has meant that my beautiful deep double ceramic sink in the kitchen has turned into the place I repot house plants & tends to have dead leaves & shreds of house-plant compost decorating its sides. Oops. The stainless steel workhorse in the utility room† sees all the daily life action. 

I am always even-more-seriously-than-usual a space cadet when I’m trying to finish a book. I mean, let me reiterate for anyone whose memory of the previous blog may have faded a bit, I am a space cadet ALL THE TIME. But it does get worse toward the end of a book, & it’s worse than usual this time for a variety of reasons, including that I’m out of practise. But May I Say in My Defence that all the ::LANGUAGE LANGUAGE LANGUAGE:: . . . ahem. You’ve already heard about the ongoing clusterfrell that is the new Microsoft Office package. Lately there is the Tale of the Toner. 

I was already drifting toward buying on line rather than on the ground†† the last years in Hampshire & since I moved up here this partiality has intensified. Covid finished the job. &, of course, stuff I buy through Young Beowulf has to be sent up here somehow.  There was a brief heyday when most of your deliveries just arrived, with the possible exception of anything sent by Royal Mail, which appears to be hell-bent on self-destruction. But one of the big delivery companies has recently lost its mind. I have a LARGE note taped to the front door that says IF I’M NOT IN, PLEASE LEAVE ALL PARCELS.††† But the delivery company in question has apparently decided that the only delivery acceptable is one that includes a PHOTO of the parcel being PASSED THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR. The angels wept.  Oh, & while the delivery people are vouchsafed some kind of photo-taking gremlin, they don’t have phones. So they can’t ring or text you & say ‘delivery at xx time & if you believe that HA HA HA HA you chump’. I only know that these dingalings have so much as driven past my door because Young Beowulf keeps getting aggrieved confirmations. 

After this nonsense had been grinding on for more than a week I eventually found a card saying, Hi! We tried to deliver your desperately important parcel today! But we didn’t! Tough cookies!, floating around the front garden. I don’t even know for sure that it was my delivery because it had no frelling identifying frelling features. It was just a generic Delivery Company from the Nether Worlds card. Now here’s the thing. I live on the top of a hill. It’s pretty windy here most of the time. I don’t have a mail slot.‡ I do have a table outside slap next to the front door, tucked into the crevasse between the sunroom wall & the house wall, & which is covered in pot PLANTS during the summer. But it’s, you know, a table. Both on & next to it there are a lot of ROCKS.‡‡ Wouldn’t you think the obvious thing to do with a POSTCARD would be to put it on the TABLE & place a ROCK on it? This has never happened yet. The toner has been the worst casualty in this war of idiocy, but there have been others. I now quite regularly find failed-delivery postcards in the front garden—when I’m not receiving something I now go look through the borders. I fear that my neighbours probably find failed-delivery cards regularly in their borders too. Possibly some of these are theirs.

While Young Beowulf & I were waiting for my urgent delivery, I was running out of toner. Why was I running out of toner? Because the Microevilratbag situation that involves a document disappearing every time I re-open it is giving me white hair & palsy, & I have for some reason taken to printing out every time I change a preposition. So, thanks to the jolly, client-supportive evolution of computer technology I’m killing more trees. As well as running out of toner. I had asked Young Beowulf to order more in plenty of time for it to get here, despite my increased tree-assassination activities, before my last cartridge expired.

No. Wrong. I ran out of toner.

I despaired. Young Beowulf has assured me that book-in-progress is safely backed up, but I SHOULD BELIEVE THAT TECHNOLOGY IS DOING WHAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO DO???? So I’ve been emailing myself every day’s work.

Well, that’s reliant on technology too. & some of you may have noticed that Microsoft Outlook crashed a day or two ago? & MS blithely said that a few tens of thousands customers were affected? Well, it may be only a few tens of thousands out of the double-gazillion victims that use Outlook, or maybe MS can’t count§, but yes, I was one of those customers who had no email for a day.

Meanwhile Young Beowulf had ordered the frelling toner from another source, which promised to send it Royal Mail. Royal Mail is its own debacle, but the local guys are pretty good§§—supposing the parcel gets that far.

It took a week when it was supposed to take forty-eight hours.§§§ But it ARRIVED.

&, even better, the cartridge actually fitted my printer & produced printed pages. Kind of a lot of them.

I asked Young Beowulf to order another pair of toner cartridges immediately. A few hours later he told me that they’re out of stock at this supplier, who is now also refusing to promise what delivery company they’re going to use. When the cartridges are back in stock. . .

* * *

* or middle. Since I have to have used the blender before it needed cleaning.^

^ I Don’t Do Housework.+ But I’m fairly pathological about stuff that comes in contact with food. I’m even a little bit pathological about Genghis’ food dish. Which is pretty hilarious since he licks the floor.++ Which is REALLY not a good idea in this house.

+ I can’t remember how much I’ve started telling you of the Saga of the House. It’s long & complex#. But I’ll just mention here as a way of edging in the general direction of reality without, perhaps, scaring you-my-readers to death, that this is the first time I’ve had bare floors since Maine. Ah the broom. Yes, I remember the broom. Meanwhile I have a friend who hasn’t seen this house yet coming tomorrow to stay overnight, & I’m feeling a little touchy about both my level of non-house-work doing & my interesting approach to interior decorating, which is basically books & tchotchkes. Lots & LOTS of both books & tchotchkes. & I like the, ahem, as one might say, noisier end of tchotchkes. I had another, local, friend here recently, a friend who is moving away & might conceivably want somewhere to stay if she wants to come back & see the people she used to live down the street from, or possibly the harbour view, which is pretty spectacular.## We have previously mostly sat in the kitchen, but this time I was showing her over the rest of the house & she was apparently going into shock, &, as we were standing in the main guest room—which I consider to be one of more harmless rooms, at least if you can withstand 1,000,000 volumes of the English lit collection taking up all of one wall & some of the floor—she uttered a few broken words that seemed to indicate that she didn’t think she could stay here. 

I know I’m eccentric. I didn’t think I was, you know, dangerous. I do try to restack any tottering heaps before the arrival of anyone they might fall on. I hope tomorrow’s overnight visitor is made of sterner stuff.###

Oh, & I swept the floor today. With the result that I don’t want to walk on it. WHAT ARE YOU DOING WALKING ON THAT FLOOR? DON’T YOU KNOW I JUST SWEPT IT?

Also, well, there are things to say about rediscovering original Victorian wood floors. But not tonight.

# & includes a disturbing amount of screaming

## not that I’m biased

### I told a friend who knows me well that I had to meet an 11:20 train tomorrow morning & she said, Wow! I’m impressed! That’s the crack of dawn for you! HA HA FRELLING HA.~

~ Well. Yes. 

++ & the pavement. & his butt. & your face, if you don’t get out of the way fast enough.=

= I haven’t died yet. I wonder if there has been any close scientific research on the prophylactic qualities of having your face licked by your dog at regular intervals. They’ve noticed that kids that grow up with hairy, unhygienic pets tend to have stronger immune systems than kids who grow up in houses that smell of Clorox. The constant presence of dogs in my life may be why the ME doesn’t knock me down any harder than it does.  We will not pursue the observation that I already had dogs in my life in close personal face-licking relationship when I frelling went down with frelling ME in the first place. 

** ::sings a little aria of joyful hallelujah:: I have a kitchen & A UTILITY ROOM. I have never had a utility room before. TWO SINKS! TWO! SINKS! I have a PANTRY!!! I’ve never had a PANTRY!^

^ & at this point I fell down a very deep rabbit hole, which has been excised toward another blog post some day. I apparently really needed the outlet of a blog during the long, long months of house renovation. Which indeed are not over!!!!!!!!

STOPPING NOW. STOPPING. NOW. 

*** The utility room floor is one of the things about the Saga of the House that did not go well. I had brand-new expensive vinyl—I think it’s vinyl, they keep changing the terminology, it was upscale & did I say expensive!?!—laid which after a few months started turning funny colours in splotches. . . . 

Okay, wait, that’s another chapter of the house saga, & I need to go back to work on the book tonight, as well as get some sleep. The point is that I don’t CARE what happens to the utility room floor. Whatever it is won’t make it look any WORSE.

† which is the size of a small swimming pool, & very convenient it was too when Pav^ managed to stand in the working painter-decorator’s paint tray & briefly became pale pink.^^ Some modern developments are true progress, & one of those is water-based permanent paint, which meant all I had to do is put her in the utility room sink & add water. Lots of water. Lots & lots of water. There was a good deal of language too, which I believe amused the painter-decorator.

^ previous dog generation

^^ It was quite becoming

†† some of this was my shift to organic food. Suddenly there were good organic grocers—on line. On the ground you could find the occasional bag of organic apples or carrots. Woman does not live by apples & carrots alone.

††† I’ll tell you the Doorbell Chapter of the House Saga some other blog.

‡ I’ll tell you the Mail Slot Chapter of the House Saga some other blog.

‡‡ I like rocks. But after Pav died & before Genghis barged into my life I spent a lot of time on the shore here. Picking up rocks. I brought rather too many of them home.

§ It will not amaze you that I tend toward the latter theory

§§ our local postal workers are themselves seriously unhappy with what the national admin is doing to their lives & futures. I’ve had some mutual-hair-tearing conversations with a few of them about this. For all I know the people working for Delivery Company from the Nether Worlds feel the same way, as I would know if I ever talked to one of them, but I probably would have killed them with my bare hands before they got the words out. Administrative distress still doesn’t explain the postcard + table + rock thing.

§§§ This produced interesting confirmation emails, declaring that the package had been delivered several days ago . . . but was still in transit. I think those quantum physics seminars for upper level Royal Mail admin were a mistake.

Of keys & key safes

Glory hallefrellinglujah whatever gave me the insane idea that I could seamlessly* insert** writing a blog back into my life? Although if TECHNOLOGY would stop kicking me around like a an old damaged football*** I might be both more willing & more able to tiptoe across the Dead Marshes of the blogoscape†, averting my eyes from the spooky candles of distraction††, & keeping my gaze fixed on . . . hmm. I don’t want to go to Mordor, & I especially don’t want to go to Mordor with the Ring hanging around my neck & in the company of the revolting Gollum & the EVEN MORE REVOLTING Samwise Gamgee. It’s just that the Dead Marshes have a very evocative stumbling-around-in-the-dark-with-added-eerie vibe to them, which rather suits a manic introvert trying to figure, or re-figure, blogging again & FRANKLY TECHNOLOGY IS VERY MORDOR LIKE.†††

Furthermore stuff keeps happening.‡ I had a friend coming over late morning, which is EARLY by my standards so I took Genghis out for his first walk in my Morning Garments‡‡, which meant the door key was loose in a pocket instead of weighed down by several other keys & a key ring in my jeans. We had an adequate walk‡‡‡ & when we got back, in plenty of time to feed the Mongol Horde & brew myself another cup of tea before my friend arrived . . . 

. . . the key was no longer in my pocket.

PAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANIC.

Additional whacks up longside the head provided by the fact that I’ve had the new back door for . . . um . . . a year & a half? Maybe? But I’d just somehow never got round to replacing the old key with the new one in my key safe.§

So, having scraped myself out of the ancient pear tree that overhangs the back garden, a nice indoor ceiling to fly up into not being available, I managed to remember to text my friend NOT TO COME UNTIL/UNLESS SHE HEARD FROM ME AGAIN & Genghis, who knows that coming home means food, was briefly nonplussed when we did not crisply enter through the back door & immediately give him (a) a special, coming-home treat followed by (b) a proper meal, although I’m not sure what we were calling this one? Elevenses? He doesn’t care, but the only thing that comes CLOSE to food on his list of reasons to go on living is MORE WALKING, so having bribed him with an extra ordinary-going-for-walk treat or two, he was happy enough to turn around & go out again. On exactly, & I mean EXACTLY, agonisingly & persnicket-ingly EXACTLY, the same walk we’d just finished.

The fates were kind. I found the key.

& have spent most of the rest of the day prostrate with the aftermath of a major adrenaline spike. The kind that just about takes the top of your head off§§.

I did however pull myself together long enough to put a NEW BACK DOOR KEY in the key safe. I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear.

* * *

* all right, yes, it was never going to be seamlessly 

** I want to say shoehorn but the idea of a seamless shoehorning makes my brain hurt

*** AKA a little old lady who still remembers rotary dial phones^. I’m sure there’s some invasion of privacy going on, the way every Expensive & Frequently Bogus Help for the Aged catalogue suddenly starts arriving on your doorstep somewhere in your 60s. Because when book-in-progress is thumbing its nose at me & going nyah nyah na na nyah, which has been most of the time, the last few years, I will look at almost ANYTHING to get away from that blank screen, & I glance through even these things occasionally. & along with the bunion pads & the nose-hair removers I notice with some dry amusement that manual typewriters are apparently making a comeback among the elderly. I’ve told you already, I’ve been a professional-level typist for nearly 60 years [sic]^^ & your average home manual wouldn’t last a week with me, but I admit to CURIOSITY about the Japanese company that has started shipping electric typewriters to the yearning west. But unless the Japanese economy is running on an alternate-universe model, they’re too cheap to be adamantine, & protestations of their being professional quality ring hollow, rather like the sound of an exploding typewriter. The advertising come-on also wants to tell you that when you aren’t struggling with spreadsheets^^^ they are PERFECT for your aspiring writer persona, but that’s only if you are the one-perfect-letter-per-hour variety of aspiring writer. Someone who pounds the doodah out of her medium of expression when the story is running hot would soon find herself with a typewriter-shaped doorstop. 

^ I’m pretty sure punch-button phones, although they were still landlines you plugged into the wall+, existed by the time I bought my first IBM Selectric, but I’m equally sure I didn’t have one yet. 

+ & you didn’t call them landlines. They were just the phone system. They were the only phone system going. AH THE GOOD OLD DAYS. Yeah. When, for example, organic food was so far off even the fringe-loony spectrum that the only way to eat it was to grow it yourself. & good luck finding, for example, organic fertilizer. AH THE BAD OLD DAYS. But the bad old days did contain IBM Selectrics. 

^^ Things not to be excited about being precocious at

^^^ Erm, what is a spreadsheet?+

+ NO NO DON’T TELL ME

† Assuming it still exists. I’ve already acknowledged that EVERYONE TELLS ME no one blogs any more. RIGHT. GOT IT. YOU CAN STOP TELLING ME, THANK YOU, & if my new blog fails, well, I want my experiment to have been an honourable one, which does mean I have to write some blog posts.^

^ & if it does fail, hey! It’s not my fault! It’s that no one blogs any more!!!

†† & footnotes.

††† full disclosure. I so don’t keep up. If it’s not LORD OF THE RINGS^, STAR TREK the original, NEXT GEN & DEEP SPACE 9, or BUFFY, with lashings of FARSCAPE & BABYLON 5, I don’t know it, & won’t make cranky ill-judged allusions to it.^^ 

^ The book not the movie(s). Peter Jackson should burn in hell. Ahem. 

^^ Oh, well, a friend got me started on Marvel recently. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE IS ONE OF THE TEN BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME.+

+ I’m not sure what the other nine are. I’d have to think about it. & next week it would be a different list.# 

# TOY STORY would also be on it both weeks. 

‡ Just to get the technology out of the way for at least five minutes, the Disappearing Document situation is getting worse. Used to be I had to have left a document for half an hour or so for it to disappear. It’s now disappearing in the time it takes to hit the ‘print’ button. I suppose this should make me want to write blog posts rather than book-in-progress because when it’s only a blog post the bridge I want to throw myself off of when the document disappears is a lot lower. I might just sprain an ankle. When the BiP disappears there is no bridge tall enough.

‡‡ I got in the habit of sleeping in something I could answer the door in when Peter was no longer available for morning duty. This is usually a long loose jersey dress with a hoodie over it in the winter. & an apron over that once I’ve fallen out of bed but before I want to strain mental faculties with things like getting properly dressed.^

^ Also, define proper. I have a lot of fun with dresses, hoodies, aprons, etc. Today’s hoodie says Books. Helping introverts to avoid conversation since 1454. Truth in loop-back cotton terry.

‡‡‡ Except for the part about being assaulted by an overweight off-lead Jack Russell while its equally overweight, & a lot slower off the mark, owner, stared at us for a good ten seconds before he moseyed over & started trying ineffectually to catch his ****** dog. Meanwhile Genghis was turning himself inside out. In terms of sheer brute strength, if I have the beast by the collar, I can hang onto him—which requires me to be on Constant Alert for Collar Grabbing, because if he hits the end of his lead at speed, he is away & I have a dislocated shoulder—but the inside-out part is challenging because of the way he FLAILS. 

§ Tangential rant about the key safe:  I read up on these gizmos, of course. Fretting over potential purchases is something I’m good at. It’s the frelling follow through I have trouble with. Like learning how the blasted thing works^ & then employing it in a confident & forthright manner for its intended purpose.  HOWEVER. HAVING STRUGGLED THROUGH ALL THE DETAILS VIVIDLY DESCRIBED IN THIS FOOTNOTE TREE, I got to the end where I actually had the thing put together, drilled into the wall^^, & ready to roll, &  the final instructions tell you cheerfully that you need a six-figure number for the security code, & they (cheerfully) recommend that you choose a memorable date. & THEN THEY TELL YOU YOU CAN ONLY USE EACH INDIVIDUAL NUMBER ONCE. So, how many people have memorable dates that fulfill that requirement??? My birthday has four ones. Peter’s birthday has three ones. Our wedding day has two zeroes. 

^ this laborious process frequently begins with CHOPPING the thing out of its abstruse packaging materials without damaging the thing itself, which can be complicated by not being sure which bits are partof the thing itself & which are seriously non-ecological protective swaddling. This exercise almost certainly then progresses to seriously uninstructive instructions.  It’s bad enough when a single sheet of pronouncements is provided, rejoicing in such expressions as Exquisite advantageous living endowed by elegant appliance we wonderfully supply! It’s worse when you have a bound tome about the size of the first volume of LOTR with two pages of tiny illegible type dedicated to each of 1,000,000 languages, most of which you’ve never heard of, & as you’re flipping despondently through, it occurs to you unnervingly that the Polish or Chamicuro pages look more understandable than the English.+

+ This is English I’m writing, isn’t it?#

# I should still have the hiragana & katakana alphabets on my computer & theoretically a few basic kanji, but I GUARANTEE small temporary blog hostings don’t support them. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. THAT’S MY EXCUSE for not attempting to scare you to death. Which would backfire when some genuine Japanese reader emails me to say that I just wrote There are koalas in my soup. Which would not have been what I was trying to say.=

= I would not have been discussing soup at all, but I would at least have said, there are Nihon ishigame in my soup.

^^ OF COURSE I had help. If I tried to do this the wall would’ve fallen down. Or possibly morphed into a roc & flown away, which would have been a lot more interesting, but I still need a wall.

§§ & winds it, like rainbow confetti, through the branches of the ancient pear tree