Robin McKinley's Blog, page 40

Very Short Wednesday

 

 

I really need a night off.*  So I thought I’d leave you with two Exciting Announcements and a few links.**

Peter’s IN THE PALACE OF THE KHANS has been nominated for the Carnegie long list: 

http://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/pressdesk/press.php?release=pres_2013_nom_announce_carnegie.html

And just in case you haven’t already bought your copy, here’s a reminder:

http://peterdickinson.com/books/in-the-palace-of-the-khans/

The ‘buy now’ takes you to amazon.uk but amazon.com and Barnes and Noble have it as well.

And SHADOWS is coming out in the UK:

EBook 5 December

Paperback 2 January

The cover will look pretty much the same and the blurby stuff has been rewritten but it’s still about Maggie and some very peculiar shadows.  It should be available for pre-order by now.**

And if you wish to be encouraged, possibly inspired, but not to say hectored, pleeeeease read this:

http://www.examiner.com/review/shadows-by-robin-mckinley-simply-wonderful ***

* * *

* You know there are several people out there who have offered guest posts and then disappeared. . . . Just thought this might be worth mentioning.

** You’ll have to look the link up yourselves.  I don’t go near the Robin McKinley pages on amazon.

***  Or if you want to be reminded of my back catalogue you can read this:

http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2013/10/08/old-favorite-new-genre-exploring-fantasy-sub-genres-through-robin-mckinleys-work/

::beams::

Remember, remember . . .

 

 

Remember, remember!

    The fifth of November,

    The Gunpowder treason and plot;

    I know of no reason

    Why the Gunpowder treason

    Should ever be forgot!*

. . . I went bell ringing.

It does amuse me that there were eight native-British Fustian ringers who would rather ring bells than watch any of the gazillion firework parties laid on by every two-dog village in the entire country.  New Arcadia has a good one every year—viewable from either Peter’s spare bedroom window or my attic**—and if I’m not doing anything else I will give a cursory glance out of the appropriate window at the end of the show when they throw everything they’ve got left into the sky at once.***  But it’s not important.  Bell ringing is important.

I’d spent too much time today rushing around†;  Penelope rang up out of the blue this morning, suggesting we get together for a cup of tea†† and since I hadn’t exactly got out of bed early that kind of was the morning and the rest of the day has been an up the down escalator experience.  The hellterror has had the semi-squirts††† so that cancelled the training visit to the vet’s waiting room since I don’t want to stuff a dodgy tummy with treats.  But that is somewhat counterintuitively a further drain on time because she’s not the slightest fussed by lower intestinal irregularities and still needs hurtling:  ten intense minutes doing sit-down-stand-paw-otherpaw are worth at least twenty merely barrelling through the hedgerows.

Having no sense, and also because it was a beautiful day I wanted the excuse to go for a country hurtle, I pursued another fruitless scheme.  The Undesirable Repercussions of Running Out of Money, subparagraph seven:  by renting your second house with the bigger garden, you no longer have anywhere all three of your hellcritters can riot properly, including room for Darkness to run away.  I think it was Southdowner who suggested a riding school‡;  so I went out to see Jenny.  Remember Jenny, you long-time readers?  Who has a yard‡‡ in Ditherington?  Who let me ride her fabulous Connie?  Before the ME got so erratic (again) that I had to stop.  I know I could go back just to hang out and hug a few horses and even though I miss horses more than I miss riding . . . it’s still really too discouraging.  So I don’t go.

Well, the riding school/ hellcritter thing isn’t going to work;  the footing’s all wrong and the door doesn’t close properly against something the size of a hellterror.  The space doesn’t have to be critter proof because even the hellterror has a not-bad recall and they’ll only be there, supposing we ever find a there for them to be, with me in full supervisory mode.  But the fencing has to be recognisable as fencing from a hellcritter perspective.  And none of Jenny’s fencing is.  Rats.  But I did get to meet a few of the current yard residents. . . . Siiiiiiiigh.

But we had a lovely hurtle.

And I came home and sang.  Mozart is necessary:  see previous entry.

I was too tired to go bell-ringing.  But what was I going to do, stay home and watch the fireworks?  I went.  I think I am going to learn to ring Cambridge before it kills me but I admit I’m not sure.  And Fustian’s tower secretary came up to me at the end and said that I was invited to the tower Christmas dinner, that he’d send me the info, and did I want to bring my husband?

Whimper.  This is really very nice of them;  it’s generally only worthwhile regular non-member visitors who are invited to the Christmas dinner, and I’m only taking advantage of their twice a month extra practise for the [extra] stupid.  But I wasn’t even planning to go to Forza’s dinner—and a whole evening of being sociable?  Two whole evenings if I go to both?‡‡‡  And that eating in public thing?  Whimper.

I’m sure it’ll be good for my character.  Both dinners.  Maybe I’ll just bring some carrots§ in a bag.

* * *

* For any Americans out there who think that the 4th of July is the only legitimate day for fireworks:   http://www.potw.org/archive/potw405.html

** If Third House’s future tenants want fireworks, they’ll have to buy a ticket and go.

*** But I’ve never seen a dragon.  Let alone one that rips overhead like an express train and bursts over Old Eden.  Okay, is anyone else bothered by the express-train-like firework dragon in the first chapter of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING?  I remember noticing it for the first time on my approximately 1008th reading when I was probably about twelve.  Shock horror.  I’m totally unpersuaded by the theory that this is an aside to the modern reader;  personally I think Tolkien screwed up.  But he was a notorious control freak—could he possibly have missed it?  Can he, his family, friends and other readers and his publisher have missed it?  Alternatively, can a meticulous Anglo-Saxon scholar have deliberately stuck a plonking great anachronism in his own story-telling?^  I don’t like either answer.

^ There are at least a couple of others, I think, but my memory is doing its vague and mushy thing again.  If they all concern the hobbits, then there is reasonable support for the theory of hobbit society as a satire on English society sharp enough to contain a few anachronisms successfully.  I think I remember that the Shire has umbrellas and pocket-watches.  But they’re smaller and less obtrusive.  Express trains are large and noisy.

† I should be packing boxes at Third House.  Don’ wanna.  Sigh.

†† What wins, a cup of tea with a friend or packing boxes?  Guess.

††† My life with hellcritters.  Well, at least it was only semi.

‡ I can no longer keep my Yank/Brit jargon straight.  I think I mean riding ring in American.  The place, probably with a fence around it, where you do your training/schooling.

‡‡ Stable

‡‡‡ Peter would only go if I put him in chains and hired a forklift.  There are some advantages to being 86:  you can just say ‘I’m/he’s 86’ and everyone gives you lots of lovely slack.

§ Yes, I eat carrots.  Whinny.

The necessity of Mozart

 

 

Mozart.  I need Mozart*.

Nina, Ignatius and I went to a concert tonight.  I was looking forward to it, but I was looking forward to it a trifle sulkily because the concert I really wanted to go to was last week, and I can’t now remember if it was the ME, which has been bad lately, or another outbreak of hellhound interiors, but I do remember I didn’t go.  Tonight’s was more of a wild card:  one of these singer-songwriter bozos with the forty-seven guitars and the flugelhorn.

He sounds like a great guy to have a beer down t’pub with:  his inter-song patter is very jolly.  The music . . . unh.   Well.  He belongs to the great tradition of Maudlin Folk and I was ready to run outdoors and find a river to throw myself in during the interval . . . except there was no interval.**  By the end I was catatonic and incapable of throwing myself anywhere.  Walking back to the car was challenging enough.

Meanwhile I’d had another disconcertingly good voice lesson earlier today.***  I’ve had several weeks in a row of ravening bulltiddly out here in the life space that should be shutting me down—it always used to—but my voice has struck for freedom or something.†  NEVER MIND THAT THE MARTIANS/BORG/BODY SNATCHERS/THING/SCUM OF THE UNIVERSE LANDS TOMORROW.  LET’S SING.

I did wait till I’d closed the car door and Ignatius and Nina had driven away tonight before I started on Un moto di gioja.††

* * *

* Although let me say that if this blog sounds bittier and more distracted even than usual it may have something to do with attempting to train the hellterror in Long Down while I’m writing (?) it.^  She knows ‘lie down’^^ perfectly well^^^ as part of the whole sit-stand-down-sit-paw-otherpaw-down-stand-down-sit-paw-stand-otherpaw# itinerary##, but that involves food which keeps her focussed.  My attempts to teach her go lie down, which, with sit, tend to be my bottom line about life with dogs, has met thus far with utter failure.###

^ No, that’s lie down.

^^ No, that does not include chewing on the towel I have put on the floor next to my chair as a bed-facsimile.+

+ Or the frelling table leg

^^^ No, that does not include chasing your tail even within the confines of said towel.

# We’ve begun rolling over, but we haven’t got past the hellgoddess-helpless-with-laughter stage and since that brings on all the hellterror sense of humour, knowing she’s nailed her audience, we’re not at the moment getting too far.

## Yes, I will allow sitting—quietly—within the confines of the towel—but the look of heartbroken yearning for freedom doesn’t actually work all that well on a face involving a large Roman nose and tiny beady evil eyes.

### Dogs are so different.  I think all my previous puppies, once they’ve resigned themselves to having to do things like sit and lie down at all (mostly) on command have been happy to accept their usual bed, crate or otherwise, as the place they Go to Lie Down.  Pav settles down (relatively) contentedly in her crate at the times of day/night she knows there’s no point arguing, but during the hours^ when she knows she should be OUT any interruption of the outness is looked upon with extreme disfavour.  So we’re trying a different approach.

The goal is so that we can all hang out in my office at the cottage together.  I’m EXTREMELY BORED with working downstairs with the laptop—or occasionally the iPad—balanced on top of stacks of books, magazines and packets of critter treats on the kitchen counter.^^  But Pav has to be able to lie down and stay lying down.

^ ‘Hours’ is another of those mutable terms, mostly relating to whether I’m doing anything that can be stretched to include a frelling puppy underfrellingfoot.  Frelling puppy often has an opinion about this too.+

+ So do hellhounds:  Noooooooooo.

^^ Critter treats are a growth market.  Amazing variety of critter treats out there.  We’ve tried just about every cereal-free available.+  Hellhounds don’t like any of them and hellterror likes all of them.

+ The hellterror is nearly cereal-free and will be as soon as I finish feeding her some polluted kibble that I bought in error but with a walking roly-poly dustbin about the place couldn’t be bothered to send back.  Cereals aren’t brilliant for dogs anyway, even dogs that aren’t allergic to them, and you can’t have accidents with something that isn’t there.

** And it’s really too cold for throwing yourself in rivers.

*** Despite the relentless ignominy of following Nadia’s star baritone which is the usual order of events.  I positively like getting there early enough to hear him sing, but when it’s my turn I always have to climb over that little hump of ‘no, no, never mind, I’ll just sit here and keep knitting.’

† It’s also to do with that increasingly weird sense, which I’ve mentioned here before, of it being something like another critter I have to keep fed and hurtled and if I don’t it pines and looks at me sadly.^

^ Within the menagerie concept it and Pav make an interesting contrast.  Pav doesn’t do mournful and despondent worth a dead scorpion, but she is very beautiful.  My voice, poor stunted unbeautiful thing, does forlorn to make Little Nell look like a stand-up comedian.  Although they both tend to hit the ends of their leads when out hurtling.

It’s kind of interesting having enough voice to hit the end of its lead-facsimile.  But the rules change when you have something to work with.  Hanging a bridle on the back of a chair is just . . . hanging some tack on a piece of furniture.  If you put it on a horse however. . . .

I am, as we know, a control freak.  This is part of why it’s taken poor Nadia two and a half years to get some relatively usable noise out of me.  But I admit that the current uncharacteristic state of lack of control is kind of fun.

†† Frell the neighbours.

Hellterror training, continued

 

I was fording raging torrents coming back from church again tonight.  I’m frelling learning where, if it’s been raining with undesirable enthusiasm, there are going to be raging torrents on that stretch of road:  I could do without being obliged to acquire this aqueous information.  There are one or two especially raging torrents that I’m going to give names to if this keeps happening.  Arrrgh.

It hasn’t been a totally satisfactory day in other ways.  Got to Forza* and found Vicky on the step, waiting for someone with a key.  We waited.  We chatted.  We waited some more.  We chatted some more.  I finally got Pooka out and checked the tower diary:  it said ringing this afternoon.  We were getting cold.  It’s kind of a wind tunnel, where you wait for Someone with a Key.  Also, no one else was showing up, which was suspicious.

Finally I checked my email, and there was a note from Albert, saying ‘oh, in case you didn’t know, there’s no ringing this afternoon. . . .’  ARRRRRGH.  It had been sent about an hour and a half before.  I was hurtling and feeding hellcreatures at that point.  I was not looking at my email.  I did take a last quick glance at the tower diary when I climbed into Wolfgang.

ARRRRRRGH.

However the hellterror’s first experience of a training class yesterday went very well.  Neither of us died.

I did get up at the dingleblasted crack of dawn**, hurtled hounds, ate something not because I was frelling hungry at that savage hour but because I was going to have to function.***  And then the hellterror (who was delighted by early breakfast) and I leaped into Wolfgang and . . . away.

We didn’t get lost.†  Until we got there, that is.  This is a two-speck village:  it’s not even a wide place in the road.  How can you MISS something when it should be all there is?

We managed.††  Fortunately a man wearing the sort of clothing you might expect of someone about to stand in a field shouting orders wandered past and proved to be the bloke we wanted.  I explained that while there were and had been many dogs in my life, this was my first hellterror;  and that while I’d never had anything to do with dog shows when the breeder of the family Pav’s mum had come from saw how pretty Pav was turning out, wanted to show her.  I’d blithely agreed, not engaging brain about the likelihood that a hellterror who thinks an exciting night on the town is a stroll around a silent churchyard at one or two o’clock in the morning and an exciting night in is three people in the sitting room for handbells and tea, was not going to cope with a dog show.  A large dog show.  Which is what duly occurred.  But Pav has turned out very pretty indeed, and Southdowner is not willing to give up without a struggle.

Hence my attempts to gear up for Operation Super Socialisation.†††  Our new trainer did warn me that some dogs just never take to showing, however well-bred and well-trained they are, but I said I’d worry about that later.  At the moment I just wanted her to get used to more input than she got at home with me.‡

We had by this time arrived at the training field, while Pav was busy proving that she never, ever walks politely on a short lead or pays any attention to me whatsoever.  Sigh.  And at about this interesting juncture the largest dog I have ever seen entered the ring . . . on its hind legs, with its handler grabbing for the extra-strength back-up harness.‡‡

Ah yes, said the training bloke calmly.  Jezebel is a little nervous of other dogs.

And Pav did not like Jezebel, who made Wellington look like a Pomeranian.  There was barking.  There was pogosticking on little short legs.

But it turned out okay.  It also turned out there were only the two of us—well, it was raining—so we just worked on calming our respective mad furry things down.  The Mastiff did very well—as soon as her owner got the sausage rolls out.  Jezebel was walking on a short loose lead and sitting—facing away from miniature mayhem on the other side of the ring—for her sausage rolls by the end.  I had had the forethought to have a couple of packets of treats in my pocket so we did the turning away and gobbling treats too, although I only got about three steps of loose lead out of her in the entire hour.  Siiiiiigh.  Well, room for improvement.  She was sitting on request by the end of the hour—and we’d slowly spiralled in to within eight or ten feet of Nemesis without either of them reacting.

So.  Small cautious yaaaaay.

* * *

* This is about to be the season when I wish violently that my home tower was still a one-minute sprint down the street from the cottage.  Forza will be trapped in Christmas shopper gridlock from . . . any time now.

** An interesting image, the crack of dawn.  I tend to think in terms of thunder and doom rather than widening lines of light.

*** I can mostly hurtle, or at least womble, even when I’m sub-functional.  Driving . . . I’m afraid I certainly have driven when I’m doing my river-bottom-slime imitation but I try to avoid it.

† I even didn’t go the way he told me.  I looked at it on the map and thought, Why?  That’s the long long way around.  Apparently the owners of dogs in need of training/socialising/exposure to more other dogs all lack satnav and have back road phobias.  But this is my briar patch and we went the back way.

†† And satnav would have been no help.  We were in the right post code, what more did we want?  Miracles?  No, the village hall.

††† This week’s agenda includes using the vets’ out of hours waiting room as a training area^ and going to a dog-friendly pub for lunch.

^ The point being that a vets’ waiting room even out of hours is full of critter smells and activities, and Southdowner suggested this as a good socialisation focus months ago.+  I was careful about the vet I talked to about this so the answer would be ‘yes’.++

+ I like the idea of a whole stream of us cranky no-social-life types with volatile puppies using the vets’ waiting room for life-exposure purposes.  They’ll have to post a schedule, and we can all sign up for our slots.

++ Also, the vets’ waiting room floor is the largest piece of floor space I have available.  Especially when Third House is about to go off limits.

‡ An additional reason why I was a clueless twerp about how much socialisation I am giving Pav is because it has seemed to me she’s jerked up a developmental stage—especially noticeable this week, unfortunately, after our spectacular groundwork failure at the show, but, dunno, maybe the show itself had some positive effect?^

Part of Operation SS has been taking her for hurtles over landscape she hasn’t been on before.  Last week and out in the middle of nowhere, one of these blasted bungalow-sized Labradors came roaring out of the shadows at us.  Fortunately I saw him coming in time to pick her up first, while I was myself roaring CALL YOUR DOG.  CALL YOUR FLAMING DOG.  It was a good minute, maybe more, before I finally heard a frantic little voice calling Welly!  Wellington!  Come! —which Welly the Wellington totally ignored, of course, and two minutes before the wretched woman appeared, and chased Welly off—since he certainly wasn’t going to let her catch him.  Now, granted Welly wasn’t vicious—just huge—but I’d’ve expected Pav to react, and she didn’t.  She watched with interest from her perch on my arms—which were clamped to my body so Welly’s gigantic nose couldn’t dislodge them—but she wasn’t bothered.  I was bothered.

Second time, worse, was today, when another bloody terror—scraggily-haired Jack Russell type—came shooting around a corner at us, paused only long enough to adjust its attack mode and FLEW at Pav.  I didn’t have a chance to pick her up in time, and she just stood there looking regal, to the other terror’s consternation.  It was disconcerted enough that it backed off—which gave me a chance to grab her.  At this point the useless owner appeared.

But a month ago I’d’ve expected her to go ballistic, barking, and I wouldn’t have blamed her either.  But she didn’t.  I want to believe this is progress and not just that she happened to have her mind on other things at those moments.

^ Never mind.  I can hear Southdowner laughing from here.

‡‡ As I realised in retrospect.  At the time I just thought we were both going to die.  But it had an ordinary collar and lead plus one of those no-pull things, and her owner was shifting her grip from the snaffle to the curb, so to speak.

KES, 103

ONE HUNDRED THREE

First out was Sid’s fabulous leather collar, which looked even more fabulous after dark, sitting in your new kitchen with the wreckage of the first stage of unpacking all around you, and trying not to hear Yog-Sothoth in the cellar, deinonychus under the porch or the madwoman in the attic.  (I wandered off into a brief fantasy about deinonychus being invited to join the poker game through a door specially cut through the wall of the cellar.  But it was too horrible so I turned around and came back to reality.  Relative reality, with a hob who eats scrambled eggs.)  I might have to look for a dog beauty salon if Sid was ever going to wear this.  Ugh.  Or rethink that bath.  Double ugh.  At least the actual bathtub was big enough.  Instead of six friends I could hire six strong men to hold her while I applied shampoo.  Triple ugh.

Then I pulled the rose bracelet out and looked at it.  The hob (and the hot water) had made me light-headed.  I was ready to believe anything.  But nothing interestingly impossible occurred to me.  The cuff still looked like silver, with vines or something etched into it.  Okay, there was something impossible I could believe:  they weren’t vines at all, they were an arcane alphabet spelling out disast . . . No.  Not disaster.  The rose seemed to flicker gently, as if it were a real rose in a real garden in patchy shadow with a breeze blowing.  And I smelled roses again.  Maybe the arcane alphabet was a spell for the scent of roses.  I turned my head to glance at the door into the parlour where one really real and five semi-real rose bushes sat.  I was relieved not to see any little eyes peering back at me—or possibly at my chocolate.  No.  There were limits.  Besides, I wasn’t going to leave chocolate lying around:  Sid might get there first.  “Would you like some peppermint tea?” I said.

There was no answer.  Duh.

I looked at the rose medallion again.  I had no idea what it was made of.  I had originally thought it was painted ceramic, but on closer inspection I wasn’t so sure.  There was a very slightly irregular, perhaps faceted, feel to it that my finger could sense although my eyes (at least not in this light) couldn’t.  And the depth of the color seemed to me extraordinary for mere paint.  I laid it down and sighed.  As mysteries go I much preferred this one to horse dung and Murac.

When I got up to give myself a second cup of peppermint tea I picked the hob’s bowl up from the side of the sink (new shopping list:  drying rack), dried it off, poured some peppermint tea in it, put a folded-up square of tea towel on the wooden window seat first so it wouldn’t leave a mark because drying wasn’t my best skill, and set the bowl on it.  Also the towel might perform some minor role of tea cosy in case the hob was busy elsewhere at the moment.

It was after ten o’clock.  I was exhausted.  Maybe I could go to bed.  I who regularly didn’t get to bed before three, and then usually had to read for a while before I resigned myself to wasting time sleeping.  I found a flashlight and took Sid out through the kitchen door, having remembered that the flight of stairs to the back yard was shorter than to the front.  Sid moseyed around in the way of dogs who know they’ll go back indoors as soon as they’ve done what you’ve brought them out here for, and I concentrated on thinking about things like drying racks.  Speaking of drying, was there a clothes line?  And . . . um . . . how about garbage collection?  I was going to be well beyond cranky if I had to take my own rotting effluvia to the dump.  I didn’t even know where the dump was.  Something else to ask Hayley . . . oh, glory, Hayley was coming to dinner tomorrow.  That was right now an even more appalling prospect than Yog-Sothoth.

Sid was rootling in a thicket.  There were rustling noises, as of something fleeing out the other side.  “If you find an orc, leave it there,” I said.  “Or a skunk.  Especially a skunk.”  —There.  Finally.  I picked it up, tied a knot in the bag and left it on the porch.  I would look for garbage bins tomorrow.

We went back inside.  I locked the door.  I brushed my teeth.  I fetched the hob’s (empty) bowl and washed it and my tea mug, trying to remember if I’d kept the bigger as well as the smaller teapot.  If the hob had a taste for peppermint tea I’d need a two-person—well, two-creature—sized teapot.  But I might have been having one of the Alone Forever in a Hostile Universe moods common to the recently divorced and only kept the smaller one.

I checked the front door.  I looked at the mess in the parlour.  I could either tackle this or go to bed.  I was much too tired to tackle it, but if I went to bed I’d have to . . . you know, turn the lights out and stuff.  Shut my eyes. . . .

 

Hellterror training

 

I have to get up early tomorrow.  EARLY.  REALLY EARLY.  Pav and I are going to a training class.  Experimentally.

One of the many, many things that have not gone right recently is that Southdowner decided that since she was going to the show anyway—the dog show Pav and I were going to attend with her when I still had a dog minder to look after hellhounds in our absence*—it would be good exposure for Pav to come along too, without me, and have a New Experience.  It’s not like Pav doesn’t adore Southdowner.  I am a boring discarded toy when Southdowner is around.

However, Pav didn’t think much of this plan.  Pav apparently achieved orbit in a manner that confounded scientists and astronomers all over the globe.  There is going to be a special seminar next summer on Small Furry Tricolour Flying Object seen for a few radiant and confusing hours one afternoon in late October 2013 in southern England.  I’m not planning to attend.

Meanwhile . . . Southdowner brought her home in a steel reinforced butterfly net and gave me a severe admonishing about socialising.  She needs more experience of the world than Peter, a few neighbours, some handbellers, and random people on the street rushing up to her and saying Oh!  A mini bull terrier!  I LOVE bull terriers!  I’ve always wanted a mini one!, which I’m afraid Pav and I are getting rather blasé about since it happens so often,** are giving her.

Oh.***

So along with all the other rubbish this week, I’ve been attempting to crank up the machinery to try to provide Pav with suitable horizon-broadening adventures.  I hadn’t much cared about the government raising the age for the free bus pass . . . but public transport is a great adventure for the lap-sized hellcritter.†  Hitherto when we go into Mauncester or Ziggeraton for fresh woods and pastures new we just carelessly take Wolfgang:  a frelling bus ticket costs even more than petrol for your profligately individually owned internal combustion engine vehicle:  What Is Wrong With This Picture.  Sigh.  But you do get more critter-socialising bang for your buck-plus if you travel in an interesting manner.  And then there are the trains . . . which even to approach the gate to the track costs an egg-sized†† pearl or your first-born child, which latter is not an option in my case.  Arrrrgh.

There are also dog training classes.  We googled extensively while Southdowner was here, and I had this list when she left.  There’s something wrong with everybody on it, starting with the people that other people have warned me off.†††  Then there’s the so-called professional dog trainer who doesn’t even have her own message on her phone machine—and I hate those robot answer messages that come with the machine so you don’t even know if you’ve dialled/punched the right number—and blah and blah and blah.  But I eventually thought of someone I’d liked the look of last year when a tiny manic Pav was freshly my problem—only his puppy socialisation class is Wednesday evening, and I’m way too garbagey a bell ringer to give up my home tower practise nights.  And then, you know, I thought Pav and I were getting on with our socialisation, in our casual amateur way.

I rang him and said I had a year-old mini bull terrier who had Not Reacted Well to her first dog show experience and he didn’t quite laugh but he’s heard it before.  And he suggested that as a trial training class experience—just to bring her, sit on the sidelines, see how she reacts and give him a chance to assess her—SATURDAY MORNING AT TEN FRELLING O’CLOCK might be a good choice.‡  He’s half an hour away and I will have to hurtle hellhounds before I leave. . . .

Good night.

* * *

* Aside from the extreme nuisance value of not having any dog minder . . . the irony is that we’re happier without her and I feel pretty much a doofus for not recognising the signs that All Was Not Well.  I still feel the end of the line could have come a little more gently.  And . . . what do I do now?  Having lost one dog minder from using her too little and another from using her too much I feel a trifle bemused about what faulty approach to implement badly next time.^  I’ve said this before, right?  Well, it does keep recurring.  With the alternate plan of staying home for the rest of my life.

^ Finding—and keeping—a child minder must be exponentially worse.  But at least kids eventually outgrow needing one.  Dogs never do learn to take themselves around the churchyard and cook supper.

** As Southdowner said when I first met one of hers, they’re Marmite dogs:  you love ’em or hate ’em.

*** Speaking of the many manifestations of my canine-related cluelessness.  I had no idea.

† I’d originally planned to take the hellhounds on some public transport but dogs on buses are at the discretion of the bus drivers:  great.  Swell.  And what if your bus driver says ‘no, I don’t like dogs/I’m not in the mood/AAAAAAAAAUGH’?  I can’t pick them up.  I can pick Pav up.^  I can pick her up and march up the steps and thrust my foresightfully prepaid ticket at the driver and keep going.  It should work.  I’ll let you know.

^ Barely.  SHE WEIGHS THIRTY-FIVE POUNDS.  IT STOPS HERE.  And once Southdowner and/or Olivia get this showing bug out of their systems she’s going back to being a SLIM hellterror.  Just sayin’.

†† Only pigeon-egg-sized.  Not chicken.  They’re not greedy or anything.

††† Can you believe there are still professional trainers out there recommending choke collars and Appropriate Force and so on?!  What?

‡ I don’t think he said frelling.  I have said many things, including frelling.

Book Rec: The Professor’s Daughter, by Joann Sfar & Emmanuel Guibert

 

That would be graphic book rec, or if you prefer fabulous comic book rec.*

. . . Oh heavens, how do I try to tell you what a hoot it is, and how adorable?  Especially when my head is going bang bang bang as the inevitable result of two and a half hours in a dentist’s chair today.**  Well I can start by saying that it’s perfect reading for lying on a sofa with an assortment of hellcritters and a sore head***.

A charming young Victorian woman, whose famous father is an archaeologist, wants to go for a walk in Kensington Park, but has no chaperon.  Being an enterprising sort, she fishes one of her father’s mummies out of his sarcophagus, dresses him in tails and a top hat, and drags him outdoors.  They listen to Mozart.  They take tea.

They fall in love.†

Mayhem ensues.††

One warning:  the plot, such as it is, is very, very, very ridiculous, and for pity’s sake don’t expect consistency or for all the loose flapping bits to be tied up before the end.  Once you’ve got your seatbelt on—and your rational intellect sent off to read Schopenhauer†††—you’ll be fine.  But I spent the first several pages going, Wha’?  Wha’?  I don’t read much illustrated storytelling and am not used to the tropes.  It’s okay, I went back and reread the beginning.  But I hope you won’t have to.

I loved the drawing—Queen Victoria alone is worth the price of admission‡—and the text is full of divine one-liners.  I usually figure that anything in the first few pages doesn’t count as a spoiler but in a very short graphic novel, um.  However . . .  our mummy gets drunk on his tea:  ‘ . . . I’ve had neither food nor drink in thirty-two centuries . . .’  While he’s sleeping it off he dreams of his children, and they guess he wants to marry the pretty lady.  Maybe her father won’t agree to it, he says.  Why wouldn’t the lady’s father agree? they ask.  ‘Because I’m dead and it’s just not done,’ he replies.

A word here also for the translator, Alexis Siegel, who must have had a hell of a time in both the good and the bad way.

Go for it.

http://us.macmillan.com/theprofessorsdaughter-1/JoannSfar ‡‡

* * *

* I’ve never quite become friendly with the ‘graphic novel’ or, since they’re not always fiction, ‘graphic literature’ terminology.  Having spent my entire professional life being whacked around by one or another genre label^ I feel that graphic literature sounds like an attempt to civilise something that at its best is often enthusiastically and energetically uncivilised.^^  But I admit I don’t know fiddlesticks about that corner of the publishing world, so I may be tilting at non-existent windmills about this.

^ When are you going to write/have you ever written a real book?

^^ A bit like F&SF, for example.  Or what the Victorians did to fairy tales when they decided to dumb them down for kids.

** Yes.  Shorter than predicted.  He didn’t finish.  Moan.

*** Even if the need to keep the youngest of the party firmly trapped in place was not ideal in these circumstances

† Well of course.

†† Well of course.

††† Rikke

Schopenhauer at one point uses the example that in case of a child’s death a woman with a lesser intellectual capacity will suffer less than a woman with a developed intellect.

 The point being that the analysis and understanding of death and its consequences enhances the pain far beyond the mere acute animalistic pain. Thus the higher evolved the intellect the more the suffering. . . .

I’m afraid this chiefly makes me want to climb in my trusty time machine and race back through the centuries so that I can rip Schopenhauer’s head off and give it back to him on a platter with an apple in its mouth.  Of all the . . .

And just by the way I observe that it’s apparently only the woman who grieves?  Presumably there had been a dad involved in this situation?  Presumably men are pure intellect and don’t stoop to mere weak mortal grief at all?  Grrrrrrrr.

Note that I hated Philosophy 101 in college.  Just for reasons like these.  My [male] professors weren’t overly fond of me either.

‡ Although once I got my seatbelt on, the one place I was thrown out of the story again was by reference to Queen Victoria’s corgis.  It’s not Queen Victoria who has corgis.^

^ Okay, it’s a joke, fine.  Don’t joke about DOGS.

‡‡ And it’s totally cool to have a book rec about a thirty-two-hundred-year-old mummy named Imhotep on Halloween.  Eat your heart out, Boris Karloff.  Or Arnold Vosloo, for that matter.

GOOD News

 

I’m so glad it’s short Wednesday, I’m so tired I am in grave danger of falling off my chair.*

Also, I am in shock.  Which is very tiring.

TRUMPET FLOURISH

***MY BANK APOLOGISED.***

FURTHER TRUMPET FLOURISHES.  IN FACT AN ENTIRE CONCERTO, INVOLVING SEVERAL ORGANS WITH FIFTY THOUSAND PIPES EACH AND A FEW OF THOSE HUGE JAPANESE TAIKO DRUMS THAT FEEL LIKE YOU’RE BEING PUNCHED IN THE CHEST WHEN SOMEONE THUMPS THEM.

It’s taken my bank nearly four months and they’ve still got both my name and my address wrong BUT NEVER MIND.  THEY APOLOGISED.  They’ve REFUNDED the substantial number and £££ of fines they charged me and have sent me copies of all the letters they wrote to all the people whose cheques bounced—including scary, credit-rating-ruining people like my credit card companies—saying it was THEIR FAULT.  NOT MINE.  THEIRS.  THE BANK’S.  THE BANK’S FAULT.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.**

Good news.  I can USE some good news.***  And I can continue to contemplate the goodness of this news tomorrow during the three and a half hours I am due to be in dentist from R’lyeh’s torture . . . I mean, chair. † I think you had better expect tomorrow night’s blog to be short too.††

* * *

* It was a bell-ringing night, one of those nights when there were only six of us so all of us had to ring all evening.  You know retired people may still have some BRAIN left by the end of the day. . . .

Also my beloved Celtic-knotwork-pattern-cover cushion is going—has gone—to pieces.  There is no security in this insecure world where things wear out.  I am sure I am much unsteadier in my chair in the mews kitchen with my chair cushion in SHREDS,^ whether or not I just spent an hour and a half on the end of a bell-rope.^^  And I’m totally failing to get my head around replacing it.  There are gazillions of cushions out there.

^ It disintegrated all by itself, with no help from hellterrors whatsoever.

^^ One of the other ringers, whom I would have said I had never met before, stared at me for a minute and said, I know you.  I rang a wedding with you at Ditherington last year.  You’re the knitter.

Busted.

** Pity they can’t make an itsy-bitsy further error, move the decimal place over six or seven or eight places to the right and make me wealthy.^  Then I could not only keep Third House I could build a conservatory off the sitting-room.^^  I suppose, having noticed one error, they might notice this one too.  No, wait . . . I pointed their previous error out.  I had to point it out.  Hmm.

^ And for those helpful people telling me if I’d only write this or that book/sequel I’d immediately become wealthy . . . in the first place *&^%$£”!!!!!! and the frelling horse you frelling rode in on.  In theory this blog nonsense—and the Twitter nonsense, and the Facebook nonsense, and the public email address nonsense—is so that public people can have some direct contact with their private readers/fans/supporters.  And vice versa.  Which seems to me to be mostly a good idea:  we’re all human beings first and last.  But shouldn’t there be some FAINT responsibility in that vice versa-ing, for paying attention?  Which is to say HOW MANY RATBLASTED TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY I ONLY WRITE WHAT I AM GIVEN TO WRITE?   I’D BE ON SUNSHINE SEVENTEEN AND DAMAR THIRTY-TWO BY NOW IF I COULD.

And in the second place . . . SUNSHINE and Damar didn’t make me wealthy the first time.  There’s no reason to think that a second or a third or twenty-seventh book would do any better.  Remember that for every GAME OF THRONES there are 1,000,000,000 series that only did well enough to bully the poor sweating author to keep trying.

PamAdams

. . . an autographed book sale? I’m sure that the hell-hounds and -terror would cooperate to place ‘official’ pawprints.

Sure.  The minute I finish the last frelling doodle from the now-ancient-history Bell Fund.  Siiiiiiigh. . . .

^^ Have I mentioned that one of the knock-on effects of letting Third House is that I won’t have the little summerhouse as a greenhouse this winter?  I have therefore, with Atlas’ aid, brought the grow-light to the cottage and hung it from one of the big ceiling beams in the already-small sitting room, and in cold weather we will have to have handbells at Niall’s because my sitting room will be full of PLANTS.

*** There are way too many alligators in my immediate vicinity.  As the saying goes.

† On Halloween.

†† And apropos of nothing at all, any of you folk on this side of the Atlantic have experience with Lovefilm vs. Netflix?

McKinley FAIL

 

Fiona was here again today—she was here one day last week on the same task—sorting and packing up backlist in the attic at Third House.  Last week she was here on a day when the ME had me more or less nailed to some sofa or other with occasional totterings outside to allow hellcritters to stretch their legs and perform certain functions.*  Today I was at least upright and mobile–and downstairs gazing despairingly at bookshelves full of other people’s books.

I’m getting Third House ready for rental.  Yaay.  Not.

I realise it’s not the end of the world.  It’s not even not the end of the world as I know it.  But it’s the end of a little piece of the world as I want to know it.

I’ve earned my living as a free lance writer for—yeep—nearly thirty years.  But I’ve never been a best-seller** and I don’t write frelling fast enough.  I managed to buy Third House during an uncharacteristic little flurry of getting out a book a year for about three years.  For which I am devoutly grateful.  At least I do own it.

But at the moment I can’t afford to own it.  I didn’t have enough money to do a really thorough remodel;  I went way over budget as it is to get the frelling weight-bearing, which is to say backlist-bearing, floor put in, because of the building regs about weight-bearing floors.  And it turned out fine for someone who mainly wants space for lots and lots of books, but it’s not at all laid out for normal people with, you know, kids and families and things.***  So while I’ve been watching the bottom of my bank balance get closer and closer and plainer and plainer† I’ve also been wondering if it was even worth trying to let Third House, with its peculiar floor plan and paucity of bedrooms.  Eventually I went round to our nice local realtor . . . and the answer is yes . . . just.  By the time I’ve paid to have an assortment of small annoying problems scolded and told to pull their frelling socks up, frelling broadband installed, the (frelling) garden thumped into order†† and all that extra-frelling backlist and a few bits of furniture flung into storage . . . I’ll do very slightly better than break even . . . after about a year to earn back what I put into making it up to rentable standard.†††  But I think it’s probably worth it to have someone else paying the shockingly unhilarious council tax on a small not-all-that-old house that happens to be inconveniently located in a quaint village downtown deemed a Conservation Area.

Meanwhile . . . storage will be slightly cheaper if there’s less stuff to store and if I do some of my own packing.  Hence staring at my bookshelves and hence Fiona, bless her many, many times with yarn sales of extraordinary splendour and a satnav that is never wrong.

But I’m still not feeling exactly chirpy about the whole thing, so you’ll excuse me if I go to bed early with a good book.  One of the ones I brought home with me from Third House. . .  sniff. . . . ‡

* * *

* Days when the ME is bad it would be very nice if they were taller.  I can rebalance myself delicately with fingers resting on an alert hellhound head.  The hellterror, however, is probably roping my ankles together with her lead or using my knees as a rocket-launcher.^  It’s not that she can’t hurl herself six feet into the air after a squirrel, it’s that she can’t maintain it long enough for me to lean on her.

^ I was on the floor this evening being a hellterror-toy and Fiona said, are you aware that your right rear pocket is parting company with your jeans?  Yes, I said, that’s because the hellterror sticks her hind feet in that pocket when I’m carrying her under that arm.  And a good thing too, what she weighs.+

+ I had occasion to be carrying Chaos a few days ago.  He weighs barely more than she does.#  It’s just the long trailing legs make it harder to get him over a dog-unfriendly stile.

# Of course she eats, which might have something to do with it.

** Yes, I’ve been on the list a few times.  But these things can be both mutable and evanescent.  I’ve never been a best-seller like Ninety-Eight Shades of Chartreuse is a best-seller.

*** All three of our current houses together would be about half the floor space of the old house—and about twenty per cent of attics, outbuildings and garden.  Granted that was a big house, and bigger than we needed.  Still.

† Is it more distressing to have your monster super-global corporate bank jerking you around when you have a lot of money in it, or only a little?  Discuss.

†† I hope my future tenants like roses.

†††This is not the wild American back of beyond, but hopelessly over-civilised southern English village society.  Rose Manor wouldn’t get a booking in New Arcadia.^

^ But KES is going to make my fortune after all and then I can have Third House back.

‡ And I’m NEVER HAVING OVERNIGHT GUESTS AGAIN.  The sofabed at the cottage isn’t going to have room to open any more, after the twelve more boxes of books imported from Third House. . . .

After the storm there is singing

 

 

I think the frelling rain last night left bruises—hellcritters certainly wanted me to think so—but other than that we got off pretty lightly around here.  I have some seriously unhappy dahlias and a kamikaze geranium but I did NOT lose any of those huge unmovable pots I’ve got braced up in a foolhardy manner at the top of the outside half-flight to the greenhouse and the bins.  I took the little pots down off their various walls and posts and wedged them all in up there between bins, water-butt and house walls (mine and Theodora’s) and they’re all fine . . . so long as I move them back again before someone stumbles up there expecting to be able to walk on the ground.  Me, pre-caffeine, for example.*  I also, very late last night, got out of bed and padded downstairs and out into the screaming gale in my nightgown to unhook the frelling hanging basket from the front of the house.  It and I both came dripping indoors again.**

We do have some trees down and as hellhounds and I were sprinting off toward Nadia at 10:15 this morning there were several tailbacks where the road was down to a single lane:  the heroic road-clearers with their electric vorpal blades had been out since dawn, but they were still at the clear-one-lane-and-get-on-to-next-total-blockage stage.  Tonight the wind is still frisking around rather—making early compost out of all those autumn leaves—and the electricity is also still bleeping off and on, much to the consternation of our older technology***, and the internet did say hahahahahaha you must be joking for a while last night at the cottage.  But according to the meteorologists (if you believe meteorologists) the worst is over.

I made it to Nadia’s.  It has not been a good week, for singing or anything else—some of this will be brought out of the shadows, dusted down, its hands examined for stickiness, and introduced on the blog†—and I went in clutching my music with no great hopes of anything.  But I . . . sang again.  This is almost becoming a habit.  Golly.  I do feel I need to keep reminding you that we are talking relative here.  On an absolute scale where Beverly Sills is a ten and the East Water Vole Debating Society’s surprise performance of CATS in which Old Deuteronomy is played by a Dalmatian dog named Spot is a one, I am somewhere between .0025 and .003, depending on the kind of day I’m having.

This is nonetheless significantly up from being an ungradeable tinny wailing from the void.  I was trying to explain to Nadia that having any voice at all is disconcerting and in a weird way it feels like starting all over again because I have no control over it.  Yes, she said immediately, it’s like when you change up from the 14 hand New Forest pony to the 15.3 thoroughbred.  Yes.  That is very like—even if it’s a thoroughbred you got cheap because nobody else wants it.  It’s still 15.3 . . . which is a lot bigger than your pony . . . and it wants to work.  Which brings me to the next thing I was trying to explain to Nadia:  I now sort-of have a voice, which I have attained by ridiculous struggle, but here it is.  And there is apparently responsibility involved.  How more-than-ridiculous is that.  It’s like a dog is for life and not just for Christmas:  if I don’t give my voice regular exercise and attention it sits in a corner looking at me with large sad forlorn eyes.  MCKINLEY.  GET A GRIP.††

I still frelling go to frelling pieces as soon as I have to sing an actual song.  Let’s just stay with exercises where I have a prayer of remembering everything.  THERE’S TOO MUCH TO REMEMBER WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO SING A REAL SONG.  And I don’t mean memorizing the lyrics, although when I do—usually inadvertently, from pounding through the poor thing so often bits of it helplessly adhere—that actually helps because it’s one less thing to have to remember consciously†††.  Meanwhile you’re trying to negotiate the jungle full of things with teeth of maintaining air space and support, keeping your huge fat tongue out of the way, melody, dynamics, meaning, emotional commitment and expressiveness, twiddly bits and so on. . . .

I’m presently rather madly floundering among not one, not two but three Mozart arias, all in Italian.  Well, I love Mozart, I can just about sing Italian‡, and the prospect of my ever singing Verdi even as an amateur doofus are not at all good.‡‡ And then Nadia told me I had done very well with my first German song‡ AND SHE GAVE ME A NEW ONE TO LEARN.

::Beams::

* * *

* Gwyn_sully

I hope none of you are at your best and brightest when you’re reading it and, if I’m lucky, making amusing/interesting/engaged comments on the forum.

Oh yes. I read this blog as part of my morning routine during the work week. Aka prior to caffeine ingestion. . . .

You can READ before caffeine?!?  You can make your EYES FOCUS and your BRAIN TRANSLATE THOSE SQUIGGLES BEFORE CAFFEINE?  I’m so impressed.

** I would probably have risked it for myself but I was having visions of a freak tornado throwing it through some neighbour’s window.

*** I AM SO GRATEFUL FOR SELF-SETTING CLOCKS.  Especially when frelling Daylight Savings Time has just begun/ended less than twenty-four hours before a major power-chopping storm.

† And some of it won’t.

†† The development of some kind of singing capacity is not unlike my struggles on the end of a bell-rope.  When I was a young ringing thing groping through trebling to bob doubles . . . progressing in time to the horror the horror of ringing bob doubles inside . . . the idea of ringing Stedman was beyond my capability to imagine.  And that was just Stedman doubles.  Stedman triples was something that only happened among superhumans.

Well.  No.  I ring Stedman triples.  I don’t ring it very frelling well, I’d better be on the one or, if it’s a only plain course, maybe the two and I’m totally dependent on the rest of the band being SUPERB to get through a touch at all.  But I do ring it.  This was inconceivable to me nine years ago.

You wouldn’t want to hear me singing Voi che sapete—or Dido’s Lament or Linden Lea.  But I am singing them.

††† Which is just great till I suddenly REALISE I’m singing the lyric from memory and then panic.  And forget, of course.  This happens regularly with Nadia.  Sigh.

‡ It sure beats singing in English:  all those consonants.  All those diphthongs.  But I haven’t given up on Linden Lea.  Or The Roadside Fire or Finzi’s Fear No More.  I am a sap.

‡‡ Maybe Azucena.  Siiiiiiiigh.  Stride la vampa is even in my Big Cheezy Book of Mezzo Opera Arias.  With Voi che sapete and Dido’s Lament.

‡‡‡ Mind you it’s taken something like six months.  Maybe more.  I thought I never would get my head around those frelling words.  And then quite suddenly it started becoming possible.  I still sound about as German as a chipmunk sounds like Brigitte Fassbaender . . . but I sound a lot more German than I did six months ago, and I don’t just keep breaking down spewing gggrrrrmmmmvvvvzzzzzgrzldblgggg any more.