Robin McKinley's Blog, page 43

Not a good day*

 

 

BUT FIRST, BEFORE I FORGET:  YO, YOU AMERICANS, PETER’S DEATH OF A UNICORN IS A NOOK DAILY SPECIAL [or something like that] FOR TODAY ONLY.  ORDER AT ONCE OR BE ETERNALLY DAMNED BY THE HELLGODDESS TO A FUTURE OF THE LIBRARY HAVING JUST LOANED THE BOOK YOU WANTED FIVE MINUTES BEFORE YOU GOT THERE/ THE BOOKSHOP JUST SOLD THE LAST COPY OF THE BOOK DITTO**   http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/death-of-a-unicorn-peter-dickinson/1000971256?ean=9781618730411

* * *

. . . In fact a ratbag sucking pukefest of a day.  It’s probably just as well that poor Nadia is suffering what is probably her first school-soup*** experience† and cancelled everyone’s voice lessons today;  I would have had trouble driving that far or standing up for an hour.  Thank you so much unnamed off-the-planet ex-colleague;  I’m pretty sure there’s a germ involved in my present circumstances of feeling like six kinds of death† but as I whined to Merrilee it’s getting stomped with extreme prejudice by Ms Off the Planet that’s brought the ME back in full gruesome force.

There are at least certain advantages to two middle-aged hellhounds and a hellterror.  The hellhounds will forgive me less exuberant hurtling in exchange for extra time on the sofa, and the hellterror will, in her manic, perpetual-motion way, do a fair bit toward keeping herself amused so long as I have enough physical and moral strength to scrape her off the ceiling and drag her out of the hellhounds’ bed occasionally.  No, make that often.  She liiiiiiiiiiiiiiives to torture the hellhounds.  When she’s loose they lie in their bed staring at me reproachfully/ balefully/ accusingly.  Darkness tries to hug the shadows and keep a low profile—with less than satisfactory results—Chaos emerges occasionally to pretend to not play with her and also, especially at the cottage where the hellhound crate is around the kitchen-island from where I usually sit, to get a better angle on his hellgoddess glare.  I can ignore hellhounds quite successfully if I have my head down over computer/iPad, until—usually just after I’ve registered that it’s been too silent for the last twenty seconds or so—there is a GIGANTIC ERUPTION from the hellhound crate and I am obliged to go enforce some slippery and unstable semblance of order.

It was a beautiful day today—I would have liked to get some gardening done†††, but minimal hurtling was as much as I was capable of.  The extra sofa time was performed with dispatch however.  I read THE TALE OF GENJI in the original . . . er.  Actually I played one of these computer-Boggle-with-minor-variations games on Astarte.  There are several of them and the one I like best‡ has an assortment of background screen colours . . . all of them way too frelling dark.  What’s the deal?  What’s wrong with a WHITE choice?‡‡  Playing this idiot game gives me eyestrain.

I’m going to bed early.  And I’m not taking Astarte with me.‡‡‡

* * *

* When you turn the title of the post into a live shortcut, if you’ve used exactly the same title before there’s a little number that appears at the end of the live-shortcut title telling you how unoriginal you are.  I’m expecting this one to be Not a Good Day 1,000,000 ^

^ It has been such a bad day I’m sitting here staring into space and considering putting ‘Not a Good Day’ in the title-space in a new-post window, and hanging it publicly long enough to get a live shortcut off it to see what my number is.  And then delete the freller.

I think I’ll just let it be a surprise.+

+ The ‘*’ may make it original however.  Unless I’ve done that before too.

** Except mine, of course.  I need the sales.^

^ I know—I think I know—that libraries that loan ebooks are strictly controlled about copies and number of times let out.  What about e-shops?  Can they always just press a button and sell another copy of a book in their ‘warehouse’?  Until their contract or whatever it is runs to an end?

*** That is school germ/virus miasma:  the kids all bring their individual runny noses and coughs and stir them around in the halls, classrooms and playgrounds and soon there is a fug no mere mortal can withstand.   Several generations of Dickinsons call it school soup.

† Stella started school this term

†† Approximately.

Bubonic plague
Rabies
Terminal Crankiness
Mad Hedgehog Disease
Colour Out of Space-itis
The Shock of Discovering that the World As I Knew It Is Ending:  Green & Black’s is ceasing production of their mint chocolate which is the rock on which my life is founded.^  This is SERIOUS.  I could go into a DECLINE.  Yes, G&B makes some very pleasant other kinds of chocolate, and I do eat them occasionally, in a casual and condescending way.  BUT it’s the mint that is the nonpareil, the paragon.^^  You need to worry about this.  If I decline too fast and too dramatically I might not get PEG III finished.  I might lose heart, pack it all in and become a piano tuner.^^^

^ Yes, yes, I know, God and all that.  God and mint fondant dark chocolate.

^^ And may I just say that I abominate and abhor that cheezy workaround that some chocolatiers employ, of adding a few drops of peppermint oil to their basic chocolate and calling it mint chocolate.  That is like calling Canada Dry Ginger Ale Veuve Cliquot Champagne.  It is not.  They both have something to do with mint flavouring/fizzy liquid.  THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

^^^ I have told you that the end of PEG II is arguably worse than the end of PEG?

††† My winter pansies are all sitting around tapping the tips of their leaves and going, Well?  Well?

‡ Despite an EXTRAORDINARILY whimsical list of acceptable words.

‡‡ Or pale pink, of course.

‡‡‡ Oh yes I am.  She’s not all evil eye-bashing time-wasters.  Aloysius sent me a fascinating, if mostly rather beyond me, pdf book on a sort of arc of Bible interpretation and I’m going, Really?  Really?, a lot.  I think Aloysius finds me fun to watch.  The problem with this late-conversion thing is trying to integrate it into the basic fact that I have almost sixty-one years of experience as a human being.  Remember I said 12 September last year that everything changes?  Everything?  Yeah.  And it takes more than thirteen months to catch up.

The forum comments that didn’t get into Oh, Great . . .

 

 

Yesterday was a black hole, by the way*, but I’m better today.  I think.

EMoon

Oh, yes, the “Are you published?” after you’ve said that’s what you do. Even after you say how many novels you’ve written (since occasionally that comes first) and you know perfectly well that no one (I think no one in history but I could be wrong) writes over 20 novels just for the heck of it. It’s work. It takes time. It takes time away from other things in life that a writer might want to do. I wrote one monster . . .when I wasn’t published, but chances are very, very high that if the thing had not been published, I would now be much better at knitting, singing, gardening, riding, and the house wouldn’t look like it does…and it would have been my only novel. . . . .(Of course I’d have gone mad. Madder than I am. But I don’t think I’d have sat down to write just about a book a year without deadlines and checks. Also, we’d now be very broke.)

Yes.  And that’s the other thing:  if you can’t earn a living by writing, then trust funds and/or wealthy spouses aside, you’re going to have to earn it some other way.  Now earning a living is a major time suck.  It’s just that if you’re doing it for love, you can manage to ignore the forty cents/shilling thruppenny per hour you’re ultimately getting paid, so long as you can keep eating.

Hoonerd

Not being a blog follower when PEG came out, but still having visited the website enough to know that sequels were definitely not the hell goddess’ thing, I came to the end of the book . . . I tried my hardest to reason with myself . . . if this was where the story ended, then this is the story that needed to be told and I should look inside it to find the meaning, and I came up with all these beautiful ideas about friendship and perseverance and had completed the grief process up to acceptance… Then discovered the sequel tantalizers online.

::falls down laughing::  Sorry.  It’s friendly laughter.  Still . . . ::falls down laughing some more::

There certainly could be a story about how Sylvi and Ebon, Marked for Life by Their Tragic Separation, went on to do Great Things Alone.  That’s just not the one I’m writing.

Er, this Peg II crashing to a halt business is a little frightening. I’m glad it was past tense and I feel like I’ve heard positive things about it lately? Hmmm.

PEG II crashed and burned because I was refusing to recognise that it needed to be two books.  Two more books, making a [YAAAAAAARRRGGH] trilogy.  So the pacing, the story arc, the way everything fit together, was totally bodged and gleepy in the original PEG II.  This was scaring me quite a lot, as you may imagine.  I still don’t know whether it was just I had my head down so far I couldn’t see the forest for the trees or if I really was suffering a total mental block about the idea of a [twitch] trilogy [twitch].  Anyway.  By the time I finally figured it out, or let myself figure it out, I had the morale of club moss or a dead octopus or something. I could not face starting over from the beginning right away. Meanwhile—remember that benchmark about eating?—I had to keep eating.  So I wrote SHADOWS.

I admit PEG II and I are still not the best of friends.  There’s an awful lot of I Have Been Here Before, But Not in a Good Way.  But we’re getting there.

Nat

I really like the family dynamics in your work- I get rather sick and tired of lowly orphan/foundling hero/heroines- is that just fantasy writer quick hand of being able to send them off questing without too many obstacles??? I think I’m going to do a short story on the peeved mother who gets left behind on the farm who suddenly has to do all the chores and swears at that mysterious old stranger who has gotten little Timmy all excited about saving the world.

Thank you.  Yes.  I agree.  Orphans are fine, but there are a lot of families out there.**  And families are interesting.  I’ve been thinking about that story about the left-behind mum too.  And the other three children, the herd of goats and the ill-tempered pony.   And the cabbages.  And the mortgage payments.  Feel free to write it first.  All good stories can be retold indefinitely.

As an avid fantasy reader one thing that bugs me IS sequels that are done just for sequels sake. Singletons are lovely.

Singletons are different.  They feel different, they read differently, they hold together differently.  It’s not just that they’re perforce shorter, although that’s the obvious thing.  It would be a gigantic pity if The Serial Mind totally took over.  But I want to put in a word of defense of writers writing less-than-great sequels.  Some of them . . . are just writing less-than-great sequels.  It happens.  But some of them have been told that either they’re writing a series or that there’s a rumour that Wal-Mart is hiring.  Remember the need to keep eating.  I’m lucky:  I’ve been around a long time as a writer of singletons and most people are mostly used to it.  I’ve been haunted by sequels all my working life but when I wrote SWORD and HERO while series were desirable they weren’t yet a stick that your public and your publisher beat you with.***

…. I think I’ll stick to quilt pattern designs. Hmmm. A pegasus would look great.

A pegasus would look great.  But if it’s a McKinley pegasus remember they are NOT horses with wings.

LHurst

Thank you for the glimpses into your mind and life that you provide in the blog. I’ve become a compulsive blog reader in the last year or two. It’s not only what you write but the way you write that draws me irresistibly. Thank you! 

You’re very welcome and thank you.  And I want to say out here on the blog that generally speaking I try not to copy and paste the really nice compliments because it makes me look like such a prat.  But I read them with ENORMOUS PLEASURE.  Just sayin’.

Alanna

We shall make t-shirts that say “FRELL YOUR FRELLING SEQUEL” and wear them around.

I’m beginning to think I should officially look into the t-shirt thing as an author who needs to keep eating while she [re]writes her next [frelling] novel.  There’s also the footnote t-shirt.  Maybe there should be a PEGASI ARE NOT HORSES WITH WINGS t-shirt too.

Sixpence

What I love is books that continue around the edges of them. They are so much more ‘real’ than books where the author finishes everything off.

YES.  EXACTLY.  As a reader I way prefer books where it’s not all tied up with a big shiny ribbon at the end.  The big-shiny-ribbon conclusion tends to kill it dead, for me, and send retroactive gangrenous ripples back through the book that I had perhaps been enjoying—or at least successfully suspending my disbelief for—till then.

Shalea

. . . I sometimes approach sequels with an attitude of “oh, so these poor characters — don’t they just get to live, well, not happily-ever-after necessarily, but out of the spotlight maybe? With no more than what the rest of us typically have to deal with, at least?” Whereas if they’ve landed in a sequel again it’s because something Very Exciting has happened.

Snork.  As a fairly dedicated stay-at-home myself†, who relishes her hot baths, pillows and blankets, and mains-electric reading lights,  as well as a writer (mostly) of singletons, I like your attitude.

Maddyfox

. . . why, a good 60% of the time is the next sentence out of someone’s mouth Oh, are you published?

AND this one…

Oh, I’ve always wanted to write – everyone tells me I should write a book about (blah blah blah) …

 SOOOOO, my question is always: Do you like to read? To which, invariably, the reply from alleged aspiring writer is: ohhhh noooo – I hate to read!

‘Invariably’?  You poor thing.  You need to find a better class of pub/gym/chat room/alternate reality to hang out in.  The aspirers who talk to me usually do love to read—and seem to think this means they’ll be natural writers.  Cough.  Cough.  And it’s a beginning, of course—it’s even a good beginning, being a reader:  it’s just not enough.††

* * *

* What a good thing it was already a Saturday!  Or I might have been forced to hang a KES ep out of order!

** Harry has a brother!  Okay, she’s an orphan, but she has a BROTHER!  Also, I was younger then, and it was harder to keep account of too many important characters.  Trying to hold everyone straight in HERO was a steep learning curve.  If someone had told me then I was on track to write a book with PEG’s cast of characters I might be a manager of graveyard-shift supermarket shelf restockers by now.^

^ This is the Mysterious Disappearing Footnote from the other night, for anyone who was confused by the forum exchange about it.

*** There’s a similar sort of defense to be made about orphan protagonists.  I’m sure there are some out there that were created orphans for no better reason than that the author wanted to get on with the story . . . but that’s not actually a bad reason either.  What starts to get on my nerves is if there’s a huge doodah about the protagonist’s orphaned or otherwise tragedified state when it isn’t, as I-the-cranky-reader sees it, earned.

† Bell ringing is VERY EXCITING!  I rang a HARVEST FESTIVAL today!

†† And the awful truth is that there are a few good writers out there who are not great readers.  I Will Name No Names, but I know a few of them.  Arrrrgh.  It’s like the comforting truth that it takes time to write really well.  No.  Wrong.  It takes some of us a very long time to write anything worth reading.  Not all of us.  Arrrrrgh.  On the whole I’m willing to leave the non-readers in peace because I pity them for what they’re missing.  THE FAST WRITERS I WANT SHIPPED TO ANOTHER GALAXY.  NOW.

KES, 99

 

NINETY NINE

Slowly I unsnapped my seat belt.  It made a noise like the clap of doom in the silence.  I sat there breathing (audibly) for another half minute.  It was so quiet.  I could almost regret the whooshing pine trees Rose Manor didn’t have.  Sid made a small restless movement and a polite grunt which I translated as, well, let’s get on with it then.

I opened Merry’s door and slid down cautiously.  Yes, there was solid ground.  I took a better grip on my flashlight and made sure the loop of Sid’s lead was over my wrist:  I didn’t think she would decide to hit the road again but I was taking no chances.  We—well, I—stumbled over the ground and up the overgrown path.  The stairs to the front door went on forever.  The stained glass over the door twinkled in my wildly swinging flashlight beam as I fished for keys.  Tomorrow I would find out what it was.  Tomorrow.  Tomorrow was a long way off.  I continued fishing.  There was that bracelet Jan had told me to keep;  there was the pebble I’d taken away from Sid.  The keys had to be . . . yes.  They were.  There were advantages to quarter-ton keys:  you know where they have to be by the direction you’re listing in.  I could think of advantages I would prefer but I wasn’t in a mood (or a position) to argue with fate.

Okay, listen, I said to myself.  The pile of fresh, real horse manure in the middle of the road proved that it wasn’t Murac.  And let’s not examine this hypothesis.  Let’s just cradle it gratefully.  I was tired.  My brain was skipping like a bent CD.  Tick—ticktick—tick—ticktickticktick.

Clunk.

I swung the door open.  I wished I’d thought of the whole coming-back-in-the-dark thing when Mike and I had left.  I groped for a light switch.  There had to be one but I couldn’t find it.  We took a couple of steps inside the dark house.  My footsteps creaked.  “Hi, honey, we’re home,” I murmured.  Nothing answered.  Fortunately.  There were stripes of faint moonlight lying on the parlour floor like wormhole ruts.  I edged past them, trailing Sid, and went into the kitchen.  Light switch.  I turned it on.  The shadows leaped back so quickly I was sure there had been things in them.

I was supposed to sleep here tonight?  Totally impossible.  Fall down in a sudden coma, possibly magically induced by the poltergeist who liked its solitude, very likely, but sleep?  No way.  No double-festering way.

I let the breath out I hadn’t realised I was holding.  The uncurtained windows were grey with wiggly jaggedy black bits, which would be silhouettes of trees and climbing roses and things.  Perfectly normal garden things.  The kitchen table still looked solid and sturdy.  It was probably a trick of the light, but the wood grain almost looked like dapples on a horse.  The chairs from the parlour still looked forbidding and uncomfortable.  The old gas stove still looked like a heap of trash.  And I wanted a cup of tea.

I moved toward Caedmon’s niche.  I knew he was still doing his wood-burner thing because the house was warm.  Ish.  Walking toward him and into his steady heat was like walking into the embrace of a friend.  I was definitely sleeping on the floor next to him tonight.  Maybe I should get a fan, as Mike had suggested.  Not only would it move the warmth around a little more it would make a noise.  I didn’t like listening to my own breathing.

“All right,” I said.  Sid looked up at me.  “We unload.  We eat something.  We do as little unpacking as possible but we rig up some kind of bed-like thing in front of Caedmon.  If it isn’t late enough to go to bed by then I’ll write to Norah.”  I thought about this.  No, writing to Norah would be unwise.  Something might slip out.  Something like eeeeeeeeep.  Much better to start rereading LOTR.  Start at the beginning:  A Long-Expected Party.   I’d been rereading LOTR in times of stress for thirty years.  An e-LOTR had been my first purchase after I’d downloaded the Kindle app, which had been my first download after I bought the iPad.  Okay.  We have a plan.  The only drawback to it was the going back out in the dark again to unload Merry.

I managed to find some front porch lights and turned them all on.  Hurrah for agencies that kept their rental properties’ light bulbs up to date.  This made the front yard look far more like late-Saruman Orthanc than I liked, but it was still better from the ankle-breaking, or deinonychus-pouncing, standpoint than total darkness.  I left Sid guarding the door, fumbled my way to ground level, pulled everything out of Merry and made a heap on the ground, and then ferried it up all those stairs in three trips.

I found the light switch for the front room and turned it on.  The silvery frame of the Margaret MacDonald print leaning against the wall behind the book boxes flashed briefly as the lights came up.  Later, I thought.  I have no idea where I’m hanging anything yet. I hoisted the last bags over the threshold of the front door.  I closed the door.  I locked it.

The clunk of the bolt sounded different from the inside.

Oh great . . .

 

Great.  Splendid.  The best.  I think I’m coming down with something.  A fever-shakes-aches-and-pains-and-staying-in-bed type of something.  MAYBE IT DOESN’T REALLY MEAN IT.  One of the few up sides of ME is that it tends to be very jealous of its control over your health and to see off mere commonplace germs.  But this is not something you can count on.  Meanwhile in my little tap-dance and smoke-and-mirrors way there are twangly stressors that don’t get mentioned much in the blog.  In the first place while it’s lovely to have a new book out, especially one you are receiving lots of lovely feedback on,* it’s also stressful.  The bottom line is that if your last book doesn’t do too brilliantly the future of the next one is in doubt.  SHADOWS seems to be doing well . . . but you can’t help worrying.  Well, I can’t help worrying.

In the second place I received another of those lightning-bolts from headquarters not long ago** and . . . um.  Well, it’s a homeopathic/alt medicine principle that sometimes you get a cold or a fever because your body is doing housecleaning and getting rid of or setting fire to stuff it doesn’t want any more.  And this particular lightning-bolt was definitely the ‘get rid of this rubbish’ variety.  So while my mind is still reeling my body may be getting on with business.

And third . . . I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you this story.  It would make such good blog material because it is bonkers to a very high degree.  But I don’t think I can.  Someone I deal with on an almost daily basis got knocked off her perch by something—I don’t even know what—and I’ve been morphed involuntarily into the Big Bad so she has someone to blame.  WHAT?  Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  There was one truly spectacular phone call but a lot of it has proceeded by text and email so I can go back and READ IT and reassure myself that I’m not the crazy one here.  Crumbs.  But I’m still suffering bunker mentality, which is a germ magnet.

So you’ll forgive me if I use responding to forum comments as a crutch again, and then I’m going to bed.  With a good book, but an undemanding good book.  Possibly one I already know the end of, so I don’t have to worry about that.

* * *

Blondviolinist

boddhi_d wrote

Never mind a sequel to Sunshine; I’m holding out for the cookbook.

That’s one of the biggest similarities between SHADOWS & SUNSHINE that I noticed… SHADOWS doesn’t have quite the emphasis on food that SUNSHINE does, but there were several dishes (starting with Maggie’s mom’s chicken, apples, & cream meal) that I very much want the recipe for!

This boggles my mind.  SUNSHINE—and Sunshine—are obsessed with food.  She’s a baker at her stepdad’s café!  And although the story went as the story went, stories are often clever this way, and this does make the whole ‘feeding’ thing with Con more resonant.  Maggie in SHADOWS is just a teenage girl who likes her food.  I admit that I took advantage of opportunities to specify—the chicken, apples and cream, the chickpea and tomato stew . . . and of course the hot chocolate—but it didn’t seem to me there was, you know, lots of food.  I may be suffering the mental and emotional effects of Post Menopausal Zero Metabolism/Possessed by Demons ME Digestion worse than I realised.

Oh, I’ve got that chicken recipe . . . somewhere.  Remind me again when there’s less going on and I’ll look for it.

Stardancer

. . . my heart got a bit wrenched just by being reminded of OUTLAWS. I would adore a sequel to that book. But I adore all of the other worlds, too, including the ones I haven’t met yet,

::Beams::

so who I am to demand one over the other? . . .  (Although I must say that knowing that any such sequel would NOT include Robin’s murder by a homicidal abbess greatly cheers me. I couldn’t believe it when my beautiful hardback, illustrated set of Robin stories as a child ended on that note.)

Howard Pyle by any chance?  I know he’s ancient but that edition’s a classic.  And it’s the one that ruined my life.  It genuinely depressed me about being a girl—I wasn’t even menstruating yet, so I was still officially a kid.  I had always clung to tomboy status, but I already knew I wasn’t going to grow up to be a boy.  It wasn’t just that she killed him, my beautiful kind generous heroic Robin, she killed him by treachery.  I couldn’t bear it.  It makes me feel a little sick even now.  A little sick and a lot angry.

Hmm.  I could always just write that part of the story.  Hmmm.

Ivonava

. . . I have trouble with the footnotes occasionally, but find they often read quite happily on their own. . . .

A lot of people read them like this.  I know because they tell me.  You read a post straight through top to bottom unless there’s a footnote at a particularly tantalizing point so you’ll flick down for that one.  Or you’re reading the footnotes and you find one whose antecedent is not obvious so you flick up.

It’s okay.  It’s only a blog.  Nobody dies.

I have a feeling that the people that demand sequels are simply a little challenged in their ability to express their delight, and know no better than to ask for more of the same. I’m sure it’s intended as a compliment.

I think in some cases that’s true.  This is another of those things I’d never quite articulated—partly because I’m not at my best when the s-word is used in my hearing—but I think you’re right, and I should try to remember it the next time it happens.  It’s a sort of alternative formula for squeeeee.

Some of these people, however, are more addicts.  These are the people who MUST HAVE MORE.  They’re ripping open the next pack of Green & Black’s before they’ve finished the first.  I’m that way about books myself.  Just not about sequels.

* * *

* And I delete unread anything that begins ‘you stupid cow’ or equivalent.  I also delete immediately if something that started well devolves into ‘you stupid cow’ territory.

** You hear about burning bushes and ladders and angels and things in the Bible^ but you rarely hear about that sensation of having had a bucket of cold water dumped over you.  Or maybe I just haven’t got to those parts yet.

^ Never sleep with a stone for a pillow, that’s my motto.  How could you NOT have weird visions if you’re trying to sleep with your head on a stone?

Short Wedn—I mean Thursday

 

 

 

 

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

::Beams::  ::Beams more::  ::Beams till her face starts melting::

 

Judith

Ever think of trying your hand at poetry? (Since you have nothing else to do in all your spare time?)

Yes, I’m afraid so.  I have spurts of poetry-writing:  the Poetry Council is no kinder or better-organised an operation than the Story Council.  But I have a notebook beside my bed that . . . well . . . hey.  This is clearly the moment to try and resurrect my idea for a haiku-writing contest, with SHADOWS’ Japanese and origami.  That idea was from years ago . . . some time before The Great Bell Fund Doodle Disaster laid me low and I more or less swore I would never run another contest that required me to do anything.*  Hmm.  I wonder what the rules were.  All I remember is that I’d be writing haiku too.  Maybe Blogmom will remember better.  I’ll ask her.

Diane in MN

I finished SHADOWS last night–TERRIFIC book, thank you!!

Thank you.

–and thought to myself that it would probably generate a good-sized sequel response. Especially since readers seem now to be conditioned to think in terms of series. Aside from franchises or the occasional series like the Black Stallion books, I don’t think they were anything like as common when I was a youngish reader, decades ago. I might have welcomed sequels to books I liked, but I wouldn’t have expected them.

Yes.  That’s my memory too.  Nancy Drew—which I don’t think was a franchise yet when we were kids—and The Black Stallion—which also became a franchise later, I think?—were the two I knew and they actually felt different to me than standalones or stand-nearly-alones like, say, FIVE CHILDREN AND IT and THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET.  Narnia was sui generis and LOTR was one story in three volumes.  Serial Madness started in murder mysteries, that I’m aware of—it may have begun somewhere else entirely but that’s where I first encountered it—and murder mysteries have become far more acceptably mainstream** than fantasy (and SF) still is.  So maybe series are a good thing.  She says dubiously.  Since most (not all!  Most!) series start to bore me to death after the first three or so, even the ones that stay ‘good’ in some kind of absolute sense.  It’s highly possible that I don’t write series because I don’t much like ’em as a reader.

Anne_d

Sequel? Well, Robin, if you’re going to write a sequel to something, I think it ought to be…

 Whatever you feel like writing, if and when you feel so inspired. So there. *blows raspberries at annoying persons and makes sure Robin’s Mr Bolty is properly charged, just in case*

You are a Wonderful Human Being and I Kiss Your Hands and Feet.  ::Puts fully-charged Mr Bolty carefully within reach::

Gwyn_sully

Nat wrote

I FINALLY got to buy Shadows online . . . and my husband has some insane idea that I should give it to him to buy me for Christmas, and wait to read it until then. Wait??? I think not!!!

I have never understood why other people seem intent on commandeering perfectly good presents to oneself. If I have gone to all the trouble of buying something it means I am not inclined to wait until the next gift-giving occasion.

Lack of imagination.  That way they don’t have to come up with an idea themselves.  Call me a cynic but . . . you can learn to work this system, you know.  This time of year Peter has very nearly a file folder of interesting clippings beside his place at the kitchen table.

Catlady

If anyone ever took footnotes away from me I’d die. I keep absent-mindedly wanting to put footnotes in KES.

And I keep absent-mindedly expecting them. I surely wouldn’t mind if one crept in now and then, though maybe Kes herself would, perhaps.

I’m going to think about footnotes again in Part Two.***  Kes is emphatically enough her own self at this point that when I (shamelessly) rip off my own life to decorate hers I no longer feel the line between where I stop and she begins is any blurrier than it is with any character I’m responsible for.  I’ll see if she would find footnotes amusing.

And I still say the end of Sunshine is perfect. . . . I’m rationing Shadows, but I’m sure it ends perfectly, too. . . .  I look forward to the endings as excellent consolation prizes for the books being over.

(Thank you!)  YES.  I’ve never managed to articulate it that clearly but that’s exactly how I feel as a reader.  A really good ending makes it at least almost worthwhile that the book is over because part of what makes an ending resonate is that it is an ending.  And there’s always rereading. . . .

Boddhi_d

Never mind a sequel to Sunshine; I’m holding out for the cookbook.

Oh.  Well. . . .

Seriously, though, I hope the Story Council doesn’t develop an obsession with sequels. Would I love a new Damar novel? A sequel to SUNSHINE, or CHALICE, or SHADOWS? Or a novel from one of your short stories (say, FIRST FLIGHT)? Um, yes. Of COURSE. But…

 If you had written a third Damar novel, which novel would have gotten bumped down the road, or not written at all? ROSE DAUGHTER? If you had written a sequel to SUNSHINE, would you have had time to write CHALICE?

It is EXTREMELY kind of you not to mention that I could write faster.  I wish I could write faster.

As much as I’d love to know (for example, not at random) Mel’s story,

Yes.  Me too.  I’ve said before that Mel probably wins the Most Criminally Underused McKinley Character Award.  He’s also someone/something I know a lot about . . . just not enough, or at least not enough that sticks together, to make a story out of.  Arrrrrrgh.

I even more love having a whole new world to explore with each novel. So what if it’s a quick visit rather than an extended tour? I still got to meet Taks, Sippy & Hereyta, the Master of Willowlands, Narl, Ebon & Sylvi…

::Purrs::  Er . . . [pulls self together] . . . Well, you will see Ebon and Sylvi again of course.

Librarykat

. . . I read [SHADOWS] in several big gulps . . . Loved the Japanese and the origami – I found myself trying to picture the different folds.

Sigh.  It is very kind of you, too, in this case not to mention the Japanese beyond an acknowledgement that it’s there since (as I recall?) you’re a native speaker.  Note that there is far less either algebra or Japanese in SHADOWS than there was supposed to be.  But I had to get it written so I could get paid and the Story Council’s info files are invariably incomplete.  I’d had two offers of help on the Japanese and at least one on the maths and between email gremlins and life I dropped all those balls.  Siiiiiiigh.  I’ve already had one polite email from a SHADOWS reader who genuinely speaks Japanese.  And if I do write a sequel, I will have to get this sorted.  I thought I could about get away with Takahiro this time, because he hasn’t spoken Japanese in years and is rusty.  But I wouldn’t have that convenient excuse if I wrote any more about him.  And while I now have a minor jones for silly maths books for silly people I suspect Maggie’s algebra book has one or two things to say that to me would be . . . in Japanese.  Kanji.  Of which I’ve successfully memorised about three characters.  Maybe five.

EMoon

Oh, yes, indeedy…other writers DO know lots that never gets in the story, and rummage around frantically to find things that will actually hook up to make a story rather than a collection of interesting things. . . .

Oh, the Interesting Thing Syndrome.  Moan.  I know it so well.

Sequels…um. People keep wanting a sequel to The Speed of Dark.

Golly.  That seems to me about as goofy as wanting a sequel to BEAUTY and for similar reasons of story arc.

My Story Council equivalent (the Plot Daemon, Mr. Colin Glencannon from those books: he’s down in the engine room of the Story, pottering about until he gets steam up) isn’t offering any hope of it. . . . I can’t write it until it comes to me. I can always write something…there are always bubblings and stirrings and the Plot Daemon tells me to get up on the bridge and get ready to steer the ship, but the subject and destination appears in a nifty dispatch case (red leather, from other books) with a Top Secret label I have to sign and send back.

I AM VERY JEALOUS.  I just get whacked—usually a sharp blow to the back of the neck.

B_twin_1

ownedbycats wrote

([Footnotes] might even make those blasted cliffhangers slightly – SLIGHTLY – less annoying.)

Not necessarily… *imagines a cliffhanger where you have to wait a week to find out what the footnote is*.

::falls down laughing::

* * *

*Standard caveat:  It’s what happened about the bell fund that stomped me, not the doodles.  Unfortunately my morale crushes rather easily.  Yes I’m still doing doodles.  Still slowly.  Maybe there’s a Doodle Council.  That could explain a lot.

** Ie with better sales because a broader audience and more general attention.  Would I rather be feted or wealthy?  Wealthy.  Totally.

*** Speaking of series.

The S-word, continued

 

People are extraordinary.  Not always in a good way.  Before I plunge into part two of my rant I want to insert my usual disclaimer that the vast MAJORITY of my book mail—or I should say book contacts, since it includes all that on line stuff plus, when I still went to cons, face to face type comments*—is friendly, positive and courteous.  On days when the iron wall** I am repeatedly dashing myself at has developed spikes to make the dashing experience more interesting, this reader support is probably all that prevents me from taking the job as a graveyard-shift supermarket shelf restocker that I keep talking about.  Thank you to all of you.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  I really don’t think I’d like being a graveyard-shift supermarket shelf restocker.  I’d rather go on telling stories.

Then there’s the rogue reader element.  I’ve had another easily a dozen people demanding sequels to one thing or another as immediate reaction to last night’s blog post.***  What part of ‘I can only write what I am given to write’ don’t you understand?  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  Is reiterating what I’ve just told you I can’t do supposed to be cute?  Cute as roadkill.  Is it supposed to be encouraging?  Dancing on hot coals barefoot makes you hop around faster.  Are hot coals encouraging?†  So—what?  I’d write sequels if they came to me to be written.  They don’t.  There’s nothing I can do about this.  Reminding me relentlessly of my deficiencies is not a good way of getting my best work out of me.

At the opposite end of this range however are the people who have apparently taken it quietly that Robin McKinley Never Writes Sequels when they get to the end of PEGASUS.  WHAT?  I am just as mystified by this as I am by these people who go on insisting about the sequel to SUNSHINE or Damar or what have you.††  PEGASUS has to have a ‘sequel’—the story ISN’T FINISHED.  Clearly.  Well, I thought clearly.  But I get not only the outraged reactions to PEG THE FIRST . . . I also get these sad, humble, polite little notes saying, I know you don’t write sequels but the ending of PEGASUS is a little rough. . . .

LOOK.  THIS IS NOT A SPOILER.  SYLVI AND EBON GET BACK TOGETHER.  OF COURSE THEY DO.  GOOD GRIEF.  DON’T FRELLING WORRY ABOUT IT.†††

If any writer handed me-as-reader an ending like the end of PEGASUS and told me that is the end I would hunt them down and kill them, okay?  I’m pretty sure I’ve said that before, but I’m still getting mail . . . from people who manifestly don’t read this blog. ‡

So there’s PEGASUS, which has to go on with the story.  There’s SUNSHINE, which, despite all you people who think otherwise, and while it is certainly not neatly tied up with a bow and a SWAK sticker at the end, does NOT have to go on with the story.

Then there’s SHADOWS.  I admit that I got to the ending and sort of looked around and thought, uh oh.  Several of my first readers said, You do know you’re going to get bucketloads of queries about the sequel, don’t you?  And, grimly, I said, yes.  I do know.  And in this case . . . all you sequel-enquirers have a point.

But . . . I don’t know.  When I got to the end of SUNSHINE I already knew a lot about what happens after.  I knew most of the blunt answers to most of the obvious questions . . . I just didn’t know how they fit together in a story, and I still don’t know, ten years (eeep) after the book came out.  But a lot of SUNSHINE had been around in the Story Place in my head for quite a while, even though I didn’t recognise it as such till it went SHAZZAM and became SUNSHINE.  I wrote SHADOWS in what, for me, is a hurry, and more or less out of nowhere—dare I mention it had started life as a short story about a girl who hated her new stepfather, whom she suspected of doing illegal magic.  But when PEG II crashed and burned on me and I couldn’t face starting over right away with the prospect of PEG II and III looming but I also needed to keep eating . . . SHADOWS said, Pssst.  Over here.  The learning curve for me about Maggie and her world was pretty steep.  I’m still on it.

I don’t know if there will be a sequel.  Mind you, the ending of SHADOWS is fine.  It doesn’t need a sequel the way PEGASUS does.  But it’s also more open to writable possibilities than SUNSHINE is.  I don’t know.  Ask me in six months.  No, ask me in two or three years, after I’ve got PEG II and III handed in.

* * *

*  Brrrrrrr.  Real people.  Brrrrrrr.^

^ Why, in a random situation that is not a book convention or some other book-oriented activity, when you’re sitting around exchanging life info and, let’s further say, what you all do for a living—let’s say during the breaks of your Street Pastor training—and one person is a hairdresser^, this one is an accountant, that one teaches maths and physics^^, and it gets to you and you say you’re a writer, and someone says, oh, what do you write, and you say, fantasy, genre fantasy, wizards, dragons, enchanted swords, retold fairy tales and the occasional vampire, why, a good 60% of the time is the next sentence out of someone’s mouth Oh, are you published?  HOW THE RATBLASTED FRELL DO YOU THINK I EARN A LIVING IF I’M NOT PUBLISHED?  I have learnt, not without difficulty, NOT to murder these people with my bare hands, but I admit my fingers tend to flex involuntarily.

^ Or was.  SPing is popular with the still-lively retired

^^ Speaking of brrrrrrr.

** AKA ‘Story in progress [sic]’

*** There’s also some [wrestles self into submission] . . . person on Facebook the headline of whose comment begins When is the SHADOWS sequel coming? . . . I have not clicked on this to see how it continues.

† It doesn’t improve the quality of your hopping, please note.

†† Or SPINDLE, and make it all come out after all the way they thought it was supposed to and doesn’t.  Sorry.  No.  I would love to write a sequel to SUNSHINE or Seven Third Damar Novels, but if I wrote a sequel to SPINDLE the status quo would not change.

Or BEAUTY.  This of all of them confounds me the most, I think—I’ve already told you that every story I’ve ever written gets at least the occasional request for a sequel.  There is nothing to write a sequel with at the end of BEAUTY.  Even at the time I made embarrassed reference to my Technicolor ending, although now, getting on for forty years later, I still entirely support my younger self’s belief that that’s how the story goes.^  Speaking of story arcs:  that one is COMPLETE.  If I’d written a sequel it would have perforce been a whole new story with a few familiar names.

^ Warning:  overfamiliar caveat follows:  Although I wish I’d made it clear in that last looking-in-the-mirror bit that she sees she’s grown up, NOT that she’s become beautiful.  She HASN’T become ‘beautiful’.  She HAS grown up.  Sigh.

††† There’s lots of other stuff to worry about.  Just not that.^

^ Do they STAY together this time?  What does STAY TOGETHER mean?  Does anyone DIE in a fabulous tragic saving-the-universe kind of way?+

+ Mwa hahahahahahaha.

‡ Or at least if they do, when they raise their eyes from their knitting again, they miss a few lines.

The S-word

 

So.  Is there going to be a sequel to SHADOWS?

I DON’T FRELLING KNOW.  I DOUBT IT.  BUT.  IT’S JUST ABOUT POSSIBLE.  MAYBE. 

Which is an improvement on ‘NO.  NOW SHUT UP AND GO AWAY.  SHUT UP AND GO AWAY NOW.’  Right?*

Now as I have said here on a number of occasions previously, and often at top volume, I have been surprised by the vehemence of the demand for a sequel to SUNSHINE.  Not that it does the demanders any good.  The answer is still no.**

But SHADOWS . . .?

. . . To Be Continued.  Since I seem to have let myself get distracted again.***

* * *

* There is still no sequel to SUNSHINE.  All those of you who think you MUST HAVE ONE, repeat 1,000,000 times and then take a cold shower.  And just by the way, although I was more or less braced for the s-word question about SHADOWS I was not at all braced for the comments about SHADOWS being ‘kind of’ a sequel to SUNSHINE or that the worlds are very similar.  WHAT?  Aside from the chief fact that they’re both written by me, and most authors do have each his or her own singular voice which is still there behind the adaptation to each individual story, and that SUNSHINE and SHADOWS are both alt-mod urban America and told in first person by a cranky young woman I don’t see them as similar enough to warrant a lot of comparison.^  ‘Alt-mod urban America and told in first person by a cranky young woman’ would cover a bazillion titles currently teeming on Amazon.  The two of these I wrote are more similar to each other than they are to any of my ‘high’ fantasies, sure, but very few readers think that DEERSKIN is the elusive Third Damar Novel despite its being a third-person narration about a Young Woman Who Does Things with a throwaway reference to Damar^^ . . . or that SPINDLE is a sequel to DEERSKIN for similar reasons.

^ The military don’t figure in SUNSHINE and SOF are (mostly) good guys many of whom have a rather interesting take on the Others themselves which (I will tell you for free) is not shared by SHADOWS’ army dudes.  For example.  And there’s no Con equivalent in SHADOWS.  Speaking of Con, SUNSHINE has the Others as the chief problem, whereas SHADOWS has cobeys.  But the great spectacular drooling difference from where I sit is that SUNSHINE has no animals in it.+  You can’t turn a page in SHADOWS without tripping over a critter, and the more pages you turn the furrier it gets.  I still don’t know how I managed to write an animal-free novel, but there you go.  The muse is a funny . . . critter.

Oh, and I apologise for the parallelism of the two titles.  Never occurred to me when SHADOWS’ title emerged from the . . . shadows.  Nothing I could do about it, but I admit it’s misleading.

+ No, Mrs Bialosky does not count.

^^ Can’t remember if any of the references to other high fantasies by McKinley made the final cut of PEGASUS or not.  If they didn’t . . . there are still two books to go.+

+ Siiiiiiigh . . . .

** I WOULD FRELLING LOVE TO WRITE A SEQUEL TO SUNSHINE.  As I have also said (often) before.  I’m not (not) doing this out of some perverse desire to torture my fans and lose money on sales and other interesting and unique reasons.  I’m not writing a sequel because I haven’t got a sequel to write.  The Story Council has not deigned to send me one.  If it’s any comfort it’s a lot more frustrating for me than for any mere reader, however impassioned, because of the weird way that authors—well, some authors anyway, this author anyway—frelling LIVES in the story/stories she writes.  I know so much more about any story I’ve ever written than ever gets on the page—certainly than ever stays on the page—since the biggest part of any storyteller’s job is choosing which bits to tell.  I don’t know how many other writers waste insane amounts of time looking in cupboards and under rocks for remnants and curiosities that they know they won’t ever use but I bet there are a lot of us.  There is the excuse—in fact the good excuse—that you need to know as much as possible to do a better job of choosing.  But some of it is just oooh.  Shiny.  Even the icky bits are (mostly) oooh-shiny because of the weirdness of discovery.  I guess this is probably aggravated by the world-building aspect of fantasy and science fiction, but OUTLAWS doesn’t have any magic in it and I still opened a lot of cupboards in the writing.^

Anyway.  I know a lot about SUNSHINE’s world.  A lot a lot A FRELLING FRELLING LOT, and very pit-viperishly frustrating I find it too.  Because I’ve only got about a third of a story to hang on it or under it or through it or something.  And it’s not a continuous third either, so don’t get your hopes up about the novella.

There is no sequel to SUNSHINE.^^  Get used to it.^^^

^ And read a lorry-load of frelling history books, attempting historical accuracy braaaaaaaaaaaaaak.  I’m not doing that again.+

+ I hope.  I’ve got about a third of the sequel to OUTLAWS flapping around in a spare mental room too, but I’m not sorry I don’t seem to have to write that one.  The only thing that might make me like the prospect# is having the opportunity to tell the story of how Robin was not murdered by a homicidal abbess.  I haven’t got a problem with the idea that women can be villains too.  But it bites me big time that the standard Robin Hood retellings have no women characters worth mentioning but just to make sure that the whole violent misogynist bias hasn’t escaped your attention a woman comes centre stage long enough at the end TO KILL THE HERO.  Treacherously.  Great.  Splendid.  This is another of those things that made me a feminist, like LORD OF THE RINGS and Susan in THE LAST BATTLE.

# MORE PEOPLE DIE.  I DON’T LIKE CHARACTERS DYING.  I had a very rough time with Guy of Gisbourne.  I had to kill DOGS.

^^ There are also practical problems.  Which I may write a blog about some day.  And then again I may not.

^^^ In case you want to remind yourselves:  http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2008/12/02/there-is-no-sequel-to-sunshine/

*** If anyone ever took footnotes away from me I’d die.  I keep absent-mindedly wanting to put footnotes in KES.

Other S-words

 

The S-word would be sequel*.  Okay, SHADOWS has only been out five days and I’ve already had upwards of twenty queries about whether or not there’s going to be a sequel.  And I was going to write about that interesting question** tonight.  But first I got kind of distracted*** and . . . I.  Am.  So.  Tired.  And I’d hate to miss a good rant on the eminently rant-worthy topic of SEQUELS by being too tired to do it justice.

So tomorrow.  Maybe.  If there’s an invasion of dragons tomorrow I’ll probably want to write about that.

* * *

* Although it could be Street Pastors.  Or Singing.  It’s not.  But it could be.

I’m still so shattered^ from the weekend that pulling myself together to drive to Nadia this afternoon felt like the last equipment check for the final assault on Everest.  I could have used a Sherpa to drive us home after—’us’ since I had hellhounds in the back seat siiiiiiiigh.  I’d had a text from my dog walker during the last tea and rattle-your-brain-back-into-its-socket break Sunday evening at training that Darkness had begun his double-ended geysering act again.  JOOOOOOY.  Mavis has certainly seen various hellcritters merely streaming but I’m not sure she’s ever been witness to the full spectacle before.  Maxine and I had fled precipitously from the seminar hall at the end of Saturday because she has complicated child-care arrangements, and then we fled again Sunday night because I was anxious to get home before anything else happened.  Poor Corey^^ is going to begin to think we don’t love her.^^^

Aside from these little mechanical issues# it was another brilliant weekend for us increasingly-wondering-if-we-can-do-this-at-all trainees.  We had a paramedic talking to us on Saturday about ‘emergency management’ . . . a great deal of which really comes down to knowing when to call for help.  SPs are only there for moral support and lollipops:  if it gets beyond what a listening ear and sympathetic murmur can handle, you need to call for back up.  And sometimes you need to run away, although that’s not likely to be an issue for us in this area.  They’ve got a livelier scene down in Lesser Disconcerting.

Sunday we had a cop going over similar ground from the cop perspective.##  It’s good not only for morale but for that slightly queasy sense of ‘we’re out here doing what’ that the cops really like Street Pastors.  I think I’ve told you already that crime rates plummet where the SPs patrol.###  But we’ve got no legal mandate which means that people will talk—and listen—to us sometimes when they won’t talk to the cops, and sometimes listening is all that is necessary.  Listening and maybe a pair of flipflops for the exceedingly drunk young woman~ who can no longer walk in her insane eight-inch-platform clubbing shoes.~~

And then for my voice lesson today not only did Nadia thump me repeatedly through Fruhlingsglurglezzzzvvch she loaned me this thumping great book of lieder translations so I AM FORCED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT I’M SINGING.  And then when we were going to finish off with a few restful minutes in English~~~ HER NEW STUDENT ARRIVED, KNOCKED ON THE DOOR AND CAME IN AND SAT DOWN AND WATCHED/LISTENED INTERESTEDLY.  Do I even need to tell you that I instantly couldn’t sing a note?  At least not the right note.

Next time tell her to frelling wait in the frelling sitting room.

Siiiiiiiiigh.

But the hellhounds and I had a very nice amble around Mauncester on the way home.  Hellhounds were delighted about the ‘ambling’ part.  If they’re not off lead and blurring into red shift they like a nice amble and I’m forever HURRYING them past interesting smells.  Today I was happy to lean against a wall occasionally and let them really examine that bollard.=

^ It could be shattered too.  Popular letter, s.

^^ Llewellyn is on holiday this week, the slacking wastrel.

^^^ Actually I wrote her an email explaining the speed of our retreat.

# And Darkness, bless his moral fibre if not his spastic guts, had managed to keep his legs crossed till I got there.

## A very cute cop.  Just by the way.  Too young for me but he’d do nicely for Maxine.  There was a good deal of giggling about this on the way home.

### And if that’s because most of the criminal element is going, Those interfering old biddies are coming this way again!  Haul ass!, that’s just fine.

~ Or cross-dresser although I’d be surprised if we had many of these around here who are identifiable as such.  This is such a conservative area that wearing All Stars is like identifying myself as one of the absinthe-drinking crowd.

~~ Yes we carry lollipops and flipflops as standard.  And bottles of water—and hot chocolate!—and I forget what all else.  Wet wipes and single use gloves . . . but I am very pleased to say that while we pick up whole bottles, for sharps as they’re called, needles and broken glass, we get to call for help.

~~~ Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind by Thomas Arne.  Since you asked.

= When we got home I was slammed into by a frantic hellterror WHO THOUGHT SHE WAS NEVER GOING TO BE TAKEN FOR A HURTLE AGAIN.  SHE WAS GOING TO SPEND THE REST OF HER LIFE IN THIS CRATE.+  It took some extra-strength hurtling to reassure her.

+ Although as long as there were regular deliveries of butter sandwiches she’d probably cope.

** That job as a graveyard shift supermarket shelf restocker is looking really good.

*** See footnote one (*).  Which presumably you already have.

Extraction (of honey) – guest post by AJLR

 

This year the weather gods have been a lot kinder to us and to the bees and pollinators (of all sorts, though obviously I’m talking about honeybees in this post) than in the past two summers. Our strongest colony managed to produce a respectable surplus and in early August we took off the ‘super’ box in which the bees had been encouraged to store the extra honey. These boxes, which are just over 18 inches to a side and about eight inches deep, contain up to 11 frames of comb that the bees have filled with honey and capped off with lovely pure white wax once the water content of the honey has been reduced to about 18%. Getting to this stage takes the bees a lot of work – making the wax for the comb, uncounted journeys collecting nectar in their honey stomachs, producing the enzyme invertase to mix with the nectar to turn it into honey, fanning to get the water content down in the honey, producing more wax to seal the top of each cell. After all that effort on their part one needs to deal carefully with the extraction of such a valuable and hard-won substance*.

So, one day in the second week of August we saw that there was sufficient honey in this super to be worth extracting. Given that each frame, when full, will hold about 3 lbs of honey, you can see that with nine out of the eleven frames full and capped we could expect about 25lbs of honey from this one box. To be able to remove the box from the hive without a bag full of bees, the day before we had to place a ‘clearer board’ underneath the super so that the bees could come down out of the super into the brood box beneath but could not get back up there again. One then has the open the hive, take off the full super and put it quickly into a big bag that can be closed tightly to prevent the bees getting back in before one can get it into the car. And they will try…

 

We had previously arranged with our local beekeeping branch to borrow an extractor – something like a giant spin dryer into which one loads the frames of honey so that it can be spun out.  Such equipment can be expensive if you’re a hobbyist/small-scale beekeeper, so it’s very useful belonging to the local branch and having such facilities.

With the full frames, one has to slice carefully down the face of the frame, using either an uncapping knife, or special fork, or whatever is to hand that approximates this (I used a breadknife). The setup is that one places a very clean piece of wood or other strut across a baking tin, in order to rest one end of the frame while one is cutting down it. Then you carefully slice down on both sides/faces of the frame, avoiding cutting too far down into the comb. The idea is just to take off the cappings and let those fall down into the tray beneath. The picture below shows where I was halfway cutting down one frame. The following one is of the cappings from a couple of frames sitting in the tray (my turkey roaster on this occasion) and waiting to be picked up and put in a sieve to allow as much honey as possible to be collected at the end. One definitely needs a steady hand doing this. It is easier if one has one of the heated (electric) uncapping knives but they are bit expensive (as are the custom-made uncapping trays) for someone with as few hives as I have. This worked fine, anyway.

 

 

 

Before starting uncapping one needs to get the extractor set up in a clean area to which one can shut all doors and windows – the smell of the honey will otherwise bring in bees and wasps intent on taking a share. We set up in the kitchen, putting the extractor on a small wooden table. You can see from the picture below that this one will take nine frames, spaced evenly around the drum. Once loaded up (trying to keep the load balanced or the drum will try to ‘walk’ off its stand as it spins) one puts the lid on firmly and slowly starts the spin. The one we’d borrowed is an electric one but there are manual ones as well. The best thing is to start slowly, not going to full speed until the honey is starting to come out. These extractors can be a bit unstable if one isn’t very careful with the loading (or even if one is). My husband and I found ourselves clasping this one lovingly between us as the speed increased, grimly hanging on to stop its self-willed intent to go for a walk with our precious honey!

 

Still, after about four or five minutes we slowed it down and switched off and peered cautiously down into the bottom of the barrel. There were several inches of liquid gold down there…

(After spining the honey off one removes the frames and puts them back in the super for safety (and cleanliness). Most beekeepers (including us) put such a ‘wet’ super back on the hive for 48 hours so that the bees can lick out any remaining honey and store it elsewhere. If there’s a late flow of nectar on, of course, one can find them trying to fill it up again. My mentor beekeeper lent me one of his patent double floors this year, so that I could try his way of getting the bees to clean out the super without trying to refill it. It worked very well.)

So, there we were with many pounds of liquid honey in the bottom of the extractor. These things come with a ‘honey gate’ at the bottom so that one can just open the gate and let the honey flow out into a honey bucket. This is the stage where one starts filtering if the intent is to bottle the honey from the bucket. There are various sieves one can put under the honey gate on the extractor, of different grades. We have a double sieve with the top layer being 600 microns and the lower layer being 400. The top layer takes out larger bits – little fragments of wax, the occasional bit of bee – while the smaller mesh underneath refines it further. We do also have a 200 micron sieve and the people who exhibit at honey shows go down to 100 microns, but 400 was fine for us. You get a good clear honey with just that type of filter. The first photo below shows the setup with the honey bucket, the second one is where we’ve set the double sieve into the top of the bucket and the honey is running through from the extractor.

 

After the honey has been run into the bucket one leaves it to stand in a warm place for at least 24 hours, so that any tiny air bubbles come to the surface and disperse. This ‘ripening’ is particularly necessary if one is going to sell the honey after bottling; one wouldn’t want to fill up all the jar and then find the level had gone down after they’d been standing for a while!

And the end result on this occasion was 25 lbs of very nice honey, some of which we’ve kept for ourselves while the rest has gone to family and friends. The bees have since been fed with lots of nice warm sugar syrup which they have happily taken down into the brood box to top up their winter stores. A colony like ours will typically use at least 40 lbs of stores during an English winter so one needs to make sure they have plenty if they’re to come through safely.

Yum. :)

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* One never, ever, feeds honey that isn’t their own (or from a hive a few feet away at most) back to a colony. There can be fungal spores or other substances in there which don’t affect humans but can spread diseases among bee species. So, never put out shop-bought honey as a ‘treat’ for bees or other pollinators, you won’t be doing them any sort of a favour. Syrup made with white granulated sugar and water (at the proportion of 1 lb of sugar dissolved into 1 pint of water) is by far the best and safest. And use white sugar because brown or other unrefined sugars will upset their stomachs.

KES, 98

NINETY EIGHT

What do you do when your life as you thought you knew it ends without warning?  I thought I’d already been through this, when Gelasio asked for a divorce.  I stood there, staring down the flashlight beam, and trying to think.  I don’t know what I was trying to think about.  Something to make the earth stop whizzing around on its axis in the wrong direction.  Where was Superman when you needed him.  Maybe a local out late for a hack had left this.  It was just horse manure.  Ho hum.  I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed a large pile of steaming fresh horse manure in the middle of the road as we drove out toward Cold Valley, crouched as I was over the wheel and peering eye-strainingly at the road illuminated by Merry’s headlights.  Merry had very good strong headlights.

My hand was starting to shake.  The flashlight beam jiggled sympathetically.

Maybe there was a riding stable nearby.  I could investigate once I got settled in.  Unpacked a few boxes.  Put the milk out for the hob.  I shuddered again.  I didn’t need to be thinking of the hob just now.

Sid, having inspected the horse dung to her satisfaction, had raised her head and was scanning the horizon.  Her eyesight after dark was probably a lot better than mine.  She didn’t look worried.  Presumably that meant that the—company—we had seen were continuing to move away from us.  Which was good as far as it went.  Which I hoped was farther and farther away from us.  Sid wouldn’t be bothered about where that company had come from, and she was telling me they were gone.

It was still hard to turn around—to put my back to—to whatever.  To what was moving away from us—away from us, awaaaaay from us—leaving the occasional pile of horse dung behind as a memento.  The natives wouldn’t even notice.  It was just horse manure.  I turned around.  I trudged the twenty feet back to Merry.  My back was cold, but that was just the wind.  Just the wind.

Sid leaped straight in as soon as I opened Merry’s door and sat down on the passenger side like this was something she’d been doing all her life.  Well, I thought wildly, one day of a less-than-two-year-old dog’s life was a much higher percentage of the whole than one day of an almost-forty-year-old human’s. . . . I buckled her in.  I buckled me in.  I turned the key.  Merry rumbled immediately to life.  Which was something.  That meant we could put more distance between us and . . .

I didn’t miss my road.  Amazingly.  It wasn’t even that I saw it and thought, oh, there’s my road:  my hands just hit the blinker and turned the wheel.  Some of me knew where we were going.  I woke up from whatever daze I’d been in—something about trying to decide if our recent encounter would have been more or less horrifying if there’d been more moonlight.  If there’d been more I might have seen that it wasn’t Murac, it was just some random bunch of SCA-ers out for an evening stroll.  Or I might have seen not only Murac but his great buddy Astur, whom both Flowerhair and I were pretty sure was a bad guy, although a useful sort of person to have on your side in an argument, so long as you were sure he was on your side, and would stay there till the argument was over.

There were lights on in both the other houses on the . . . on my street.  I looked a little wistfully at the house on the corner where, according to Hayley, normal people lived.  Well, if they were too normal they probably wouldn’t like me much.  One of the problems with normal people is that they tend to hold your book jackets against you, especially if they have or have had teenage boys in the family who bought them for the cleavage.  Like Hayley’s brother.

I drove stoically past the Lanchesters, whose curtains, I was extremely glad to observe, were drawn.

I slowed to a near-stop before turning up into Rose Manor’s driveway.  This had nothing to do with exhaustion or terror—no no of course not—it was merely I didn’t want to drive into any of those wormhole ruts and discover ourselves driving across a purple desert under a red sky with two suns, six moons and a rvzzlblug in a pear tree facsimile.

We crept over the ruts in a manner that made me wonder if Merry was articulated in funny places.  That was one more thing I wasn’t going to think about tonight.

We stopped.  I turned the headlights off.  I turned the engine off.

It was very dark.  I couldn’t even see the Lanchesters’ lights through the hedge.

Very very dark.  We sat there, listening to Merry going ping.

We were home.

Maybe I should have asked the hob to turn a light on.