Robin McKinley's Blog, page 80

The puppy has landed

 

 

Yup.  With a rushing sound like a very large meteorite.  Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh WHOMP.  The earth shivers and lurches off its orbit.  Well, I shiver and lurch off my orbit.  And will I ever return?  Well, not exactly. . . . because I now have three dogs.*

Olivia left Birmingham slightly later than I was expecting and then I was doing my silly trying to work trick and didn’t take hellhounds out for the afternoon hurtle till later than I should have** and as a result managed to miss the actual moment of touchdown.  But as hellhounds and I sprinted back across the mews courtyard*** Olivia emerged from her car† . . . carrying a puppy.  Which for some reason she thrust at me.

Oh, said hellhounds.  What is this strange apparition?  It’s not staying, is it?

Olivia locked the other three up (securely) and Pavlova, hellhounds, Olivia and I went out to the little piece of open grass at the end of Peter’s garden where hellhounds could get away from the awful phantasm, I put Pavlova down, and she made a beeline for them, wagging her still-tiny tail††.  AAAAAAAUGH, said hellhounds.  It’s a . . . it’s a . . . AAAAAAAUGH.

But you know . . . it could be a lot worse.  A lot worse.†††  And I am dazzled at the prospect of having a food motivated dog.  What an idea.  Blither blither blither.  I was reading Karen Pryor’s Clicker Training for Dogs tonight as Pavlova had some Holding Time‡ and I was focusing on this click and then give your dog a TREAT thing.‡‡  Wow.  I mean.  Wow.  I was furthermore sitting on the sofa for this epic moment of horizon-broadening‡‡‡ with the hellhounds draped roundabout in similar to standard pre-puppy postures.§  I’m hoping that more sofa time might resign them to Pavlova rather, in fact, quickly. . . .

 

The four of us.

 

* * *

… Now if only I could figure out what the magic words are to make the New Beast just, you know, load photos. This has got to be the LONG way.

* Last night I dreamed, in the twenty or so minutes I was actually asleep, that I was getting a fourth dog.   NOOOOOOOO.  Well, that woke me up.

** I had to go back to the cottage when I found out that I’d run out of my favourite Caffeine Triple Whammy tea at the mews, which I have a secret stash of at home for just such an emergency.  And then there was Arrival of Puppy and all three of us humans went straight on to champagne.  Well, I’ll need it tomorrow.  AAAAUGH.  I HAVE THREE DOGS^^.

^^ I think this kind of thing is supposed to drive you to alcohol.  It drives me to caffeine.

*** With a large packet of tea sticking out of my pocket

† I’d missed the fun however.  She had all four of them with her^ and while hellhounds and I were pelting back down main street had ferried them through the house to make the inevitable messes in the back garden where it’s easier to clean up.^^  Whereupon Fruitcake and Croissant^^^ fell in the pond.  They’d just had their ears tattooed today# and Fruitcake emerged green.  That’s not the water.  It’s the tattoo ink.  I took a photo but my camera couldn’t cope.

^ It’s all about socialisation and learning to live in the world, which includes long rides in cars, and I think furthermore that her usual range of puppysitters were having lives today.  Maybe doing things like dressing up in their good clothes and speaking in complete sentences that contain no references to kitchen roll and newspapers.

^^ They recently resurfaced the mews courtyard, which is to say dumped about sixty lorry-loads of large gravel on it.  Large gravel.  Driving over it you feel like you’re on safari somewhere far from civilisation or the concept of paved roads.  It’s pretty horrible for sprinting over too.  And I really don’t want to pick puppy crap off it.

^^^ Olivia had (possibly unwisely) told Natalie, Croissant’s future possessor, about this blog, and was shortly told off to inform the proprietor that she, Natalie, was getting the prettiest puppy in the litter.  I think we’ll just leave her to her little delusion, don’t you think?  It’s very sweet of her to prefer her own inferior puppy.+

+I have or anyway had an adorable photo of Croissant on the sofa with forty-seven other bullies, visiting at Aunt Southdowner’s but with all the computer havoc going on lately I can’t find it.  I wanted to post it here so that you would see that Croissant is adorable too.  If I continue to fail to find it I’ll ask Southdowner to send it again.

# Yup.  Tattooed.  These are seriously pedigreed show-quality puppies and personally it seems to me a better proof of identity than microchips which first someone has to look for and second may wander.

††But golly has she grown.  They do of course, puppies.  But. . . golly.  Her ears still aren’t standing up.  Just by the way.  Will you stop with the ears? said Olivia.  She’s not going to be huge, okay?  I guarantee it.  —Noooooooooo.  Don’t say things like that.

††† It could still get a lot worse, of course.  But it’s not going to.  Not.^

^ This includes her not turning into Yeti II.

‡ I think it will be a long time before I can knit with a hellterror in my lap.

‡‡ I’m immediately starting the process of trying to convince her to relieve herself on command.  Hey, have a crap and get a treat!  Dogs must think we are totally nuts.

‡‡‡ Occasionally the Holding part required two hands, but mostly I can read.

§ Eventually some negotiation will have to be made for occupation of the hellgoddess’ actual lap.  And we had some, you know, proper sofa time while the hellterror slept, exhausted, in her new crate, worn out by having been repeatedly picked up and removed from underneath the apple tree which is ankle-deep in disgusting rotten apples.  I’m reminding myself that having a food-motivated dog is going to be a good thing.

The long way is VERY BORING. But the PUPPY is cute. And the hellhounds are, of course, gorgeous in every way except the EATING way.

PAAAAAAAAAAAAANIC

 

THIS TIME TOMORROW I WILL BE ALONE WITH A PUPPY.  And two seriously unthrilled hellhounds* and a husband who has gone to bed.  I didn’t sleep at all last night because every time I began to drift off I was mobbed by gigantic hellterrors** with antlers and talons like an eagle’s and whole rows of fangs and little red glittering eyes.***  I think possibly I have an attitude problem.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAH.  Why didn’t I stick to that delinquent-gorilla-fostering programme?  Why did I think I wanted a bull terrier puppy?

To my utter lack of surprise, I have not managed to finish this editorial tweak of SHADOWS so I will have the interesting experience of trying to work with a puppy in my lap since I’m going to try this Holding Strategy which is supposed to produce Calm Laid Back dogs, even when they were bullies to begin with.†  It will be even more interesting when I print the whole ms out and try to read hard copy . . . with a puppy in my lap. . . .

Did I say AAAAAAAAAAUGH?  Let me say it again.  AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.††

* * *

*Who are presently crashed out in their standard post-dinner-struggle manner.  I am ravaged by guilt.  They don’t realise The World Changes tomorrow.^  Guys!  Wake up!  This is your last evening!  Er . . . let me rephrase that . . . last evening when there’s only four of us.^^  You should be awake!  Having precision nostalgia and glaring at me!  You don’t realise how exquisite our time on the sofa was tonight!^^^

^ Although I think Darkness has suspicions that something is not going to hellhound plan.  Chaos looks at the travelling crate that has been riding in the back of the car with them all week and thinks, well, whatever, humans are weird.  Darkness looks at it and thinks whaaaaaaaat is this about.  It’s the same with the new crate in the sitting room at the mews.  Chaos thinks eh, it’s a thing, isn’t it time for another walk so I can mug my brother some more?  Darkness thinks, hmmmmmmmm, what is she up to?  Today I draped a blanket over the crate so it’ll be more secure and den-like for a puppy who weighs about one-tenth of a hellhound,# and fluffed up one of the polyester throws I use as hellhound bedding inside the crate, and Chaos opened one eye and closed it again and Darkness sat up and stared.##

^^ Unless you count frelling computers, rosebushes, my piano and/or Wolfgang.

^^^ Have I mentioned the difficulties of knitting with a hellhound in your lap?  You do hear about people’s hands and wrists starting to hurt if they knit too much, or to a really tiny gauge, or a frelling frelling frelling pattern, or a hard unyielding yarn, but you don’t hear so much about eye- and shoulder-strain from knitting holding your needles over your head.  If I forget and bits start trailing across Resident Hellhound+, RH tends to kick violently.  Stitches can be lost this way, never mind the bruises.  And I still haven’t figured out a successful plan for handling something that gets larger than a leg warmer, like the back or front of a sweater.  Have I mentioned that I’ve started another sweater?  No, I haven’t finished the first one.  I haven’t quite finished knitting the second sleeve . . . and I don’t want to face finding out that the bits don’t fit together.  I especially don’t want to find this out on a week when other things are happening.  Like your family is increasing by one hairy four-legged incontinent member.

+ Usually Chaos.  Darkness customarily lies tactfully along my leg or (excellent as the weather gets colder) across my feet.

# Although not for long.  Although I’ve had several people tell me soothingly that the biggest puppy in the litter does not necessarily grow up to be the biggest dog . . . We’re channelling little and delicate here, okay?

## Also there was serious language when I found out what a total pain in the rear the catches on the new crate are.  Maybe I should have bought the one that cost three times as much.  For a couple of plastic latches?  Faugh.  I’ll buy clamps at the builders’.

** I don’t even like terriers.  But bullies (and Staffies^) are sui generis really.

^ And anything else some outraged terrier owner wants to write in and tell me I don’t know squiff about.  Maybe.  I don’t like most terriers.  But then I don’t like most people.  I don’t like most books.  I don’t like most things.

*** Not in a good way.  For you Hellhound readers.

†  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  Um.  I wonder if it works in reverse?  Will a puppy in the lap calm me down?

†† Olivia and I have been texting each other all evening.

Me:  PAAAAAAAAAAANIC

O:  Don’t panic.  It’s going to 2b fun!

Me:  She’s not as big as Yeti [standard bull grandmother, Southdowner's foundation bitch] yet, right?

O:  curled up on my lap atm, she is size of Yeti’s head

Me: Yeti has v big head

O: u r impossibull!

Me: I’m abt to b impossibull, 2morro.  She’s even cuter than fortnight ago, right?

O: She is adorabull.

Me: . . . text as u leave 2morro?

O: Yes will text you when I set off, that’s a generous 2 hours 4 u 2 run around cottage like headless hen.

Me: THANK U SO MUCH.  Is my girl 1st to go?

O: She’s first, having last snuggle on lap, *sniff*.  She is sweetie.  Only today person who had them 4 day said she was calmest. . . . U believe me, right?????

Me:  OF COURSE.  WOULD U LIE?

O:  Good, be reassured, be very reassured.

Me:  Resistance is futile, right?

O:  Absolutely. You need wodges of kitchen roll & scads of newspapers—that & ur sanity r all u need to hang onto.

Me: Sanity? Um . . . I think it’s too late.

O: W bullie prob a good thing.

Me:  I thot that was why u decided to let me hv 1.

O: Yes u hv sufficient insanity 2 qualify 4 bullie ownership. . . .

. . . . And on that positive note, you will forgive me if I go to bed early, not that I’m going to sleep or anything. . . .

 

 

 

KES, 47

FORTY SEVEN

 

I stopped crying.  I gently lifted Sid out of my lap and picked up the hash.  It did not have a tab opener like a beer can.  I had been assuming a can opener as part of the furnishings at Rose Manor and hadn’t bought one.  Wait.  Think.  I remembered Mr Screaming Skull giving me the tour of the van.  “You never want to go on the road without a coupla things,” he said.  He flung the glove compartment door open proudly and said, “Can opener.  Bottle opener.   Box a’ tissues.  Sunglasses.  Flashlight.  Granola bars.”  Granola bars?  “You eat the granola bars, you replace ’em,” he said.  I hadn’t eaten any.

I went out and retrieved the can opener from the glove compartment.  Sid was standing in the door watching me hopefully.  There was a dog in cabin seven.  I looked furtively around again but there was no one in sight.  I opened the hash and Sid had her breakfast.

Which left me.

I looked at the phone.  I hate the phone.  I have hated phones since long before there was email, let alone texting.  The only person I’m ever ready to talk to without advance warning is Norah.   I had hated the phone even when I was a teenager, which is a sign of mental impairment and severe social maladjustment (although this latter was not news).  My feeling had been that we could get together for an ice cream at Dangerous Sweets or I could see you tomorrow at school.  I still felt that way, except without the ice cream and the school options.  And as soon as email happened I stopped checking my phone machine messages.  My agent used to threaten to fire me if I didn’t learn to answer normal business questions in less than eighteen months and fewer than forty-six times of asking.

I needed to call Homeric Homes and find out when I could pick up the keys.  (Unless they’d done a blood test on my thumbprint and found out that I am an alien from Alpha Centauri.  Rats!  My secret is out!  Well, but so?  Why wouldn’t they rent to a nice law-abiding alien who pays the rent on time?)  I needed to find a local vet and make an appointment to bring in my stray dog.

I needed to ring Mr Wolverine.

There was a yellow pages under the phone.  I riffled through it.  I punched in some numbers.

“Eatsmobile,” said a familiar-sounding voice.

“Er,” I said, my usual phone paralysis coming over me.  “I don’t suppose you do takeout?”

“No,” said the familiar voice.  “Who is this?”

“Er,” I said.  “Kes.  I . . .”

“Yeah,” interrupted the voice.  “I thought so.  You came in with Serena.  And then you asked if I was going to warm the pot.”

“Oh, um,” I said apologetically.  In hardly more than twenty-four hours in this town I had already offended the Mistress of Tea.  “I’m from Manhattan.  Most of the restaurants there don’t know these things.”  I narrowly managed not to beg the Mistress of Tea to have pity on an ignorant supplicant.  I really hate the phone.  It makes me stupid.

“Why do you want takeout?” said Bridget.  “This time of year, we can always fit another body in.  I’m looking at an empty booth right now.”

“Er,” I said articulately, for the third time, not counting the “um.”  “I seem to have acquired a dog.  Sort of inadvertently.  And I haven’t moved in yet so I don’t have anywhere to leave her.”  There.  That was clear and cogent.

“You’ve got a dog inadvertently?” said Bridget.  “Okay, that’s a new one.  I’m glad I’m not from Manhattan.  I like to know when I’m adding something to the household that’s going to bark at the mail delivery, eat my socks and shed hair everywhere.  Hang on.”

I think she put her hand over the receiver, but there was some shouting, and I’m pretty sure I heard the word ‘dog’ and I’m also pretty sure I heard someone laugh.  “Okay,” said Bridget.  “Depends on how desperate you are for another pot of well-made tea.  We can open up the courtyard and I can serve you out back, and you can bring the dog.  We don’t usually expect people to sit out there till frostbite is no longer an issue, and I’ve got a little warming tray for the teapot and an extra cosy, but you’re going to freeze your butt off.  I don’t know what we’ll do about your food.  We’ll have to think of something that congeals attractively.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling my eyes fill up again.  For godssake, MacFarquhar.  “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Bridget.  “Although, speaking of mentioning, it’s only fair to warn you that this will be our favorite story of the weirdness of customers for at least a week.”

“Cheap at half the price,” I said.  “I’ll be along as soon as—er.”  How was I going to bring Sid with me?  I didn’t even have a collar and lead for her yet.  Nor any idea if she had a clue about leash manners.  I had already theorized that perhaps collars brought on the psychotic breaks.

Bridget laughed.  “Yeah.  Inadvertent dogs are like that.  See you.  When you get here, come around to the side.  I’ll open the gate.”

 

Puppy books

 

I have been reading.  Books with names like YOU’RE GETTING A PUPPY?  THERE GOES YOUR LIFE.  And:  YOU’RE BRINGING A PUPPY HOME?  MWA HAHAHAHAHA YOU POOR FOOL YOU’RE TOAST.  This is not entirely reassuring.

I possess forty years of dog training manuals—no, I have unloaded most of them, but I have tended to keep each generation’s most useful and/or most user friendly text.  And while the forty-year-old one is badly out of date in terms of more recent research into and understanding of dog character and dog behaviour* I’ve kept it because I remember the way it blew me out of the water at the time, having trained my poor Alsatian by the choke-collar and the meanest s.o.b. in the valley method, because that’s what they taught you in dog school in those days, and while [wince, wince] I went along with it because these were grown-ups and experts and of course knew best I didn’t like it much.**  And here was a dog book saying, hey!  It’s okay to love your dog in a ridiculous and soppy fashion!  You can still teach it manners!  And training your dog is not an adversarial situation!

There’s a lot of great stuff in (some of) the new(ish) generation(s) of dog books, and I’m grateful that Southdowner and Olivia got me in a head lock*** and told me I had to read x and y or I couldn’t have Pavlova.†  But . . . there are two glaring errors of practical application in most of the straight how-tos†† from my point of view:

 They’re all frelling based on frelling food rewards.  If your dog isn’t interested in food, you are frelling STUFFED.  So to speak.
They assume YOU HAVE ONLY ONE DOG and that ONE is the puppy you are being advised on how to train.†††  This is particularly infuriating from a DOG TRAINING WRITER WHO FREQUENTLY REFERS TO HIS/HER SEVERAL DOGS.

I started out thinking that perhaps these are several generations of dogs the writer has owned, but nooooooo.  Tucked somewhere in a throwaway line there will be reference to when Megalopolis first met Poltroon there was some ambivalence, but they’re best friends now.  Define ambivalence.‡  And then tell me what you did about it.  And don’t tell me it’s all based on desiccated liver, that universal, unilateral dog manna.  My hellhounds couldn’t care less about desiccated liver.  I will probably try to insinuate a little raw liver into the introduction to Pavlova‡‡ . . . and hope that this doesn’t merely put them off raw liver, which is the nearest thing they have to a food grail, and I’d be sorry to lose it.  I’ve wondered if where I went wrong with the desiccated liver is that I mistook it for the universal, unilateral dog manna, and offered it as such, rather than appreciating that all food is scary and dangerous and can only be negotiated with cautiously and under exactingly and inflexibly regulated conditions.

Sigh.

I’m hoping that Pavlova will prove to be made of robuster stuff, which is to say that SHE EATS.  And while I’m home all the time—and there are two other dogs in the family—so the learning to keep herself amused calmly when she’s left alone is not a big issue, I am going to try the Kongs‡‡‡-stuffed-with-food trick . . . again.§

The beginning of the year, I threw out a bunch of dog toys, including several Kongs, because I had no earthly use for them.§§  And, you dog training manual writer bozos, there are a lot of people with more than one dog.  And a lot of dogs that are not good eaters.

Please address this.  Before I bring my next sighthound home.

* * *

* And, just by the way, call me a cynic, but I predict that the teenager who is buying today’s top dog-training picks is going to be looking back in thirty five or forty years and thinking, I can’t believe I believed that.  How did poor Spot/Sid/Ash/Mongo/Mayhem grow up to be such a nice dog in spite of my training style?

** And she was still a surprisingly nice dog, although she had some issues.

*** Which they would never do to a dog.

† To which I replied, I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.^

Then I bought the books because I’m a doobie really.  Also, Pavlova is MINE.

^ There isn’t anyone out there who doesn’t recognise this, is there?  If there is, allow me to shield your shame by suggesting that you google ‘I fart in your general direction’ or ‘your mother was a hamster’.  It will come up immediately.  With video clips.

†† There’s more in the dog-behaviour books, but they tend to leave you to figure out productive strategies yourself.

††† Mostly I don’t mind the assumption that I’ve never had a dog before in my life and (apparently) have barely ever met one and that everything my puppy does is going to be strange and bizarre to me.^  Um.  Remind me why I’m buying this incongruous alien being?  Peer pressure?  Given the further assumption of most dog-training manuals that your neighbours all have canine barbarians who uproot trees, eat small children and the mailperson, and bark like the last trump, why you are clutching this book at all becomes even more mysterious.

^ Including things like eating, sleeping, peeing and defecating+.  Gosh.  Us modern humans are really out of touch with our bodies, aren’t we?

+ I’m not sure if this was a typo and/or Word auto-corrected in the wrong direction, but what this word originally appeared as is defecting.  Snork.

‡ Was there blood loss?  How much?  Did it involve a trip to the vet’s/doctor’s?  In or out of office hours?  How many stitches?  Is there a permanent limp?

‡‡ Which will probably mean the kitchen ends up looking like Hannibal Lector came to tea.

‡‡‡ http://www.kongcompany.com/en-uk/kong-101/how-to-kong/

§ And in vivid memory of Hannah’s first dog, many generations ago^, whom Hannah was advised to placate with food-stuffed Kongs, which she, Lucrezia, demolished enthusiastically and then went on to dismember hundreds of dollars’ worth of guaranteed dog-proof crates.  The dog behaviourist stopped returning Hannah’s phone calls.

^ I’m a little surprised that after Lucrezia Borgia she didn’t decide to keep an alligator in the bath, or something easy-going and low maintenance.

§§ And the total FAILURE they represented every time they rolled out from under the tallboy covered in dust was depressing.

Ringing Madness. Also just madness.

 

In theory I was going to ring eight times in seven days, between last Saturday’s wedding and this Friday’s handbells* and then spend this Saturday taking deeeeeeeep breaths in preparation FOR THE ARRIVAL OF PUPPY ON SUNDAY.  I imagine that most activities will be a trifle curtailed for a while, while Pavlova whips us into shape.**  But then Fustian went and cancelled last night’s Slow Stupid People tower practise . . . which I didn’t find out about till I had slowly and stupidly come home again and found a message on my answerphone.  Sigh.  Fortunately there is knitting.  I had my knitting with me*** and I had a nice little break, sitting in Wolfgang, listening to the radio, and knitting.  I didn’t really need to drive forty-five minutes to spend half an hour in Wolfgang listening to the radio and knitting, but . . .

Sunday was ridiculous.  There were twelve of us at the abbey, which is very good for Sunday afternoon . . . and four ringers at the Crabbiton harvest festival at evensong.   I had tottered through my Grandsire Triples and then watched in a kind of despairing awe as most of the rest of them rang Grandsire caters, which is ten bells.†  Three hours and several cups of tea later†† and with thoughts of the Saturday wedding I nerved myself for the worst and . . . there was the priest and the attendant priest and a brace of deacons and the flower-arranging lady and the four of us ringers and††† . . .

Felicity said through gritted teeth that every village in a ten-mile radius was also having a harvest festival and she had tried suggest that some of them combine forces but no, no, everyone should have their own.  Felicity is a bit ferocious.  We were there to ring the harvest festival and we rang pretty much for forty-five minutes straight.  We rang call changes, and we rang full-pull plain hunt‡, and we rang bob minimus, and then we started over.  It was a very well rung harvest festival, and I’m sure all those other towerless churches in a ten-mile radius were very glad to have us.

And tonight, despite being very short of sleep,‡‡ it wasn’t too bad at abbey tower practise.  I rang another plain course of Stedman triples and Scary Man said afterward, that was a nice uneventful course.  Which means I didn’t screw up.  This is high praise from Scary Man.

* * *

* Who knows, I might even go to New Arcadia tower practise and bring my average back up.  But I doubt it.

** Possibly a large round shape like a layer of meringue, baked to melt-in-mouth^ perfection and then THICKLY LAMINATED WITH CHOCOLATE.^^

^ I do not approve of meringues with sticky middles.

^^ Or similar.  http://cheezburger.com/6546949888  Hee hee hee hee hee.  Thank you, b_twin+

+ AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE.  A mouse just ran across the kitchen floor.  I do not like field mice indoors.#  Do not.##  Peter, roused from his post-prandial snooze on the sofa, staggered toward the kitchen under the impression that I was being trampled underfoot by a wild buffalo stampede###, and was a trifle underwhelmed when I told him it was a mouse.  He produced a mouse-trap with a flourish . . . baited with chocolate.  I viewed the chocolate suspiciously.  No, no, he said, it’s really old.  But the Rat Man said that mice like chocolate better than cheese.  —What is this, mammalian solidarity?  I wonder if anyone has done a study on chocolate to cheese preferences in mouse society as a whole as opposed to specifically menopausal mice.

Fortunately the hellhounds slept through all this.~  In a space the size of this kitchen the advantage is the mouse’s and I don’t want to watch Darkness trying to two-dimensionalise himself so he can squeeze between the freezer and the cupboard.  I will put down the trap on our way out tonight.  We do not need any more small furry creatures that scuttle unpredictably underfoot~~ than the one arriving on Sunday.

# Where’s an extra-gigantic house spider when you could really use him/her?

## You know about the urine slick, right?  That mice leave wherever they go?  Ewwwwww.  Keep your cutting boards upright and scrub those counters.

### No, wait, this is England.  Wild boar, then.

~ They’re used to me screaming.  At my computer, say.

~~ And pee inappropriately

*** I am making a TOTAL mess of the second sleeve of First Cardi.  WOOL IS STRETCHY.  IT’S GOING TO BE FINE.  Besides, my arms aren’t perfect replicas of each other, why should my sleeves be?

† It gets worse.  Then they rang Stedman caters.  WHY AM I BOTHERING.  I should just learn to crochet^ and get it over with.

^ Then I can bungle crocheted sleeves too.

†† You can kind of tell where I am in a book by how many cups of tea, let’s say per hour, I am drinking.  The later, the more.  By now, and especially when the latest hopeless plan was to have SHADOWS’ trimming and tweaking DONE by Saturday evening just in time to have my life destroyed for the foreseeable future by a PUPPY, it’s . . . pretty extreme.^  But I might have made it if I weren’t trying to learn to use a NEW COMPUTER^^ WITH A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM.  Fate hates me.  Okay, I knew this.^^^

^ No, I don’t really wonder why I sleep so badly.

^^ In the really, really stupid design category:  the gragglebatting keyboard is this sort of marcasite effect in what if it were this autumn’s must-have little cropped jacket would be called mink, and the lettering is white.  I can’t frelling read it.    So while I’ve been QWERTYing for fifty-one years+ where all the little dingleblargs are varies++ as well as every frelling laptop having its own unique approach to crucial basic commands like ‘page up’ and ‘delete’.

+ Yes really

++ And my ability to remember has taken a body blow by the fact of Astarte’s add-on keyboard having an American layout for all the stuff that isn’t letters and numbers.  I’m used to double quote marks being above the 2.

^^^ In a previous life I could ring Double Panjandrum Cornucopia Maximus and she never got past Grandsire Triples.  She swore revenge.  And then she’s the one got the promotion this time while I got sent back as a storyteller.

††† But I went to the abbey evensong on Monday again and there were more priests than there were parishioners.  And when I came out the door there wasn’t even a plate.  I said to the nearest supernumerary priest, isn’t there a retiring collection?  And he looked totally nonplussed and said er, no.

          I’m not surprised the Church of England is losing money.

‡You don’t really want to know, do you?

‡‡ Because I had to get up this morning and let Raphael in.  He’s excised one or two of the New Beast’s annoying habits but there are lots and lots left.  He also took Faithful but Doolally Old Laptop away with him.  When I rang Gabriel later to consult about an insufficiently excised annoying habit, he was hoovering out the insides of Old and opined that once the strata of hardened corn-thin crumbs have been stripped off it might work again.  The New Beast, in theory, has a sealed keyboard so this can’t happen.^  Hey.  I eat at my computer.  My computer(s) have to deal.  But this is where Faithful Old is promoted to be the composing computer, and I haven’t got enough hands to play two keyboards and eat corn thins so it should be okay.

^ Although I expect this is something like the unoverturnable dog food bowl.

Five days till puppy

 

FIVE DAYS.  TILL PUPPY.*

I’d gone to the big pet warehouse last week to view my options.   The place gives me the whimwhams:  it’s the size of Hyde Park, they should issue you roller skates at the door.**  First you pass the glassed-in seas full of fish***.  Then there are the vast enclosures down the centre that you have to skate/pony trek around, which contain 2,011 varieties of rabbit, plus hamsters, gerbils, guinea pigs, chinchillas, wombats, armadillos, capybaras, kinkajous, marmots, and rock hyraxes.   By the time you get to the dog-paraphernalia section you’re losing the will to live.

And then you look at the prices of the kit you’re going to have to buy and you finish losing the will to live.†  GIBBER GIBBER GIBBER GIBBER EEP EEP EEP EEP.  Dogs are expensive.††  You don’t want a dog.  How about a nice diamond tiara?  The initial outlay is less, and the upkeep’s . . . a steal.

I had a run at the hellhounds, because the majority of their kit was rolled over from the previous generation of whippets.  After that it was just food . . . except they don’t eat . . . and vet bills.  Olivia is selling her puppies with the insurance already in place and, never having had pet insurance before, I’m doing it this time.  I’m just about tearing holes in my cheque with the nib of my pen, I’m so doing the pet insurance thing this time.†††  Meanwhile, back at the containment issue. . . .

I did have one bright idea.  On my way to the pet warehouse this time I stopped at the farm store.  They have some dog stuff—including crates.  I bought a slightly less flash item, it’s missing out the gold tassels‡ and the cubic zirconia, but it’s essentially the same flapdoodling crate, for ONE THIRD of what it cost at the pet warehouse.‡‡  The cheezy plastic carrying crate, which I had to buy at the warehouse, and which Pavlova is not allowed to outgrow till she and the hellhounds are excellent friends‡‡‡ cost ten quid more than the medium-large proper metal crate.  The plastic carrier is already riding around next to the hellhound box in Wolfgang, to hellhounds’ mild but disinterested puzzlement.  Oh how little you know, you poor trusting innocents.§

* * *

* I think I’ve got her call name sorted.  Peter asked, and I told him, and he said, what about her nickname?  I said that for the moment she’ll remain Pavlova on the blog, but I added that there had been other suggestions, and his vote is May for Mayhem  THANKS SO MUCH, MY SYMPATHETIC, SUPPORTIVE HUSBAND.  PAVLOVA IS GOING TO BE YOUR LITTLE NIGHTMARE TOO FOR SEVERAL HOURS A DAY, YOU KNOW, EVEN IF YOU GET TO TELL ME TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT PUPPY, AND I WILL TAKE HER AWAY AT NIGHT.^

^ Very late at night.  You could suffer a lot before I take her away.

** Well.  Possibly not roller skates, precisely.  I never really got over the ‘dangerous’ stage of roller skating.  But a pony would be nice.

*** Don’t try to buy any of these.  The clerk will look at you with deep suspicion, and send for their specialist, who will emerge from some dark hideaway bearing a clipboard and a condemnatory expression, and she will then ask you 4,312 questions very few of which seem to have anything to do with the possible purchase of fish, and, when you’re worn down and off balance from trying to remember the name of your aunt’s second dog^ and whether perhaps you have a secret crippling aversion to live bloodworms^^ they spring it on you that you will be obliged to buy not merely a tank, but a circulator, an aerator, a heater, a punkah, a punkah wallah, a widglebadget, a plastic statue of a deep-sea diver and special water from Atlantis.  And their home visitor will be in your area next week, and will need to approve your set-up (in triplicate) before you’re allowed to take your guppy or your goldfish home.  And did you wash your hands before you came out?  And did you comb your hair?

^ My aunt didn’t have a second dog.  Which explains my failing in this respect.

^^ Any sane person has an aversion to live bloodworms.  But I fed live mealworms to my robins and pieces of cut-up day-old (pre-dead) chick to the raptor on my wrist during that fabulous Day with Raptors a few years ago . . . WHICH WAS TOTALLY GROSS.  But it didn’t ruin the experience.  I could learn about bloodworms.

† Speaking of losing the will to live.  THIS COMPUTER CONTINUES TO DRIVE ME FRELLING INSANE.^  Plus little teeny minor issues like re-frelling-inputting all my auto-text and shortcut-key things, like the symbols for my footnotes:  AND WINDOWS EIGHT HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN HAS SHEETS MORE SYMBOLS THAN XP DID, AND IN NO BETTER OR MORE LOGICAL ORDER THAN XP DID.  How many ways can I say ARRRRRRGH??

^ And furthermore I’ve just had an officious little pop-up from my argleblarging virus software for pity’s sake telling me I should close and reopen IE because it’s taking up too much memory.  GET.  STUFFED.  FRELLINGLY.

†† . . . GO AWAY.  I’VE NOW GOT SOME FRELLING RESEARCH WINDOW POPPING UP AND SAYING, WE CAN’T FIND ‘††’ WHAT DO YOU WANT US TO DO ABOUT IT?

I DON’T WANT YOU TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.  I WANT YOU TO LET ME WRITE MY BLOG ENTRY IN PEACE.

Um.  Where was I?  Dogs are expensive.  Yes, but, quarter-gram by quarter-gram, nowhere near as expensive as fish.

††† Although PAVLOVA IS GOING TO BE SCINTILLATINGLY HEALTHY.  SCINTILLATINGLY.  HEALTHY.  IN EVERY WAY.  AND A GOOD EATER.

‡ She’d only chew the tassels off anyway.

‡‡ Salaries for the specialists, including CPD^ seminars in scowling and intimidation, are extortionate.

^ Continuing Professional Development, over here.  Don’t know what it’s called elsewhere.

‡‡‡ If I’m lucky she WON’T outgrow it.  No channelling of inner standard [size^] bullie grandmother, please.

^ Standards can burgeon up to eighty pounds.  Minis SHOULD TOP OUT at half that at worst.   I’m kind of assuming a short-legged square hellhound.  But she’s a girl,+ she might be smaller.  Yessssssss.

+ And I am going to like having a girl around again.  I bought her a pink food bowl.  It’s one of these Guaranteed Does Not Tip Over things.  Hahahahahahaha.  Whoever they are, they have never met a real puppy.

§ GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT GUILT.  No, no, they’ll love her, they’ll think she’s a terrific idea, they’ll all get along great . . . eventually.^

^ Because I don’t have enough to worry about I was thinking . . . I have been planning to do the rolling-generations thing this time since I brought the hellhounds home six years ago because Life Without Dogs is unbearable but while you’re in the early grieving stage you can’t just go out and buy another dog(s) . . . and as you begin to get over the early grieving stage you start thinking do I really want to go through this again.  Staggered generations is obviously the answer.  But I wasn’t actually planning on doing it this soon.  So does this mean I have to buy or adopt a FOURTH dog when Pavlova is six and the hellhounds are twelve?

Nooooooooo.

Big Ugly Stupid Bilious Pestilential Computer Arrrgh

 

 

Tonight’s blog may be short.  My faithful workhorse laptop at the mews which has been trying not to die for months now . . . wigged/kirked/gonzoed out big time last night while I was in the middle of writing a KES ep.*  I keep KES in batch files of about ten eps each and I’m near the end of the current batch and yes I back up, back up and back up so at worst I would’ve lost ONE ep but one ep is bad enough and it would still be EXTREMELY BAD FOR MORALE to see an entire batch file of KES go mega doolally before disintegrating into component pixels.  This did not quite happen.  But I did finish the ep on Astarte and email it to myself and then went trembling back to the cottage and posted from there.

And today, with joy totally failing to abound, I brought the no-longer-new giant non-economy-size laptop to the mews and am trying to use the fffffreller.** 

I am not happy.***

* * *

* No not last night’s.  I’m still holding at about ten ahead of what you guys see.  Barely.  There seem to be one or two other things going on at the moment.  I seem still to be working on SHADOWS.  I am, with terrifying slowness, addressing the doodle backlog^.  And I have a puppy arriving in six days.

^ The terrifyingness of the slowness aggravated by my latest mandate.  Which I will tell you about some other evening.  For the moment . . . suffice that Doodling Is Happening.

** For those of you with better things to do with your minds than remember my tech embrangles, the old laptop was clearly on its way out the beginning of the year.  So I bought a new laptop.  Kicking and screaming when the archangels told me that I had to get over XP and move onto Windows 7.  Noooo.  Nooooooooooo.  You’ll be fine they said.  7 is a sensible, friendly OS.  Yes, and the moon is made of chocolate chip ice cream^, I said.  So I bought it so that I could get over the Early Self Destructive Stage of learning to use a new OS before I started the third and final draft of SHADOWS.  The last thing I wanted to do was start whacking at, and, more to the point, be whacked at by, a new OS while I’m trying to write the FINAL draft of a novel.

And then New Giant Super Flash laptop turned out to be a dud.  And . . . this is when I get rude^^ . . . unless NGSF turns out to be the best computer I have ever spilled crumbs into the keyboard of, I will never buy an HP again.  Because HP headquarters wasted an incredible amount of my and the archangels’ time, and their, HP’s, money, which means their customers’ money when they put their frelling prices up again, flailing around with this computer.  If they had any dregwarted concept of customer relations, when they couldn’t fix it in . . . let’s say . . . a week, they should have given me a new one.  But they didn’t.  They dorked around, and dorked around, and dorked around . . . it was something like two months before I had the thing back again, by which time I was inevitably, helplessly well launched into that final draft of SHADOWS.^^^

So I give the ex-laptop presently lying on the piano bench in a confusingly computer-shaped heap of exploded processors and toasted hard drives and bent chips credit for trying.  It hung on till I got SHADOWS turned in and its has not been the only voice moaning, for pity’s sake McKinley are you EVER going to finish it?  And it can hardly be blamed if the prospect of further weeks of tweaking stretching off into the unknown foggy future was too much for it.#

^ It’s full or nearly full tonight, and it’s a nice clear night and . . . the moon looks like it’s made of chocolate chip ice cream.  You know all those conspiracy cover-up theories about the moon landing?  This is the real one.  Pssst.  The moon is made of chocolate chip ice cream.  And they don’t want us to know.+

+ Seems to me it would give the space program a big fat boost, but what do I know.

^^ Rude?  Moi?

^^^ And a good thing too, since it took me about four months rather than four weeks.

# And Raphael is coming on Wednesday to carry the dead warrior respectfully away and . . . just check that there isn’t some resuscitation flimflam a clever computer angel could perform on it.  The original plan had been to strip everything off but Finale, the big fat music-composing programme—a lot of the old laptop’s problem is that it ran out of memory about two homeopathic software updates ago^—and leave it plugged in next to the piano.  ^^

He will also be bringing several pints of fresh blood plasma, platelets and red blood cells to help repair the damage that two days of Windows 7 has done.

^ Homeopathy has many virtues but it doesn’t seem to attract good computer programmers.

^^ It’s perfectly true that laptops are more or less portable, but this one has been less for quite some time, since its battery died and it would cost nearly a new laptop to replace, and if you’re going to pretend to compose music at all you had really better have external speakers, even if they’re laughable witzy ones (yes).

*** Why is the default document heading full of Stupid Styles?  Why does it keep RESETTING itself when (apparently) I breathe widdershins on some dinglebrained hyperlink?  Why do new emails ping as they come in, but there’s no helpful little box that appears briefly in the corner of your screen to tell you what it is and whether you should go look at it now or not?  Why is ‘select’ buried several layers in at one end of the screen and ‘copy’ is visible in the toolbar at the other end of the screen?  Why are there sixty gazillion gradations of type colour and no PINK?^

^ You have to go ferret around in the customisable.  Give me a frelling BREAK.+

+ Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to blog/retweet this since VikkiK sent it to me:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/02/28/147590898/they-did-it-to-pluto-but-not-to-pink-please-not-pink

I did know there was no pink in the rainbow—it’s the sort of thing people who like pink keep having pointed out to them—but I hadn’t realised the Other People were trying to make something of this.  So the rainbow is defective.  Get used to it.  Pink rules.

 

KES, 46

 

FORTY SIX 

The alarm went off YAAAAAAAAAAAH in the manner of alarms and both Sid and I jolted awake, looking for the fiiiiiire—and then stared at each other wildly in that wow, what was I drinking last night way.  Then we both remembered.  “It’s okay,” I said.  “You can stay for breakfast.  Supposing I can think of what to feed you.”  She lay down again.  I moaned my way out of bed and found last night’s clean clothes to put on.  And the last several days’ jeans and sweater.  Black jeans are black jeans but I was really tired of this sweater, faithful uncomplaining minion that it was.  It was also grey and brown, suitable for recent events, but if I didn’t get a hot pink and/or sequins fix soon I would go into meltdown.    

            I checked myself quickly for fleabites and didn’t find any.  Ringworm would take a few days to come out, if it was going to.  I opened the curtains and scanned the sky anxiously:  blue and clear.  It had been raining some of my last day in Manhattan, but I was loading the van via freight elevator and basement parking garage.  Hauling cardboard boxes and a small two-seater sofa up a steep flight of steps in the pouring rain was not an attractive prospect.  My rose bush might like it however.  She was looking a little overwhelmed by the vehicular array facing her . . . but she also definitely had a couple more leaves out.

            I turned around and looked at the black thing lying on my bed.  From what I could see of her coat and skin they looked in pretty good shape.  I would know better what I was getting into (or rather had apparently already gotten into) once I’d bought a brush and attempted to wield it.  Heavy emphasis on the ‘attempt’.  Not all dogs take to being groomed.  I had the scars to show for it.  Chan Two won almost every class my mother took her in and she was unrelentingly charming to judges but she took out her performance nerves on the backstage staff, which tended to be me. 

            When I started rummaging through the shopping bags that had produced bread and tuna the night before I heard Sid sitting up.  Breakfast was clearly on the agenda then.  I spared a disconsolate thought about my own breakfast.  I had been looking forward to another Eatsathon on my way to pick up the keys to my new house. 

            To Rose Manor.  To my house.

            That I had a house and a car-substitute before the van went away was clearly (clearly!  Clearly! I did not have PATHETIC tattooed on my forehead!  Gelasio’s whereabouts, with or without attendant floozie, were of no interest whatsoever!  I was an operative adult human being—with only two overdue book contracts!) a good thing but I was getting a little ahead of myself with Sid.  The Silent Wonder Dog could have waited till I moved in and found out, for example, if some of the jungle in the back was fenced in well enough to have a dog loose in it, and to go to the pet shop and buy suitable accoutrements (and food) after I’d chosen my canine companion but while the pound held the actual dog for me.  I looked at the ingredients on the can of hash.  Mostly beef and potatoes.  The odd bit of bay leaf and oregano wouldn’t hurt her.  Pet shop first.  I needed a collar and lead to take her to the vet’s, as well as dog food.  Supposing the sight of collar and lead didn’t bring on the psychotic breaks that were the reason she wasn’t still with her previous human.  The collar would give me some options when she objected to being brushed too.  I sighed.

            I had been concentrating a little hard on the variety of tactical problems immediately before me and hadn’t heard her get off the bed but—sitting on the floor staring at a tin of hash—I suddenly had a dog nose in my ear.  It whuffled.  And I found that there were tears running down my face.  “Crap,” I said, or rather wept.  “Crap crap crap crap and—and—and ringworm.  And warts.”  What was I just telling myself about being an operative adult human being (overdue book contracts optional)?  Nose of dog moved from my ear and tongue of dog began licking my face.  She had sweet clean breath, which was a good sign for her state of health.  Mine however . . . I cried harder.  I had to put the hash down.  Sid climbed into my lap, or at least the front half of her did, and lay down.  When she then laid her chin on the can of hash, I started to laugh.  I would be hysterical in a minute.  Arrrrgh.  I petted the dog in my lap.  Her fur really was silky, despite the dirt and tangles.  She would be a seriously hedonistic stroking experience as soon as I got her washed and combed.  And fed up a little.  She was also nothing but hair and skeleton.  This hadn’t been so obvious from the tummy view last night.  She needed her breakfast.  Come on, Macfarquhar, function.

 

Ground floor ringing

 

CHEEZUM FRELLING ARRGH HOW I HATE GROUND FLOOR RINGS.  If East Persnickety had been a ground floor ring, I would never have started to learn to ring the first time—well no, I would probably have survived the first weeks of handling lessons and groping my way through rounds, because there’s that early rush when you’re learning anything new where it’s all cool.  And then little wisps of reality start getting up your nose and making you sneeze.  My first Sunday service at a ground floor ring I would have taken one look at the AUDIENCE and run away.*  If New Arcadia had been a ground floor ring I wouldn’t have tried to learn to ring again.  If the (frelling) abbey were a ground floor ring I would be learning crochet sooner than anticipated because I had so much more time since I stopped ringing. 

            It does vary from tower to tower.  Glaciation is a ground floor ring, as is Triggilum, but they’re each in a little nub off the back end of their respective churches, with doors between the ringers and the congregation.  But this is still not really enough of a variation, because ground floor ringing chambers with doors tend also to be where the choir puts its robes on and the tea ladies make the tea, both of which occupations require a lot of bustling and flapping, which IS SERIOUSLY UNSAFE AROUND LIVE BELL ROPES, let alone live bell rope pullers.**   Colin, who never loses his rag about anything, and who likes to put on being cranky occasionally to amuse the assembled at bell practise, has been known to be positively uncivil to people carrying trays bearing tall tea urns and tottering piles of cups through the rope circle while having jolly conversations over their shoulders with their colleagues similarly burdened.  ARRRRRRRGH.  The Glaciation ringing chamber is, at least, a reasonable size.  At Triggilum, as I know to my cost in grey hair and stomach lining integrity, when someone comes barging through the doors, there isn’t ROOM for them to do anything but BLUNDER INTO A RINGER.  And furthermore the bells at Triggilum, heavy, elderly, on plain bearings and rarely rung, are mean. 

            Anyway.  I got a phone-call from Felicity early this week asking if I could ring a wedding at Crabbiton on Saturday.  I ring at Crabbiton practises often enough*** that the tower feels familiar, and while I’m certainly aware that it’s a ground floor ring I don’t really think about it.

            I should. 

            It was a popular wedding—daughter, indeed, of the ex-tower-captain.  The church was totally packed out.  I came in by the little secret door tucked into the side of the church and debouching into the ringing circle.  AND THERE WERE ALL THESE PEOPLE.  AAAAAAAAAUGH.

            Furthermore, of course the ceremony was running late, so, having reeled back with a muffled scream of dismay, I returned outdoors to cower trembling† in a corner of the churchyard and knit frantically while I got more and more anxious about the trial to come.  Now, I admit, this particular ground floor ring, while open to the rest of the church, is at least at the back.  They’re not all STARING AT YOU.  Except they are, of course, because we start to ring as soon as the joyful couple have begun progressing toward the exit, and most of the crowd are more than happy to stay for the floor show while they wait for the bottleneck at the door to ease.  Bell ringing does look fairly peculiar, so some of the people idly watching will find themselves getting intrigued and will then amble toward the ringers.††  Then they start getting their cameras out.†††

            And the worst of it is . . . over the phone to Felicity yesterday when she rang to confirm, I absent-mindedly let her talk me into ringing for the harvest festival tomorrow.‡  And I thought we were the floor show today.  Tomorrow will be much, much worse. 

* * *

* I wonder if the invitation to that first traumatic official service ring is delayed in ground floor towers for fear of just this reaction? 

** Although I’m sure I’ve told you about Most Harrowing Ground Floor Ring Experience when I was ringing another of these frelling weddings at a church where for REASONS THAT REMAIN UTTERLY OPAQUE the circle of ropes was in the crossing, you know where the short arm of the church crosses the long arm of the church?   And we were ringing both before and after the service.  So you’re standing there RINGING while people are streaming through the rope circle, with the ropes flying, the way ropes will do, especially as this was (to add insult to injury) a long draught situation^, AND THEN SOME MUM CAME MOSEYING THROUGH WITH HER BABY IN A PUSHCHAIR.

            Nobody died.  But I’m still having nightmares.^^ 

^ Which just means the ropes are unusually long and the ceiling is unusually far away.  The belfry is probably at least one more floor above that first ceiling, but rope-draught is usually counted from the hands of the ringers to the first rope-holes.  Most long-draught towers have rope guides, which are extra little holes for the ropes to go through in some kind of structure below the too-far-away ceiling.  But not all of them.  Twitchy ringers like me REALLY HATE long-draught towers with no rope guides and long-draught ropes are common in ground floor rings on account of the basics of church architecture, which is another reason to hate ground floor rings.  But a long draught ground floor rope circle in the church crossing . . . 

^^ There was also a church I rang at on an outing once.  I don’t remember where it was and I never want to go back there.  And it was empty, it was just us ringers-on-an-outing.  But the circle of ropes was up on the fripplehagging dais behind the altar.  Whose appalling idea of a joke was that?  Whoever it was, they really hated bell ringers.  There is no way in glory that I would ring service standing behind the altar IN DIRECT LINE OF SIGHT OF THE ENTIRE CONGREGATION.  One wants to believe that most of them are reading their Bibles or composing themselves for (or after) the service BUT EVEN SO.  

*** Including last Wednesday, when Wild Robert had one of his monthly manias there.  There were six of us for the six bells.  And we rang Cambridge pretty well all evening.  One and a half of us knew what we were doing.  I knew maybe a quarter of what I was doing, as measured by whether I can hold my line against . . . the other three and a quarter of us going wrong.  It was an interesting evening. 

† Also . . . it’s cold.  It’s, you know, autumn. 

†† At Crabbiton, at least, there’s a come-no-farther rope that Felicity snaps across the front of the circle, so they can’t come frolic among us, with or without tea urns.  Or, in the case of wedding parties, dangerous headgear. 

††† Also, I have no sense.  I like bright colours.  Today I am wearing purple and turquoise.  All I was thinking, when I was thinking about the fact that Crabbiton is a ground floor ring, is that I don’t want to be wearing jeans that I’ve just been pulling out uncooperative^ frelling plants in.  Felicity was a member of the wedding party, so she at least was seriously dressed up.  The other four—including Wild Robert in black—were all demure to near-invisibility.  And then there was me.  In purple and turquoise.  Bright turquoise.  Feh.  I’ll show in the frelling photos.  Who is that woman with her face all screwed up like she’s being tortured? 

^ Uncooperative = dead 

‡ The basic problem is that I believe that BELLS EXIST TO BE RUNG.  If there’s an event where there should be rung bells, the bells should ring.  So I’m kind of a patsy for people trolling around for one-off events.

 

The Day After. No Armour Needed. Or a Flamethrower or anything. Yet.

 

Shortly after I posted last night’s blog, the nuraddin* inbox pinged.  Uh-oh, I thought, here we go.

But no.  A WONDERFUL HUMAN BEING was writing to me.  She’d just read the blog and thought I needed cheering up.  She goes on in a highly salubrious manner about my books, and she seems also to be saying that she likes this blog because it isn’t all about writery things.  But the second to last sentence made me laugh and laugh: 

Thank you for existing and writing and generally refraining from giving up on your more annoying readers and moving to Mars.** We appreciate it, and you.

Thank you, Ms EG.*** 

Maren

Another arrrrrgh here. A lot of self-publishers seem to think that libraries will be overjoyed to receive their brilliant work, but this is not in fact the case. If there are no reputable reviews of it and no other patrons have requested it, we probably don’t want it. Never mind the space it (and all the other unsolicited self-published books) would take up on the shelf–it also has to be cataloged (time-intensive for books that are not already in the national cooperative cataloging system) and processed, which costs actual money in work hours and materials. 

This too.  And worth giving some air/blog space to reminding people of.  I was last night a trifle fixated on the prospect of our young entrepreneur collating writing advice from me, JK Rowling, Stephen King, William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and Dr Seuss†, which your average library might very well be interested in.  But it will probably not clutch to its bosom with glad cries How to Write Good by the local poker club and tea-leaf-reading society.  Despite the inclusion of muffin recipes and hints on how to start your car in really cold weather. 

But really the bottom line is that librarians have no sense of the rightness of things and the true order of the universe. ††  They’re very like (um, do I need to say professional?) writers that way. 

* * *  

* For those of you who have never been moved to contact me directly, nuraddin is the email address that you EVENTUALLY make your way to from either web site or blog, having first passed a great many warnings saying things like BEFORE YOU ASK ME WHERE I GET MY IDEAS, PLEASE READ MY FRELLING FAQ.  But you would be amazed at the number of people who STILL ask me where I get my ideas.^  Or similar.  Or if I have any writing tips just for them because they’re stuck on the story they’re writing . . . ::bangs head against wall::  THAT’S WHY WRITERS ALL HAVE WEB SITES AND FAQs THESE DAYS, YOU KNOW.^^  Anyway.

 ^ Or possibly you wouldn’t.  In which case, there, there, I sympathise.  

^^ And before we had web sites, we had FAQs printed up on pieces of paper with a few nice design features and possibly a photocopied signature, which our publishers would (probably) automatically send out for us if we asked them to.++  I wonder what the difference in investment is between creating FAQ sheets, printing them off, and paying postage on them, and creating frelling web sites.  Publishers’ frelling web sites, mind you.  I don’t get a penny of help running my blog or web site.  Merrilee says this is a good thing because it’s therefore fully under my control, and my publisher can’t force me to think up inventive new ways of answering hoary old questions like Where Do I Get My Ideas+, because publishers tend to like you to stick to the subject which is being a writer and I’m not very good at sticking to that subject.  As you may have noticed.  But when I’m a YEAR LATE TURNING A BOOK IN AND THEREFORE A YEAR LATE GETTING PAID, the idea of a little benign direction—you know, whips, chains, hot pokers, publicity assistants—doesn’t seem so bad, if there were FISCAL CONTRIBUTIONS INVOLVED. 

+ Schenectady is the standard answer, but it’s worth checking under the dog on your lap or in the dusty gap behind the books piled beside your bed, where the spare pair of glasses you haven’t seen in several months have fallen and the vitamin pills you tend to drop land because you’ve forgotten again and already put your hand cream on.  

++ They would also pre-read your mail, if you asked them to.  You never had to see the crazy abusive ones.  Unfortunately as street mail fell off and email took over, this excellent system began to break down.  I no longer know what the standard policy about writer street mail is at any of my publishers, but I can tell you that sod’s law guarantees that the crazy abusive one will get through somehow. 

** Although probably not Mars.  It would be a struggle growing rosebushes and I think the oxygen tanks would chafe the hellhounds’ skin.^  However Oisin and I were today discussing our respective requirements for the isolated uninhabited internet-free islands we are each going to move to some time in the possibly not too distant future.^^ 

^  Bullies are tough. 

^^ When I arrived he was playing the piano.  Show off.+  WHO IS THIS COMPOSER, he said.  NOOOOOOOOO, I said.  I can’t do anybody but Mozart.  And maybe Beethoven.++ 

+ These frelling piano teachers. 

++ It was Rachmaninoff.  Give me a BREAK.  It was Rachmaninoff PRELUDES.  Oh, sure, I knew that.  And for my next trick I will sing the Queen of the Night Der Holle Rache aria.  Yes, that aria.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2ODfuMMyss

 ***And you’re a lot more tolerant of the ending of PEGASUS than I would be.  That it’s taking me LOOOOOOOOONGER than it should to get the sequel written is one thing, but I would totally hunt down the writer of an ending like PEG’s and kill her if she declared she wasn’t going to write a sequel.  I know that I and Certain of My Readers disagree about the ending of SUNSHINE. . . . But PEGASUS?   Jiminy toads and beetles.  It needs a sequel.  It totally needs a sequel. 

† If I wrote THE DRAGON AND THE SWORD then maybe Shakespeare, Christie and Seuss are available for writing tips.

†† As well as having no sense of humour.  Also just like writers.