Robin McKinley's Blog, page 90

More KES forum

 

Sarahkay

I wonder if something similar to this has ever happened to Robin…? 

Susancassidy

I really want to know how many times this has happened to Robin 

Speaking of the Great Divide between writers and readers—which is sometimes there and sometimes isn’t, and sometimes talking to friends who have nothing to do with publishing I’m brought up short by the stuff they don’t know because why should they—it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t KNOW that of course this has happened to me.  I hope this isn’t unbearably conceited.  It’s just . . . my books have always roused strong emotional reactions in a visible, and frequently noisy, segment of their fans.*  From the first con I ever went to I’ve . . . er . . . had people flinging themselves on me, more or less literally.  I need to make a point here of again saying that THE VAST, VAST, VAST MAJORITY OF MY READERS  KNOWN TO ME BY POST OR IN PERSON ARE PERFECTLY NICE PEOPLE.  The problem is that the ones that aren’t are the ones that stick in your memory.  I’ve told you some of those stories.

          Stuff/situations/people like Hayley are . . . um . . . charming and authorial-heart-warming.  In spite of the four inch heels she’s obviously a real person—and a feminist (in spite of the four inch heels).  And—speaking of the four inch heels—I’ve told you already that I didn’t know Hayley was a fan till an ep or two before she pulls the book out—she’d been not meeting Kes’ eyes right along but I didn’t know why either.  And I like that too—as a person who is a writer, who meets people who are readers.  I like it that people surprise you.  That people are surprising. 

            Okay, the worst?  Probably the worst is when people love your books so much they cry on you.  Oh.  Gods.  I mean, I’m an easy weeper myself, but having someone break down in the middle of telling you how much they like your work and how much it means to them and so on and BURST INTO TEARS . . . it’s not gratifying.  It makes me feel half an inch tall, and I want to run away. 

EMoon

I always told myself stories, too. . . . the storytelling went on . . . day and night, in school and out. Told them, drew them, wrote them, got caught writing them instead of homework, learned to hide them better, hold them in my head until later…all that. 

I think I’ve said on this blog more than once that the great shock to my system was when I found out not everyone was like this.  I also needed to escape from my childhood and stories were obviously the ticket out.  But it wasn’t like ‘oh, okay, let’s go live in a story I like better than my life.’  It was just there.  Like walking or breathing.  It was the way things were. 

Katsheare

I know people who create stories because they can’t not. 

Yes.  As above.  And I differentiate between daydreaming and storytelling.  Daydreaming is yours.  In storytelling the story owns you.  

It had never occurred to me how stories might come to them, that they might have met the characters just as their audience [meets] them. What a thrilling (when it happens), frustrating (when it doesn’t), surreal experience that must be. 

It’s only surreal later on, after you find out that not everybody is like this.  Then you start thinking, oh, how surreal.  Oh, I must be weird.   . . . Sigh.

Stardancer

It’s a pity Kes had to be hit on the head in order to meet Flowerhair, but I’m quite glad she did! (Met her, not got hit on the head.) 

I know this is not what you meant, but I’m going to make the opportunity here to say that I am strongly of the belief that YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SUFFER FOR YOUR ART.  Okay, so I don’t know if greeeeeeaaaaaaat artists have to suffer or not—although I’ll hazard an impertinent guess and say they don’t either—but the codswallop that is sometimes shovelled around about the Agony of Creation, oh, bollocks.  Writing is very, very hard work, yes, and that other old truism about going out and having a life is the best thing you can do for your writing because you need something and somewhere to write from is hugely and thunderingly true.  But the whole suffering artist thing gives me a sharp pain in the rear.  I think it was Joyce Carol Oates I first saw protesting the idea that writers are all neurotic and that we write from our neuroses.  We write IN SPITE of being f*cked up, however f*cked up we are.  We would write BETTER if we were NOT f*cked up. 

            Yes.

            So it happens that Kes met Flowerhair the first time as the result of being hit in the head.  But the Story Council already had Kes’ name on their books.  She’d’ve met her one way or another. 

Gonetotervs

Hmmm. I want to read about Flowerhair as well, but Amazon isn’t listing any books yet . On the other, I have found an out-of-print series featuring “Hellflower” who looks as if she might be a temporary substitute….Robin, you’ve never written under an alias, right? 

HELLFLOWER??!!  Oh . . . dear.

            At the torturously snail-like speed I write?  Robin McKinley wouldn’t have a reputation (good or bad) if I were busy spreading her around under aliases.  So . . . no.  But you’ll see more of Flowerhair.  I just don’t know how much more, or when.  

rainycity1

I had a really rough day today, and opening up your blog to see the next installment of Kes was just what I needed. Thank you. 

::Beams::  Many thanks to all of you who have posted, tweeted or emailed similar.  What Kes says is true:  it’s not just earning a living.  Authors do long to feel appreciated.  

KatydidNL

I couldn’t respond to #21 right away…it punched me right in the stomach (not unlike Kes’s bully) and cycled together with memories of my own childhood, and the glorious escape my imagination was. Sometimes, just as described here — the only escape. 

Yes.  Isn’t this one of the reasons we have an imagination?  To make us more than we are?

There’s a part of me that still opens closet doors and feels the back wall, just in case. You never know where the entrance to Narnia might be. 

Yes.  Around the next corner of this till-now familiar road . . .

I am also just now deep into the wonderful “Reflections” by Diana Wynne Jones, containing many of her essays and thoughts about writing, about writing fantasy, about writing for children. (Highly, highly recommended, by the way.) And one thought that keeps coming back to the forefront in her writing is how the imagination is our refuge and our strength; it is how we solve problems, when faced with them, and where we find strength, when life is too much. And therefore, how it should be encouraged, in children as well as adults, and not discouraged, as being childish or “not real” enough to be worthwhile. 

Speaking of crying.  I keep reading REFLECTIONS and crying.  And putting it down.  It sounds just like her.  She really was that sharp, and that funny.  It takes me drafts to look clever.  She was clever just out of her mouth.

Hari and Aerin were very much in my mind, as I faced my own childhood (and adolescent) fears and struggles. 

I get a fair number of letters and emails that say this.  And I really appreciate them.  Really.  I’m cranky, but really I’m squishy as hell.  I’m cranky as a defense. 

I guess, to sum up — I love Kes — it’s making me laugh, and chortle (those are two very distinct reactions) — but this episode made me gasp in recognition and brought tears to my eyes.

Thank you. 

Thank you.

Can’t wait to read more. 

Coming soon to a screen near you . . . 

* * *

* Also in a blessedly smaller segment of their—and my—anti-fans.  Before the blog, when readers hated me, they didn’t have a lot to go on outside the books themselves.  Fortunately most people for whom the blog’s humour (and crankiness and, um, narrowness of focus) is not to their taste, just go away and find someone who is.  What kind of fascinates me, however, in a delete-it-fast sort of way, is that the people who are moved to write to tell me why they will never touch another of my books and have cauterised the blog’s address from their search engines, need to tell me this from a High Moral Plane.  It’s not that my jokes are pathetic or that bell ringing/knitting bores them to death or that if I’m such a poor singer why do I keep doing it . . . it’s less often any more because my books have offended them, although this still happens too^ . . .  it’s that I’m a Bad Person.  What is it with the High Moral Plane?  Is it just me, or is it the standard approach for telling an author you’re dropkicking them into oblivion?   

^ Top Three Reasons for Never Reading Another Robin McKinley Book:  (1) Aerin and Luthe (2) nonstandard Sleeping Beauty ending of SPINDLE (3) language (and sexual details!!!!) in SUNSHINE.+ 

+ The people who hate me for the ending of PEGASUS aren’t paying attention and don’t count.

Bronwen and knitting

 

Whiiiiiimper.  Bronwen was supposed to come down today—Niall and I were poised to beat her up with handbells—both our third ringers this week having pressing engagements elsewhere.*  And I haven’t seen her in yonks and yonks—I still have her Christmas present sitting in my office.**

            It’s been muggy-sultry-breathless hot*** today and I was worried about her driving in her un-airconned car.  This is the only bright spot in a day of Bronwenlessness, that she wasn’t long on the road in this weather:  no, she was long hanging around for the locksmith.  She rang me about an hour before she was due to arrive, to say that the door lock on her house had decided to secede from the union, and she needed a locksmith to break into her own home.†  She’d been waiting something like two hours at that point, and was obviously not going to make it here.

            Waaaah.††  Bronwen KNITS.†††  I was going to ask her KNITTING QUESTIONS.

            See.  There has been knitting.

First Cardi, a week ago Sunday

First Cardi, tonight (minus the extra rows added WHILE WAITING FOR STUFF TO LOAD). I'm about to start my third skein, how exciting is that?

 

Scale. Although I'm not sure how useful it is. The fabric is really wodged together on the needles. There's more of it than it looks like here.

And then there has been . . . knitting.

Gratuitous Error #1

I have no idea what I did here.  It looks like the yarn version of that old dumb teenage thing where all nine of you in the VW Bug get out at the stoplight, run around the car, and get back in again before the light changes to green. 

Gratuitous Error #2

I’m pretty sure I dropped a stitch here.  What I don’t know is what I did next.  I know that personally what I hate worst in knitting errors is when there’s a hole so Above All Things There Shall Be No Hole.  Well, there isn’t a hole.  But there seem to be several more stitches.  After I’d knitted a couple more rows I started to worry, so I decided to count.

            And I had SIX FEWER STITCHES THAN I STARTED OUT WITH.   How does this HAPPEN?‡  I counted and recounted obsessively when I first cast on, and used stitch counters and everything to doublecheck.  But I don’t see any way I can have LOST SIX STITCHES in what passes, in beginners’ terms, for a relatively even, regular block of knitting.  WHERE ARE YOOOOOOOOOOU?  So, since I was six stitches down anyway, I decided to let the extra two or four (this is 2 x 2 ribbing) live.  Clearly I need their aid and support.

            But I am so glad that I managed to half-plan and half-luck-into this particular pattern and this particular yarn for First Cardi.  I knew from all those hellhound blanket squares that variegated yarn was the way to go:  solid colours show up your mistakes way too much.  And then I discovered the extra disguise feature of ribbing, so then I had to have ribbing too.  The two errors we are examining here are only the largest and ugliest:  there are lots of little gleeps and oopses.  I want to be able to WEAR this sucker when I’m done—but I don’t want to spend the next six years ripping out and starting over either.  And the yarn itself is just the right level of ‘I really like this, it’s pretty, and comfortable and satisfying to work’ but not to the dangerous ‘I am not WORTHY of this DIVINE STUFF and when I make a HORRIBLE MESS I will have to FALL ON MY KNITTING NEEDLES’ level.  I have some of that yarn in my stash.

            But I may yet have to fall on my knitting needles.  This is only the back.  All the stuff that isn’t like just knitting a Very Large Square is to come.  Beginning with . . . shaping the armholes.  AAAAAAAUGH.  I realised a day or two ago I was within a few rows of having to SHAPE THE ARMHOLES and . . . stopped knitting.  (Note:  siiiiigh.)  But then Bronwen was coming, and she could . . .

            And then Bronwen didn’t come.

            Whimper. 

* * *

 * How can someone choose a HOLIDAY over the chance to ring handbells—especially with Niall and me?^ 

^ Be careful how you answer that.  I can have you banned from the forum, you know. 

** Of course I could put it in an envelope and post it.  And your point would be? 

*** No, not as E Moon in Texas would recognise sultry.  But we’re flimsy delicate little things here in southern England.  And I frankly wouldn’t survive Texas.^  

^ Neither would the hellhounds.  Another friend with dogs wrote me recently about her vet, who has a rescue greyhound.  Does he eat? asked my friend.  Oh yes, said the vet, he eats.  There was a pause.  Although he’s what you might call a self regulating eater, she added.  If it’s too hot, he doesn’t eat.  If he hasn’t had enough exercise, he doesn’t eat.  He doesn’t always like the stuff at the bottom of the kibble bag, and some of the really high-quality stuff upsets his digestion.  —Yes.  I hear this.  In my guys’ case however the list continues ‘If the moon is in the wrong quarter, they don’t eat.  If the bus at the bus stop when we walk by is the wrong colour, they don’t eat.  If the first fellow in the queue to get on the bus is wearing the wrong shirt, they don’t eat.  If there are the wrong number of squirrels in the Foremost Squirrel Tree, they don’t eat.  If they do/do not see the churchyard cat who does/does not swank around under their noses, they don’t eat.  If the hellgoddess’ knapsack is sitting on the floor at the wrong angle^, they don’t eat.’   Siiiiigh.  But what I’ve finally begun to figure out, the last summer or two, is that they eat better in hot weather with less exercise.  You’d think, once they’d crashed out in front of the fan^^ for an hour or so and cooled off, it wouldn’t matter.  But it does.^^^ 

^ The wrong angle for that day, you understand.  It will be a different wrong angle tomorrow. 

^^ Unless it’s an Objecting to the Fan day.  We have those too.  

^^^ Especially when the moon is in the wrong quarter. 

† This almost happened to me about six months ago—at grrmph o’clock in the morning, of course.  And I don’t think we have 24-hour locksmiths around here.  Fortunately my lock relented and I spent the next week basting it in WD40 and it’s been . . . fine, she says, looking around nervously. 

†† She finally got another locksmith.  But it was still too late for handbells in New Arcadia.  Niall, who is a truly loathsome human being, suggested that I could spend the already-dedicated handbell time learning a touch that I could call next time we get together.  Certainly.  Right after I finish creating this failsafe appetite stimulant for hellhounds. 

††† Bronwen knits appallingly well.  I have to avert my eyes or I would be forced to take up tatting or discus-throwing. 

‡ I don’t think the Twilight Zone ever tackled knitting.  Probably too scary for an ordinary audience. 

 

KES, 22

 

TWENTY TWO 

“Oh,” said Hayley.  “Oh.  Oh—that would be wonderful.  I—oh—I —”

            I had left my monster knapsack in the car, but the monster black leather jacket I wore eight or nine (or ten) months of the year had excellent pockets, and a pen was not a problem.  (The fact that I had a weakness for fountain pens might have been a problem but the occasional black ink stain on black satin lining and black leather passed, ahem, unmarked.  The one time there had been a situation producing language was when I’d been wearing a white silk shirt under an invisible but not-yet-dry stain.  But what on earth had I been thinking of, wearing a white silk shirt?  The error was not repeated.  Not only because the permanently stained shirt in question went to the Salvation Army.)  I pulled the top of the pen off, shook it, and gently opened the battered old book.  Hayley had fallen silent.  “ ‘To Hayley’?” I said.

            “Yes please,” she said.

            I knew her name was spelled ‘Hayley’ from her emails.  You wouldn’t believe how many ways there are to spell people’s names.  Three hundred and sixty nine ways to spell ‘Mary’.  Four hundred and twelve for ‘Laurie’.  What’s bad is when you’re signing at a convention and you get twelve people in a row all of whose names are ‘Laurie’ or ‘Mary’ and each one is spelled differently.   I wrote:  “To Hayley with best wishes from someone else whose childhood was warped by H P Lovecraft.  Cthulhuanly yours, Kes.’  I handed it back to her, but she didn’t look at what I’d written.  She stood holding the book in a manner I refuse to call reverently. 

            “My brother gave it to me,” she said after a minute.  “He’d bought it—er—for the cover.”

            “The coffee stain is an improvement,” I said.

            She laughed her startled-out-of-her laugh again.  “Well—it’s not quite how I imagined Flowerhair, after I’d read it.  But there hadn’t been anything else in the house to read that weekend that I hadn’t already read a million times, or WAR AND PEACE or CLARISSA or something, and my mother was too busy to take me to the library, and I did kind of like the idea of a woman with a sword.  In spite of . . . er . . .”

            “Yeah,” I said.  “The separating of the sensitive teenage boy from his hard-earned money cover illustration.”

            She laughed again.  “I didn’t mean to spill coffee on it.  But I used to read it on my 8 am class mornings at college—especially that scene when she’s just escaped from Syforian again, and she’s so tired she’s going to sleep for a week, and Wesna has actually paid her what he owes her for a change, so she’s going to hire a room at Ganorac’s inn, and sleep in a bed, and eat every time she wakes up . . .”

            “I feel anxious about your state of mind at college,” I said.

            “My parents both teach English—my mom at the state u extension in Distantville, and my dad at the community college in Xanadu.  I was determined to do something practical.”  She sighed.  “The business course had a lot of 8 am classes.”  She smoothed the un-smoothably ragged cover of her FLOWERHAIR.  “I hadn’t realised just how awful it looks till I pulled it off the shelf this morning.  I have the first hardback omnibus, which is very pretty and very clean, and I was going to bring that, but then I thought, why?”  She looked up at me and smiled.  “I wasn’t going to show it to you or anything.  How embarrassing.  How unprofessional.”  She looked down again.  “So I brought this one along.  For luck.  Or something.  A habit of bringing it along for luck is one of the reasons it looks the way it does, although dropping it in the bath once or twice has contributed.”

            “An author would much rather see a book that’s been carried around for luck and dropped in the bath than the pristine copy that lives on a shelf,” I said.  “We’re vain, you know.  We like the idea that our stuff is appreciated.”  

            She finally opened the cover, but she still didn’t look at what I’d written, which was a (coming-loose) page or two in, on the title page.  I hadn’t noticed, but there was a series of rows of little marks on the inside cover.  “I used to keep track of how many times I’d read it,” she said.  “With a code, which I think I’ve mostly forgotten, for which adventure most nearly spoke to my current situation.  Syforian was extremely popular in junior high, when I seemed to hate all my teachers.  I reread the Osgil chapters obsessively after I had my heart broken for the first time.”

            Osgil had been an unsatisfactory lover whom Flowerhair ended up killing in a fair fight.  ‘Unsatisfactory’ was the polite version.  He’d tried to sell her soul to Syforian so he could get his hands on Doomblade. 

            Hayley looked up again.  “I’ll stop now.  But—thank you, you know?  Thank you.”

            “You’re very welcome,” I said.        

 

Feeding the Birds

 

The deed is done.  I bought myself a bird feeder today.  And some frelling bird seed.  We’re cutting back on the live mealworms* which, even allowing generously for relative body weight, cost more than frelling organic cereal-free hellhound food.   But I have spent nearly sixty years resisting Feeding the Birds and have now finally succumbed to . . . two robin nests in about two months.**

          I bought my shiny new bird feeder on line so it’ll be a day or two arriving.  I went for something squirrel resistant, which, in this case, means that the tube of bird seed is surrounded at a little distance by a tempered steel cage whose holes are (theoretically) too small for anything but a robin or a tit or a sparrow or thereabouts to get through.  The thought of feeding the local population of rats with furry tails is one of the things that has stopped me getting caught in the feed-the-birds trap before this.

            I’m having a little seizure of anti-on-line shopping however and with a car that runs I might revert to doing a little more of it in three dimensions, even if this means I can’t do it at three o’clock in the morning.***  But I’m tired of web sites that were stuck together by rather stupid demons using wallpaper paste and the blood of people who tick NO to the free newsletter, updates, special offers and more fun things to clutter the hell up your inbox option.†  The bird feeder site says, YOU HAVE TO CREATE AN ACCOUNT!!!!!, if you want to, like, order anything . . . BUT YOU’LL REALLY LIKE HAVING AN ACCOUNT BECAUSE WE SEND YOU ALL THESE GREAT OFFERS!  How often do you buy a new bird feeder?  I thought I might at least order their FREE bird feeding guide but . . . you have to create an account.  Apparently you have to create another account, because I’ve already created one so I can buy the frelling feeder.  So I’m going to receive TWO copies of the fabulous newsletter and all the special offers??  I don’t think so.  Never mind the dazzling nuisance of filling out your name, address, phone number^^^, and your new secret doodah password^^^^ all over again.

            So I declined.  I can get my bird feeding regime from the http://www.rspb.org.uk/

            But the current pinnacle of on line shopping fury was reached a few nights ago when I was trying to buy . . . socks.  I want colourful cotton socks, not black, navy blue and beige creepy weird fabric socks, and this is apparently going a little far, at least for the British market.  There’s a big lower-limb underwear chain over here whose web site is a nightmare.  I keep not going there because after about ten minutes I’m losing the will to live.  They have videos.  Videos of SOCKS?  WHY?  And if you are scrolling wearily down the long series of Hello Kitty and Robert Pattison socks, because the awful truth is that lurking among the rest there are Colourful Cotton Socks, and you SEE WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR and click on the brand thumbnail, for every different colour you look at within that brand, you will have to come back through that individual screen again before you return to the home screen.  Let’s say there are two different greens, and you’ve clicked back and forth two or three times to compare—?  Yes.  And let me add to your burden of comprehension by further explaining that, probably because of the video option, EVERY PAGE TAKES SEVERAL SECONDS TO LOAD.

            I got out my knitting to avoid killing all the neighbours and laying waste generally to New Arcadia.

            I was on this frelling site nearly an hour.  And at the end, I had finally laid down my needles and was making my way through the checkout when . . . THE SITE TIMED ME OUT, THREW ME OFF, AND WIPED MY ORDER.‡

            Fortunately the pet shop here, which already orders cereal-free hellhound food for me, carries a liberal selection of bird food.  

* * *

* Unless there’s a third nest.  I suppose I should clear out the old ones.  There wasn’t a lot of free space in my greenhouse before the robins found two imaginary gaps to wedge two real nests into.  

** One of my Twitter followers said thank you for the photos,^ that most people don’t get to see this.  It’s funny how quickly something amazing becomes normal:  it doesn’t necessarily become less amazing—and I will be crushed if the local robins never build a nest in my greenhouse again^^:  don’t we have a tradition?^^^—but it still becomes established routine.  

^ Which reminds me, I have to finish the series.  Not tonight.  I’ve spent too much time ranting.  

^^ Although it would be nice to have the next nest where I can see it without the assistance of a camera-tipped gorilla-length arm. 

^^^ Including live mealworms 

*** Arguably the best feature about going to Bowdoin College thirty years ago was that the flagship Freeport 24-hour LL Bean is about a quarter of an hour away.  Back in my college days LL Bean was not yet . . . fashionable.    

† Which might explain the being gruesomely, headachingly tired so much of the time.  Here I thought it was the ME.   Hmm.  And I still get an awful lot of special offers. 

†† 00000000000.  Most web sites created by stupid demons don’t pick this up.  

††† I hate passwords.  I have unique ones for bank accounts and things, but for a site that sells bird feeders?  Give me a frelling break.  And then there’s the PROVE IT stage of paying on line.  PayPal, for example, is one of my unique passwords, so then I have to remember what the sodblaster it is . . . but one of my credit cards demands that you choose a Memorable Name of more than ten letters, and then every time you use the frelling card you get a screen that wants a specific, if random, three of the Name’s letters.  THE LETTERS HAVE WORN OFF TWO-THIRDS OF THE KEYS ON MY OLD LAPTOP.  I can type, because I’m not thinking about where individual letters are:  I’ve been typing on a QWERTY keyboard for fifty years [sic].  But tell me to pick out three specific letters from a lot of blotchy black keys?  Are you KIDDING? 

‡ It’s almost enough to make me rethink knitting socks.^ 

^ NOOOOOOOOOO.+  Cardigans!  I want to knit cardigans!  And jumpers!  And waistcoats!  And things that show that you’ve gone to all that knitting trouble!++  And that don’t get holes in them just because you wear them to walk in! 

+ I wrote this web site a little email, expressing would-be-customer dismay.  Four days went by.  Today I received your standard gloppy gormless infuriating robo-letter saying nothing at all at considerable length.  I felt my blood pressure rising again and answered it saying, this is gloppy, gormless and useless and proves that your customer relations is as rubbish as your web site.

            I got an answer!  And it was just as gloppy, gormless and useless! 

++ And made all these knitting mistakes.  Maybe not-showing has something to be said for it.

 

How to feel like a GIRL

 

Gaaaaaah.  Go to farm store and try to wrestle large bags of potting compost.  Large wet bags of potting compost.

            So, I have (theoretically) a car that runs again.  So I decided to put a little strain on this hypothesis.  We went for a proper countryside hurtle yesterday—climbed into Wolfgang, drove somewhere, parked, hurtled, and drove home again.  Between time pressure and will-Wolfgang-start pressure we haven’t been getting out of town for true over hill, over dale, lost in the wilderness, up to our necks in brambles and nettles, hurtles as often as we were once accustomed.*

            Wolfgang ran beautifully.  So today on my way to my voice lesson I decided to stop at the farm store and buy compost.  I had run out with the last lot of half-price fuchsias.**  Peter wanted some compost too, so I headed for the Giant Three for Two Bag area.  Laid my hands on the topmost bag, pulled, and . . . nothing happened.  Got a better grip.  Pulled. 

            Nothing happened.

            When you buy compost at the home-and-garden store, they tend to keep it under a roof because all the wussy London commuters and would-be DIY types and little old ladies can’t deal with Giant Wet Bags of compost.  But some of us are poor and would rather be spending the money on plants***. 

            I got an EVEN BETTER GRIP, added some language, and yanked the &&&&&& sideways.  It frelling shifted.  Reluctantly.  And with a ripping sound.  There are two—or three—parts to the problem.  The first one is, of course, that compost gets heavier when it gets wet.  The second one is that the plastic bags it is not-quite-sealed into STICK LIKE FURY to others of their kind.  Water + two layers of bendy bag plastic = superglue.  I eventually did get six Giant Wet Bags of compost on my trolley—which was gritting its teeth and sagging in the middle—and then I had to ROLL the freller first to the till and then out to Wolfgang in the alpine car park.†  The third part of the problem is the sheer practical physics of an overloaded trolley with wonky wheels, an uneven ground surface, and a frustrated, red-faced, pop-eyed human motive force who weighs less than her possessed-by-demons freightage.   You have to figure out which way the sodblasted trolley wants to roll†† and then apply what influence you have in some kind of clever semi-opposed orientation which may or may not average out in a tiny sprint in the right direction.  And then do it all over again.  Several times.  And they had a huge pot of frelling pansies right in front of the exit door, which is mysteriously cantilevered to throw you away from whatever you were/were not aiming for, which is to say Wolfgang/pot of pansies.  ARRRRRRGH.

            And then you get to transfer your six Giant Wet Bags of compost into your car. . . .

            It’s amazing I could sing at all.†††

            But Wolfgang ran beautifully.  Including when I stalled him out on a hill in the middle of a traffic jam with Monster Bus from Hell‡ behind me.‡‡ 

* * *

* And speaking of brambles and nettles . . . arrrgh.  This was not one of our standard walks, but it was chosen first because I knew I could park Wolfgang in the shade, heat having tended to aggravate his condition^, and second because it was only about two more miles if we had our hurtle, got back in the car, turned the key in the little hole and . . . had to walk home. 

            It’s not one of our standard walks because a long stretch of it skirts the Large Fat Ugly Smug We Have More Money Than You Do and We’re Entitled estate.^^   The deal is supposed to be that if you have a public footpath running beside or through your property you have to maintain it.  Some owners are total stars.  Some are Fat, Ugly and Entitled.^^^  These jokers had put up a fence slicing off the footpath from the rest of the field, which would be fine if you could actually use the supposed path without a machete.  Since we were there last they’ve put up a map CLEARLY INDICATING the path . . . which is now invisible through the thickets punctuated by the occasional fallen tree.  We went down the field.  I noticed with some dry interest that two of the fallen trees had taken out quite a bit of their fence.  We climbed over it at the far end . . . and were then faced with a literally impenetrable stile and a gate clogged shut by brambles that would have done Sleeping Beauty’s castle proud.  ARRRGH.  A machete would have been better, but I do have a jackknife and a bad attitude. 

^ I’m sure any self-respecting mechanic would say ‘tut tut—nonsense’ but from the clueless owner’s eye view it was true.  And he was parked in hot sunlight last Tuesday at the garage, when he memorably refused to start after having been mended to a very high standard by the Niagara-Falls-Wallenda-walking+ equivalent electrician++. 

+ http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/nik-wallendas-niagara-falls-walk-daredevil-high-wire-stunt-us-16586935

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/stuntman-nik-wallenda-com_n_1601887.html

As someone who has to have Atlas prune the second storey of my Mme Alfred Carriere, this story is scarier than vampires.~ 

~ I mostly dread and loathe circuses, both for the clowns, and for the fact that I don’t want to see anyone get eaten by tigers or miss the net because there isn’t one. 

++ Which is to say this electrician would have fallen off.  

^^ I may have mentioned once or twice that I’m not a royalist.  I’m not an aristocracy-ist+ either.  

+ Have never liked the term ‘oligarchy’.  The few what?  Disease-resistant-rose breeders?  Olympic standard dressage riders?  Flying Wallendas? 

^^^ There are cranks in every stratum of society, but the wealthy and/or blue blooded seem to have a curiously high proportion of self-serving ratbaggery within their ranks.  

** You get these come ons in your email and you’re in a hurry, but you like fuchsias, and this nursery does nice healthy plants and you could use a few hole-fillers, especially the kind that don’t demand twenty-hour-a-day sunlight^, so you order the ‘border collection’.  And then they frelling substitute half the frelling plants and you end up with a lot of hole fillers where you’d rather have the frelling holes.  I actually wrote and objected and they wrote back sniffily that they had said there was a possibility of substitution.  Oh?  Where?  Not either on their web site or in the original come-on email.  They didn’t answer that one.  Life is too short.  So I potted the bloody things. 

^ I swear our best sunlight happens at about rmmgh a.m. while I’m pretending it’s not that late.  

*** But not again on half-price fuchsias.  

† Who was going to start. 

†† ‘judder’ is perhaps more accurate 

††† More or less.  Last week I went in there very very tense due to circumstances, including cars, trains, planes and buses^, beyond my control and even Nadia couldn’t quite winkle me loose and so I went home convinced that it was all over and I would never sing again, not that what I’ve been doing so far is really what you’d want to call singing.  This week was better.  This week I can Go On.  Although I hope Nadia doesn’t take very much maternity leave or I’ll have to . . . join a yoga class or something. 

^ Okay, maybe only cars and buses 

‡ I did it deliberately!  Of course!  Just testing!

‡‡ I’m sure I recognised it from last week.

 

KES, 21

TWENTY ONE  

I almost cried.  I was having a stressful day.  My eyes did maybe fill up a bit.  I’m pretty sure the cover went blurrier than it already was.  (This was a good thing, as was the coffee stain, and the torn corner.  My early covers . . . well.  Let me just say for the record that I have never, and will never, write a female character with pneumatic boobs, and that the purpose of leather clothing if you’ve reluctantly become a sword for hire is to cover you up.  And the mad demon Flowerhair inadvertently took Doomblade away from was not iridescent purple and did not have four arms and twisty yellow horns.) 

            Hayley was holding the book out toward me so I lifted one hand and took it.

            I stood staring at it.  The blotchy cover went away and I was remembering the first time I had met Flowerhair—met used in the storyteller’s sense of that first jolt of fetching up against a character or a story with a life of its own that you might be able to use.    

             I was ten years old.  I’d just been beat up by the neighborhood bully again.  Bullying, like most things in New York, was compartmentalised.  There were the playground bullies at school, who followed a strict class hierarchy, and I mostly hid out in the library anyway.  But eventually I had to go home.  I was beneath the notice of our building’s bullies, who were teenagers, but out on the street and on our block, unfortunately, there was a preteen bully, and he and his cronies totally had my name.  Our janitor—this was years before building managers and doorpersons—would run them off if they hit me too near home and he noticed, but he was about ninety years old, mostly deaf and half blind.  And one of the building teenagers took a kind of big-brother shine to me, but this was not actually so great, because my nemesis would hit me harder next time if his hero had been defending me.  My mother had her Ghastlies, and my father thought you were supposed to stand up to bullies.  That’s all very well if you’re at least as big as they are (which I wasn’t) and the odds were a little more in your favor (there were four of them and one of me).  It was not a great time in my life.

            This particular occasion, one of the gang somewhat imprudently punched me in the head.  Skulls are hard, you know?  And he hurt his hand.  Poor baby.  Ow, he said.  But he’d hit me hard enough that I saw stars, and when he hit me again in the stomach (with his other hand) I fell down, and stayed down.  That was usually their signal to run away (as long as I hadn’t fallen down too soon and spoiled their fun:  there were rules about being bullied too), which they did.  I sat up, cautiously, but didn’t try to get up immediately, because I was watching a fascinating movie in my head. 

            There was a young woman dressed in white, with flowers in her hair, seated on a high open carriage drawn by four horses:  two black and two white.  The carriage was very grand, gold and white;  behind the young woman stood two guards dressed in black, leaning on their spears against the motion of the carriage, but looking very alert and dangerous for all of that.  I wondered what—or who—it was that this young woman needed to be so carefully protected against:  not that I knew any more about spear-carrying guards than Tolkien (or Robert E Howard) could teach me, but these didn’t look like honor guards to me. 

            The young woman looked brave.  And she looked like she needed to be brave.  She sat up very straight, although the bench she was on was backless, and her chin was a raised a little bit higher than if she had been on her way to a picnic or a prom.  Her hands were quietly in her lap;  she was wearing a ring that sparkled in the sunlight, and I glanced down at it.  Which is when I saw that her hands were chained together.  Chained.  The shock was almost as great as if No Brain had come back and given me another punch in the stomach.  

            I’d been telling myself stories for as long as I could remember.  Longer.  My memory began with a story-telling habit already established.  Sometimes I wrote my stories down.  (Sometimes I burned them after I’d written them down.)   But this one was different.  I wasn’t making this one up.  Whoever the young woman with the flowers in her hair and the chains round her wrists was, she existed. 

            It was at this point that our janitor found me, helped me up, brushed me off, and distracted me with some very colorful epithets concerning No Brain and his buds. 

            I shook myself and looked up.  Hayley was watching me anxiously.  I guessed that Sally didn’t know anything about Homeric Homes’ new client’s dubious means of earning a living, or that one of her employees was a fan.  “Would you like me to sign it for you?” I said.

 

Baby robins

 

I am skronking a blog entry together here even later than usual, having been working on SHADOWS till a depraved hour, having also decided this afternoon that it was over time to do you my fabulous Second Nest photo essay . . .  and always forgetting that photo blogs take JUST AS LONG as text blogs because of all the choosing and cropping and rechoosing and recropping and fussing and making lists and changing my mind.   I fuss slowly.  In this case complicated by the fact that I have extraordinary numbers of . . . ahem . . . not totally excellent photos to fuss over. 

Baby robins. Among the plant food and Epsom salts.

Now this is the first nest, and you see that it was not divinely situated for photo taking.  I could see it fine–and I can tell you there are five baby robins in there–but since I didn’t want to shoot off the flash in their little fluffy faces I was a bit stymed on the photo front.

Teeny teeny weeny. Not much with the feathers either.

Now this is the second nest, beautifully open to sunlight and photography . . . except for the little fact that it’s over my head behind a wall of pots and paraphernalia and that I took this and all the following photos (and a great many more you are spared) standing in a highly precarious manner with my feet on two loose bits of timber propped up on bricks and holding the camera at full arm’s length pointing down to where I know the nest is, on the far side of the aforementioned wall, and my other hand frantically grasping anything it can, to keep me (relatively) steady for shutter-clicking.  The things I go through for this blog.

By the way, to give you some idea of scale, the width of those upside-down pressed-compost pots leaning on the edge of the nest is two and a half inches.  Baby robins are very small. 

You may remember I discovered the presence of the nest when I dropped some of these pressed-compost pots on sitting mama robin’s head.  I had to clear them away without being able to see what I was doing either, and these last few were  inadvertently left behind.  And then when the photos revealed their presence I was afraid to try to move them because I didn’t want to freak anybody out.  Mum and dad remained dubious about me (despite all the mealworms) but the kids were so used to this ticking black rectangular thing swooping down at them from overhead every day (just about the time the mealworms arrived, in fact) that I could probably have decorated the nest with ribbons and pinwheels and they wouldn’t have batted an eye.  Although I’m sure mum and dad would have disapproved.

 

Feeeeeeeeed meeeeeeeee

They are all mouth at this age–with its beak open you feel like you can see the back of a baby robin’s skull, not just its throat–on these tiny wavery little necks.

Are we cute yet?

They're getting a little more emphatic. They're still all beak, but they're BIGGER.

Feed me, revisited.  They’re even beginning to make some effort about feathers.

I never did quite decide if there were four or five this time.

I think it’s only four.  But there are always slightly more bulges than four robins decently need, and I never saw them live directly either–just the photos.  Maybe the fifth one is shy.  Note beaks still as big as their heads.

Mum, keeping an eye on me

If you look carefully in the gap in the centre, you will see a tiny little red head, its eye clearly staring suspiciously at the photographer. 

TO BE CONTINUED. . . .

Car

 

Well.  I have a car.  Maybe.  I seem to have a car at the moment.  Um.  A car-shaped object.  It looks a lot like Wolfgang.  Except that this red, convincingly dented and red-paint-touched-up, very Wolfgang-like car-thing keeps starting.  Well.  So far.

            Yesterday afternoon I rang the garage.  The line was engaged.  It went on being engaged.  I said to Colin and Niall, when they arrived to ring handbells, that the garage had taken their phone off the hook so I couldn’t ring them up.  I kept trying.  Eventually someone absent-mindedly put the phone back in its cradle again and then there it was, ringing, and they sighed heavily and answered.

            It’s all ready, said Paxton.

            Uh huh (I did not say aloud).  I’ve heard that one before.

            Paxton heard me anyway.  No, really, he said.  We couldn’t find anything wrong with it . . . until we discovered it had been fitted with a gingledrabbler.  We’ve never seen a gingledrabbler on a Volkswagen before.

            Um.  Granted that everything I know about cars could dance on the head of a pin with room left over for a picnic table, but this is not a word I’ve ever heard before, in relation to cars or anything else.  I don’t want to have a discussion about it but I do at least know the word ‘solenoid’ exists, for example, and that it’s a Car Part in one of its manifestations, and that you need the one or ones in your car to be happy in their work.  Gingledrabbler I do not know.  Apparently it’s another of these fluxy electrically channelly things.  And it was interrupting the flow in Wolfgang somewhere. 

            So we called Volkswagen, Paxton went on enthusiastically, and they said, oh, yeah, only a few cars were fitted with gingledrabblers—

            —Which I take as a bad sign, just by the way.  They tried it and they decided it was a bad idea and didn’t do it any more. 

            —but, went on Paxton, they said they were still making replacements.  So we ordered one.  And we’ve fitted it and the car starts.

            Okay, good, I said cautiously.  Wolfgang had run brilliantly over the Jubilee weekend after our little emergency trip to the local garage with the RAC man, and then declined to start two or three times as he readied himself for the additional exertion of dropping me in the proverbial soup at 70 mph on the motorway.  And then there was last Tuesday.  I’m feeling a little bruised. 

            I’ll take it out tomorrow morning and drive it really hard, said Paxton.  And turn it on and off a lot.  Give us a ring, and you can pick it up in the afternoon.

            My today began last night, as my todays usually do.  We are in a supper resistant phase with the hellhounds.*  The current system involves that they must have lain at tortured, food-repelling angles all over the kitchen floor for a sufficient time and then locked in their crate before they will eat.  Sometimes.  And it’s not like the exact sufficiency of time is measurable or predictable.  Nooooooo.  No, you have to monitor the tortured angles, and at the RIGHT MOMENT you have to move them into their bed, and then watch them closely** for tiny signs of interest in the contents of their bowls.  If you shut them in too quickly it doesn’t work, and then you have to start all over.  If you wait too long they just go to sleep.  ARRRRRRGH.  I could be solving the global financial crisis and finding a cure for malaria with the focus and energy I’m using TRYING TO GET FOOD INTO HELLHOUNDS.

            Last night was a Chaos fail.  And I couldn’t stay awake any longer.***  So we all got off to a slow, late and CRANKY start today.  And the weather was going RAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIN sun RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIN sun RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIN WIIIIIIIIIIIIND sun so on the whole I decided we did not want to walk back out to Warm Upford again.  Instead I sacrificed my music lesson and Oisin drove me out there.†  I approached Wolfgang with caution, holding out three keys in a humble, supplicating manner.††  I got in the driver’s seat.  I buckled my seatbelt to indicate my faith in the process.  And with Oisin looking on somewhat cynically, I turned the key in the little hole. . . .

            And Wolfgang started.  Vroom vroom.  There was a problem?†††

            Hellhounds and I had a gorgeous post-more-handbells‡ hurtle this evening while my knees and ankles went No heavy knapsack!  No endless commuting with heavy knapsack!  Wheeeeee!  Do you have any idea what a bag of dog kibble WEIGHS?  No, don’t put it on the scale, we don’t want to know!

            And then we got in Wolfgang‡‡ and luxuriously DROVE to the mews.

            And now I guess I get to see if he’s going to start for the, uh, fifth time in a row. . . . 

* * *

* You’ve all seen some version of this, yes?  http://mikewarot.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/humor-how-to-give-cat-pill.html ^ Of the ones I’ve seen, this one’s my favourite, not least for the ‘how to give a dog a pill’ add on at the end.  But then dogs and sighthounds are only distantly related.  You’re much better off giving a sighthound—my hellhounds anyway—a pill the hard way, which is to say opening its mouth and poking it down its throat.  It will look at you reproachfully, but that’s about all.^^  But try to offer it food out of context and clearly the end of the world is approaching.  My guys adore liver, and (usually) shoot out of their bed to beg for it if they think it’s on offer.^^^  But offer it outdoors in what might conceivably be a training environment and it’s squashy, red-brown cyanide.  My guys’ recall is mysteriously good^^^^ but for godssake don’t offer them a reward for coming, that will put them right off.               

^ Although it leaves out the peeing-on-you stage.  I was once left in charge of a cat that had to have a pill every day.  Longest week of my life.  

^^ If it’s your own dog, and it manages to hork it up again, I find that saying ‘you’re supposed to swallow that, you wretched animal’ before repeating the opening-and-poking routine is usually effective.  Dog Hierarchy:  Make It Work for You.  You might as well get the breaks where you can, you’re still going to be cleaning sick off the floor at intervals, not to mention the out-of-hours emergency runs to the vet. + 

+ Companion animals are SO REWARDING. 

^^^ This includes after they’ve had their dinner and I might be so brazen as to be having liver myself for mine.+  I’ve told you before that the hellhounds are so, well, awful, about eating that I have positively encouraged them to learn to beg while I’m putting their meals together:  ANY interest in food is to be encouraged.  This means that on liver nights I approach preparing my portion with a kind of lightning-raid mentality, because I will have hellhounds underfoot for the duration.  Yes, they get scraps of mine too.  When I decide to err as a dog owner, I err comprehensively.  

+ I LIKE liver, okay?  It’s also one of those superfoods—we buy organic—that is a Very Good Idea if you’ve got a chronic debilitator like ME.     

^^^^ knocking on wood here till my knuckles bleed 

** While pretending to ignore them.  This is easier out in the kitchen with, you know, light, than it is in the deep dark recesses of the frelling crate. 

*** I was too tired to KNIT.  

† And I brought my camera . . . and there was no puppy.  

†† Paxton said that sometimes the chips in the keys go wrong.  So when Paxton drove us in the other day I sent him back with ALL Wolfgang’s keys. 

††† Oisin followed me home.  So he could pick up the bits that fell off, as he said helpfully. 

‡ The theory is that I ring only with Niall and Colin on Thursday or Niall and Gemma on Friday, because I have a novel to finish, etc.  But like this week we were already set up for Gemma on Friday and then Colin suddenly realised he wasn’t leaving on holiday till Friday and could therefore ring handbells on Thursday, and . . . I have no self control . . . but my touches of bob minor on the three-four are improving.  

‡‡ With a remarkable assortment of stuff that seems to have silted up at the wrong end.  There’s its equal and opposite load at the mews.

Sleep, short of, very

 

I am Very Short of Sleep.  I tried to print out the first 1,000,000,000,000* words of SHADOWS yesterday evening.  I knew it was going to be a less than happy, joyful experience, because my printer is POSSESSED BY DEMONS as SO MANY TECHNOLOGICAL APPURTENANCES BUT ESPECIALLY PRINTERS ARE.  I cast my mind back, and I think I’ve always hated my printers, which live** to find reasons to refuse to print, but of course the current incumbent is most on my mind so I am convinced I HATE IT WORSE THAN I’VE EVER HATED ANY OTHER PRINTER.

            Last night I got one—that’s one, that’s COUNT IT ONE page out of said printer before it jammed. ONE.  ONE PAGE.  ONE.  Well, before it claimed to jam, which is one of its little jokes.  So I opened all its stupid, sticky-catched doors and couldn’t find anything wrong of course (it very, very, very rarely has a paper jam, it just likes the attention), and hit ‘print’ again.  Now it’s telling me there’s a Paper Mismatch in Tray, which is its default non-printing position.***  Usually if you yank the paper tray in and out a few times it will sullenly (and temporarily) accept its fate and print out a few pages.  Not last night.  I think the prospect of printing out lots of pages was giving it a more drastic than its usual case of the megrims . . . and so when I resorted to turning the bloody thing off, knitting a row†, and turning it back on again . . . there was a pause for warming up and contemplating its options before it shouted:  TONER INVALID!  . . . Which is a new one.   I haven’t seen toner invalid before.  New experiences are so refreshing.  And then it ran through all the different toners individually:  toner black INVALID!  toner cyan INVALID!  toner magenta INVALID!  toner yellow INVAAAAAAAAAALID!!!!!!!!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA GOTCHA!!!!!!!!

            Whereupon I had a nervous breakdown and emailed Raphael.  Who is an insane person, and checks his business emails even at 8 o’clock at night.  I’ll ask Gabriel to get on it tomorrow, he replied.

            Hellhounds and I hurtled back to the mews for dinner.  And then—despite Peter warning me about the weather—we went home at our usual rrggmmph o’clock except, as you may recall, we are presently on foot, and hellhounds were TRAUMATISED, that’s TRAUMATISED by having to walk home in the RAIN.  Now, granted, it was heavy rain, and if hellhounds were in the habit of listening to either husbands or weather reports they might have been feeling a little testy about my having ignored both these excellent sources of advice, but I’m pretty convinced they came up with the whole TRAUMATISED thing all on their own.

            And they wouldn’t eat their supper.  No, no, we couldn’t touch a morsel, they said, shuddering delicately, we’re so TRAUMATISED. 

            . . . And then Gabriel, bless him, rang first thing this morning.

            I am very short of sleep.           

Ithilien

Okay… so the dwarf doesn’t appear to be the landlord… 

Well, if he is, Cathy and I need to have a more complex conversation than I realised.  As I’ve told you I’m trying to stay about ten eps ahead of what I’m posting so I have some clue where I may be headed, and every now and then, while she gets on with her life, I send Cathy some new fragment of story info which has only just emerged . . . and I mean fragment.   These tend to be so fragmentary that she would be forgiven for saying, um, you’re telling me this why?, except that they come with that charge, like putting your finger in a live socket, that says SOMETHING HERE.

Anyway.  So far as I know Ron is not the landlord. 

Katsheare

Do authors hate their characters enough to make them realtors? Oh, wait. 

Hey.  I have a friend who’s a realtor.††  Remember that KES is also a parody.  I will send up anyone I can get my little hands on, Kes herself in particular of course, but everyone, and the horse they rode in on, and the street names of New Iceland, and . . . I’ve already told you that I’m really looking forward to writing the first scene/chapter of FLOWERHAIR THE INVINCIBLE—which you get a peek at, I think it’s next ep—but that doesn’t negate that somewhere down the line she has some trouble with attack mushrooms.  

Glanalaw

I’m working on some of Britten’s arias right now (Titania’s two big ones, from his version of “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and one from “The Turn of the Screw”) – he certainly does like to torture musicians. But it’s a good sort of torturing. 

Wowie zowie honey, you’re in at the deep end.  I think if your head will bend in that direction††† Britten is an absolutely fabulous education all by himself.  One of my fantasies is to sing his setting of Auden’s Tell Me the Truth about Love but . . . not this week.  

. . . this house is basically my dream home. Grottiness and out-of-datedness and possible Cthulhu and/or Yog-Sothoth in the cellar included. 

Oh, me too.  If I asked for a show of forum hands I suspect we’re in the majority.  But that’s part of the fun (I hope).  Parody and riffing on a favourite trope are very nearly the same thing. 

Katsheare

I can’t help but wonder if Hayley is just a fan and doing her best not to totally fan-girl geek-out. Matching accessories notwithstanding.

 Mother pin a rose on you.‡  I did wonder how many of you were silently having your suspicions.  I didn’t know till, um, I think the second ep Hayley appears.  I had the same initial reaction to her that Kes herself did.  (No, damn it, we are not interchangeable, even metaphorically.  There’s just a lot of overlap.)   I still want to remonstrate with her about her footgear however.

 b_twin_1

As someone who normally bolts through a book, this sort of drip-feeding is….. causing me no end of anguish. (And then the author chuckles evilly…?) 

Well, yes, I never turn down an opportunity to chuckle evilly, but . . . 

Julia

I love this whole thing so much. But it really is torture, only getting a tiny bit at a time.  

. . .  tell yourselves that the only way you will have KES at all is like this.  While I admit I hope she turns out to have some kind of long term, comprehensive, something-or-other future, I would, for example NEVER have written last night’s ep for a story that, you know, started life as a contracted book.  KES is more work than I was, um, hoping, but she’s also even more fun than I was hoping.  And I’ll take all the fun I can get.  Especially when there are things like printers in my life. 

blondviolinist

::reads Kes 20:: ::reaches end of excerpt:: ::dies laughing:: 

‘dies laughing’?‡‡  You churl.  Wait . . . wait . . . a new storyline is just coming into view.  I can’t see it clearly yet . . . hang on . . . yes . . . it’s something about a violinist.  Something . . . something awful happens to a violinist. 

* * *

* I keep dwelling on how slowly this final draft and tidy-up and yank-together is going but as I organised the first lump for printing out I realised that one reason is because it has got long.  It’s not in the PEGASUS category but . . . it’s not short.  It’s not a cheerful little 75,000-word throw-off that it started life as.  Well of course not.  Who do I think I am.  IT’S NOT LIKE THIS IS UNDER MY CONTROL, YOU KNOW. 

** And caper and dance and laugh maniacally as soon as you’re out of your office. 

*** It has paper size SETTINGS.  It ignores these.  You can carefully select the paper you’re using, and during the exciting hey-presto of PAPER JAM and PAPER TRAY MISMATCH it will have reset them.  It will have reset them to a paper size that has never existed in the history of the world so that you don’t have opportunity to give it the paper it claims to want, to see if this makes any difference.  I comfort myself with the thought that it wouldn’t.     

† Waaaaaaaay better than that flimsy old counting-to-ten thing.  I have no problem merely counting to ten and then committing murder.  Knitting a row has an actual tranquillizing effect.^ 

^ Unless of course I make a horrible error. 

†† And, if we’re counting, three friends who are accountants. 

††† And no shame if it doesn’t, EMoon,^ everyone’s different, give me a minute and I’ll think of three major composers I can’t stick on any account.^^ 

^ EMoon

[ep 20]  is SO VERY MUCH what I needed tonight!!! 

Oh good.  ::Beams::

^^ You can take 90% of John Adams, Harrison Birtwhistle and Pierre Boulez, and 80% of Stravinsky and Ravel, and bury them in the back garden, for example. 

‡ This is a common phrase, yes?  It’s not just me? 

‡‡ PamAdams

My shout of laughter on the ending of Kes #20 just brought my office mates to my door. I believe they’re thinking that I’m the madwoman in the attic.  

I think you might have a legal case for unacceptable working conditions.  You might want to look into this.

KES, 20

 

 TWENTY

By the time we went downstairs again I’d been silent for so long that Hayley’s sales pitch was beginning to splutter and stall.  I knew I should rescue her—my life crisis was not her fault—but I was feeling a little overwhelmed.  We went out into the garden and stared back toward the house.  It was on enough of a slope that there were only a few steps down to ground level from the kitchen door.  Maybe that meant that the space under the front porch was only large enough for rabid raccoons and not for deinonychus.   I looked at the cellar doors I wasn’t supposed to leave open.  I looked up at the tower (still no visible madwoman at the windows.  Oh, wait, maybe that was going to be me).  

I glanced at Hayley.  She looked like a woman trying not to wring her hands.  She was also, in her four-inch heels, limited to walking on the (overgrown) stepping stones.  These only went a little way down the garden and petered out in a paved circle that was probably supposed to have a table on it for artistic al fresco dining.  I looked away from the house, toward Yggdrasil:  it could wait, like the wardrobe in the room upstairs.  “I’m afraid the garden has been let go rather badly,” said Hayley.  “If—if you take the house, Homeric Homes would of course have someone in to do some clearing up.”

I made an effort.  “That’s all right.  I’m sort of looking forward to having the epic confrontation with the garden myself.  And I’ve already heard of a teenage boy who wants to do the mowing.”  I looked at Hayley.  She was staring at me as if I’d turned into a deinonychus.  Or a rabid raccoon.  “I’ll take it,” I said, although my voice broke on the second word.  “Er—that’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?”

She shut her ever-so-slightly-dangling jaw with a snap.  “Yes—yes, of course, I’m delighted.  I—I just —”  She suddenly looked like the teenager she’d been not all that long ago, wearing her older, businesswoman sister’s clothes.  “I haven’t been out here myself in two or three months.  It—it didn’t look quite so—so —”

“Shabby?” I said.  “Don’t worry.  I won’t tell your boss.”

She drooped.  “Yes.  Shabby.  Not ‘in need of some modernisation’ but—shabby.   It looked better with three feet of snow on the ground.”

I looked up at the house again.  They didn’t look anything like Ford’s rose-bushes, but I thought those might be rose-bushes under the windows. “I don’t mind taking baths.  I like taking baths.  As long as the hot water works.”

“The hot water works.  Or it will be made to work.  Ron is a bit of a magician really.  Sally, my boss, keeps trying to convince him to work in New Iceland—and he’d make better money there.  But while he’ll come occasionally if the job sounds interesting, he stays in Cold Valley.”  She looked at me again, still puzzled.  “But the house is huge.  I know you want a dog, but—oh!”  She blushed again.  “I’m so sorry.  Of course you —”

“No,” I said, smiling.  I was beginning to think Hayley was in the wrong line of work.  Weren’t realtors supposed to be made of stainless steel and granite, interested only in getting your name on the dotted line?  “It’s just me.”

“If it didn’t have to be Cold Valley,” Hayley said, “there are other, smaller, better maintained houses in this area that allow pets.  The details for one came in just yesterday—I thought of you.  We don’t have the info sheet printed yet, but it’s not very far out of our way back to New Iceland.  We could swing past and if it interests you we could go back to the office and pick up the keys.” 

I looked at this house once more.  But this time I was pretty sure it was looking back at me.  Maybe it was the rose-bushes.  Since that last glass of fizz in the penthouse garden I’d been feeling a little sensitive on the subject of rose-bushes.  Or maybe it was fellow feeling for something old and shabby and no longer desirable.  “No,” I said slowly.  “No, I think it’s this house.”

“It will be desperately hard to heat in the winter,” argued Hayley.

I laughed.  “You are the most extraordinary real estate agent,” I said.  “You’re supposed to be whipping out the contract the moment I show weakness, and saying, ‘just sign here, here and here, in blood please, what are you waiting for?, it’s only five hundred years, here’s a lancet for your finger’.”

Hayley’s blush was so vivid her hands turned red too.  She was clutching her handbag again, as if it contained the lease for the Taj Mahal.  She slipped the strap off her shoulder, and unzipped the bag.  Well, well, I thought.  She’s a realtor after all—she does have the contract ready and waiting.  And I was embarrassed to feel a little disappointed. 

But it wasn’t anything like a normal sort of contract that she pulled out of the depths of her bag and wordlessly held out toward me.  It looked like a paperback book.  An old, extremely beat-up paperback book.  The pages were coming out, a corner of the cover had either been torn off or had disintegrated, and there was a big blotchy stain across most of the rest of it that might have been tea or coffee.  And the pages were wavy, as if it had been read in a steaming-hot bath two or twenty-two times.

I hadn’t seen one in a long time.  It took me a moment to recognise it. 

It was a first edition of Flowerhair One.  FLOWERHAIR THE INVINCIBLE.