Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 10

Gallantry

So I got into one of those conversations with an old, slightly older than I am, friend last week. Who has a hard time with the idea that unsolicited compliments from strangers on the street is a bad thing. “It’s nice. It’s… ” he searched for the word. “It’sgallantry.”

I thinkthat in his head this phrase called up visions of Camelot, and courtly love and deep bows over the hands of delicately scented ladies wearing satin and lace (I’m pretty certain those are the images… I’ve known him for a...

That Which We Call a Rose

I was paging through the Sunday Sweets on Cakewrecks, looking at many cakes which are technically gorgeous but rarely raise my creative pulse. I can’t draw, so hand painting a cake to look like a Wedgwood canister is right out. I get a little twee-d out at too much pink (especially at this time of year). There are creations so enormous and ambitious that I think the initial idea (cake!) has been forgotten. And so many of these cakes employ fondant, which usually tastes like sugary cardboard (...

Change is the Only Constant

In times of change it’s always useful to remember that everything is atime of change. Since the advent of print-on-demand, and then of e-books, there have been approximately 47 trillion articles written on The End of the Book As We Know It, the End of Publishing As We Know It, and so on. It’s easy to believe that the old ways were handed down from Mt. Olympus:a trade book shall require 9 months from the moment it is handed to Production, neither 8 months nor 10, but 9, and 9 shall be the numb...

The Long and Short of It

Oh, forever ago when I was young and foolish and had just moved back to New York City from Boston, I took a job at an investment bank. I had lived in dorms, or with room-mates, since I left home for college, and I really wanted to have an apartment of my own. And I wanted it within spitting distance of my childhood home in Greenwich Village, which was, on the face of it, ambitious to the point of insanity. So I took a job that paid very well, on the theory that I would work 9-5 and go home an...

A Rule of One

The Nativity of the Virgin by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) Italian, out of copyright

Hand washing. I’ll come back to it.

I have this theory. Or maybe it’s just an idea. It’s about the advantages you give your characters. And how many advantages you can give themwithout distractingfrom the story or making them unbearable.

Advantages? Beauty is one, and very common; but there’s also intelligence, skill, charm, grace, wit, fortune, discernment, athletic ability, good birth, kind parents, a person w...

Thankful and Grateful and Mindful

Tis the season of giving thanks. Or perhaps of giving gratitude. I’ve been thinking about this some–not least because Thursday is the American Thanksgiving, which really should notjustbe about food, but somehow always is (OK, maybe a smidge about the Macy’s parade, and in some households about football, or not killing Uncle Pete who always arrives drunk and has unfortunate opinions), but because I listened to a piece on NPR about a Japanese discipline of mindful thankfulness, which sounds lik...

We Must All Hang Together…

… or, assuredly, we will allhang separately.*

Being humanis not for the faint of heart.Being a kid, being a teen, being an adult, a parent, the child of parents with health or memory issues. There is no age of being human that doesn’t come with challenges. Familyhelps. But family has changedover the centuries, and our idea of what family owes us (and what we owe our families) has changed too.

Time was, if you had children, they were raised to be part of a support system–doing increasingly co...

Black Thumb

My mother used to have a little sign by her bed that said “A garden can be fun…if you don’t have one.” I’ve never been sure if this meant she was anti-gardening (she was a killer weeder) or just anti-my father’s whole-hearted dive into gardening.
I am feeling much in sympathy with Mom today.
After spending a couple of hours proof-reading new Book View Cafe releases (watch the skies… in about a month) I decided I would go out and gather up the rotting lemons in the backyard. See, we have a lem...

Writing in (Yet Another) New Way

I got invited to do a cool thing!

(Okay, part of my delight is that I don’t think of myself as being part of the cool crowd, and therefore, being invited to do a cool thing plucks at my deeply-buried high school nerd self.)

A few months ago a writer of my acquaintance asked me if I’d like to be involved in a Serial Box project. “Serial what now?” I said, with my customary aplomb.

It was explained to me:Serial Boxis a new venture that takes as its model the episodic novels of yore–or more c...

Everything Changes

Last weekend I was in New York City for a meeting about The Most Fabulous Project I’m working on for Serial Box: a thirteen episode serialized story set in the Restoration, and… okay, I’m getting off topic. I was in New York, city of my birth and of my heart, and even better, in the neighborhood where we lived when my daughters were born.

Lots of things have changed. You expect that in New York–particularly in a neighborhood that was going through growing and gentrification pains even before...