Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal, page 11

It’s Not Easy Being the Little Dog

Ready for my close-up…

Emily, seen left, is 9 1/2 years old. She weighs 48 pounds, almost all of it muscle and fur (plus a little drool). She is a large fur-shedding machine whose chiefest joy is playing catch. And food. And playing with her humans. And food. And cuddling. And food. Like, say, most dogs. I point out to her, on occasion, that I remember when she came home with us and was a Little Dog. And she glares at me, because, I truly believe, in her mind she is The Little Dog, and all th...

A Week of Silly

Laura Anne Gilman, writer extraordinaire, member of BVC and the world, got me involved inGISHWHES(the Greatest Internet Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen) this year. This event/activity/madness was started by Misha Collins ofSupernatural, and goes on for a week. You get 200+ prompts, and yourteam, individually and in groups, accomplishes as many of them as possible over the time allowed. Many of the prompts involve charitable activities and acts of kindness, random and otherwise. Others...

Punching Down

I saw something the other day that made me really angry, in that “what, were you raised in a woodshed or something?” sort of way. Prolonged, self-involved, privileged rudeness makes me on-beyond-cranky. And as I watched this behavior continue I realized that the perpetrator really had no idea of what he was doing.

I was at a cafe, writing (I have said elsewhere that getting out of the house and away from its distractions is a must for me). There were others there, also working diligently, dri...

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Job-hunting takes time. So does writing. But you cannot write, or job-hunt, all the time. And I’ve been experiencing a real need to create tangible things. Beaded jewelry. Knitted things. But what I’ve really been doing a lot of is playing with yeast.

When I was a teenager I baked a lot. It was a form of rebellion (my mother was a fabulous cook, but did not care for baking) and I made croissants and herbbread and sourdough and rolls and pies–and one summer my summer job was to bake things and...

A Little Etiquette, a Little Incense, a Little Edge

I think I was 13when I discovered, more or lessall at once, Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart, Jane Aiken Hodge, and “romantic suspense,” a broad category that included different sorts of books but generally featured a woman in a diaphanous gown, framed againsta brooding manse. There might not even be a brooding manse in the book, but on the cover… (at the same period, SF oftenhad a rocket ship on the cover regardless of actual rocketry in the book). Gradually I fell away from romantic suspense,...

The Gooey Center

I am eleven chapters, give or take, into theWIP. Since my books tend to work out to about 20 chaptersit is fair to say that I’m half way through the book. And ever since somewhere inchapter eight, I have found myselfin a piece of writing real estate that is familiar,ifnot beloved,to me: the Gooey Center. Also called the Slough of Despond, Did I Suddenly Become Stupid?, or, sometimes, Why Did I Think I Could Do This?

What is the Gooey Center? It’s the point somewhere in the middle of the manus...

Fixing the Future?

Because my husband works in the film industry, we sometimes get to see early screenings–or screenings that are remarkable because the director is there, or we’re in the company of other film tech people, or just because it’s a great theatre. Last week we got to seeTomorrowland.

There’s a song by Aimee Mann called “Fifty Years After the Fair,” about the 1939 World’s Fair, which includes the line “How beautiful was tomorrow…” AndTomorrowlandstarts out at the 1964 World’s Fair, and evokes it bea...

Work * Life * Balance (yes, again)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time–not least because I was downsized out of my last job last August, and am spending a good part of each day working to find a new one. Unless you are pathologicallysocial (I am not) or really brilliant at networking (I am not) this is hard work. Unpaid, hard work. It is disagreeable tome (and, I suspect, for many other people) for the same reason that book promotion is hard for me: I get creeped out by the notion of viewing people I come in con...

Tidings of Comfort

Louise Tiffany, by Louis Comfort Tiffany

Note: I chose this paintingbecause I liked it. It was only after I’d typed in the painter’s name (Louis Comfort Tiffany) that I realized I’d doubled up on the entendres. Pure serendipity.

With a to-be-read pile that stacks up to the sky and threatens my continued survival (it’s on my bedside table, andin an earthquake it would surely topple over and mash me flat) it perhaps makes no sense that I sometimes have to stop what I’m doingand startcomfort rea...

Raising Feminists – The Fairy Tale Edition

This weekend my husband and I went to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’sPresidio. We’d been meaning to for a while, and though we missed the exhibit of Walt’s massive train set (my husband has a 7-year-old boy’s love for trains) the rest of the museum was pretty cool. Lots of tech stuff, lots of original art, lots of “making of” information and displays. Because my husband is a recording guy, he ate it up with a spoon. And because I’m a story guy, if you will, I ate it up with a...