C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 139

Jane has a Shu-shu post…vet visit: yep, it's that time…

And some recent pix, including the work we've done on the house. With Shu helping.

 

Had a great birthday—

Jane and OSG and I booked the Lake Coeur d'Alene dinner cruise…we ended up getting the Mish-a-nock, which is the largest of the several boats, not our favorite, because it is sooooo stable: we prefer the little ones that rock about a bit—but we had practically sole possession of the upper deck, with its bar, on a partly cloudy, windy night. WE, being native, had hauled out some serious coats—knee length wool for Jane and me, a down-fill for OSG—and we were snug as bugs up there on the bow, at a table by the front rail: the Mish-a-nock has real glassware and tableware and plates, a good thing, since we had to weight down the cloth napkins or collect them AND the tableware from the deck. I'm talking gale, here…

We had salmon and prime rib; and green beans; and cheesecake; and lots of chardonnay; and the music was actually nice. We were snug and comfortable, while the bottom deck was, well, lighted so you couldn't see the shoreline or the beautiful sunset and the moon rise and set…We, upstairs under the open sky, did.

So a fine time was had by all. OSG gave me a great pirate shirt, an Admiral's brass plaque for my bedroom door, (I have kind of a nautical theme going, and two garden lights, and Jane, who wasn't supposed to give me anything but Seishi, gave me some kitchen spatulas (we needed them), a Kenpachi keychain, and an Ichigo action figure.

It was marvelous! Good friends, water under us, Chardonnay, good food, high wind, and prezzies—how can you beat it?

As of last year, I'd traveled 465,159,024,000 kilometers with the sun…

…so I figured—but then, you know my mad math skills. (Not.)

Haven't figured it this year. But not counting the spiral course of the earth, it's another year's progress around the galactic center.

Singing robot.

She's really progressing…lately she dances, but not too many moves.

 

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We are within a little of finishing the outside house repairs for the year…

Our brick-painting has reached the hardest color to replicate: the yellow-earth bricks. Jane's nailed it.

Jane also has got the back door up. What then happened—I leave it to her to tell, when she's coherent enough.

I got the butterfly bush planted; I've painted brick. I've tinkered with pond chemistry, got that fixed. I've made real progress on the book; and I am in less pain than before—thank goodness!  I think the cessation of pain has had a great deal to do with my concentration. I can ignore a lot of things—but that burning pain is amazingly nasty.

We have yet to pick up the panes for the storm door—but we almost have all the pieces ready. Jane has yet to paint the front door and a bit of trim.

I treated us to a quesadilla maker: it was on sale, and it's a nice thing. Jane says she's at the point she'll eat anything. I think she just comes in for fuel.

The weather's holding around 85 degrees. I've gotten to be such a wimp about heat it feels like 105.

We had a shocker on the news the other evening: a local doctor we share the ice with now and again —he's 85—crashed his plane while trying to land up by Priest Lake. We hear he's going to recover: he's a very determined gentleman, and we hope the best for him.

We ourselves are faring quite well. Her Furry Grace has recovered somewhat—she was so weak this summer I began to wonder from moment to moment whether she was going to draw the next breath while I was holding her; but she's full of it, now—she's gotten to viewing both boys as rowdy teenagers, and has finally warmed to Seishi enough to sniff him over. This however, will be followed by a swat. Shu thought he would play with Her Grace's tail for old times' sake, and oh, my, yes, got swatted.

So the household is finding an equilibrium. We have some new ideas for Closed Circle and will be working on that. And we are not going to touch another repair project until winter, once we get that storm door up.

 

 

NYC had all the luck of its Irish—

The storm surge and the high tide turned out to be out of synch, and the receding tide actually fought the incoming surge, or the flood would have been two feet higher—and gotten the subway and the WTC build site. The whole city should wear shamrocks this St. Paddy's Day—him being also the patron saint of engineers.

All of you in the path of Irene—take care.

And if in an evacuation zone, do. Please. It's not the wind. It's the water. You can't argue with a flood. Collect the cats and get to high ground.

52 card pickup…with the new Foreigner novel

It's hard to explain—especially in light of the traditional instruction in English classes about the way stories work—especially how novels work. Dunno how often somebody's asked me to discuss plot—and I just groan, because I'm not sure there is such a beast, at least of the color, size, coat-texture and conformation described in English class. It's what hung me up in my course of learning how to write for about two years.

WHAT happens in a book is sort of important. WHO happens in a book and how their minds work is more so. WHEN the WHAT happens is way, way, way down the list. So the traditional book report in which Johnny gets up and recites the sequence of events in the book (besides being boring) is probably the most irrelevant thing about the book. It's only the thing the writer decided at the last moment.

Think of it as a fireworks show. You've got certain triggers that are going to set off certain colored lights. How you arrange them is, yes, sort of important, but the larger nexi that group the triggers into meaningful sections are sort of mutable: you can pull the whizzbanger type A from collection 3 and put it in 5 with no trouble at all. And sometimes you discover you've got one trigger that really needs to be shown-but-not-touched (now we're talking about novels) and having it set off a nice little set of actions here near the beginning could do that—until it's REALLY pulled later; but by that time you want to link a bunch of other little fireworks to it, so that multiple things will get solved by one trigger.

That's plot. I think of it not as anything like a sequence of events, but as a webwork of tension-lines between characters and sets of characters. You pull one—and one yank moves several characters. It's not events. It's tensions. Events are cheap. They can be moved all about at will. They can be put in any sort of order. That's why Johnny's book report made no more sense to me, who started to write at 10, than the legendary bunny with a pancake on its head. It bugged me. Bigtime. It was describing a very minor thing about the book—and I just had a lot of trouble believing that was what the book was about…to the extent that I'd go into the Dreaded Book Report assignment trying to report on the triggers, not the events, and then I'd get distracted, because there was often something that just didn't satisfy me about the way the writer had handled the flow of it all, and I was too young at the time to understand what was driving me crazy.

It was realizing all this stuff about sequence just proved to the teacher you'd actually read the book—heck, I was such a brutally truthful kid teacher could have just asked me and saved us some agony; and finally realizing that it was just a list of trivia, so far as its importance in the plot. Map-driven books, like quests, are the simplest, because there really IS a sequence that's nailed to a map, and it's pretty straightforward: if you get into trouble with pacing, don't invent an incident to fill the Great Nothingness Desert—move the mountains three days closer and don't make the desert so important. IE, change the map, f' gosh sakes.

Intrigue of any sort is one of the hardest—because there are twists and turns and there IS no map: the territory to be crossed is all in the mind of at least one individual—and if it's in the minds of half a dozen individuals, you've got yourself a big team of horses to manage. If you've built them right, they'll surprise you—but they'll always be logical. Like the chimp in the test who was handed a pole and a set of  big stackable boxes — in a bare room with desirable bananas hanging from the ceiling—said chimp went through no process at all with the boxes, just stood the tall pole on end with a quick thump, shinnied up the pole with balance unlikely in a human, grabbed the bananas and shinnied down, then sat peeling his banana in the wreckage of the scientist's behavioral experiment on tool use. A good character will do that to you. Several good characters are a three ring circus of such behaviors. They keep writing a fun exercise.

Sequence? Naw. It's chimpanzees. Lots of chimpanzees. And if your plot isn't nailed to a map, you can move events all over the place. It's why I write my 'plots' , ie, the anticipated events, on an old calendar—and once I'm finished, you'll see a lot of X's where I nixed a thing where I'd thought it would happen, and moved it earlier or later in the whole book.

That's why writers should not drive in heavy traffic or cook with high temperatures while they're 'plotting.' It's like 3-dimensional chess, and it makes you just a little zooey.

Brilliant notion over breakfast…

Like many remodeled houses—we have a bit of a brick-match problem. In our case, some IDIOT put dark brown, grey, and red brick in the place where the old garage door used to be, when the house brick is earthy orange (like Oklahoma dirt), earthy yellow, brown, and slightly red. You may imagine this has been a feature we do not love.

We have tried trellises, we have thought about Permastoning the area (where the back door now is)—and with our red-brown trim paint, that goes with the red windows, Jane got an inspiration and went over with the red-brown paint, and painted a half-brick on the seam—to match a half-brick on the house side. Ha! We did more of them. WE have a Plan! And we are going to have to get some more quarts of paint—and we have this glaring mismatch solved. Chorus of: "We're Painting the Roses Red…"