Tired and old

 

I'm gruesomely tired again.  Sigh.  I was so buzzed last night that it took me forever to get to sleep . . . and then the phone rang again this morning . . . blerg . . . not at an hour that anyone but a madwoman* who turned her light out well past mmph o'clock would consider early.  Peter needed a ride to the osteo.  He'd managed to get an appointment because Rajan had had a cancellation—and it's a good thing that Peter asked me because he is, if anything, worse today, probably because he overdid it yesterday, but it still meant I was Dali's-clocking out of bed and trying to find clothing to put on** earlier than planned. 

            It's been a beautiful day—hellhounds and I all went kind of limp and floppy under the always-surprising unhingingness of spring.  What is it about gorgeous spring days that your bones turn to vanilla custard***?   We had a glorious walk with the skylarks singing like Orfeo† to Eurydice, and I had two excellent hours in the garden this afternoon going, Aaaugh!  It's alive!  And, aaaugh!  It's dead!††, and starting the slamming-hastily-into-pots of the March-April mail-order-delivery rush.††† 

            But I'm worried about Peter and . . . while this is undoubtedly absurd and presumptuous and possibly offensive . . . I'm taking what's happening in Japan personally, as if it were my land and my people.  There have been way too many 'natural' disasters in the last few years—whatever happens now at Fukushima—and the first shock of the news is always like a blow to your own chest:  it's hard to breathe, and your eyes go funny.  But I'm in England, which has been spared so far, and I'm sitting comfortably with my computer in a warm room with a good light source and plenty of food in the refrigerator.  I lived in Japan for five years forty five years ago and I've never been back—and I was an American military brat who never spoke the language properly forty-five years ago and doesn't speak it at all now.  It's not like I ever was assimilated.  But none of that matters.  I feel like the prodigal daughter who left it too late and can't go home again.  Can't do anything but grieve for the people whose losses are all too real.

            So I'm not in the best mood‡.  And Jodi, in an email conversation we were having about books,‡‡ made reference to the recent flare-up about the YA mafia, and I said, the what?, and she sent me some links.  Here's maybe the best sum-up, or it was a day ago and I'm not going to go looking for more:  http://www.yahighway.com/2011/03/field-trip-friday-special-edition-ya.html  You can follow her links and then those links till your hair turns white and you've worn your 'enter'-pressing finger to blisters.  The combustible idea seems to be that there may be a group of best-selling YA authors who all live in each other's pockets, blurb each other's books extravagantly . . . and if you piss one of them off you'll never work in this town again.  And that pissing them off may happen by running unflattering reviews on your book blog.

            Um.  No.  Wrong.

            Now, granted, I am not a best-selling author, and I stay home and ring bells and sing and plant roses and am hurtled by hellhounds‡‡‡ and don't keep up with my corner of the publishing world and am an evil cow of a reader who finds reasons to dislike even those above reproach,§ so if there were a cabal I wouldn't be in it.

            But there isn't a cabal.  For reasons that other people have covered admirably elsewhere, which pretty much come down to: #1  no one has that kind of power, except maybe Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling, both of whom are by almost universal accord decent human beings, and wouldn't have any use for a cabal if someone came rushing up to one of them and offered to make her Empress.  And #2 publishing is a business, and a cabal doesn't have a chance against 1,000,000,000,000,000 editors, agents, booksellers and CEOs looking for the next big thing. 

            But what I wanted to say is about people.   One of the things that several of the commentators on this latest outbreak of a very old familiar complaint—that of those not where they want to be (published) looking at those who are (and famous with it) and wondering if there's an invidious reason why the situation is the way it is—have said is that the ferocity of some of it (and some of it is pretty ferocious) is down to the whole anonymity-of-the-internet thing.  It's so easy to rip a strip off from the comfort of your own office/sitting room and safe behind your user name of Dances with Flamethrowers.  Well, it is undoubtedly easier to do it that way . . . but this behaviour has been around, I assume, as long as there have been people, and I can vouch for its having been around long before the internet happened.  One of the reasons I stopped going to cons is because I'm lousy at confrontation and don't think well on my feet, and I don't like people getting in my face and telling me what is wrong with me, my books, and the horse I rode in on,§§ . . .  and in a few extreme cases telling me that I stole their ideas, that they know that I'm the reason publisher x turned them down and they hate me forever.  Yeeeeeep.

            There are undoubtedly gross injustices that happen everywhere, including in publishing.  (This also is scrupulously explicated in some of the links above.)  There are famous people (including authors) who behave like assholes—including pretending to a power they haven't got (like that they can stop someone getting published).  And some of the furious unfamous people have good reason to be furious.  But . . . there's so awfully much fury and a fair bit of it is not justified.  And that makes me sad and kind of depressed.   We've all got stuff in our lives that isn't working.  I have ME and a frail elderly husband.  There's other stuff I'm not going to talk about in public.  Even Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling have problems, even if you and I don't know what they are.  Problems tend to cause internal pressure, and ones that don't seem to have any answers (like perhaps ME and old age) may bleed their own safety valves by blowing about something irrelevant to the real source of misery.   I'm feeling more like 116 than fifty-eight tonight, so maybe I'm just tired.  If I were less tired I'd probably come up with a better finish line.  But here's the one that I keep thinking.  You know those standard dopey interview questions like, if someone gave you a gazillion pounds/dollars/euros/rubles/yuan/yen, what would you buy first, or what would your superpower be, or if you could have one wish for the world what would you wish?  Okay.  My wimpy old answer, tonight, when I'm tired and depressed, for that last one is:  that when people are in a situation they don't like, when they're angry or hurt or frustrated or confused and looking for someone to blame, that they assume the best rather than the worst about the people around them.   And go from there.

             Yeah.  Wimpy.  I said.

            And maybe tomorrow I'll tell you why an evil cow adopted Pollyanna and why the whole savage-review thing doesn't appeal to me much—even when it's not only not one of my books being pilloried, but I even agree that the subject being torched is not a good book.  

* * *

* or hellgoddess 

** I know I have 1,000,000 t shirts around here somewhere 

*** Not chocolate.  Chocolate is much denser.  

† I think Gluck^ like I think Verdi.^^  Ask me how I pronounce Desdemona.  

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orfeo_ed_Euridice 

^^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otello 

†† And then I came indoors and had an hour and twenty minutes on the phone with Hannah and knitted.  Ow.  I have got to get either a shoulder holster or a speakerphone before I cripple myself. 

††† I do hope we are not going to get any more late frosts.  It was only luck that the busy lizzies were in the kitchen sink [sic] at the cottage the night before last, when I went out to Wolfgang at the mews at my usual going-home o'clock and discovered him under a thick enough coating of frost I had to get the scraper out to see through the windscreen.  Most of the tender bulbs are still in boxes on the Winter Table—which is the weight-bearing object that stands over the hellhound crate in the cottage kitchen which I would like to take down, but I can't till I can be fairly certain I won't need it for a tender-plant hostel again.  I've got a few short queues of the recently-potted-up outdoors that I'm going to have to schlep indoors again if the temperature drops.  This happens every year:  your tender plants start arriving and you have to do something with them.   It's when my always-too-many dahlia cuttings show up that the situation becomes critical.  And it's no use looking superior and saying that if I had any sense I'd wait and buy the tender stuff at a garden centre—garden centres only ever carry about half a dozen of this year's top fashions in plants, and the two that you might have wanted will have sold out early. 

‡ And just by the way, if this roller-coaster of good and bad days doesn't roll to a halt and let me the hell off soon, I'm going to go to bed and stay there.^ 

^ Faint dissenting murmur from hellhound bed:  Nooooooooooooo, wrooooooooong

‡‡ Fancy!  Talking about books!  

‡‡‡ And worry about my husband 

§ Shakespeare.  Feh. 

§§ I wish.