Good and very damn bad

 

So, first things first:  is everybody on board with the fact that Elizabeth Moon's KINGS OF THE NORTH is out today?  http://www.elizabethmoon.com/books-paksworld.html#kings 

I can use some good news.  (And I can always use another good book to read.*)  It's been a mortally—literally—sucky day, in that I got the expected-but-you-always-hope-it-won't-come news that a dear friend is dying.  Damn, frelling sod it and ratbags.  I am therefore a little overwhelmed with the standard forehead-clutchers like so what is life for then anyway?  And, why death?  There has got to be a better system than this sudden-irrevocable-horrible-accident, getting-old-and-going-to-pieces, stupid-ugly-soul-stealing-disease system that we've got.  Times like these I remember those sour old adages about how the clinically depressed are the ones with a true view of reality;  those of us still functioning are in denial.

            So I'm going to pull some more comments from the forum to give myself something to think about, since my brain will keep reverting to how much I am going to miss her.  

In response to the multiple-project theories remark, boddhi_d wrote:

…I swear, I'm going to have to include projects in my will, the completion of which is a requirement to inherit. ('To my beloved second cousin I bequeath my pearl earrings and $1000, to be distributed upon finishing the rosebud quilt that is nearly done.')

ROSEBUD QUILT?  Hey, I'll finish it.  (The pearl earrings might be nice too.  Thanks.  Your second cousin can have the $1000.  Don't you have something else she can finish?)

In the southern U.S., we have an all-purpose phrase that can be used to GREAT effect in many circumstances, and I think is appropriate here: "Bless your heart." As in, "Bless your heart, child, why don't you just go sit down and try it again, and this time actually pay attention?" It's a fabulous way 'not to be rude.' AND it can be repeated ENDLESSLY.

(Snork.)  It's southern, is it?  That's one of my mother's family's phrases, and I have increasingly suspected that my grandmother was far more southern than she wanted to admit.  (I have no idea.  She was a strange woman.)  Hey, do you know 'oh my stars and heavenly bodies'?  Which is a phrase I love, and have never heard it anywhere except my mother's family.

'I have no clear idea who the main character is'

Bless its heart.

::falls down laughing::  I totally have to relearn this.

I can't help but wonder, is this maybe a problem of the reader trying to decide which of the males is the main character?

Getting slightly ahead of myself here, yes we do know that Rglmmph is male . . . or anyway I have never seen . . . ahem . . .  'Rglmmph' as a girl's name.   And I'm hilariously tickled that several of you picked this out as a probability.   I have told you, haven't I, about one of my favourite reader letters, from back in the days when I got letters rather than emails, which was, siiiiiiiigh, a school assignment letter, from a junior-high boy, who had managed to read THE BLUE SWORD under the impression that Harry is a boy?  The thing that made this so killing is that he got the plot pretty well accurate—he or someone had read it—but—but . . . the mind boggles.  One possibility is that someone else read it for him and silently changed the relevant detail of the protagonist's gender . . . sounds like the sort of thing a brother or sister might have done, doesn't it?  And maybe he wasn't paying well enough.

'If Oisin doesn't stop flapdoodling around on the flimsy excuse that he has 1,000,000,000,000 things to do already^^^ and get the New Arcadia Singers organised,'

…and write another GUEST BLOG…*

*That was a cue, wasn't it?

If it wasn't, it should have been.  I'll be sure to point this out to Oisin. 

I have had a slender but gratifying stream of emails from blog readers saying more or less what Stephanie said on the forum: 

. . . reading your blog has changed my way of looking at authors – not that I didn't know that an author is a person, but I just didn't know any personally. I realize that the blog is just a small and selectively edited part of your life, but a lot of your voice comes through and I really enjoy feeling like I know a little bit about Robin, the person. . . . I want you to know how much I appreciate you spending the time to share some of yourself with us. Thanks

Thank you for recognition of the selectively-edited part;  and at the same time, yes, you do know a little about Robin the person, and to the extent that this blog is succeeding in putting over the concept that authors are ordinary people too (normal = insane) then it is a success, and I feel a lot more cheered up about how much work it is and how much it probably isn't much of a marketing tool because I can't think in marketing.  I'm missing a lot of important brain lobes:  higher maths (well, okay, lower maths too), analytical philosophy, British crossword puzzles . . . book marketing.  But this humanising thing is, indeed, one of the things that the internet has proved very good for:  all this connectivity includes making broader genuine personal contact than was ever possible in the era of street mail and rotary-dial telephones and IBM Selectric typewriters.

P.S. And I have a terrible lot of yarn stored up, and a dearth of finished projects too.

Normal.  Insane.  And because I've ordered yarn and knitting needles from two mail-order companies I am now on their email lists for SALES and SPECIAL OFFERS.  AAAAAAAAUGH.

cnaught writes: 

Regarding Rglmmph:

I'll admit I was a bit confused the first time I read Hero and the Crown — an issue sorting out what was flashback and what was current

I wouldn't do this kind of thing if I had a choice.  I'm too used to hearing people say that they like my books once they get into them but they're usually a rough beginning—and as someone who buys hellhound food and yarn on book sales I don't like the thought of how many people may be putting my books back down again because of those rough beginnings, who might have liked them if they'd persisted.  I know what you're all talking about, but in the first place that's the way the frelling story comes—and in the second place as a reader I like the indirect beginning, the moseying around the world for a bit before you start finding out what you're there for, which is no doubt why the Story Council keeps sending me stories like that to write. 

 – but:

(a) it only lasted for about the first chapter

(b) no trouble discerning who the main character was (really??) 

Yes.  I understand the slow-deliberately-not-clear-but-it-may-just-look-muddled beginning thing.  But to not recognise the main character?  What? 

(c) I was in fifth grade at the time, and

Just an aside:  arrrrrrrrrrrrgh.  You're one of the unusual ones.  The Newbery was very, very, very good for my career, and I don't want to pretend I don't know that.  But if I had a dollar/pound/handful of yen for every fifth-grader or fifth-grade teacher who has written to me in great offense declaring that my books are too hard for children and some variation on a theme that I am writing them wrong and/or they want their money back and/or they want them clearly LABELLED as for 25-with-a-college-degree-in-English-lit and older, I could frelling retire.  

(d) I liked it!

 Yaaaaaaay!

 It felt so grownup to have to work a little bit to accurately process what I was reading.

YAAAAAAAAAY!

Most books that kids get to read don't really try to challenge them re narrative structure.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!  Oh good.  Oh good.  And when it works . . . yes.  But it's also true that overfacing a kid with a book they're not ready for is counterproductive.  I just feel—ahem!—that teachers, parents, librarians, and the various grown-ups associated with early or reluctant readers could possibly take a little more responsibility than is indicated in outraged letters to authors of somewhat challenging books. 

Scorpiomouse writes: 

After nearly three decades of trying to be SANE and SENSIBLE and NORMAL, I'm finally accepting that insanity is just fine. I consider this blog to be part of my self-therapy – we . . . identify with your less sane moments. Ta da! . . . (For those of you thinking, "I could never contain my insanity, it is too central to my character," I respectfully posit that you probably could, it would just have dire consequences requiring lots and lots of self-therapy.)

Allow me to recommend knitting to complement the chocolate and the To Be Read pile, those bastions of self-therapy.

BurgandyIce 

I do have lots of time-squandering little people ("demonic"?! Really?!)

Hey, I'm a hellgoddess with a brace of hellhounds.  Demonic is our territory.  We like demonic.  Demonic is a major portion of our readership.

 * * *

* Speaking of which . . . those of you who keep inquiring/moaning/protesting/shouting about the lack of e-versions of my backlist . . . you can't possibly be as big a pain in the neck about this as I am, so please, please, cut me some slack.  There is nothing I can do about it, except inquire, moan, protest, and shout and, trust me, I'm not letting anyone who can do something about it forget that I am still sitting here unresolved. As Merrilee keeps (patiently) pointing out to me, publishers are a very, very, very large herd of cats^:  and the implications of all those proliferating electronic rights are messy, so in fact you can't just say 'yo, dudes, stop meowing and do it'. . . . The same plea goes to those of you who want audiobooks:  there's nothing I can do about the situation.  Merrilee is working on it.  Merrilee is ace.  It'll happen, but I don't know when.  

^ Here's a small but frustrating example of trying to deal with cat herds.  I am not top of anyone's list for potential plugs for books because I'm neither a big enough name brand nor a generous enough reader, but I do get 'em.  In the last month I've had three requests that I read manuscripts—not ARCs or books, but stuff still in page proofs.  They usually try to send these to you in some electronic form or other, but until the iPad 2 comes out in the UK I don't have an ereader, and I hatehatehate reading anything but Twitter and the blog forum on a computer.  So I ask for hardcopy pages.  I've never had a problem receiving ARCs or books—they go in a mailing envelope and they arrive as normal post.  For some reason manuscript pages make everyone go all trenchcoat and undercover—there's clearly some malign security programme that self-boots:   It's not a book yet.  Top secret.  Red alert.  Whoop whoop whoop.  Pass it on.  The result is that every one of these frelling manuscripts has arrived for signature.  And delivery company drivers show up any time they frelling well feel like it between 8:30 am and 6 pm.  I know what's happening:  between the time the editor grinds her teeth over the necessity to provide hardcopy to some aged retro anti-geek who lives in the back woods of where and tells off some hapless assistant to produce said pages, and the resultant bundle still hot and curly from the office printer goes down to the mailroom with my address on it . . . the fact that I'm a solitary human being living in a small house in the semi-wilds of Hampshire and not a fellow behemoth with six receptionists on the front desk has got lost in the factory-assembly-line of a big corporate mailroom.  Their rules to live by say that anything that isn't a book goes out for signature.  And by crikey that's what happens.  ARRRRRGH.