DAYS LIKE THIS SHOULDN'T HAPPEN TO A DOG.*

 

So let's have an Ask Robin to distract me. 

I've been wondering what was the first ever memorable story you wrote/wrestled with? I don't mean the first one you had published, but the first one you can recall pouring your heart and soul into and deciding that you wanted to be an author/writer from that point on.

Never.  It is a revelation to me every day that I'm a professional writer.  I've become enough used to it that I no longer wake up every morning [sic] expecting to find out that I sell shoes** at Wal-Mart*** but I do still wake up every morning amazed . . . which is not a bad thing really.  It's not only a rush, it keeps you at it.  How did I get this lucky, you know?  Stop mooning around and keep working.  Yes ma'am.

            I've always told stories.  Before I knew that's what I was doing, I did it.†  I told stories before I had words, and certainly before I could read and write:  and yes, I can remember a few of these, but I'm not sure I can describe them.  Once you have words it's hard to go back.  But story-telling for me is just part of my experience of living in the world.  Everything is part of a story.  It's only a question of whichever way the fragment you're contemplating chooses to run, and whether you have the time and inclination to follow.   How many of you wander around humming random hums?  Hands up, please.  I bet there are a lot.  You don't do it to do it, you just do it.  You're built that way.  You just find yourself doing it.  Some of your hums may be fragments of other people's real composed music, but some of them are just playing with sound.††  And you may go on to nail down a hum on a piece of paper and create (or try to create) a proper piece of music around it, but that's later, and that's something else, and it doesn't discount or disparage the hums if you never turn them into best selling power ballads.  Story-telling is like that for me.†††  I tell stories anyway.  That I can write some of them down and make people pay me for them is a bonus. 

* * *

* Or a hellhound.  I had a am-I-coughing-in-my-sleep^-or-is-that-a-hellhound-yowling-to-go-out-NOW? morning.  Plus delightful clean-up duty.  Plus the guy with the very long squeegee who does my first^^ floor windows showed up^^^ and I didn't dare let him into the back garden, which was reserved for urgent hellhound activity.

            And then there was the continuing to stream, the continuing to cough, and the continuing to not get enough sleep.  Whimper.  I just don't get the coughing.  How can bodies be so perverse? 

            And then there was going to the vet.  And this time our client was Chaos, who has a Vet Phobia, and turns into the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper every time he is dragged across that fell threshold, so that was even lovelier.  He has a Vet Phobia, as I'm sure I've told you, because some arrogant little chickie of a wet new post grad vet and who didn't have a clue what was wrong with him gave him one of those full-spectrum antibiotic jabs that are known to hurt, how dare you be stochastic and PAINFUL with my dog??, and then got all shirty when he screamed, and said that whippets were 'wimpets'.  She's lucky she got out alive, but I didn't find out till later that she'd chosen her treatment because she had no idea.  Oh, and this is after she had told me that I ought to get them neutered.  That that's what responsible owners do.

            She's gone on to make some other veterinary surgery a joy for everyone, but I am left with a hellhound with a vet phobia.^^^^

            Chaos is also one of these dogs that after you have broken up his pills into tiny crumbs and mixed them in carefully with the nice drooly chicken scraps, carefully eats all around them because of course they are a non-food-stuff and are in his bowl in error.  So then you get to wodge up all the crumbs into a mushy glob and shove it/them down his throat.  DOGS.  YAAAAAAAAAAAH. 

            Handbells, this evening, for some mysterious reason, were relatively successful.  Niall even started making calls.  I don't DO calls in bob major.  It was another situation, as it so often is, that the other three have rung MILLIONS of touches of bob major in the tower, and they tell me eagerly, oh, it's just like bob minor EXCEPT WITH TWO MORE BELLS!  Yes, and driving a car is just like riding a bicycle except with TWO MORE WHEELS!  Oh, and an engine.  Spare me.  I can, in fact, get through a course of plain bob major in the tower (probably), because I ring it on handbells.  It's EASIER in the tower. 

^ which would not be the first time.  I'll take any sleep I can get. 

^^ American second 

^^^ His schedule is known only to himself, although I believe it has something to do with prophetic dreams, tea leaves and the curious incident of how many times the dog in the night-time barked.+ 

+ Maybe it had the streamings, and needed to go out.  The original silent hound evidently had excellent digestion.    

^^^^ Today's vet was another recent vintage grad but . . . golly.  Not only was she sweet to my hopelessly neurotic hellhound . . . well, if I were thirty years younger and single, I'd ask for her phone number.  I think I could work out the gay thing as I went along.  

** I think I could get into selling All Stars. 

*** But not at Wal-Mart. 

† I personally believe that the human critter is hard-wired to tell stories like we're hard-wired to learn language.  But story-telling may get squeezed or belittled or misunderstood out of the functional part of you, like other bits of our potentials got squeezed out of those of us who are convinced we cannot possibly do maths or hard science or whatever else.  

†† And as jumping-off places other people's work is the greatest.  I've said many times that I learnt a lot writing appalling Tolkien pastiche.^  I am one of the humourless frumps who say no to 'fan fiction' but as a private learning experience that never sees the light of any computer screen but your own, trash my stories with my blessing, and may you go on to write your own books that will make me laugh and cry.^^ 

^ Infinitely direr than the bad Kipling pastiche for some reason.  Probably because Kipling is not forsoothly.  On the other hand, I learnt not to be forsoothly from Tolkien.  

^^ Or distract me from coughing and no sleep.  Any book that can do that is better than the Pulitzer Prize. 

††† I also wander around the house humming.^  But it took formal voice lessons to get that started again.  I used to hum random hums when I was a kid, but it was disruptive or impolite or whatever, and I was taught to stop.  Of course kids have to learn to behave appropriately, but I wish we as a species or at least as a culture could learn better methods to teach kids, for example, that singing off-pitch is also the precursor to singing on-pitch,^^ or that if you want to tell a story about a flying dragon you don't have to worry about the frelling physics of frelling flight right away, or even about how Marigold got back from Madagascar/the grocery store so quickly.  It'll come.  Go with what you've got.  

^ Or I did till about a fortnight ago SIIIIIIIIIGH. 

^^ I know.  We've had this conversation in the forum.