If I say it's been a pretty good day, will something awful happen?

 

WOLFGANG IS HOME AGAIN. 

AND I'VE HAD A BRILLIANT DAY WITH SHADOWS.* 

I've also been pursuing this learning Japanese thing.  Oh dear.  Enthusiasm is dangerous.  This particular manifestation of my lifelong tendency for rushing in all directions simultaneously started several weeks ago.  Takahiro was already in the second draft of SHADOWS—he has been there from the beginning—so it's not like he was a surprise.  And I've still got a few of my very (very very) old books about Japan and the Japanese language and culture, and I'd had a somewhat nervous cursory look at these.  I do research to throw it away, you know?  It's just that I like to have some idea what I'm throwing away.  There will be about six words of Japanese in SHADOWS.  But it needs to feel like there could be more—rather like the bees in CHALICE.  I crammed like mad on real, this-world bees and bee-keeping.  There's precious little of it left or visible in CHALICE, but I know it's there. **

            So I had been looking at my fifty-year-old Japanese grammar and wondering how much the language had changed.***  When, lo, with a whap up longside the head like fate dropping in for tea, CLANG, frelling www.audible.co.uk sent me a come-on for discounted language-learning downloads.  And, further lo, and further whap, Japanese was one of the options.  Which is how I started listening to beginner-Japanese lessons.

            Fast-forward to a few days ago when I confessed to my latest madness, and several kind people sent me links and recommendations.  OH DEAR.  I seem to have bought both a grammar and a dictionary for the Kindle ap on Astarte† and a grammar and dictionary from the frelling Apple ap store.††

            So I should go study something.  Gakusei da.  Ha.  †††

* * *

* Well, I hope I have.  I think I have.  Maybe I have.  Um..

            I almost never reread immediately;  when I've just written—or rewritten—something I'm still in trees-not-forest mode and chances are if I did reread it I wouldn't be able to tell if it's doing its job or not.  And furthermore I would know that I can't tell, and then I'd start to worry and I'd waste time pushing commas and 'and's around.  So I have to Live with Doubt till the next day at least—and probably longer.  Today I stopped in the middle of a scene—I was hoping to reach the end of it before my brain went STOPPING NOW, but then I did reach the end of the previous scene and went a little farther.  Tomorrow I will not reread except the last paragraph to make sure I know where I am, and then I will keep going.  I know.  It seems at least as likely that it would be a better idea to read at least the entire scene that I'm starting in the middle of before I set off again, in order to match momentum/energy with what has gone before.  But I find in practise that rereading always throws me sideways and undoes impetus^—and I write at all by motion, by the vigorous flow of the story.  I can fix bad connections later.  While I'm still writing drafts, even if it's the last draft, forest—flow—is more important than trees.  I don't always even reread entire scenes mid-draft—if I think I can keep going, I probably will.  If I have to go back and stick something in or take something out I'll do it with as narrow a focus as possible:  six trees, not a quarter of the forest.    

^ Unhurtles hurtling.  

** I was talking to Alastair about this as we were walking out to Warm Upford.^  I know there are writers who write wonderful fabulous deeply felt and exquisitely expressed books, and who do nothing but write wonderful fabulous etc and stuff like read other people's books and watch films and TV and cruise the internet and basically never get out and it works fine for them.  Now granted I wish I had more time to read other people's books or watch films and TV at all, and that most people probably wouldn't count bell ringing as something to get out for, but I totally don't know how you stand all those hours in front of a flat media screen of one sort or another (paper counts here) without having a garden or hellhounds or a piano or a '64 Mustang in the garage that you're rebuilding, or something.^^ 

^ He thinks I walk too fast.  BIG HMMMPH.  He's six foot four.+ 

+ He's also the skinniest 6'4" you have ever seen and eats like a starving man.  ARRRRRRRGH.  Okay, how skinny is he?  He can fit into my jeans.  Have I told you this story before?  I'm sorry, I have to tell it again.   Many years ago, he and his wife were the prince and the principal boy in their local Christmas pantomime.  She wore my thigh-high purple suede boots with the smooth-leather purple turndowns#.  He wore my old Harley Davidson black leather jeans.  It's true he had a little trouble kneeling, but that's leather for you.  The zipper went up fine.  The legs were a little short, but he wore (ordinary) boots.  I believe the pantomime was a great success. 

#You need the turndowns to hide the elastic bands you're wearing to keep the frellers up. 

^^ Or possibly a frivolous stab at learning another language that requires a whole frelling new alphabet+ which certainly changes the parameters of your flat media screen. 

+ Japanese has three alphabets, except they're not alphabets, they're syllabaries.   

*** Think of a fifty-year-old English grammar.  –Quite a lot, in practise.  Konpyuta^ wa doko da? 

^ Say this out loud.  And then there's konpyuta-gemu.+ 

OKAY WORDPRESS YOU RATBAG.  GIVE ME MY LONG VOWELS  BACK.  U, A AND E IN THE ABOVE SHOULD HAVE LITTLE LINES–MACRONS–ABOVE THEM.  ONLY WORDPRESS WON'T LET ME. 

+ Hint:  'e' in Japanese is pronounced rather like a long 'a' in English.# 

# I'm fond of Fingerzilla and Montezuma myself.  

† Also the complete works of H P Lovecraft and the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James.  That's the hell of Kindle.^  Old stuff is so CHEAP.  And there's nothing cosier and more luxurious than reaching for your slender, takes-up-very-little-space-on-the-bed ereader in the middle of the night/morning when sleep has decamped to Pago Pago and being able to scare yourself silly so you really won't get any sleep now. 

^ Note that because I have an iPad I can suffer all the more extensively with a Kindle ap as well as the entire stock of the frelling Apple ap store. 

†† The grammar told you to download when you had plenty of time so I got out my knitting.^   And I was in the middle of a row when it finished, so I finished my row, and then I made myself another cup of tea, and then I sang two choruses of Leonard Cohen's HALLELUJAH, and then, assuming it had had enough time to settle down and put its toothbrush in the mug and its socks in the bureau drawer . . . I opened my new grammar.  AND ASTARTE PROMPTLY CRASHED AND FROZE.  THE BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH WITH THE APPLE LOGO.^^  I'M SO HAPPY. 

            This time, fortunately, the holding-two-buttons down simultaneously^^^ trick worked.  It was, of course, after computer angel hours, although Raphael has a silly habit of checking texts on his business account at home in the evenings.  And the grammar has opened obediently several times since then.  Lambasting me with jolly descriptions of the next 1,000,000,000,000,000 hours of dedicated studying, but hey, there's an off button. 

^ I HAD TO RIP OUT EIGHT ROWS TWO NIGHTS AGO.  AAAAAAAUGH.  But I seem to have got all the little loopy horrors back on the needles again and have caught up and I think it's okay.  Frogging is like falling off your horse, right?  You're not a real rider/knitter unless you've eaten dirt and had to rip stuff out?  Right?  Right?  

^^ Why the Apple logo, you know?  This seems to me to be teaching the dog to bite the lab technician when it hears the bell. 

^^^ With possibly extraneous shouting

††† Or possibly hai.