Various. Or possibly variable.

 

 

Katinseattle

. . . It’s that communication problem again. . . . I thought the comment about engineering texts was funny. But I did feel dumb about my shock over the empty dish. Of course I knew the hob was there. . . .

It must have been good writing.

YES.  DEFINITELY.  IT WAS DEFINITELY THE GOOD WRITING.  Also may I say you’re reading it in the spirit in which it was intended.  If you give a story its head and let it run away with you, you will be surprised at the things the story wants you to be surprised about.  It doesn’t have to be a big surprised.  Just a little ‘you’re the boss’ surprised.  When you close the book (or the ereader-of-choice case) you think, why was I surprised about that?  Of course the villain was going to tie the hopelessly wet heroine-facsimile to the railroad tracks.  And of course her dishy true love is going to arrive in time and untie her . . . and whap the villain up longside the head while she’s at it, and then order her hopelessly wet girlfriend to take those frelling self-defense classes.  Of course.  You’d have seen it a mile away, if you hadn’t been letting the story have its way with you.  Which is a very nice thing in a reader.  Just by the way.

As for ‘seventy is the new fifty,’ a cousin blithely emailed that to me. A much younger cousin. I growled back at him, via email. I’ve spent seventy years growing up. I’ve left a number of difficulties behind and collected more that I’ll never leave behind. I want to now say, “I’m 70, I can’t/don’t want to/won’t do that anymore.” Don’t tell me now I have to wait another twenty years.

YES.  I COULDN’T AGREE MORE.*  Granted I’m only sixty (-one) but the principle has been manifesting itself in my life for some time.  I’m not crazy about the wrinkles and the horrible squidgy sagging skin—I’m especially not crazy about the skin, but I’ve had awful skin all my life**, why should it change for the better now—and the memory that makes a snapped rubber band look like the much-desired steel trap, and the stealthily accumulating assortment of aches and pains.  But they absolutely beat being young and clueless and having all those frelling mistakes yet to make.  Granted some people make fewer mistakes than others . . . some of us make LOTS AND LOTS MORE than others . . . but everybody makes some.  And I made a few that it’s worth being thirty or forty years older to be thirty or forty years away from.  And a lot of that thirty or forty years has been pretty interesting in its own right.

Nat

When I have ‘What the?’ moments, I just think, why SHOULD I expect to understand everything?

Everything?  I don’t want to understand everything because then I’d be God and I have enough trouble being responsible for three hellcritters.  I wouldn’t like reigning over all of creation at all.  But it would be nice to understand one or two things occasionally.  And I feel the labelling and signposting system could be expanded a good deal.

. . . BTW- are there publishing rules on having the same exact title as another author?

Ah yet another query about my life’s work that I can’t answer.  Generally speaking, however, no.  I imagine that if you named your book Qzhhgorgum because it was about a race of creatures called qzhhgorgum which you invented, you’d have some kind of copyright protection against someone else calling their book Qzhhgorgum:  the Doodah, or possibly even Qzzhhgorgim:  the Semi-Original, as well as the line of merchandise including the fuzzy earmuffs (qzhhgorgum have four ears) in a range of exciting decorator colours and the frying-pans with the specially adapted handles (qzhhgorgum have four fingers and four thumbs) and . . .

. . . Ahem.  But—still generally speaking—you’re going to avoid, if at all possible, having the same title as somebody’s else book for all the obvious sales and marketing reasons.  It happened to me once:  ROSE DAUGHTER started life as ROSE COTTAGE.  And then Mary Stewart came along in the same frelling year and from the same frelling publishing house.  I grant you that ROSE DAUGHTER is a much better title for my book*** than ROSE COTTAGE would have been, but at the time I was not at all happy when my publisher told me I had to change it.

Rachel

. . . I feel I need to stand up for linoleum. It is not anything to do with vinyl, but a wonderful floor covering made from naturally occurring substances. (The lino bit of the name is from linseed oil.)

I actually knew that about linseed oil.  But I didn’t google it first, and would have said if I were asked that it was probably one of those things that originally had linseed oil in it and the name was still being used, like ‘knitting wool’ may in fact be acrylic.  And I wouldn’t have been surprised if the linseed oil part was an urban myth and people who knew better fell down laughing if you said there was a floor covering with linseed oil in it.

 Its trendy new name is marmoleum.

. . . And I did not know it still existed.  I do know that my floor-installers got very huffy when I said lino, and insisted that theirs was the much superior . . . um, vinyl.

 Vinyl is a much easier material to install and is waterproof, but all the eco credentials are with lino.

Yes.  Sadly the vinyl pongs.  I want to believe that you stop smelling it not because human noses aren’t very good but because it stops off-gassing SOON after it fulfils its purpose and becomes a floor.

To find out more, can I recommend the fabulous linoleum museum at Kirkcaldy. (If you are not a lino fan, it also has an amazing collection of Scottish colourist paintings.)

Okay, now I am going to fall down laughing.  A small Scottish museum specialising in . . . lino and the Scottish Colourists.  I wonder if there’s a B&B in the area that takes hellcritters.  Several hellcritters.

Gwyn_sully

But I don’t like eating in a group and I resent being forced to do so…

Ah, my mistake. I misconstrued the problem. Preferring not to eat in groups is totally a different deal than dietary requirements. I can’t say for sure how I would deal with it, since we’ve always been upfront that dinner is part of what we do and I assume that people who don’t like to eat in groups join a group that is a better fit for them. . . .

It’s the Curse of the Talking Fingers thing again I think:  if we’d been speaking face to face we’d’ve had this sorted before we knew there was anything to sort.  I’ve never been a happy social eater but I’ve grown worse about eating in groups as I’ve got older and have less slack for making bad guesses about food—both what’s in it and if I’ll get away with eating it.  And I used to do a lot of cooking ESPECIALLY BAKING and I used to like feeding people, a select few at a time.  Any more, eh, well, putting together one of my gigantic mixing-bowl-ful lunch salads takes a surprising amount of time, even after Peter washes the lettuce.  Before I sound too pathetic, I miss communal food philosophically more than literally:  my life abhors a vacuum at least as passionately as Mother Nature ever did, and time that I might once have filled with baking brownies tends to silt up with other activities.†

There’s another thing to keep in mind:  I’m not at my best and brightest at (usually) mmph o’clock in the morning when I’m writing this thing and I hope none of you are at your best and brightest when you’re reading it and, if I’m lucky, making amusing/interesting/engaged comments on the forum.  It’s a blog.  It’s only a blog.  So we’re all going to misstate ourselves from not being awake yet/enough or because our minds are on the funny noise upstairs/the funny noise from the dog bed/whether or not to ask the cute cop for his phone number/whether or not to ask the cute cop for her phone number/etc.  It happens.  I hope we’ll all live.  Especially me, since odds are overwhelmingly that I screw up the most.

* * *

* Except about the good writing.  I agree even more about the good writing.

** Although if anyone had ever heard of dairy allergies forty-eight years ago I might have been able to miss out both the pizza-faced stage and a lot of by-the-time-I-figured-it-out, lifetime-established digestive mayhem, and focussed on the stunning variety of rogue rashes.  Yes I know I’m oversimplifying.

*** Thank you Peter

† Handbells, perhaps.  It was to laugh, tonight.  Gemma had brought her husband, who claims for some inexplicable reason to want to learn to ring handbells.  There were FIVE of us which was pretty amazing—especially wedged into my tiny cottage sitting-room—and trying to get five people properly rung in takes a while.  Niall finally had to leave in something of a hurry to go be ringing-master at the tower and didn’t have a chance to do his Diary Trick and browbeat all of us into another meeting.  The four of us remaining all sat around chatting^ instead of dutifully going along to tower practise. . . .  hee hee hee hee hee.

^ And eating brownies.  Just by the way.

Blondviolinist

Niall so has your number.

Yep.  I expect the insinuating texts to start up any minute.