KES comments continued. . . .

 

Prologue:

I hv hellterror in lap that is 2 say sharing chair WHICH IS NOT BIG ENUF 4 BOTH OF US & I am so uncomfortbl I cld die

* * *

. . . I may be crippled for life.  No, I think the blood is beginning to flow in the right direction(s) again.  When I’ve thought ahead I’ve brought the piano stool in and set it next to my chair so she has something to spill onto and I get to keep my butt ON THE CHAIR.  She’s too small and square to have useful staying-on-chair inertia:  if she slides she’s gone.  I am long and lanky and quite a bit of me can hang off something like a chair quite securely . . . barring the intense pain this causes.  THE THINGS WE DO FOR OUR CRITTERS.   I still haven’t got the lying-together-in-a-heap system right;  the hellhounds think the sofa is theirs and while I CAN trap her in such a manner that she is prevented from molesting them it’s not like I can lie there enjoying my book while I’m on constant Suppression Alert not to mention crisping slightly under the burning accusatory glare from the two pairs of hellhound eyes.*  Arrrrgh.    Hellterror laptime at the cottage is even more death defying—for both of us.  I’m usually on a stool, a, what’s more tall stool, and she has to cling to me like a young monkey grasping its treetop-swinging mum.  She’s fine with this.**  Me, not so much.

She is now the size she should remain and likes laps.  I’d better figure something out.

LHurst

I was reading your author website today, Robin, when I was supposed to be doing something else, and I loved the comment about characters in LOTR speaking “High Forsoothly.”

It’s not original I’m afraid.  It’s been around quite a while;  I can’t remember where I first read/heard it—I assume I already didn’t remember when I was writing that bit and so didn’t identify it there?—although it was in a Tolkien context.  But I bagged it instantly and have used it ever since.  Kes too.  Kes was also crucially shaped by reading LOTR young but the twenty-year difference in Kes’ and my ages*** means that when she got to the end of RETURN OF THE KING she had other options than going back to page one of FELLOWSHIP.†  You may have noticed she seems to have read some McKinley.

Katinseattle

Although it strains my patience to get the chapters only once a week, I like the opportunity to talk back to the author at the end of each one. I’ve often wanted to do that.

‘Talk back’ used, perhaps, advisedly.††  Although may I just offer my forum a compliment here:  thank you all for being so polite.†††  Which means I get to enjoy the process too.‡  I hope it’s not just that my mods’ delete fingers are smokin’ hot.  But along with merely relishing giving you a hard time—by definition, you know:  it’s still all about turning pages, even when the pages are virtual and only happen once a week—I’m fascinated by what all of you pick up and what you don’t, or at least what you don’t feel is worth commenting on.

Morrigan

I have to wonder if Sid will be curious enough to taste the new gooey floor covering… And then how poor Kes will react to that.

Probably not.  In the first place Sid is also going to be busy and in the second place . . . not all dogs find the same truly disgusting substances delightful, and sighthounds are even more bonkers than the usual run [sic] of canine peculiarity.  This is an occasion where I can’t see that, in this case, Sid licking the floor is going to further the plot . . . and therefore I get to say it doesn’t happen.  The Story Council grants me these small decisions now and then to keep me cheerful and writing.

Given that Kes has already seen one face she overtly recognized – I am also wondering how intertwined the current dimensional meld is with her writing. And if they are at all – which is the chicken, and which the egg? Does she think these people and places, therefore they are? Or does she write them because they already exist, and it is the knowledge of them that slips through dimensional cracks into her skull?

Remember that I say (a) there’s a crack in my skull where the stories come through (b) the stories exist, I don’t make them up, I only write them down, and never well enough and (c) . . . I am often in the position of trying to write them down by being there, wherever there is, frantically waving my notebook and pen‡‡ in the air and saying Wait!  Wait for me!, and . . . that where I am (wherever it is) is very, very vivid.

Climbingivy

Don’t forget the Hob! I’m sure his dinner counts for something!

Yep.  Does.

Sheerasmom

Can’t wait for her horse to show up.

I CAN’T IMAGINE WHY I HAVE ALL THESE HORSE CRAZIES ON MY BLOG.  I CAN’T IMAGINE.

Rainycity1

Speaking of names, I’m expecting that we’ll finally find out Mr. W.Shoulder’s ????

Yes.  But not next Saturday.  Or even the Saturday after that.  Or . . .

Leeanne

I’m still asking Santa-Robin for an additional episode at Christmas…I’ve been a good girl, I promise

I’ll think about it.  I promise NOTHING.

Thewoobdog

*gnash gnash gnash*

Why, thank you.

WHERE DO I EVEN BEGIN TO COMMENT ON THAT?!

Wherever you like.

Okay, well, at the beginning, I suppose.

Sounds like a plan.

I bet Kes is glad she doesn’t sleep in the altogether – a nightgown is bad enough in this situation, but stark raving naked would be so much worse.

In such an extremity if the Story Council didn’t allow me to throw her a dressing-gown I would have done it anyway.

. . . I love how Kes is so focused on the sheer quantity of blood, like any normal person would be, but so significantly unlike most unwitting hero/ines in 95.8% of fiction.

Thank you.  Certainly there are too many supposedly ordinary characters who are not freaked out by—er—calamitous events.  Or so I as reader feel.  This is what I was talking about last night:  secrets to writing plausible fiction, including fantasy fiction:  how would you feel if, etc.  Stop and frelling THINK about it.  As someone who’s been writing stories for over half a century (eeeeeep) I do this automatically—but I also sometimes STOP and try and make sure I’m paying enough attention to the ordinary-person-in-extraordinary-situation aspect.

The blood almost becomes a featured character in this little episode . . .

Snork.

Not letting the reader forget about it, pulling one further into that sense of actually being there . . .

Oh good.  That’s the idea.

. . . Same with the way Kes’s mind keeps jumping around to random inconsequentials (floor cleaning, security deposit, HA).

Which is often what you do when you’re freaked out by something, isn’t it?  Well, it’s often what I do.  HELP.  I’M OUT OF CONTROL.  And so you/I scrabble for little bits of things to have opinions about.  ‡‡‡

. . . I can’t stand not knowing who the “we” is WS keeps mentioning. Do we get to meet them in the next ep? Do we, do we, huh? Do we, huh, huh?

NEXT ep?  No way.  Take a few deep breaths and make yourself some nice hot chocolate.

I’m guessing Kes’s dinner plans for the following day are shot now, huh?

Shot?  Not at all.  Why would they be?  In the first place, tomorrow night is a long way away§ and in the second place . . . um . . . Hayley has already been surprising, hasn’t she?

* * *

* On rare occasions I do find them all three in the hellhound bed—either here or at the cottage—but she usually gets too excited at her own (nearly) unprecedented success and they roll their eyes and turf her out.^

^ Which reminds me of the New Dog Bed photo essay I keep meaning to organise. . . .

** Most dogs, in my experience, are more than happy to put their paws on your shoulders or even around your neck, probably the better to lick your face, but in whatever friendly companionable manner.  I’m not used to a dog, especially something whose legs are only about three inches long, who without prompting puts her forelegs around your body and hugs you.^

^ Although she’s probably destroying the thighs of your jeans with her hind legs at the same time.  This is not fear, mind you, this is, Hey!  We’re having FUN!  I think I told you, my first official Street Pastor night, I realised that the clean jeans I had put on just before coming out, the clean dog-hair-muddy-pawprints-and-dog-food-fleck-free jeans, were pretty tatty.  I apologised to Fearless Leader and said I’d do better next time.  Next time, which is to say last Friday, I discovered I HAVEN’T GOT any tough denim jeans that aren’t tatty any more.  I have some lightweight ones . . . but the ones that will withstand a hard (cold) night on the town or a hellterror all look like they’ve done more hellterror-withstanding than is good for them.

*** Which is going to keep stretching alarmingly in real time.  I was approaching my sixtieth birthday when I started KES and while she still is approaching her fortieth birthday I’ve turned sixty-one.  Once I’ve got her settled I hope I can SKIP FORWARD a bit.  I have plans for her fortieth birthday and I don’t want to die of extreme old age before she’s paid her second month’s rent on Rose Manor.

† Or THE HOBBIT, but I don’t think I’ve read that as many as half the number of times I’ve read LOTR. ^

^ That’s still quite a few.

†† YOU DID WHAT?  SHE’S WHAT?  IT’S WHAT?  Blondviolinist covered this well.

††† . . . mostly.

‡ . . . MOSTLY.

‡‡ Or, lately, possibly iPad.  Although if I’m going to go wandering multi-dimensionally I should buy a second battery in case the local power source is incompatible.

‡‡‡ Not, perhaps, wholly unlike a hellterror scrabbling to stay in a lap.

§ Especially in terms of likely number of eps.  Gah.