Pegasus
And Pegasus II
coming in 2014
Fire
Available from Amazon.com
Snippet Number Three* with footnotes**
. . . I’d been this really disgustingly sweet, cooperative kid, always worried about everyone else (this got worse after Ran was born. I am never having kids. Moms with new babies have no life), which is to say this total dreary little dreep. What actually started giving me my own personality was when I got old enough to volunteer at the shelter. It was mostly dogs and cats, but even then there was one parrot (who was totally bonded to Clare, who said, I’m never doing this again), a chameleon (who still runs to the back of his tank and turns blue to go with the walls every time anyone comes into Clare’s office) and three ponies (who had started biting kids at the petting zoo in Electrowest). Since then there’ve been alpaca and sheep and goats and a crippled bobcat the Big Cat Rescue didn’t have room for and then it bonded with Clare too so they let her keep it. But I was thrilled at being allowed to shovel dog crap and scrub bowls. The self-confidence issues of a ten-year-old can be pretty weird.
But I was still pretty disgustingly wet, it’s just now I was mostly disgusting about animals. For example, I wanted a dog. I’d wanted a dog since I was born, but this was about six months after Dad died, and Mom was still trying to be extra-nice to Ran and me, especially because she was working about twenty-six hours a day and exhausted and cranky when we saw her at all. So while she gave me the old ‘a dog is a big responsibility’ lecture and reminded me forcefully that she was working twenty-six hours a day and back up from her was a non-option, her heart wasn’t really in it. I knew who I wanted—and Clare had been saving him for me—so we brought home Mongo (short for mongrel, although really he’s a border collie). He was about six months old and already crazy, and you can guess that some ordinary family hadn’t been able to cope with a hairy attack squad caroming off the walls and trying to fetch pieces of furniture so somebody would throw them for him. Mom, even having basically folded on the subject of my dog, was a little leery but Clare said I’d cope, which made me feel better than anything ever had in my life before—at least anything since Dad died. But Mongo is also really, really happy and cheerful and loving (as well as crazy) and he was totally a good idea and just what we needed.
But the point is, he was my dog. We had him because I wanted a dog. I had to walk him twice a day and feed him and brush him (way too much fur. If I’d realised I might have tried to fall in love with something with short hair) and make sure his water bowl was full and all that. Which in Mongo’s case included a lot of remedial training, starting with SIT. Sitting to have his lead put on, sitting before he was allowed out the door, sitting before he could jump in the car, sitting before his food bowl was put down—and the accidental swallowing of the hand holding the bowl is not allowed. Sitting a lot at least made new sort of loops in his caroming and got him used to paying attention to me as something more than dog-food and thrown-stick provider. Then there was learning no eating sofa cushions or baseboards or shoes or origami figures that happen to fall on the floor—he ate the best dragon I ever made and the fact that Takahiro made me a better one later on doesn’t change anything—and finding a more or less chew-proof dog bed because there are limits. I thought teaching him the long down was going to kill us both, although I have to say that possibly my attention span wasn’t totally up to it either.
But I did it. I did it all. He barely even ate newspapers or gloves after the first six months with us. I was the kind of kid who actually did walk the dog every day. Twice. Just getting enough exercise was a big thing with Mongo. . . . ***
* * *
* I think it’s number three
** See! Footnotes! ::waves:: ^
^ Stardancer wrote:
I had to look up “ecphonesis” too. But what I got out of that paragraph was mostly the fact that I kind of want to see a scene now that includes an eggplant and a philosopher
Aaron wrote:
But does a Dining Philosopher* need one or two forks to eat an eggplant?
*Problem
And you would think eating comes into this equation why?
*** Remember: this is only second draft. Mongo may start saving the universe sooner in the final copy.
Mostly coherent. And with lots of footnotes.
b_twin_1
Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.
It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE. How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT?
http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html ***
* * *
I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment. What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)? It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs. Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it. Bell methods are all basically canons, you know? Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.† But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES. Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††
I won’t say we did it well.††† But we were doing it.‡ And I noticed something. The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six. Don’t make me frelling laugh. Counting to six is sordid enough. Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong. Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point. Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line. Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.
I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now. But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing. So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring. Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went. And it was okay. It was good.§ And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . .
ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT. BACK TO SHADOWS.
* * *
* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN.
** FIRST novel! For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!! A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well. Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication.
^ Really good rhinestones. Possibly attached to All Stars.
*** I think it’s a really good trailer too. Mostly I don’t like trailers. I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them. I like this one.
^ I don’t have trailers
† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’
†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells. It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower.
††† Some of us did it better than others.
‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea. WHA’? WHA’ YOU SAY? What are you doing in my sitting room? Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells?
The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished. I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished. But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether. So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.
^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph. Maybe twice.+
+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently. But I don’t often hang around to label it as such.
‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break: you’re still going to die.
‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm.
§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge. Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way: and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you. I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .
Um, SHADOWS
SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS FRELLING SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS GAH SHADOWS SHADOWS MAGGIE SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS BLEEEEUUUUH SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS I HAVE WRITTEN AT LEAST 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 FRESH NEW SHADOWS SHADOWS WORDS TODAY SHADOWS MORE GAH MORE SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS LOVELY LOVELY MONGO BUT I CAN’T AT PRESENT REMEMBER IF I HAVE ANY MORE SPOILER-FREE MONGO SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SO YOU’LL FORGIVE ME IF THERE IS NO BLOG TONIGHT? THERE MAY BE A FEW MORE BLOG-FREE NIGHTS IN THE NEXT WEEK BUT I’LL TRY TO LOOK OUT MONGO BARS ONE NIGHT SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS JILL SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS VAL SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS A LITTLE KISSING SHADOWS BUT NOT MUCH SHADOWS SHADOWS MAGIC AND TECHNOLOGY AND CRITTERS AND WEIRD SHADOWS CRITTERS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS TAKS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SILVERBUGS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS ORZASKA SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS AND MAGGIE’S MOM GROWS ROSES SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS COBEYS SHAAAAAAAAADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS CASIMIR SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS THE 31ST OF FRELLING BLOODY JANUARY IS NEXT TUESDAY HAVE I MENTIONED SHADOWS IS DUE THE END OF JANUARY? I MEAN HAVE I MENTIONED IT LATELY? LIKE IN THE LAST 200 WORDS?
Extreme Brain Death, etc
Blah erg eh gah erfft groan snivel. I’m pretty sure I’ve used this title before, although the ‘etc’ may confuse the ’bot waiting to title it ‘extreme-brain-death-1407’ when I turn it into a shortcut to hang as a thread in the forum.* There get to be a lot of extreme brain death days toward the end of writing a novel, especially when the deadline is beetling down on you and you’re not done yet. What I haven’t been telling you, because there’s no point, is that I ran aground on SHADOWS with a horrible grinding noise about a week ago.** This is why I try not to write novels in a hurry, because forcing them along at a pace they don’t want to maintain tends to lead to this kind of thing. This is what I originally thought had happened with PEG II: I knew it was going to be long (ahem) and I thought it was just demanding a more leisurely pace, and I could wait it out. Politely. ***
You can miss signposts if you’re going too fast. I’ve been going pretty fast on SHADOWS, but mostly it’s been doing the mettlesome-steed thing and galloping along willingly. With the result that I was pretty far down the wrong byway when I realised that the landscape was going all peculiar. You may not know the difference between Piddling-on-Slepton and Greater Hatchflummery—they both have village greens and duck ponds—but you can make a good guess about whether you’re in a rainforest or the Riiser-Larsen ice shelf.† And furthermore while the story is delivered by the Story Council, some slack, not to say grace, is given to the scribe for rootling for vivid details, and I have a fertile little mind.†† I can not only have gone extremely wrong, I can have plucked all kinds of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-details out of the surrounding dramatic dazzle by the time I realise it should be parrots, not penguins. Oops. And of course the blizzard has eradicated my tracks. . . .
So, not to flog a poor innocent metaphor to death or anything, I’ve been kind of crouched in my tent, pushing earlier details around like checkers on a small travelling checkerboard, and waiting for the wind to die down so I can get my compass out and figure out where I went wrong. It’s a TOTAL FRELLING BITCH, waiting. It’s even a total frelling bitch when you’re not staring at a deadline. But there’s not a lot I can do until the blizzard subsides/the dust settles/the story forgives me for being a dork. Last few days I haven’t been listening to quantum physics while hurtling†††, I’ve been trying to, as you might say, deplot myself. Today I finally heard the parrots. . . .
So let’s have an Ask Robin to celebrate.
So I’ve been wondering this one for years, and I think I’ve checked everywhere else for the answer. In Hero, after Aerin defeats Agsded, she falls asleep and dreams three different scenes. One is of Hetta from Water and one is Harry, I thought. But the last one is of three men, one of whom we hear is called Tommy and one called Leo. Is that a story that is published somewhere and I missed it, or is it a story not yet written, or is it in a drawer somewhere?
I would totally swear that I have answered this one, but one of the new tenets of the rejuvenated Ask Robin, a bit like the rather inescapably evolved basic tenet of this blog, is that stuff inevitably comes round more than once.
No, that is not Hetta from POOL IN THE DESERT. Good grief. Check it out, people, I hear this a little too often. Even if you can get ‘the white walls around her were so high there seemed to be clouds resting on their heads’ out of a tatty little suburban garden, Hetta’s pool is specifically described as being surrounded by crazy paving, which is not ‘the flat earth around the pool was covered with squares of white stone.’‡ This wouldn’t matter, at least not till I finish writing the story about the girl in the other garden (Hetta doesn’t have long black hair either, but I don’t think that’s mentioned one way or another, since I’m mostly allergic to physical descriptions of my characters), whereupon everyone who’s assumed it’s Hetta is going to be confused. And I read stuff wrong in other people’s books all the time, and you can’t focus your best brain power on everything‡‡, and I write (and mean to write) curled-up-on-the-sofa, downtime kinds of books. But I do suggest you check this kind of thing if you’re going to write to the author, you know?
And yes, that is Harry.
Leo and Tommy and their companion are from the very first story I started writing about Damar . . . the one I lay aside because I realised it was too big and complicated and probably several books’ worth and I couldn’t cope . . . and wrote BEAUTY instead. Then when I went back to Damar I decided to start at what you might call an angle, with SWORD, and HERO was always going to follow immediately after SWORD (yes! It’s a prequel! I wrote it that way deliberately!). So Leo and Tommy are now one of the umpty-jillion Third Damar Novels still waiting in a series of beat up paper files and spiral notebooks.‡‡‡ If I live long enough. . . .
* * *
* Alternatively I could wait till a mod hung the thread for me, and then I wouldn’t have to notice.
** This is not wholly a bad thing, as it gave me a kind of break in concentration to get my bell tower resignation letter polished up and sent, which had to be done more or less right then. For all I know bits of my subconscious had been holding high level consultations about this. Including the bit that was holding my throat hostage and getting increasingly frustrated that I was ignoring the ransom notes. I feel this situation could have been arranged better but then I would think that, wouldn’t I? And by the way, about 75% of what Nadia did to me yesterday is still working—I was singing out hurtling today^ for the first time in weeks—and I may even practise tonight before I crash.
^ I wasn’t singing, however, when I frelling slipped in the frelling mud and fell frelling down squish. ARRRRRRRGH. At least I was wearing my raincoat which is old and falling to ruin anyway and I don’t have to worry about how it’s going to wash. (It probably isn’t. It is probably going to take this excuse to fall apart.) My jeans however brought half the frelling landscape home with them. Hellhounds were bemused. Usually they like me at their level but not so much when I’m screaming and floundering.
*** Convulsive shudder. Not infrequently in the last five months when I’ve been getting mental whiplash at the pace I am trying to make^ I’ve thought that having a story that WANTS TO BE WRITTEN even if it doesn’t want to be written quite this fast is ENTIRELY to be preferred to a story that . . . well, all right, it wasn’t PEG II’s fault I was refusing to listen to the whole ‘another two more books’ business. Still. I kind of feel it could have just let me write to the end of II and then stare into the abyss when I got there.
^ I know, I know, there are lots of authors who write two books a year, and some of them are even good books. I am not one of those authors. This is totally trampolining my tiny intellect.+
+ OH FOR PITY’S SAKE. Listening to Late Junction on Radio 3. Some intellectual# has taken AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells and turned it into a thoughtful piece of drooling ambient nonsense. Who are you trying to fool here. Those lyrics are not up to being whispered resonantly into a microphone too close to your mouth. GAAAAAAAH.##
# ‘An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.’ —Aldous Huxley
## Note that BACK IN BLACK is one of my all time favourite albums. Right up there with the Beverly Sills LA TRAVIATA. And equally patriarchal tripe in their different ways.
† Oh, look, there’s a penguin. Probably not a rainforest then.
†† Not much intellect. But lots of imagination.
††† SINGING is very good for encouraging brisk blood flow through the brain.
‡ One of the reasons I specified the crazy paving was that I thought I was preventing people from assuming it’s the pool—and the girl—from Aerin’s dream. Oh well.
‡‡ I think about this every time I go horribly wrong on a bell method I know perfectly well, possibly because I’ve been working too hard and have No Brain.
‡‡‡ There are some dead floppies^ involved in a few of the Third Damar Novels too, but I print everything out, so it doesn’t matter; if I picked any of them up now, I’d start a new draft on page one.
^ Floppy discs. Remember floppy discs?
I sang. I rang.
Yessssssss.
I got up this morning convinced I was doing a really dumb, time-wasting-when-I-have-even-less-time-to-waste-than-usual, thing, going to my voice lesson when I’m still totally croaking.* I told myself that I had to go to Mauncester anyway, to pick up more organic composted farmyard manure for the garden(s) so I might as well tack a voice lesson on the end of it.** I looked dubiously at my music, which positively has dust *** on it, and decided to take the easy end of it along in case Nadia wanted to recommend this pathetic baby thing rather than that. And I took my notebook, of course, to write down her pearls, rubies and sapphires of wisdom.
So I got there and she said blandly, I think it would be a good idea just to attempt to warm your voice up a little—I may be able to advise you about how to work this week. Croak, I said. That’s fine, she said. We’ll start with the nnnn sound. We can add an actual pitch in later.
Nnnn, I said. . . .
Teacher magic. It’s amazing. Oh, I still have a throat full of crud † but my larynx isn’t made of cement after all and by the end of the hour I was SINGING. I was not singing well††, but I was indubitably SINGING. Nadia said (possibly a trifle smugly) that one of the reasons some of the notes just weren’t there—open mouth, nothing comes out—isn’t about my throat at all, but about the fact that because of all this emotional stuff I’ve shut down, and specifically I’ve shut my voice off from my air supply. And she taught me the Lip Trill, which she says is very good for reconnecting with your air supply because it’s so hard to maintain. All you singers out there will know the Lip Trill. What it really is is a blowing-horse imitation: you blow out through your lips so they go Pbpbpbpbpbpbpb††† It’s also supposed to relax the muscles around your mouth.‡ Which probably explains why I can’t do it. So now it’s homework. I have to learn to pbpbpbpbpbpbpb. She also made me do the opening-curtains thing to make me more positive, and the drinking-a-glass-of-water-on-a-hot-day‡‡ thing, which I hadn’t done before, to open my throat. Why does this stuff work. It is insane.
I had already noticed that what notes are available—and they’ve been creeping home one by one like party-goers after dawn, the last two or three days—are mostly the upper-middle of my register. I’m not even trying the top end, but my voice starts cutting out again around middle C, and I should have a whole octave below that. Nadia kept coming back here and I’d go croak and she’d move back up again. Finally at the very end of the hour something shifted and I began singing in my chest voice—usually, as these things go with me, the gear change into chest voice is not all that big a deal. Ah, she said, that’s what I was hoping for. And I was thinking chest voice = speaking voice = not speaking up for myself = duuuuuh. As I had said to her in my email asking to come for a non-singing singing lesson, I even wonder if the appalling revealingness of singing, depressingly unconnected with any excellence of said singing as it is, is the reason my body chose this method of trying to get my frelling attention.
Nadia said, I was planning on getting you singing today, you know . . .
I had about an hour between singing lesson and Penelope and Niall picking me up to go ringing at Glaciation.‡‡‡ Whapwhapwhapwhap: person trying to reorient. Whap. Which—ringing—felt totally normal . . . and really, really weird and sad and creepy. I haven’t got a tower any more. I’m just some random bell ringer who knows some people in this area. Brrrrr. But ringing rounds for beginners is always grounding as well as making you feel you’re contributing to the community§ and we managed to ring Cambridge even if I then went on to make a pig’s ear of an innocent touch of Stedman which I ought to be able to do in my sleep.§§ Slightly in my defense I was ringing on the one remaining bell I don’t know for Stedman—the three—and there are always moments of vertigo as you figure out where you are on a new bell in a familiar pattern. But mostly I just blatfarging botched it. But they didn’t tell me not to come back, so hey.
And I have gone around today thrusting my knitting under everyone’s noses and saying, Look! Ribbing! Real ribbing!
* * *
* Although there is a little Freelancers Must Stick Together too. Nadia doesn’t charge for legitimately missed lessons, so she’s losing money when I don’t come. This preys on my conscience.
** Going to the local farm shop would have absorbed about forty minutes out of my day. Plus voice lesson made it about three hours. Being really, really bad at arithmetic^ has its uses.
^ Possibly I mean ‘logic’ here.
*** And hellhound hair. But everything in these households has hellhound hair on it, including me, and I am in almost constant use.
† ::Grossness alert:: And I was gacking up horrible gunge on the drive home, after having all those secret inner bits stirred up by Nadia’s intervention. MAJOR DISGUSTING EWWWW. One of the oddities of this illness anyway has been how obsessively focused on my throat it’s been so I didn’t even know there was all that crudiferousness lurking. I find myself wondering if I went down a few archaeological layers and was ripping out stuff from some previous occasion when I didn’t speak up for myself when I should have.
†† But then I never sing well. Sigh.
††† When in doubt, YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt7eTRyRKpA
‡ I don’t think there’s any of me that DOESN’T need relaxing. My hair needs relaxing. My fingernails need relaxing. Possibly especially a week before the book I’m working on is due.
‡‡ Beer if I preferred, she said. No, I said, the way I get into this nonsense of yours, I need to be sober to drive home.
‡‡‡ My voice lesson got moved later when it got made an hour long, and Colin’s practise has had a quarter hour added to the front end because he has a nice fresh growing crop of beginners who need cultivating. This is not ideal for me. On a bad ME day I’ll have to miss Colin, although give me a shooting stick to lean on and I can probably ring rounds for beginners even if I’m seeing double.
§ Contributing! To the [ringing] community! AAAAAAAUGH!
§§ Although given how well I’m sleeping lately. . .
Shipping Updates
Update: December 7, 2011
The next batch of orders will be going out Friday, December 9. Read more.... Watch this space for updates.