Midnight
That was frelling midnight that just struck . . . oh GODS no that was midnight HALF AN HOUR AGO, that was midnight thirty that just struck, I was going to stop and hit the blog half an hour ago . . . and I’m still sitting here in a daze of PEGASUS. Oh, ungleblarg, midnight . . . and that means one less/fewer* day left before The Eighth of October. Absolute Final Do-or-Die Due Date. Aaaaugh. Aaaaugh.
Colin last night and Vicky tonight both asked me if I’d finished the proofs. Proofs? What proofs? Proofs? Oh—those proofs. The ones that I had my head very far down over this time last week—so far down that I was doing things like reading them at weddings I’d be ringing handbells at in another few minutes and tower practises whenever somebody hadn’t said my name. Oh yes, I said airily, I got them in on Monday, which is when they were due, because I’m just so professional.**
NOW ALL I HAVE TO DO IS FINISH THE NEW NOVEL.
I can’t decide whether things like music lessons*** and bell practises† serve to maintain some tenuous grasp on life outside novel-finishing†† or whether they’re just trying to force me to recognise that the Eighth of October is coming too soon and I should be reading the want ads for grocery cart corral attendants.
Stay tuned for future bulletins on this compelling subject. . . .
* * *
* I can usually do less/fewer, but not at midnight-thirty when I’m still working . . . although the fact I can’t is probably an indication that it is a good thing I have now stopped working.
** I love that word. Professional. It has such a shining veneer of snappy sharp briefcases containing snappier sharper laptops and squared-up tidy inboxes each and every page of whose contents is known and in process by the person responsible. You send your proof corrections in on time and no one has to know that you nearly have to pole vault to get to your desk on account of the Open Plan Inbox which tends to accumulate around it, or that your idea of a sharp briefcase is an elderly canvas tote bag that says Blue Hill Books on it, which will no longer come white again even when it’s washed, and you’re afraid to push this issue for fear of obliterating the logo, whereupon it would become a dirty white cotton tote bag with a hill-shaped smudge on one side.
And, speaking of laptops . . . about thirty seconds before I had to rip out of here to go to my piano/mutable music lesson Azmodeus^ showed up with my laptop, and in a state of considerable suppressed glee, the glee being Azmodeus’, that is, not the laptop’s, although the laptop was probably expressing a certain amount of silent solid-state relief. So, guess why my laptop has been growing increasingly erratic the last few weeks? Because the keyboard base was full of crumbs. And Azmodeus and his minions have replaced the frelling keyboard.
I was at this point, I believe, supposed to collapse in embarrassment and shame. Crumbs in the keyboard!^^ Tsk tsk tsk! I looked at Azmodeus blankly. You can’t clean it? I said. No, he said, there’s no way in through the membrane. You have to replace the keyboard because I eat while I work? I said. How stupid a system is that? How many computer users out there also eat at their computers? If I didn’t eat at my computer I’d have to give up eating, because I am a very slow eater^^^ and if I’m not working/eating^^^^ I’m probably pulling on a bell rope or hurtling hellhounds or something. ARRRRRGH. And I’m going to have to replace the keyboard again every six months or something because there is a staggering design fault in this laptop? Next time I want a keyboard you can clean, I said.
^ Have I told you that Azmodeus isn’t best pleased at being named after a demon? Hey. This is the blog of the hellgoddess. Pull yourself together.
^^ How . . . unprofessional.
^^^And I’m not exactly breaking land speed records at work either
^^^^ Besides, I think chewing stimulates blood circulation in the head area.
*** I’d baled last week because I had the handbell wedding Friday afternoon and rescheduling was too complicated. Then this week has Not Been Good for concentration outside novel-finishing and the piece I’d been working on—before Azmodeus took my laptop and Finale away from me—wasn’t ravishing me with its original brilliance so I don’t think Oisin is missing much and I’d had this idea that while brain was in short supply maybe I could do a little more with fingers but it turns out that fingers need slightly more direction than tired preoccupied brain felt like giving them^ so that hasn’t worked out too well either. But there had to be something Oisin could do with me so I went anyway. I have the uneasy memory nine hours later that I may have spent most of my time ranting about one thing or another.^^
I had, however, in my brain-scattered haste, because I’d been working on the frelling novel before Azmodeus interrupted my flight out the door, snatched up the wrong music, and arrived with Caro and Panis and He Was Despised. Oisin was playing for a funeral and got back late^^^ and discovered me picking out He Was Despised on the piano with one finger and looking worried. I’ve been saying this for a fortnight or so in the blog, that Any Minute Now the real work begins with Blondel, and I think it just has, with He Was Despised. It’s been nice, these first few weeks, especially with finishing the novel going on in the foreground, that just doing my exercises and trying to learn a few tunes has been enough. Unfortunately I have a very acute memory of saying to Oisin this afternoon that when I’ve been singing a bit longer I’ll come in with the wrong music deliberately some day and make him play accompaniment. I’ll hold you to that, Oisin said, way too promptly. Music teachers. They’re all sadists. ^^^^
^ I Vant to Be Alone+
+ It’s just a little Mozart!
^^ Publishers, publishing schedules, time, lack of time, novels that need finishing, weather—which is being gorgeous and I’d rather be outside planting bulbs—lack of brain, etc
^^^ He organs for a lot of funerals, as you might expect. He says you discover the most extraordinary things about the ordinary people you’ve been saying hello to on the street for the last x years. He played the organ for the funeral of a man recently who when he was a young man had been a POW in Italy during WWII, escaped, and walked home. Across occupied France. And casually caught a fishing boat across the Channel. And Oisin had known him only as a nice random little old man. . . .
^^^^ Very like obsessive handbell ringers
† Between finishing the novel and some erratic attendance by other people at practises recently I have been slipping under the radar. But Colin^ came to our tower practise tonight, looked at the assembled, which with him and Anthea there were an assembled, looked at me, smiled a smile with too many teeth, and said ‘Kent’. I dove for my methods books and sat out the first touches. Kent Minor (six bells) when it came was a little ragged but I did get through it, and Grandsire Triples too, although triples—all eight of our bells ringing, but only seven of them in the pattern with the tenor always ringing last in each row—still feels like such alien territory to me because I so rarely ring on eight bells, and I only learn anything by mega-grind. Whereupon Niall suggested Little Bob Major. Major is all eight bells in the method—the tenor rings ‘inside’ with the rest, so when you’re ringing you count to eight, not to seven, as you do with triples. I can ring treble to major—treble being the easy, straightforward, no wiggly bits bell in most standard methods—but Penelope had already declared she was tired and was going to ring the treble. Whereupon Edward turned to me with the too-many-teeth smile and explained what a nice easy pattern Little Bob Major is. Um. Well . . . I did get through it, although it is a very good thing that it ended when it did, as I was about to go seriously off the rails. So I can now say—with a slightly bemused look—that I have rung inside to major.
^ Speaking of sadistic music teachers, and I’ve already said that change ringing is music
†† I originally wrote ‘on reality’ but I think that’s over-hopeful.
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