Publication day
. . . is tomorrow.
I know I should now go all gung ho* and rah-rah and . . .
And I do think it’s a good book. And I do think Peter and I have written some pretty nifty stories for it (five, to be precise). I even think the jacket art is pretty cool.** But we’re having a few little technical difficulties. Like that I’ve been begging, beseeching, imploring, supplicating for a second copy of FIRE so that Peter and I can send them off to FIRE’s two individual dedicatees, before their amazon preorders arrive. First single author copy arrived several weeks ago. Two more arrived . . . yesterday. All right. At least they arrived.
However. There is also the matter of the reissue of WATER. It’s coming out with a new jacket, so that it looks like the first of a series*** of which FIRE is the second. And in honour of producing a new edition Peter and I have written a new tiny half-story as introduction. But this new edition only exists because of FIRE, right? . . . And if you go on amazon and look up WATER ELEMENTALS, what you will find is the old edition. With the old artwork. And no new half-story. And which obviously has nothing to do with FIRE. And have I mentioned that FIRE’s publication day is tomorrow?
Life in publishing. Neverending bliss.
But FIRE does look nice, doesn’t it?
And Blog/Sitemom has been busy too. You can read all about FIRE and see what the new WATER looks like here: http://robinmckinley.com/
Usually the business with the reflection of the camera flash is a complete pain in the aptitude, but for a book of FIRE stories it becomes an artistic effect: 
* * *
* BUY MY BOOK! BUY MY BOOK! BUUUUUUUUUY MY^ BOOK!
^ Our book. But Peter is far too polite and British to do any gung hoing.
** I know a lot of you miss Trina Schart Hyman very badly too. She did the cover art for the original WATER, which was the first volume of what was supposed to be . . . of what still is supposed to be . . . a four^ volume series of stories about elemental spirits: water, fire, air, earth^^, and we were hoping to have her do the jacket art for the other three too. And then it took me seven years to produce my second half of a slim volume of short stories. . . . And I hope whatever afterlife or betweenlife she’s in she’s painting up a storm.
I’m also not sure how she’d feel about Dave Barry’s revelation that the four building blocks of the universe are water, fire, gravel and vinyl. I’m not sure how I feel about it. The possibilities for stories about kitchen floor spirits and driveway and courtyard spirits seem rather limited, but I’m probably just exposing the inadequacy of my imagination.^^^ I’ll see what the Story Council has to say.
^ Or possibly five
^^ The fifth would be time. But not only would trying to wrestle five or six stories out of time as an element be a ratbag with extra knobs on, but there’s a great shining superhighway of a Moebius strip of the irony of trying to get any short stories out of me about anything in a, uh, time frame. Need I remind you that SUNSHINE, DRAGONHAVEN and CHALICE all started life as FIRE stories. CHALICE almost succeeded. First Flight—which is the last story in FIRE—almost escaped.
^^^ Which I acknowledge is sorely tapped out by the strain of talking to pegasi. The Story Council just drops you in it, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
And I’ve told you that PEGASUS, which is now two books, started life as an AIR story, yes? I’m getting worse.
*** Yes! Series!
Pale green Monday
I’ve spent most of the day having a stomachache. It’s not even an interesting stomachache. Just your plain dull garden variety unnnh* stomachache. Now tonight was going to be my first official goofing-off, I mean text-alternative, Monday, so I can more perfectly** focus on PEGASUS one more day in the week.*** And Blogmom and I were going to produce something magnificent and compelling . . . and then Blogmom was hijacked to more urgent matters†, trailing promises to have magnificence and compellingness ready for tomorrow; and since Wednesday is guest post anyway, if I blow you off with, say, The Story of a Sunflower today, or Hellhounds Disappearing Over the Horizon Before My Finger Has Finished Pressing the Button on the Camera, or even And Furthermore, It Is All for Naught, and we have Blogmom’s tomorrow, I think you might all start getting a bit restive. And my publisher can’t have that.
So here I am.
Unnnh.††
Well, speaking of hellhounds . . . an unnerving encounter today. This morning, walking up a familiar hill . . . toward an unfamiliar assemblage of several children of various smallness, including one on a pony (the pony appeared to be falling asleep with boredom). Only one grown up, and she wasn’t very . . . and two dogs. One of the dogs peeled off at once and came purposefully toward us. Please call your dog, I said (wearily). While she was trying (not very successfully) to grab it, while it made its mind up about how much macho posturing it was going to do while hellhounds gambolled, as much as it is possible to gambol when your humourless owner has you by the harness, the second dog came trotting up. At about this point the not-very-grown-up got hold of Dog Number One and was strapping it into one of those headcollar things . . . which was not reassuring. However she now had it on the end of a lead and we weren’t dead or even bleeding, so hey.
. . . And my hellhounds from dancing and frolicking with ears flat and tails lashing, were suddenly as tall as I am—whoops—and barking and snarling. Dog Number Two thought better of his plans and hived off again. Dog Number Two happens to be the Cocker spaniel who burst out of containment—oh, several months ago this would be, maybe more—and was extremely hostile and aggressive and wouldn’t let us pass—and the bloody woman who resentfully came out of the house in response to my yells tried to blame the situation on us. We’ve seen it a few times since then but the one time it came anywhere near us Darkness strode out in front and barked and it said oh, fine, if you can’t take a joke, and sloped off.
The thing is: I’ve never seen them mean it like they did today—and I’ve never seen Chaos snarl at anyone. I’ve told you he still whimpers yearningly when I haul him past the border collie who frelling bit him several months ago—they’ve put chicken wire up since, so she can’t get her muzzle through the fence any more either—and usually what happens during confrontations is what happened with Dog Number One today: some big ugly thug comes prancing up leading with his chest, and then stands down at least a bit when hellhounds go all puppyish at him. What happened with Dog Number Two is how dog fights start— not every aggressive canine idiot is a coward—and my guys, because they’re on leads, are going to lose. This is not good, and it’s not a situation I’m used to handling.
The good news, however, is that the champagne is working.
* * *
* Stress! Stress! Stress! Must finish novel! Must lie on sofa! Must drink champagne! Very settling to the aroused stomach, champagne. Besides, it’s a 26th.^
^ For recent Day in the Life readers, or people who have better things to do with their memory than remember this kind of thing+, Peter and I count our lives together as beginning the 26th July eighteen years ago, when I picked him up at the Bangor, Maine airport, because I knew him slightly and had said if he ever had a fancy to visit Maine, etc . . . saw him walk through the airport door and went ‘oops’. We were married the following 3rd January. Peter was then 64, and said with cool British practicality that we needed to get on with the celebrations thing and that once a year wasn’t often enough. So any 3rd or 26th of any month is considered fair game.++
+ Remember, your mind is like an attic, and it fills up. Sherlock Holmes said so.
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Dell/8362/holmes.html
Sherlock would have loved the internet. So, are there any good cyberpunk novels starring Sherlock Holmes? I said good.#
# Yes I’ve read http://io9.com/5178945/22-cases-of-sherlock-holmes-in-science-fiction
++ News flash: I have just spoken to Peter. Finally.# And he confirms that I should take a glass of medicinal champagne at once.
# Rant alert: I want to see those generic phone-machine messages banned. How the hell do you know whether you’re leaving your embarrassing message on the right phone machine or not when the message doesn’t say whose phone machine you’ve reached? Of the four phones I use regularly (two at the mews and two at the cottage) one of them displays the number you’ve punched in~, as opposed to the one you meant to punch in, and even this is not much use if there’s a typo in the contact number, which, in the case of Peter leaving me the schedule for his trip to Scotland, is very possible. Two hours after he was supposed to ring me I left a small polite message on . . . somefrellingbody’s phone machine. It may have been Dr Thingummy Thingummy, with whom Peter is staying overnight, or it may have been anyfrellingbody. It may have been the Chinese take out at the corner. It may have been the Prince of Wales. Although you would think both the Chinese and the Prince would have their own messages.
~ And in one case, dialled. Yes, I bought one of those retro refits a year or two ago, that you have to put your finger in a little hole in a wheel and turn the freller.
** More perfectly is of course an interesting concept. Interesting like stomachaches are interesting.
*** I’ve decided my due date is 16 November, which is a Monday. I want my birthday off. Speaking of champagne.
† What could be more urgent than Days in the Life? Uh . . .
- Peanut butter sandwich
- Cup of tea
- Taking baying hound(s) for walk
- Another cup of tea
- Checking refrigerator for snacks
- Hanging laundry^
- Sharpening pencils^^
- Creating a virus that eats plastic and dog crap on contact and then reverts to inert viral dust till fresh contact. These viruses, of which there will be kind of a lot very shortly, will be filtered out of their environment and then, when put through the Squisher (patent pending), will emerge as The Perfect Clean Fuel. I haven’t worked out how it’s going both to burn in your fireplace and in your car, but I know there’s a way.
^ in the absence of an electric dryer. If you prefer substitute ‘folding laundry’ here.
^^ One of the many drawbacks to computers is that they have almost eliminated that perfect desk-work-eluding excuse, the sharpening of pencils. I still use pencils, but nowhere near as often. I try to bear down firmly, however, whenever I’m using one, so as to produce the need for sharpening as rapidly as possible.+
+ Speak, Nabokov: With the help of the janitor he screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener–that highly satisfying, highly philosophical instrument that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
†† If I’d realised, I would not have worn a pale green shirt and pullover/jumper today.
Bitten by a sea monster
I have this fabulous lamp. 
Actually I have two of them.* They sit on the windowsill beside the kitchen table at the cottage and they amuse me very much. When I spend evenings at the cottage** I put one on the table before I pull the curtains to shed light on my computer screen. This is a perfectly serviceable system. Unfortunately I am a halfwit.*** The lamp tends to sit between me and the kitchen radio on the other side of the table. I was (laudably) paying close attention to what I was doing Friday night † and I needed to reach over the lamp to turn the radio up or down (I have forgotten that part as a result of subsequent trauma). The lamp was sitting on a slightly higher pile of magazines than usual, but I have very long arms . . . not that long owwwwwww. But this is when the true breathtaking compass of my halfwittedness comes into its glorious own: oh, I can’t really have burnt myself on a light bulb††, I said, and ignored it.††† My arm is going throb throb throb but hey, I can still type, what do I care?
So by the time I had my (hot) bath later that night I had a blister about an inch and a half long, half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high. Frell. It didn’t like hot water worth a dead rat either OWWWWWW. Bad language. Lots of bad language. Trying to read in the bath when you have to keep one arm above water level is not very rewarding. And the burn is so frelling big I had to put a proper dressing on it rather than a feeble plaster/Band-Aid. Fah. Feh. Snarl.
And the problem with micropore is that in exchange for it not hurting when you pull it off, it doesn’t stay on very well. So I peeled the whole works off last night, looked at the damage, said, when that blister pops there will be trouble . . .
Sh*t.
However, there is some minor consolation to the thought that I haven’t merely burned myself in an especially cretinous manner: I’ve been bitten by a sea monster. This is the base of the lamp. Can you see him? Emerging from the waves? He might look a bit like a dolphin, but look at those splendid teeth.
Diane in MN wrote:
From your description, it seems that you are not a linear thinker as far as writing fiction is concerned.
I don’t think I’m linear about anything . . . except being dragged from Point A to Point B by happy hellhounds, or pelting down the street to the bell tower Sunday mornings. Linear sounds too much like maths.‡
I know that some writers are very linear, down to writing outlines and mapping plot points, etc.,
Yes. I’m sure we’re separate species. I had a writer friend who did it that way. She gave me a novel once–somebody else’s novel–an old beat-up paperback that she’d taught high school English from, that she’d drawn one of her diagrams in the back of, about it and how it fitted together, as a teaching aid. Even after I’d read the book the diagram was still in Sanskrit. Or Betelgeusean.
but the process you describe makes sense to me because of course you find out more about your book’s world and characters the longer you live with them.
Yes. It’s a lot like getting to know someone. And you know how your best friend (or your dog) can surprise you even after a lifetime together.
I can see a lot of pluses to this way of writing,
Well, it’s always interesting.
in spite of the difficulties of trying to integrate new insights into an existing structure,
Yes. You’ve got a beautiful segue from this paragraph to the next or this chapter to the next and . . . dranglefabs! . . . now you’ve got this extra character or comment or scene you’ve got to jury rig in there somehow. The first thing you—I—think is, maybe I can just leave it out? —No, I need it for the alligators in chapter two.‡‡‡ Drat.
but it strikes me that it must be much more difficult to arrive at an endpoint when new bits of information keep arriving and demanding their place in the story.
Yep. Deadly. I’d probably still be writing BEAUTY‡‡ if it weren’t for the life-saving (for both me and the story) fact that after a certain point it ‘freezes’ on me, and I simply can’t do any more with it. I’m not sure who’s giving up on whom, but I know when I hit that cinder block wall, that’s it.
Meanwhile after several days of the plastic spoon at the rockface, PEGASUS took a little spurt forward today, like it would like to come out as a book next autumn, thank you, which will do as my excuse why I’m so tired that . . . I’m keeping a very wary distance from my sea monster. I got a whole extra hour of sleep last night§, I don’t know what my problem is. But I think I’ll go to bed now. . . .
* * *
* Although they’re not mine. They’re one (or two) of the pieces of flotsam from the old house and I adopted them because I am perhaps the only member of the clan who appreciates a sense of humour in her home furnishings.^ I did remove the hideous little lampshades, scour and bludgeon the incrustation of centuries from all the folds and wrinkles, got them rewired since they were still on this ancient system where the flex/cable/wire/cord is woven, so when it starts to fray it frays interestingly, which these had indeed done, very interestingly, and the plugs that go into the wall are little round things that were outlawed fifty years ago and the sockets with them (we also had a few of the old sockets carefully preserved at the old house: these were not the only lamps that required them. I have a pair of wall lamps of somewhat similar character waiting for rehabilitation at Third House) and asked Atlas to repaint them. So I have utterly destroyed their value as antiques, but the auctioneers said they were worth about two bob thrupenny, so I’m not preventing any of Peter’s grandchildren from going to college and I have a pair of deeply satisfying silly lamps.
^ Bad blood will always out. I’m not a real member of the clan.
** When Peter is out gallivanting possibly in Scotland
*** A very tired halfwit. I’m really a three-quarter-wit, I just need more sleep.
† Writing a blog entry, since you ask
†† Hands up everybody who has ever burnt themselves on a light bulb. I’ve done it before, so I really have no excuse.
††† Remember my little song and dance about homeopathic Cantharis, which is miraculous for burns? It only works if you take it.
‡ Sylvi, heroine of PEGASUS, is good at maths. Ewwwww. Where did that come from? Further proof I don’t make this stuff up. I would never deliberately make someone in whose company I am forced to remain for years be good at maths. An irritating laugh, vile personal habits, an unfortunate addiction to the music of Elton John . . . but not good at maths.
‡‡ Which would be 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 words long by now
‡‡‡ It is chapter two the alligators are in, isn’t it?
§ Theoretically. But the clocks did go back, it is now dark at 5 pm and the shortest day isn’t for another TWO MONTHS. Getting old is like just about everything else, it has its good points and its bad points. One of its bad points is that I want my sunshine.^ I didn’t mind when I was younger. But now I frelling hate losing it every year to a mere accident of latitude.
^ Ahem.
Guest blog by blondviolinist
Practicing
“I like to play, but I don’t like to practice.” I’ve heard those words a lot, and they always make me smile. They also give me an urge to throw the speaker into the nearest creek. What do they think practicing is? Not playing their instrument? If you are serious about music, you are going to spend more time playing your instrument in the “practice room” than performing in public. The better your practice techniques, the more fun you will have while you practice, and the more your skills will grow. (Yes. I listed fun first. Fun is the most important part. Don’t even try to argue with me.)
There are two key aspects to practicing a musical instrument well: creativity and consistency. They go hand in hand: creative approaches to practicing won’t help if your practice time is too inconsistent for them to make a difference in your playing. In an average week, you should be playing your instrument at least six days a week.
Uh oh. I just lost half of you. “I can’t do six days a week!” Well, no. Maybe you can’t do 30 or 60 minutes of practice six days a week. But can you manage 10 minutes a day? Six 10 minute practice sessions spread over the week will be exponentially more productive than one 60 min. practice session.
Hmm. Some of you are still looking at me funny. No, really! It’s the everydayness that counts. Playing music is a physical skill. It has much more in common with athletics than with academics. Your body requires repetition to learn things. That’s why you need to spend at least a little time with the instrument every day. You will get so much more out of your practice time.
Schedule your practice. With my adult students, we often talk through their schedule to determine what days are going to be light practice days, and what days can be longer practice days. Say Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are busy work days. Fine. Schedule only 10 or 15 minutes practice on those days. Have more time on the weekend? Great! Make those days your long days, where you can spend 30-40 minutes with your instrument.
Consistency also matters in the way you practice. Remember what I said about playing music being a physical skill? Your body will learn what you do the most frequently.
Let me repeat that, in case anyone missed it: your body will learn what you do the most frequently.
You all don’t look scared yet. You should be. Remember how you practiced that tricky section in your last piece? The one you played about twenty times before you got it right? Yes, that one. Did you stop practicing that passage when you got it right? No? Good for you! How many times did you play it right? Three times.
Uh oh. “Your body will learn what you do the most frequently.” How many times did you play it incorrectly? And how many times did you play it correctly? And which way do you think is in your muscle memory and in your ear’s memory? Yep. You guessed it. Not the right way.
No, no, don’t get discouraged! This is where the good news about practicing starts. In order to practice well, you get to play things well lots! And let’s face it… playing things well is why we all wanted to play instruments in the first place. It’s fun to play things well. So when you finally figure out that tricky passage… go to town! Play it a million times! Show your cat, your dog, your imaginary mirror-friend. Dance around the room, and then play it again. Your best practicing is done when you are doing practically everything right.
Now about practicing creatively: in your practicing, you never want to get stuck in a rut. Having a practice routine is good, but make sure you keep including variety in your practice. Do you always practice a piece up to the original tempo? Try practicing slower for a change. Do you resist playing the piece up to tempo because you’re afraid of mistakes? Try it today, and see how fast you can go, ignoring all the finger-fumbles in the way. Do you always practice with a metronome? Try leaving it off for a day or so. Do you never practice with a metronome? (Never mind. We’ll pretend I didn’t ask that question.) Do you always play one type of music or one composer? Try a piece outside your comfort zone… maybe a modern piece with lots of dissonance, or possibly some folk music or rock. Has your warm-up routine been the same for years? Go to the music store, or online, and find a new routine to play around with. Do you ever play around with changing the dynamics and musical expression in your piece? Try playing through it five times, doing five different kinds of musical expression. Make a long list of different adverbs, and try playing your scales angrily, haughtily, jauntily, sweetly, mockingly. Play around! Music is supposed to be fun and creative. (There is a lot more that can be said about creativity and practicing, but this will do for now. Hopefully I will be able to write a post only about musical creativity another time.)
Here are a few last tips about practicing:
Warm up. Before you start to play (or sing), do some simple stretches for your arms, shoulders, and back. (Leg stretches wouldn’t hurt, either, especially if you practice standing up. Which is very good for most instruments. I’ll excuse you if you play piano or cello.) Warm your hands under warm running water if your fingers are cold. Then start your practice session slow and easy, using the most fabulous technique you can manage. Let the start of your practice session be a time to let go of whatever else is going on in your life, and focus in on your instrument, your body, and the sound you are creating. Use the first few minutes as a time to check and make sure everything is working: your breathing, your fingering, your bow arm, your embouchere, whatever. These minutes of putting everything in working order will make the entire rest of your practice session work better. (And if it doesn’t, that probably means your warm-up routine has some technical holes you need to fill. For instance, I often forget to warm up my bouncing bow strokes, and end up fighting my bow for the rest of the practice session.)
Do something technically challenging every day. You don’t have to do a lot of it. Five minutes will be fine. You know all those crazy little practice things your teacher gave you? The ones that are so good for you, but are mind-numbingly boring to do? You can do one of them for three to five minutes every day. You’ll get lots of benefit from them, and you won’t be too bored. (Come on, you’re an adult. You can handle five minutes.) You can feel virtuous and accomplished. And then you can go play something really fun.
Use the three-mistake guideline while practicing. The first mistake you make when you’re playing a passage for the first time is a freebie… no harm, no foul. Don’t chastise yourself. Don’t sigh and complain that you’re a bad player. Smile, and keep going. The second mistake you make in the same place is the helpful mistake. That’s the mistake that is telling you that you need to adjust something. Is there a rhythm or a melodic movement that you weren’t expecting? Is there a fingering pattern that you’re not quite used to? Is there a large leap that you need to prepare your body for? Don’t chastise yourself for the second mistake. Learn from it. It can tell you very helpful things about the music and about your technique. The third mistake in the same place? Well, that’s the serious mistake. That’s the mistake that should send off alarm bells and flashing red lights in your brain. It’s the mistake that tells you you are about to practice that mistake into the passage so well that you’ll have a horrid time ever getting it back out. Third mistakes are serious business. If left untreated, they spiral into 20th and 21st mistakes, and then into 102nd and 103rd mistakes. Third mistakes are what send music teachers over the edge, and make us spend entire evenings dreaming up fantastic tortures for our incorrigible students.
Use YouTube for free lessons. There are hundreds of videos of excellent musicians, with excellent technique, playing your music. Take advantage of this! Watch, and see how they move around the instrument. (This might not be useful for wind players, but for strings and keyboard players it can be very helpful.) Listen to their musical phrasing. Where do they crescendo or decrescendo? Do they use techniques or phrasing that isn’t readily apparent in your sheet music? How do they respond to the orchestral or piano accompaniment? You can learn so much from observing famous musicians in their YouTube videos.
Happy practicing!
The middle of the night
Oh for pity’s sake it’s the middle of the night already and I still have to write a blog entry. I haven’t eaten supper yet either. It can’t be that late if I haven’t eaten supper yet.
Yes it can.
My days usually do kind of flash by but for the next five days I am under the colossal, the description-beggaring strain of having to wash my own salad and chop my own hellhound chicken.* Peter is in Scotland for these five days; he has a proper author gig at the University of St Andrews** and he’s using the excuse (fie!) to visit relatives.*** Do you realise how much time it takes to wash sixteen lettuces?† I am reminded every occasion Peter takes it into his head not to be here for lunch. Ordinarily it’s a rather bracing shock.†† But it’s rough on Fridays when I have both a piano lesson and home tower bell practise. And possibly a novel to finish. I was coping before the novel-to-finish went acute.†††
On Wednesday I thought my latest assault on poor Mr Warlock’s Capriol Suite‡ was going rather well. Last night at about one am I realised this was not the case. And so this morning—having overslept again through a combination of going to bed too late and refusing to acknowledge that three hours of sleep is not enough—I got down to the mews as rapidly as possible . . . was annoyingly held up by sixteen lettuces . . . and finally sat down at the piano.‡‡ Aaaaaaaaugh.‡‡‡
I tried to keep Oisin talking about . . . oh, publishing deadlines and things.§ But eventually the deed had to be done. AAAAAAAAAAAUGH. Oisin, being Oisin, said, no, no, very good, it’s mostly §§ there (I think music teachers must have to take a Sincerity Module to get their license) . . . here, have another two pages for next week. And I still haven’t learnt the 9/4.§§§
. . . There were only seven of us at tower practise tonight, and three of us were beginners. I still managed to ad lib a trifle undesirably in various directions . . . sigh. It’s a rough deal when you have both a Pegasus and a Warlock biting your butt.¤
* * *
* Which almost is rocket science. Both the size of the individual flecks of chicken are carefully calibrated as well as the proportions of chicken to kibble to chicken stock, and profound thought must be given to the addition of any supplementary enticements such as liver or cheese. Fooling a hellhound into eating is a deeply complex business.
** Mention of whose name always gives me a tiny thrill of what-might-have-been. There are any number of roads not taken in my or anyone’s life, but some of them haunt you more than others. My first college—I’ve told you I dropped out and went back later?—had a junior-year-abroad programme. I’m sure the programme included somewhere in England, but in my youth while the UK was the UK was the UK, if I were going to choose, I’d choose Scotland.^ And the Scottish option was St Andrews. I totally wanted to do this. However, my parents weren’t going to wear it, so I didn’t lose much by dropping out. A few years later I made friends with someone who had had her junior year there. She said that it was really cold and really damp. And there were no clothes dryers. She bought a mangle for her jeans. I love this. But I’m glad it’s someone else’s story.
I’ve still never been to St Andrews.^^ But I’ve been to a lot of Scottish castles.
^ My first printed-up flyer-type pass-out-at-conventions author bio said that while I loved my little lilac-covered cottage in Maine, what I really wanted was a castle in Scotland. I think I’m over that phase.
^^ I wonder if they ever got round to installing clothes dryers. I’ve not actually had one since I moved over here; if you live in a small flat with six children, you need a dryer. A lot of the rest of us don’t. Peter’s always objected to them on price-of-electricity grounds, and I’d been going increasingly green for a few years before I married him, and relearning the quaint application of clothes pegs. At the old house we had space for racks of damp clothing. My little lilac-covered cottage in Maine, while in floor space probably fairly equivalent to my little rose-congested cottage in Hampshire, did have a screened-in porch where I could hang a clothes-line. Here. . . . Ahem. I know I’ve told you that one of this cottage’s selling points for me is that for its square footage its walls are unusually tall—a good extra bookshelf’s worth. I believe I also have referred to the fact that this also means space for one of those airers you hoist up and down on a rope. http://www.lakeland.co.uk/traditional-airer/F/keyword/airer/product/8849 Although I’m still embraced by wet clammy sleeves and trailing sheets and things kind of a lot.+ And there’s the Aga of course. All hail the Aga, especially this time of year.++ But Peter has a heated-by-presence-of-hot-water-tank airing cupboard at the mews big enough to hang laundry in. Peter wins.
+ Also, since it hangs near the ceiling, the pulleys are near the ceiling, and the rope running through the pulleys is near the ceiling. I’m assuming I’ll find out I need a new rope some evening when I’m peacefully reading in the bath and the whole works falls down.
++ It’s supposed to Rain Torrentially this weekend. Joy.
*** Hellhounds will be intensely interested in the traces of his expedition upon his return. They have a dog.
† I eat a lot of salad. Lettuce has a great caloric profile for people banged up, so to speak, by menopause. Fortunately I like salad.
†† And I do the twelve handsful of herbs and the various other bits and bobs even when he’s here. But he does do the lettuce.
††† But I think I’d regret the hot fudge brownie with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce for lunch, even if that meant I could get someone else to make it.
‡ Which sounds like this only different. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W73UErBmXEQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G25Ezx_R_lg&NR=1
There doesn’t seem to be a youtube of the piano duet version. Which is really pretty, or would be if Oisin had someone else to play it with.
And which I keep insisting on calling the Capriole Suite.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI5vr_ngvXQ&feature=related
‡‡ I can’t decide whether cleaning salad dressing off your piano is better or worse than cleaning salad dressing off your computer.
‡‡‡ At least the hellhounds ate their beautifully-chopped lunch. Eventually.
§ He also had a Schubert duet lying negligently on his music stand. Oh, I said, you’ve got a student who can actually play duets. Yes. He does. She’s seventeen, she’s going for her grade-eight (piano) exam, she’s on her way to Oxford, she hasn’t decided whether she’s studying to be a civil engineer or a doctor, and she’s pretty.
Going back to PEGASUS now. Maybe I’ll take up the crumhorn.
§§ There’s a very wide range of possibility contained in ‘mostly’
§§§ The one thing that can perhaps be said for me as a piano duettist is that I get it about keeping going. That’s the bell tower training: DON’T STOP! WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T STOP! There are two absolute rules to bell ringing. The first one is HOLD THAT TAIL END. That’s the absolute absolute rule of bell ringing. NEVER LET GO OF THE TAIL END OF YOUR ROPE. But the other absolute rule, only slightly less unqualified and thoroughgoing because you don’t positively break anything^ if you fail, is KEEP GOING. Your conductor has a prayer of sorting you out if you keep ringing; if you stop, everyone falls in the hole after you.
^ Like the stay on the bell, which the steeple keeper will tell you through tight lips is a *&^%$£”!!!! to replace.
¤ Note that hellhounds have also eaten their beautifully chopped supper. And Peter rang me from Scotland.