November 10, 2009

Lo-text Monday*

 

There was frost around last night**, and the jungle came indoors again, but the dahlias are still alive today, so it didn’t sit on us.  But Peter says the local forecast declares the lurking menace of frost all week, which means I get to waste a good half hour a day shifting things indoors at night and back outdoors in the morning.  Yes, I need to get everything over to the bubblewrapped summerhouse at Third House but in the first place that’ll take real time and, you know, organisation***, and in the second place . . . I don’t want to.  I have all these geraniums and begonias and fuchsias still incredibly in flower,† and when I put them into hibernation I’ll have to cut them down; one little bitty grow light in the summerhouse isn’t going to fool them.

            There’s a really surprising amount of stuff still at least somewhat in bloom;  aside from the geraniums and begonias and fuchsias, all of which are nuts, there are roses, clematis, osteospermums, snapdragons, Echinacea, rudbeckia, pansies, nemesia, one delphinium, a few lingering Japanese anemones, the dahlias of course . . . and a chrysanthemum. 

            I’m not big on chrysanthemums, but I keep trying;  I figure there are chrysanthemums out there with my name on them, I just haven’t found them yet.  I didn’t use to like geraniums.   This chrysanthemum I haven’t got round to replacing.  It comes up every year and flowers in November, and it’s so nice to see something coming into flower in November, I keep letting it stay. 

            Last year however, and the year before that, and the year before that, it was pink.  Which is what I ordered out of the catalogue.  Or rather white, turning lavender-pink with age.  White.  Turning lavender pink. IMG_0078 crop

 

           

 

            

 

 

 

 

 IMG_0081Pink. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 * This isn’t a title, this is a reminder.  To me.  I am not writing a proper blog entry tonight . . . and a good thing too.  My head is jammed with PEGASUS—how do people who write Truly Long Novels, Let Alone Series, cope?^  I’m going madder and madder trying to keep track of all the details—okay, I do this anyway, with anything I’ve ever written^^, but I am seriously freaking out at the idea of keeping track of it all through another book.  My notes on names and places and so on . . . not to mention the frelling pegasi language . . . run to something like twenty (handwritten) pages.^^^  By the end of PEG II there will be all of its notes too.^^^^ 

^ Don’t tell me how many times I’ve said this already.  I don’t want to know.   And I recommend you stop counting.  You’re going to get tired. 

^^Yes, of course including the blog.  Prime among the convocation goeth the blog.  I’ve merely given up keeping track here.  I’m old, I’m absent minded, and I have a vivid imagination.  This is not a good combination for either truth or consistency.  You can get away with stuff in real life that you can’t get away with in fiction.+ 

+ Write that down.  I’m a professional novelist.  This is the sort of thing I do know. 

^^^ Twenty pages of second sides of proofs of CHALICE.  Yaay.  Really looking forward to printing PEGASUS out . . . double spaced . . . that’ll finish CHALICE and get into the second sides of proofs of the new trade paper edition of SPINDLE.  Yaaay.  Anyone who isn’t a professional writer, let alone two professional writers, probably cannot appreciate the extent to which we are dominated by paper.  It’s true they sent me the copyedited CHALICE electronically . . . and I haaaaaaaaated it.  So no success there.  And you have to read proof pages in . . . pages.  Waaay to much opportunity for Awful Slippage if you read page proofs on screen. 

^^^^ Never mind that the Story Council has never sent me a coherent full length follow up to SUNSHINE, just endless infuriating scene-scraps and dream-lightning, I don’t want to have to deal with my background notes again.  Remember all that frelling slang? +  So not sheer.  Not sheer at all. 

+ There is also always the more-than-dreadful prospect of having to decipher my handwriting.  I always mean to get stuff like this transferred to computer files and typescript, and never do.  But then I don’t have to.  I don’t write sequels. 

** And I have learnt how to footnote on Twitter.  You are following me on Twitter, aren’t you? 

*** Brrrrrr.  Organisation.  A word almost as awful as ‘maths’. 

† Hey guys, I love you and all that, but you do know that August is over?

November 10, 2009 | Filed Under garden, my books, photos 

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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. -- Cicero