Bad Photos
Okay. Baaaad photos. But I decided in aggregate they become funny, and you can all use a laugh, right?
I KEEP TELLING YOU THERE ARE NO CATS IN THE SHRUBBERY.
This Woman Is Wondering If Her Husband and Her Camera Are About to Slip into an Alternate Dimension and Never Be Seen Again. (And Hellhounds Are Not Convinced About the Lack of Cats.)
If you look closely (well, not too closely) you may observe some strange dark smudges on my left thigh. Those are . . . bruises. I don’t actually look at my thighs much (taking baths, late at night, who’s awake? Getting dressed in the morning, who’s awake?) and it came as rather a shock to discover that I have this entire series of small round bruises on my leg. I spent most of my first day in shorts wondering what piece of furniture was responsible, and if I might be able to move it to somewhere I won’t be so inclined to impale myself on it. It finally occurred to me. It’s not a piece of furniture, unless you consider hellhounds furniture. It’s Chaos. He comes boiling out of the front door for a walk–any door, any walk–and my little joke is that he emerges in Must Bite Something mode. Well, he’s not allowed to bite Darkness, and who’s left? He comes and gnaws on my arm and makes ridiculous noises when we’re all sitting down comfortably indoors, why shouldn’t he gnaw on my leg and make ridiculous noises when he’s expressing his delight in the prospect of ambulatory entertainment? It never occurred to me he was leaving marks.
Oh, and yes, those are roses on my socks.
This is how the majority of ringing photos look. With your hands in front of your face (and some fairly serious distemper on the inadequately maintained ancient tower wall behind you). At least the rope is not flying out in some abstruse hieroglyph, thus demonstrating either that I am a ninth-level magician of dangerous and portentous skills, or that my bell handling skills are regrettably sucky.
Okay, this is truly unheard of. I seem to be smiling. Bell ringing is SERIOUS! You do not SMILE! Smiling at a competition results in instant disqualification for the entire band! –I believe this was when Colin, who was on the rope to my right, turned around and faced the wall, in fear that Anthea might let the camera tremble a little and he might be in the shot. Hey, dumbface! There’s a crop function!*
I’m looking at the floor, so I’m probably leading. Looking frantically sideways one way or the other is the sign of a person desperately looking for the next bell she should be following (have I mentioned recently that you have about a third of a second to pull your rope in the right place?). This is also a good example of the ‘you must be joking’ aspect of bell ringing. No sane grown up would take up something that requires this posture three times every two seconds ( . . . approximately. The other three times is the backstroke, as in the previous photo. Handstroke is when you have hold of the fuzzy striped thing).
My life. Sigh. Okay, we need some rose photos now.
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* Yes, a just possibly marginally recognisable foot and an elbow were in the original photo before I cropped it out. And I’ll hear about it that I called Colin dumbface. He keeps an eye on the blog for subversive remarks. Since he’s already making me ring six singles a minute in Stedman I’m not sure what he’ll think of to punish me, but he’ll manage.
Rabid Wolverines
IT HAS BEEN A RABID WOLVERINE OF A DAY.* I don’t want any more days like this, okay? Also I need more sleep. Obviously I was having a Precognitive Night last night about the day to come because I kept shooting awake out of lurid and complex dreams, listening for the heavy wet squishy footfalls on the stairs and the low macabre rumbling noises and the awful smell and . . .
So I’ve had three, not one, not two, but three significant publishing traumas today, for each of which people should die, but probably won’t**. I’ve had COMPUTER MEN HERE FOR ALMOST FOUR HOURS AND MY EMAIL STILL DOESN’T WORK RIGHT.*** It’s still hot, and both hellhounds and I are heatsick†, and, speaking of sick, I have a very seriously ill friend I need a day off to go visit and neither of my dog minders is answering her phone messages.
And EMoon posted this to the forum last night, in response to Blank Spots:
Oh, YES. When one of mine grinds to a halt, it’s because I got pushy and went merrily on doing what I wanted and Not Listening. That is exactly why there’s a discrepancy between (older book) and (what really happened and must happen in a book that’s forcing its way up into midbrain.) I had the right sort of idea, but the wrong time. In that case I won…nobody reading that book at the time could tell there was a problem looming…and if I hadn’t gone back to that world, they (and I) wouldn’t find out. But I have, and it’s a story that demands to be told, and therefore…
You’re scaring the bejeezus out of me here. I hadn’t planned to drop Damar like a . . . rabid wolverine, that’s just what happened, and thirty years later with Approximately Four†† Third Damar Novels waiting in the wings, I’m uneasily aware that I know things about Damar’s history that I wot not of thirty years ago and not all of them fit and maybe I could write a nice book on flower arranging or something instead.
And that’s entirely aside from the fact that PEG II is driving me one might say BARKING. Or daft as a brush. I love that phrase. Daft as a . . . BRUSH?††† Right. Okay. I am being driven daft as a barking mad brush.‡
But otherwise…when things go blank, I know to go back …feeling my way along the story-strand until I find where my bright ideas diverged from the living wood and I grafted plastic on instead.
I adore this image. Aside from the fact that it is scintillatingly accurate.
Meanwhile, both my current publisher (Penguin) and my principal previous publisher (Harpercollins) are updating their web sites to include more individual author stuff, and they want photos.‡‡ And someone, who shall remain nameless for the simple, straightforward reason that I can’t remember who it was, suggested action photos. So over the last few days we’ve bailed repeatedly on Hellgoddess and Hellhounds because Peter keeps freaking out over the camera, and the only even quarter decent one has me wearing an expression that you might expect of a woman watching her husband having a nervous breakdown with her camera in his hands, but is perhaps not quite what one wants on a publisher’s author page.
Tonight Anthea was pressed into service for bell ringing action photos, and . . . no, no, no, it’s late, I can’t face it. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. Maybe I’ll post the one of the hellhounds straining for the shrubbery‡‡‡ and me hoping that both Peter and my camera are going to get out of this one alive and . . .
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* With a minor footnote concerning the ringing of Cambridge, which, bewilderingly, progresses. It’s still not good, but after a day like today I was expecting ringing rounds to be challenging. Meep.
The monthly district practice^ is near here this month, so I may overcome my natural bashfulness^^ and go along. The spotlighted method of the evening however is London, which is another frelling surprise method, like Cambridge, and I was having a moment of madness about whether I should try to learn it . . . when I can’t really ring Cambridge yet, McKinley, get a grip.^^^ On the way back from Little Warbling tonight I asked Niall what London Surprise was like. Oh, it’s all right, he said with the glamorous indifference of someone who rings pretty much anything a conductor may have a yen for. Gaah. Really more to the case is whether whoever is conducting the district practise would let me have a go.^^^^ If it’s Wild Robert . . . I’d better study London.
^ Which is pretty much what it sounds like. Once a month a tower within the given district—a different tower every month—holds what’s called district practise on their usual practise night, but it’s advertised in the district schedule, the idea being that a lot of people that aren’t their regulars turn up, and particularly that extra good ringers show up, so the locals can have a chance to ring stuff they may not be able to with the home crew. There is usually a fancy method of the evening too, announced with the rest, so you can swot up in advance if you want to have a go, and is kind of the thank-you to the good ringers for showing up.
^^ Ie my natural tendency to go to pieces among strangers.
^^^ On a bellrope, presumably.
^^^^ See: natural tendency to go to pieces among strangers.
** And which I do have enough sense not to dilate upon in a public blog, so you’ll just have to let your imaginations run riot.
*** It’s better. We think. Maybe.
† Chaos the worst, then me, then Darkness. Note that I am sparing you the grisly details.^ Peter is fine. Peter, except when he’s being carried off to hospital in the middle of the night, is always fine.
^ Although I don’t know if theirs includes bad dreams about smelly things on the stairs.
†† Depending on how you count. It might be six.
††† Ah the British. Never mind. They invented full-circle method bell ringing.
‡ Not to mention my biological confusion, since Damar doesn’t have wings and pegasi don’t bark.
‡‡ As does calico-reaction. Don’t forget calico-reaction lj, which is going to be reading SUNSHINE next month, and wants a photo to go with the essay I’m writing about How I Came to Write SUNSHINE cough cough cough cough cough. Well, I’m writing about writing and about SUNSHINE, and that’ll have to do.
‡‡‡ They frelling caught one of the local cats a few days ago. This is one of the little snags about hellhounds: they are that fast. Cats used to normal dogs think an ordinary feline sprint will get them away from any mere canine. Wrong. Hellhounds are, however, more interested in the chase than the catching, and soft mouthed, and the cat gave a wriggle—and yes, I’m extremely glad that’s all it gave—at the moment that I stopped standing there like patience on a monument and hit the brake on the damn leads—Chaos was the one with his actual mouth around the actual cat at the time—and hellhounds stopped and looked at each other and said, oh, that was interesting . . . and now come boiling out of the door at the mews hoping for more cat action every time.
Ask Robin: Blank spots
You [have said] that your stories are, in large part, not strictly “your creations.” You maintain that they simply
Ahem. ‘Simply’ has nothing to do with it.
come to you, telling themselves first to you, and prodding you to . . . write them . . . [but] there may be gaps in the official story. And while you can accept a blank such as “and then SOMETHING happens, and Katriona is able to have a spinning wheel in the house that complies with royal orders” when it’s just a story in your head, when it comes to writing it down, something has to be filled into that blank. You must have had times when . . . the story simply won’t fill in that blank. . . .
My question is this: “How do you deal with those story blanks the Story Council leaves open, when you’re completely on your own to create them, keeping in mind that it has to lead to a certain event that you know comes after the blank?”
I suggest that the first thing you do when you find yourself in this situation—since, whoever you are, you are obviously asking with a good deal of personal feeling—is let go of the idea that you know what happens next. You may not know. You may be trying to make the story do what you want it to do: you may really like the bit that comes next, or think it’s a really clever piece of plot, or it’s going to bridge that awkward transition between part one and part two, or you’ve been longing to stick the evil giant muskrat with the enchanted harpoon and you’re finally going to get to do it.
And you may very well not realise that that’s what you’re doing. Writing stories is hard* and one of the hardest things about it is the way EVERY FRELLING THING IS SO FRELLING FLUID. Every word you write may lead to almost any other word . . . and the word you wrote may already be the wrong word. Trying to translate that fabulous story that has taken over your brain and your life into words on paper . . . gah. It’s the worst. It’s the scariest. It’s the hardest.
And so you are going to hang onto stuff that you think you know. Very reasonable of you. But you may be wrong. Maybe you don’t know what comes next. What you think you know may be totally brilliant and exciting, but it may not belong here in this story. And thinking too much about it may be blocking your finding out what happens in your blank spot. Try forgetting about the event you know comes after the blank. Just sit there with your blank and see what happens. And no, I have no idea how long I mean by ‘just sit there’. An hour. A month. Twenty years.
It’s different for different writers. So don’t take what I’m saying as the absolute and only truth. But for me, if there’s a blank spot, it’s because I haven’t listened hard enough. It’s not a blank spot in the story. It’s a blank spot in my understanding of the story.
This is what I believe: if the story is yours, if you’re the person who’s supposed to tell it, it’ll come to you. It may drive you mad in the process, and it may take years. But it’ll come. If it doesn’t come, then it’s not your story. How do you tell the difference between waiting and listening, and realising it’s not your story? You don’t, unless it tells you. Your job is to keep waiting and listening. Meanwhile, if you can’t write this story right now, write another one.** And if all your stories have blank spots, then there’s something else wrong, and you need to stop bruising yourself against that imaginary-but-very-very-real wall, and find out what it is.
But that’s another . . . story.
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* See: simply has nothing to do with it
** And if the story we’re talking about, the one with the blank spot, is the only story you can think about, then write book reviews or poetry or political commentary or something. Not writing, if you are or want to be a writer, is not a good idea. I’ve said this elsewhere, I’m saying it now, and I’ll doubtless say it again, but to be a writer you must write. And writing, like anything worth doing well, takes practise. Lots and lots and lots of practise.
And the winners are…..
Another announcement from Black Bear
I’m pleased to announce we have our winners in the Pegasus ARC contest! Without further ado, please extend your congratulations to:
Forum Winner: GraceNotes.
My favorite is a brief description in Spindle’s End: “…a wriggle of wedge-shaped stairs led down into the main body of the house.”
I’ve met stairs like that, and I love the initial rhyme of wriggle and wedge – so graphically descriptive.
Twitter Winner: exlibris_mhuitt
“And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.”
(from Chalice)
Facebook Winner: Elizabeth Poyer
Near the end of Dragonhaven, Jake muses that he can’t stand to be indoors for more than a few hours, and even when the weather is terrible he stands in his doorway; I think of that bit nearly every day.
The winners were chosen at random from our total of 428 entries across three venues.
Winners: you need to contact me with your shipping info, and any request for an inscription from Robin*. My email, which I will spell out here in a feeble attempt to defeat spambots, is waxlion88 at gmail dot com. If I don’t hear from you within a couple days, I will begin to poke at you mercilessly.
Thanks, everyone who participated—hope you all had fun reading one another’s entries!
Bear
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* I’m happy to sign, but with exceptions too rare to go into, I will pretty much only sign a person’s name and ‘best wishes’ or equivalent. I will not sign things like ‘to the greatest sister in the universe!!!’ because she’s not my sister and I might not think she was the greatest sister in the universe if I knew her. I’ll sign the ‘best wishes Robin McKinley’ part and then you write ‘to the greatest sister in the universe!!!’
And THANK YOU ALL for making this a contest worth holding. I might have been so depressed that I’d had to move to an empty atoll with no internet access if three people and an axolotl were all who entered. And yes, it’s been a hoot seeing what quotations you all came up with.
THANK. YOU.
And you three winners . . . eeep. Well, I hope you like it. . . .
Final Pegasus ARC Contest Countdown
Public Service Announcement by Black Bear
Ok, folks. If you’ve not entered the contest yet, but still want to, it ends at midnight EDT tonight. Not that you shouldn’t feel free to keep telling Robin your favorite quotes from her books, but it won’t get you a shot at the Pegasus ARCs. If you want a refresher of the rules, they’re *here*.
The winners will be announced here on the blog on Sunday, at the usual posting time. The winners will then need to contact me (instructions will be provided) and I’ll get your shipping information* and pass it on to the proper authorities, who will then ship you your book!
As Robin remarked earlier this week, it’s been entertaining to see the quotes people have picked to share. I note with some glee that Harry’s orange juice, the unwitting target of her scowl, is a highly popular subject with many of you. And also like Robin, I was really pleased to see the wide variety of sources for favorite lines—Sunshine and Blue Sword are neck and neck for most-quoted, but we also had quotes from those Robin was expecting to be overlooked, Fire and Water, and Outlaws and Knot in the Grain. Every one of Robin’s novels and short story collections got at least two shout-outs, by my rough count, and that’s pretty fabulous. So thank you, all and sundry, and good luck! I’m looking forward to pulling the winners.
I’d thought I might do a quick mod-review of Pegasus here, to make this a proper guest blog and tie it up nicely with the topic of the contest, but I find I’m pretty terrible at writing book reviews—especially when I have to be careful of spoilers. I’m one of those people who is completely oblivious to spoilers; 99% of the time I couldn’t care less if I know how the book/movie/show ends before I see for myself. This is probably because I’m fairly absentminded; you could tell me all the intricacies of the last season of “Lost” and I’d have forgotten them by the time I got the DVDs from Netflix anyway. As a result, I’m always a little baffled when I idly mention something about the ending of a book or movie in passing and my friends who do NOT like spoilers make a sound like a fire engine going off a cliff and then kick me repeatedly in the shins. So I think it’ll be best for all concerned if I don’t write you a review of Pegasus, because I’d just give something away by accident and then I’d have hundreds of angry people coming all the way to Indiana just to kick me in the shins. Good for the travel industry; bad for bears. Suffice to say, it’s a fantastic book and you’re all going to enjoy it a lot no matter when you read it.
Or else. So, spoiler-free hellgoddess review: there’s this princess and she has a pegasus, because that’s the way it works in her country. And they have adventures, despite their various parents, courtiers and advisers telling them to behave, because that’s the way they are. And the book stops in the middle of one of their adventures because I am an evil cow, no, no, no, no, it wasn’t my idea, I HATE where it stops!!! ** Oh yes, and there’s an evil magician, because what’s the point of a story about a princess and a pegasus that didn’t have an evil magician in it? No, wait, this isn’t a review, okay, here’s the review part, it’s REALLY GOOD! REALLY! GOOD!***
And because I really am an evil cow I thought I’d give you a favourite quotation from PEGASUS. I’m so bad.
He looked at her at last. Syl . . . what are we?
She could think of nothing to say.
And here’s another one:
He didn’t answer for a moment, and she was afraid he would not–and that she had gone too far. He said, I drank water from the Dreaming Sea, and Redfora told me to let you come.
And now here’s a teaser:
How big is your Sea, do you know? said Sylvi . . . Has anyone ever crossed it?
If they have, they haven’t told us about it, said Ebon. The legend is that it’s another world wide. That if you managed to cross it, you’d be somewhere else than this world. That the only way from our world to get to the far shore of the Sea is to cross the Sea–and you can’t do that either. Although there’s another legend that says the Caves extend under the Sea and come out on the other side. And that you could walk it–if you lived long enough. He paused. There’s another legend still that says that before your King Thingummy showed up with his troops–
Balsin.
And started killing taralians, our King Fralialal was thinking of taking who remained of us and trying to cross the Sea–underneath, by the Caves.
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* Be sure to mention if you want it signed, and if so to whom
** Those of you who read a lot of suspense and cliffhangers and things are going to get to the last page of PEGASUS and go, what? This is the big awful terrifying dreadful end? What? But I don’t read a lot of suspense and cliffhangers and I’ve certainly never written one before and I didn’t enjoy it at all.
*** All eight of my mods think it is! They told me so! Not that they’re BIASED or anything! Not that they wouldn’t lie to me to make me feel better about the cliffhanger and the Volume Two and everything!^
^ And if I sound even more wound up and nuts even than usual this evening, you’re right, I am. Chaos staged a complete–COOOOMPLETE–melodrama in three acts plus prologue, epilogue, ballet and intermezzo, over the eating of dinner–it was so complete, magnificently performed and detailed I was briefly distracted into thinking he must be ill. AAAAAAAAUGH. WHOSE IDEA WAS DOGS? NO, WHOSE IDEA WAS HELLHOUNDS?