Interview
It’s not even 4 pm yet. What am I doing posting? Makes me feel like the world is on backwards.
However. Lucy, as she told me she would, hung her interview early so I will briefly drag my concentration away from PEG II and post the link. Here: http://scribblecitycentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/mythic-friday-interview-number-21-robin.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
I didn’t get it to her till slightly past the last minute thanks to the awkward timing of stomach flu, so we didn’t have a chance to confer. And I notice that my tendency to extreme typography didn’t make it through the email gremlin filter* when I sent my answers. Regular readers of this blog I feel however will have no difficulty reading unmarked emphases in for themselves.
And I promised you some Beguiling News, didn’t I? Mmmmm. . . .
Oh, who tells secrets at four o’clock in the afternoon? Flapdoodle. I’ll tell you later.**
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* That’s filters of gremlins, you know, not filters to remove gremlins
** More mwa ha ha ha ha. Although in truth only a minority of you will be interested. But I’m interested.
Advance notice
Tomorrow’s blog post is going to go up frighteningly early, because it will be a link to Lucy Coats’ Friday interview, which, tomorrow, is with Robin McKinley. Lucy is apparently an early riser*, and has already warned me that the interview will go live at . . . urrrgle . . . no, I can’t bring myself to write those words. But I’ll hang the link here what passes in my life for very early indeed.
There will also be an Interesting Announcement. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
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* She seems like such a nice person too. It just goes to prove there’s no telling.
More contest winners!
It’s been a murky sort of day, both exteriorly and interiorly. Interiorly neither my brain nor my digestion is returning my phonecalls.* Exteriorly it’s been another dashing-among-the-raindrops day with slitty-eyed and grumbling hellhounds. This morning I eventually said All right! Fine! But if you think we’re going to play throw the tennis ball up/downstairs just because of a little rain** you are sadly mistaken! —And stomped back outdoors myself to stand with the rain running down my neck to deadhead petunias. Especially that frelling hanging basket at the foot of the front stairs, with the nonhanging petunias: gone-over petunia flowers are among the least attractive anyway, and even more/less so when sodden, and these are so awfully dranglefabbing conspicuous. Since the wretched plants insist on growing UP they are also getting harder and harder to deadhead. Even my gorilla-length arms eventually reach their limit. And getting smacked in the face with falling smeary wet ex-petunias is one of those remind-me-why-I-like-to-say-I’m-a-gardener experiences.***
I was lurking around the cottage in a restless and unable-to-concentrate manner because the Aga Man was due. Herself† has been cold for over two months because after a hot spell severe enough for me to decide to turn her off I couldn’t get her back on again and thought, never mind, it’s summer, we can wait till her annual tune-up and shampoo and get a refresher lesson on the proper ritual.††
My Aga is now on. I have an oven at the cottage again.
So what better day for an announcement about baking?
Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the contest thread will already know that mayasings’ Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl (Vampire) Muffins won the recipe contest. Huzzah mayasings! Huzzah Vampire Muffins!†††
I also promised you‡ a random winner among the voters. And that winner is Stephanie, who very properly lists ‘baked goods’ among her interests, and while I will not breach her privacy by quoting her email address here, I wish to remark that it has a very pleasing and suitable Green & Black’s atmosphere about it.
Congratulations, you two! And now if you would please contact a mod—Ajlr, perhaps, since she’s done the actual work on the contest—with street-mail addresses and instructions for dedications, if any, I will go fish out two more glittery gold SUNSHINEs from my dwindling hoard and prepare to dispatch same.
Contests are good. Thanks, you lot, for making them good.
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* Not that I have (i)Phones on the (missing) brain or anything. I had a seriously bad night last night. Sleep? What would that be again? And then the phone rang at 8:30 a.m. KrzzzznARRRRGHblhhhhhhhnnggg. I decided to go back to bed afterward anyway, despite the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings apparently going on across the road and the four-part dog chorus^ at the top of the hill, no doubt in response to Devil Cat sitting just on the other side of the (closed) iron gate from them and washing his paws thoughtfully. I could seriously do without Devil Cat. I could probably even more seriously do without the 1,712 vehicles belonging to his owner, who has one parking slot on our cul de sac and therefore has to be creative with the other 1,711.
Anyway. I went back to bed. Whereupon Pooka started erupting with sound effects. I’m sure it’s very clever and thoughtful of the programmer to give different ringtones to email, voicemail, texts, twenty-one gun salutes and elephants, but it’s not at all popular when you’re pretending to sleep. I have noticed that there’s the odd ping, pong or trill overnight in Pooka’s live and lively company, but it hasn’t been a big deal. Maybe I’ve had the pillow arranged over my head better. Maybe I had been sleeping lately. Maybe I suddenly became fabulously popular overnight. But this morning it was the Chinese water torture only with dings, chirrups and gibbles. So the first thing I did when I finally gave up the unequal struggle with the Normans^^ was figure out how to turn the sound effects off.
^ Three dachshunds and a Labrador
^^ Norman arrows caroming off the English shield wall sound remarkably like messages arriving on your Apocalypse.
** It’s more to do with almost losing four shelves of books and china that hang at the bottom of the stairs, the last time we played this interesting game.
*** At least there were no earwigs involved. Ewwwwww. There are almost always earwigs involved when you deadhead dahlias. Note: if you are harbouring any seven-foot dahlias this year, stand at arm’s length when you deadhead.
† You’re right, I’ve never named her. Shameful. I think it has seemed impertinent since she was here long before I was. But I hereby declare that five—no, wait, six years, big yeep—six years is enough to presume upon the company of a nameless Aga, and address myself to the lack.
†† No, no, no, not a black goat. A bowl of virgin popcorn, and don’t forget the butter^.
^ Which I’m sure ought to be from a virgin cow, but this might be a little hard to arrange, milk being tied to the non-virgin end of things.
††† I’m convinced it’s the fang holes that did it. Although as Ajlr says: . . . which, as a title alone, may be one of the most all-encompassing collections of ‘Words Likely to Appeal to Readers of Robin’s Books’ that we’ve seen here.^ Add that to the end result of the recipe and we have a very worthy winner. And I may say that the recipes assembled through this competition are probably one of the best gatherings of foodstuffs with few socially-redeeming features^^ that I’ve seen for some time…
^ I wish to observe that on the contrary, this is a SUNSHINE specific recipe, and very appropriate too. A truly all-McKinley-encompassing recipe would have to include something about dragons, swords and horses, at very least. Which might prove challenging even to this reservoir of forum members.
^^ Few? You mean there are any? Oh dear.
‡ That is, I promised after I had double-checked with Blogmom
Three, count ‘em, three chapters of PEGASUS
NOTE FROM AUGUST 30TH: DON’T USE THE ORIGINAL LINK FROM THIS POST (BELOW). THIS ONE IS MUCH BETTER AND EASIER TO READ: http://www.scribd.com/doc/36512923/Robin-McKinley-Esampler
Here:
http://issuu.com/penguinyoungreaders/docs/robin_mckinley_esampler
Knock yourselves out. Please.*
And, while you’re at it, feedback would be welcome about how easy (or otherwise) you find it to navigate and read. Hint: I find it neither. I’m asking Putnams to please sort it anyway, but reader reaction is always good for the bolstering of a viewpoint that is not going to be popular.
I’ve already asked the mods for their reaction, and Maren has come up with these suggestions for the untechie-minded like yours truly for making the experience a little less like [MMMGLRMNTH: censored to keep Robin out of trouble]:
1. The default view you’re in when the page loads is called “magazine view.” When you zoom in while in magazine view and it goes all jumpy, click the button at the top that I suppose looks like an eye? It’s between the envelope and the +/- slider. When you click on the eye, you get a menu that says “read” and “drag.” Counterintuitively, you are already in “read” and you want to switch to “drag”–it will stop jumping around.
2. OR before you even zoom in, hover your cursor over the button at top left between Fullscreen and the globe. (I don’t care for the wordless buttons at all, either.**) This will allow you to choose either “presentation view” or “paper view.” Presentation view displays one page at a time and you have to click the arrows every time you want to turn the page. The page still moves when your mouse does, but only vertically. Paper view is closer to a .pdf file–you get the whole document at once and scroll like normal. The text is a bit blurry in paper view, though–it looks best to me at 125 or 150%, but still not great. To get out of paper view again, click the button to the right of the search box at the top.
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* The beginnings of both SUNSHINE and CHALICE are excerpted there too^, but you’ve all read them already, right?^^
^ Not very eptly.
^^ I still think the idea of an author blog is a bit bizarre. She eats! She sleeps! She has hellhounds (and ME)! Who cares! I’m going to go read some fiction!
** This was one of my original complaints about it. How are we supposed to know? Telepathy?
Gloom
I have (mild) stomach flu. (I think it’s stomach flu.)
I definitely have ME. In the ‘hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk with you again’ sense.* Glurb. Unggh.** It comes back with knobs and brass knuckles on whenever there’s anything else wrong with me.
And Blondel has left forever. Well, Thursday. He’s leaving forever. On Thursday. His house is full of large bulging cardboard boxes covered in heavy plastic tape. And his mum. I was thinking about hurling myself at his feet and weeping into his shoes, but not after I saw his mum. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him or anything. Under more ordinary circumstances I would have cut my voice lesson today since I can barely breathe let alone make an attempt at that wrestling-with-several-alligators business of organising your disorganised body to produce pleasant melodic noises. But today was THE LAST. LAST, LAST, LAST.
Waaaaaaaaah.
There are, furthermore, supernumerary reasons why this is a Personal Disaster of Epic Proportions. In the first place, I’ve already created the cherub, Blondel’s nearly frelling underage replacement***, in my mind as humourless, demanding and mean.† In the second place . . . Blondel is married, so the cathedral gave him a house. The only person whose life I’ve made a misery in a year of Tuesdays is the neighbour on Blondel’s music room’s side of his terraced house who has a strange compulsion to hang around in his garden in the afternoon. Well, Tuesday afternoon anyway. The cherub is not married, so he’s going into shared accommodation . . . and he’s going to be sharing with not merely another cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours, but a cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours whose mostly-live-in girlfriend is a soprano of some national standing. AAAAAAAUGH. Okay, so, fine, he’s not going to be teaching at home. Where is he going to be teaching?†† One of the cathedral’s rehearsal rooms? (Which I know from Blondel exist and are available.) AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. I’d be hyperventilating if I had the energy.†††
Blondel did sing for me today: some of Schubert’s Winterreisse, which was divine, and Whither must I Wander? from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which would have made me weak in the knees if I hadn’t already been lying more or less full-length on the chair in his music room (good job they hadn’t packed that yet). I’d bought Songs of Travel for me a while back, when I was starting to get into the (ahem!) baritone repertoire—when I was having such a good time [sic] with Finzi’s Garland. I’d brought it along today to ask Blondel if I might try having a bash at something while I waited for the cherub to arrive—he doesn’t, till September—and he suggested The Vagabond (right answer) and Whither (also an excellent answer) and then stood there staring at the latter a few seconds and said, I’ll sing it, and scampered back to the piano. Golly. I admit that singing some of this stuff that I know quite so well on CD is kind of a mixed, uh, curse, because even if you don’t know what you really sound like you do know you don’t sound anything like Bryn Terfel. I know Bryn Terfel singing Finzi’s Garland and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel as well as I know the first page of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.‡ Bryn is a hard act to follow. Blondel can do it. And he’s going away forever.
I think I need to go lie down now and draw some comforting hellhounds up to my chin.
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* I am so old I remember when that song came out.
** You can imagine Paul Simon standing on my flimsy, supine body at this point, wearing big black Doc Martens and looking threatening. Okay, maybe it better be Simon and Garfunkel. Neither of them is really large and threatening-looking enough to sub for the ME Monster. The ME Monster also has extra limbs and a migraine-inducing red shift. And it drools.
Actually as I think about it it looks a lot like this: http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Continuum-2.jpg
(Thank you, Jodi Meadows, for the inestimable favour of directing me to http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ )
*** It’s been bad enough taking voice lessons from someone who isn’t thirty yet. The cherub is barely into his twenties. And according to Blondel he’s very talented—well, likely he is, or he wouldn’t have got the job. But the thought does loom that very talented young people tend to be rotten teachers because they haven’t got a clue what to do with the untalented, let alone the old.
† Because I’m a twit. Next question.
†† The one thing we do know is that he is actively seeking to take on Blondel’s betrayed and abandoned students. This might be a good sign, except it probably just means he’s broke. He probably has student loans to pay off.
††† It did occur to me, as I crept along in the slow lane of the bypass to Mauncester—ordinarily I’m a hot smokin’ fast lane pedal to the metal driver—that as the frelling years pass, I don’t know if the edges of the ME get blunted or whether I’m just learning focus. But driving a car is one of my measuring sticks for how bad the ME is. I don’t drive much any more—to Papua New Guinea to look at a garden is about the limit, even on good days—but there have been many days when getting behind the wheel of a car was not an option. I don’t have those much any more. It never occurred to me today that I was going to have to cancel: only that I was going to have to allow a little more journey time, because I was going to be in the slow lane, and focussing.
‡ ‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
‘Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar . . .’