Continued caresses
I keep thinking today must be Sunday, because I had a bell rope in my hands early in the day. Of course I had a horse in my hands even earlier in the day, which is a proper Saturday thing.* Speaking of caresses. There’s nothing nicer than a silky horse (except possibly a silky hellhound**). And I’ve realized Connie positively likes having her ears mauled. I think she stands on her head secretly in the field at midnight*** so she can come in in the morning with disgraceful ears. But today I was scrubbing away and discovered that her head, eyelids and bottom lip were all drooping lower . . . and lower . . . I put her away with very clean ears.
Ringing a wedding at my Wednesday tower is weirdly hermetic. At my home tower we have, you know, windows. That you can see out of. And we have them on three sides of the tower, including one that looks inside the church, so you can see what the bride is wearing and whether she was into torturing her bridesmaids. This is very useful; we can see at once when we need to leap to our ropes.† At towers without convenient windows you have to post a scout. At my Wednesday tower the only window is ten feet overhead, which you don’t think about during evening practice, and the scout has rather a way to come, so we’re poised for the sound of feet thundering up the stair. I suppose the locals are used to it but it makes me nervous. I also miss seeing what everybody is wearing.††
However. Enough of the chat. Here’s what you all have been waiting for.††† Elspeth is wasted on the literature-chopping industry. If she has a holiday in England I hope I can at least meet her for a cup of tea so we can fulminate together. Peter can come along if he wants to, but he’s really too mild-mannered to fulminate properly. Maybe it’s an American gene.
Subj: “Caress”
From: Elspeth.Winkle@Pancake.com
To: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
Mr. Dickinson,
Thank you for your kind email! Nothing would please me more than to have a list of no-no words. However, this is an unwritten list and very fickle to say the least.
Each State Department of Education assembles various committees (during the test development period) that will consist of various types of people, cutting across the layers of their populace. Various educational levels, variations in financial status, religion, color and creed. Every single member of the committees has the right to reject words (or complete stories) that are offensive to the individuals and the community which they represent. The final decisions do not always include all the craziness that is suggested, but it does get pretty “funny” some times. One wonders what kind of world these people live in, or have they been around children lately.
As far as the testing industry is concerned
children are never hungry,
they do not get lost or hurt,
they are not exposed to any abuse,
they never fight or are witness to any fights,
they love everyone and everyone loves them,
no one ever passes away,
or is very ill,
there are no floods,
hurricanes,
tornados
or fires…………….ever.
Children also will only be able to concentrate during specific word count numbers, or else.
I am most likely forgetting several other disasters that are not allowed, but I have to stop, because I am getting very depressed thinking of all this bad stuff. There are times where Alzheimer’s comes in handy.
Depending on the state, the passages may be found by teachers, contracted passage finders complying with specific state standards and grade levels, and also by the development team here and at the state level. Between what is available in the public library or can be found on the internet, the world is their oyster.
I hope that this will not prompt you to drink too much wine………or maybe it should. In any case, keep on writing.
Thank you for your understanding!
Best to you!
Elspeth
Elspeth Winkle
Permissions - Intellectual Properties
Pancake Publishing
* * *
* ‘Early’ is of course relative. I did not get to bed ‘early’ last night.
** Yes, yes, and silky cats, ferrets, rabbits–are birds silky? I wouldn’t really have characterized Angel as silky–and various other caressable creatures.
*** Since midnight is early evening to me, I should go have a stroll that way some time,^ and check.
^ Do not take hellhounds, they will see it as a precedent.
† Unless you are on one of the back bells and very gymnastic with it^ you can’t see out the window over the front door while you’re ringing but you can usually hear the tumult of a wedding ebbing away from you, even through the noise of the bells. We have at least one window open pretty much year round: eight people pulling briskly on ropes in a small room, it gets pretty sultry in there. And bell tower windows tend to be first cousins to arrow slits.
^ Which would not be I
†† Note there were a second pair of Converse All Stars ringing the wedding this afternoon.
††† And yes I did ask her if it was all right if I posted her email on my blog.
Going to bed early
I am going to bed early. Which is going to be a good trick, because it’s already late. It’s always late on a Friday (so to speak) because of bell practise. It’s August* and everyone’s on holiday, so practises are rather hit or miss lately, although I’m worrying that this area seems to be having a downturn in ringing numbers generally. They cancelled last week’s Wednesday practise, and that tower never cancels. And slow tool that I am I need my second practise a week. As well as my once-a-month third: and last Monday Niall and I were stiffed for the second month in a row** by that ringing master–or anyone else with a key to the bell tower–and I won’t be going back next month. Niall was happy, however, he got one of the other two would-be ringers in a head lock and dragged her home to ring handbells with him and me. Local handbell ringing is in even worse shape than local tower ringing.
I’ve recently realised that I’ve crossed one of those invisible boundaries. I am pretty much still in the category of Any Time on a Rope Is Good Time in terms of practise, and even the stuff I theoretically know still needs shoring up, but the stuff I’m really trying to learn now requires skilled support from the rest of the band. I can spend weeks, sometimes, never getting out of my comfort zone, because the available band, which is to say the people who showed up to ring, isn’t up to it–except that there is no comfort zone in ringing, you can always have a mental spasm and go wrong. And I frequently do.
Tonight we were only seven–which means ringing on six bells–and five of us, which is to say them, were some of our good ringers. When you’re the only wavery one the others can kind of straitjacket you in place. First we rang bob minor, which is one of the methods I should know, but I’m kind of out of practise–which is the other drawback to learning new methods; the fools and hopeless optimists around you expect you to remember what you’ve already learnt–so I was glad of the opportunity. Now the terrible, mind-rending, 3 am and sweating thing about bob minor is the Dreaded Three-Four Down Single, when you’re quietly coming down toward lead with a little, harmless three-four down dodge on the way, and the Evil Conductor calls a single. Calls make a mess, it’s what they’re for. So if you’re about to do a three-four down dodge in bob minor and Evil Conductor calls a single, you hang around in thirds place for two blows and then turn around and go up again. Trust me, this is horribly confusing, including the physical confusion of making a u-turn and going back the way you came. You ring a little differently going up (slower, because there’s one more bell coming between you and the front at each blow) and coming down (faster, because there’s one fewer bell, etc, as you all weave your way through the pattern), and while good ringers place their bell perfectly every stroke, for those of us who are not so good, momentum is also an issue with several hundred pounds of bell. And I had four three-four down singles in a row. I was preparing to stand my bell, leap across the room, and strangle Niall–who was conducting–when he called a fifth.*** Yes, all right, it was great practise. And I did get through all of them.
And then near the end Niall–who is ringing master in Edward’s absence–called for Grandsire. I dove–hopefully–for a rope, because Grandsire is slightly my bête noire–the method I’ve never really had the opportunity to learn properly but ought to know by now, by osmosis or something. The terrible horrible no good really bad call in Grandsire is a single when you’re making seconds, because then you have to make long thirds–four blows in thirds place–which come at you from a funny angle and then sort of duck and dive at you while you’re trying to balance in thirds place and it’s surprisingly hard to count to four. Which is one of the reasons double dodging (which you also do in Grandsire) is so gruesome–you can just about remember under, over, under (as you swap places and then back again with the bell you’re dodging with). . . but do you do it again or have you already done it again? It’s not like you have time to think, when you have two-thirds of a second to pull on your rope so your bell goes dong in the right place. There is only one right place and there are so many wrong ones . . . Anyway, this was a long touch with lots of calls and I galloped through any number of long thirds and came out the other end in the right place–good heavens, what am I doing here? At the end Roger, who had been conducting, complimented me. I don’t think he meant to sound surprised. . . .
But, speaking of bells and galloping, I have to go to bed early because I have a horse to ride tomorrow morning, followed by a wedding to ring at my Wednesday tower–because they’re so short handed they haven’t got enough locals–in the very early afternoon–having hurtled hellhounds first thing so they’ll let me. Usually after a walk they’ll crash out, but Chaos has taken to standing by the door gazing at me mournfully as I suit up to do something that does not involve hellhounds. Aaaugh. I’m already staying home for the next fifteen years on account of their undomesticated digestion, this dog cannot be making me feel guilty.
* * *
* Although you’d never know by the weather. It’s been RAINING AGAIN^ and while today has been a really beautiful day it’s been a really beautiful autumn day and everybody is putting their duvets back on their beds, except those of us who never took them off. I like to complain as much as the next person, and I feel pretty silly wearing wool in August, but if you’re asking me I’ll take chilly summers to hot ones any year. The hellhounds agree.
^ This is one of those towns that has a municipal hanging-basket system, where anyone who lives or has a shop front anywhere on the two main streets can hire a pre-planted hanging basket. You’re expected to do the deadheading, but The Man comes round with a tanker, and waters them. The tanker is this extraordinary little vehicle, about the size of half a Smart Car+ whose engine not only trundles it along but also pumps the water up through the hosepipe and thus into the short access pipe buried in every overhead basket. I love the nuts and bolts of things. Hanging flower baskets on Main Street are a great idea, very Town Pride . . . unless people forget to water them++ in which case they’re a very bad idea and will repel all those money-spending tourists every town wants.+++ Hence the motorised Gunga Din: he’d need shoulders like an Olympic shot putter if he didn’t have a pump, let alone an engine. You see him out there in all weathers, including torrential downpours. Um. I figured, okay, you’ve paid for your hanging basket and you’ve paid for it to get watered, so by golly it gets watered. But he says it’s not as silly as it looks: rain runs right off because the baskets are so densely planted.++++ Oh. They really are densely planted too. It’s perhaps slightly a pity however that they are densely planted in job lots of whatever was cheapest at the Hanging Basket Store. This year’s would have just about got away with the all available shades of pink, purple and blue colour scheme . . . till the scarlet geraniums on top started flowering. Ow, my eyes.
+ Not sure what they call them in the States. Those little half-length things that you can pull frontwards (or backwards) into a parallel-parking situation and have room for another one of you in the other half
++ Or go away on holiday and their neighbour forgets to water them
+++ Barring the odd curmudgeon living up a side street
++++ Well hurrah for carelessly home-planted hanging baskets that do get watered by rainfall.
** And a month ago it wasn’t even August
*** Note that the way methods fit together, every time a call is made, all the bits of work in that method have to be made by some bell. Some methods you can cushion a beginner a little more than others–my first quarter (peal) of bob minor, for example, Edward called around me so I never had to ring a Dreaded Three-Four Down Single. There are also various practise patterns where the poor suffering learner is made to ring The Thing She Fears Most over and over and over again. But in the ordinary free-for-all of a touch no one bell should be expected to ring the same beastly bit of work over and over and OVER again. But these things happen. Conducting is a total mystery to me^ but I have these visions (especially at 3 am) of bell geeks bending over bits of graph paper and cackling madly at the prospect of calling their next touch of Splendiferous Dork Major.
^ And I plan for it to remain that way
Late
It is way later than it’s supposed to be. I went to an unscheduled bell practise tonight for no better reason than that I felt like it, it was a tower I’d never rung at before, I know the tower captain and she’s really nice, and Niall was going so he could give me a lift. And while I’m no longer a beginner, I still feel happier going to strange towers with Niall because he’s a really good ringer and any tower is going to be happy to have him for an evening of rope-pulling. As it happens this is a tower somewhat overburdened with beginners and suffering August-holiday shortages of the regulars, so I was welcome in the observance as well as the breach.* Chuffed on the awareness of having contributed–I’ve told you that one of the nice things about my regular Wednesday tower is that I get to contribute: at my home tower I’m still the last and least of their member ringers–I allowed myself to be inveigled into a pint at the local pub,** conveniently located immediately across the street from the church. I like a town where there’s a pub immediately across the street from the bell tower.†
The other interesting thing about tonight’s tower is that its bells are teeny. The treble weighs less than I do. The tenor (biggest) weighs a little over three hundred pounds–my Wednesday tower’s tenor weighs a bit over 600, and those bells are considered a little light ring, and my home tower’s tenor weighs three quarters of a ton. I’ve never rung on true tinkerbells before and it’s a rather dislocating experience–what you’ve dislocated is your bell handling skill. Little bells also have little wheels which means the rope round one whips back at you extraordinarily fast because there’s so little of it too. [Bell diagram if you need reminding of how it works: http://www.cccbr.org.uk/prc/pubs/slides/50labelledFullCircleBellAndFittings.jpg ] So you barely have time to finish one stroke before you’re grabbing like a striking snake at the next one. It was fun. I really enjoyed it.*** And I didn’t break anything.
But I was planning on giving you an organised, thoughtful summary of some of the responses to Ithilien’s essay on ebooks†† a couple of nights ago, and I’ve just spent another hour plus††† cruising for stuff about the yes and no of ebooks as well as pursuing some of the links you’ve sent in. And I still have to get up tomorrow morning in time to hurtle hellhounds before my riding lesson.‡ So this is only a kind of ‘oops, please stay tuned’.
. . . And while I’m still at least three-quarters a Luddite‡‡ I can put all other questions about the good and the bad of ebooks in abeyance for a moment, because I feel that Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
makes the concept of ebooks worthwhile. I’ve never downloaded any of their books–I tend already to own that kind of historical backlist–so I don’t know how prone they are to electronic error. But the idea that they and all their lovely hundreds of years of print in instant free welcoming form is out there makes me happy.
* * *
* Or something like that. As I say, it’s very late to be writing this. Even for me.
** Gods, mermaids and little fishes, I adore the smoking ban
*** I wish I had time to ring three practises every week. I wish I had time to ride Connie three times a week. I wish I had three hours a day on the piano. I wish. . . .
† Another reason for going is that it’s an uncommonly pretty church, and every time I’ve driven by it I’ve wondered what it looks like inside. (Although I still don’t know. The narrow stair to the bell tower is immediately inside the front door, and the inner door to the main part of the church was shut.) It’s terribly Victorian, at the light end of that particular stolid, self-regarding spectrum, with a tall slender graceful spire that you look at it and think, there isn’t room for bells. And arguably there isn’t. See ‘tinkerbells’.
†† Huh. Word doesn’t recognise ‘ebooks’ either
††† Sequential glows of contributingness followed by half pint at the pubness are not best productive of thoughtfulness and organisation. Or organisationness.
‡ And then Jenny is going on holiday! Unfortunately she has a nice responsible person house-, dog-, and yard-sitting, who might notice if I rode every day. . . . I’d find time, okay?
‡‡ Although I’m not sure it’s possible for a true card-carrying Luddite to run a blog. I may just have to finish embracing technology and get it over with. Ah, but will technology embrace me back?
October in August
It’s another cold wet October day . . . except for the fact that it’s August.* And a day or three ago we were sweltering and I was whingeing about being tired of watering. You have more potted plants in a dry spell, it’s one of those laws of the universe, like bread falling buttered side down. Especially you have more little pots, especially little, porous terra cotta ones that dry out again in about two hours. As soon as it starts raining, all seven hundred and forty-four of these morph into half a dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots. If** the weather dries out again, the half dozen large plastic or fibreglass pots start producing small terra cotta pots, like gladiola bulbs developing bulblets, and just as prolific. It’s rained so much in the last two or three days that my some-people’s-houses-are-smaller-than-this ecologically correct renewable timber water butt at Third House is full again, despite the fact that Third House’s gutters are mostly blocked.
When I was riding Connie yesterday I couldn’t see through my glasses. Fortunately she’s very capable of minding her own feet. And I could still see Large Pale Blurs that were the fences, I mean the kind that you jump over. The risk there is that Connie likes jumping, so when you’re working her around fences she’s always hoping you’ll ask her to change direction slightly and pop over one. Or two. Have I said this before? She started her career as an open jumper, so she has all these neat clever habits that a good show jumper needs, like being able to clear a fence from almost any angle, including the ridiculous. I was working her around the in-and-out*** a few weeks ago when I was still getting used to the idea that I had a really good horse to ride, and coming between the two fences like we were drawing the diagonal line in the middle of a capital letter ‘N’ and Connie was still waiting alertly for me to say ‘Yes, now’ and hook a left over the fence. A horse like this, when your glasses are running with rain, you want to squint really hard to make sure you’re directing her toward the empty side of the uprights.
I was distracted from meteorological effects yesterday by the presence of a friend, here just for the day† but today it’s back to business. Plink plonk splash. Here’s a controversial subject. And I hate it when nasty clichés appear to be true. We’ve had a group of ‘travellers’ as they’re called here–itinerants who live in trailers and mobile homes and occasionally proper gypsy carts, although real gypsies are rare. They’re allowed to camp on verges and common land and on footpaths when there’s room. This particular group have been around off and on most of this year. I’ve gotten to kind of know quite a few of them–all male and mostly young–because they like my hellhounds. Travellers and lurchers are another cliché–lurchers were ‘the poacher’s dog’ originally. I avoid travellers’ encampments on principle because of the likelihood of unfriendly loose dogs and . . . I’m a little bit twitchy about being a not very large or intimidating middle aged woman wandering around in the (comparative) middle of nowhere with no more protection than two spectacularly over-friendly 50-pound hellhounds (and perhaps a minor turn of speed). Most of the mythology about travellers is the scary kind. But I see these guys in town and the truth is that I’ll talk to anyone who likes my hellhounds. And furthermore . . . I like them. They make me laugh. They talk to me as if I am one of them, because I have longdogs. They are such hustlers, and the ones I talk to are very open and good natured about it–with that faint edge of defensiveness that the young and on the make often have anyway, especially the male of the species, but in this case heightened by their obvious awareness that they are officially personae non grata. A couple of them, their faces positively light up when I recognise them and say hi. This would automatically make me defend them.
But . . . the farmer that owns the land adjoining the bit of verge that has been their favourite encampment goes round with his fork lift after they’ve gone, to clear up after them. The last time he did this he took two farm-size trailerloads of rubbish away. The honour-system farm shop has been ripped off so often they’re thinking about closing down. Other things have disappeared. A woman who rides out from Jenny’s yard swears they tried to steal the whippet who accompanies her and there’s a rumour she left the yard because of it. There’s quite a bit of more of this kind of thing that I can’t personally vouch for . . . but this is enough. Meanwhile they’ve moved again, from the edge of my standard hellhound-hurtling and hacking out on Connie range to right bang in the middle of it. Everybody is warning everybody else not to walk that way, and kids with ponies are being forbidden to go out without at least one grown up. I walked that way this morning–but hellhounds and I stayed on the top of the ridge and didn’t turn down our usual path.
I’m middle-aged and middle-class and the only time I ever lived on anything remotely resembling an edge it was more or less my choice.†† And I know culture collision can be harrowing. I want to defend their right to live in a way that doesn’t appeal to me in the least, and I’ll even go with the idea that they have a right to live in a way that middle-aged middle-class folk find annoying. But I can’t condone stealing–that farm shop is a little object like a very large nest box by the side of the road because the family who runs it doesn’t have the money or the staff to run a full size one–or trashing the landscape. When I thought they were doing their own cleaning up–and I saw (from the relative safety of my car) what their campsite looked like when they were living in it: two farm trailers of rubbish is about right, and it would still have to be a large trailer–I could think, oh, well, at least they tried. But the land is bald where they were, as if it’s been sowed with salt. And now they’re stripping another piece of our beautiful landscape, as well as wrecking their involuntary neighbours’ peace of mind. I even wonder if their carbon footprint is smaller than the average middle class working stiff with a house and a gas boiler. And in my middle-class way I feel that I get to say ‘this is wrong’ about a culture one of whose tenets is explicit disrespect of the cultures it lives among. I know the my tribe/your tribe thing has been a human problem since we first climbed down out of the trees/walked up out of the ocean, but we’re into the globalisation era and if we’re going to survive we have got to learn to get along.
It’s all so depressing.
* * *
* I’m just back from ringing handbells^ with Niall and Clio. Clio was wearing shorts. It’s August, she said grimly.
^ For anyone late to the party, we ring methods–change ringing–on our handbells, like in the tower only quadruply horrible because you’ve got two bells to keep track of, and it’s an exponential kind of thing. In fact, what’s after ‘exponential’? Clio fell down and broke her elbow ice skating two months ago+ so handbells have languished rather till Clio got out of plaster again. Niall travels for his handbell fix, but Clio and I are out of practise. Poor Clio, who is the least experienced of us, said darkly, as we lurched through bob minor, I remember now why I broke my elbow.
+Yo, Blackbear, should we let her into the Spaz Club?
** I say if
*** which is, as you might expect, two fences quite close together. In my cough cough cough open jumper days, which were a very long time ago, the standard in and out had one stride between; you can also have two or even three–or a ‘bounce’ where you haven’t got a stride at all.
† I was late meeting her train because of riding Connie^ and late getting her back to her train because of a late-running wedding for which I was ringing.^^ Hmm. I was very glad to see her. I hope she comes again.
^ In spite of getting out of bed tragically early so I could both hurtle hellhounds and ride Connie first
^^ She said bell ringing looks daunting. Oh good. I’m always afraid it looks rather stately and simple-minded till you actually get on a bell rope.
†† Although this kind of thing does tend to develop a dangerous momentum
CHALICE review
Any readers of this blog who haven’t looked it up for themselves by now, muttering about the total hopelessness of some writers of books that receive starred reviews in Publishers’ Weekly, the (ahem) starred review in PW of CHALICE is here:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6579438.html#Fiction
This should take you to the top of the ‘Fiction’ section of children’s books* where CHALICE is the lead title, but as I mistrustfully try it on more than one computer** I am finding that it seems to open fine on a big screen but tends to open halfway through the review on a small screen, so the title that catches your eye is the one following, SOVAY. (Which looks good too, just by the way, and also got a star. I’ve always loved the song.) So you want to scroll up a little. Unless it’s doing something else entirely on your screen, in which case you’re on your own.
If you want something nice and uncontroversial, this takes you to the top of the ‘Children’s’ section, and you have to scroll down through the little kids’ books to ‘fiction’.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6579438.html
I guess I didn’t make a mess of turning it into a novel after all. Or not in one reviewer’s eyes anyway. One thing that interests me, they choose BEAUTY and HERO to compare it favourably to.*** They must like short: those are my two shortest novels. And this interests me because I thought everybody is supposed to like long† this era. HARRY POTTER AND THE ENDLESS STORY MACHINE. JONATHAN STRANGE, MR NORRELL AND NINETY MILLION PAGES. I am comforted that at least you aren’t automatically penalised for short.†† There is a place for short, like in your knapsack, so it doesn’t make a hole in your sore shoulder.
And thanks to all of you who sent me these links. It is extremely ridiculous that (apparently) neither my agent nor either of my editors knew that you can just look PW reviews up on the web . . . or, as one of the friends who sent me the links by email said, Google is your friend. Um. I thought I even knew that Google was my friend. But in moments of stress I still revert. Very, very slightly in my defense, PW didn’t always hang its reviews on the web.†††. And I merely haven’t checked in . . . um . . . years. Oops. But I guess a lot of other professional publishing people haven’t either.
Furthermore . . . I did sleep last night, despite some really remarkable nettle burns. And the hellhounds ate their dinner tonight . . . not only ate it but ate it without needing to be driven out of their bed and then chased around with it first. And I rang Grandsire, if not exactly to the tower born, still, I rang the sucker as opposed to pulling frantically on my rope and waiting to be yelled at instructively. Last week I found myself on the five for Grandsire, and I’m used to ringing the three or the four or maybe the two. Not the five. But if you really know a method you can ring it on any bell. So I don’t really know Grandsire, so what else is new. It was still pretty discouraging that I could not seem to see what I was doing. This week when Wild Robert called for Grandsire again I made a dash for the five, and this week the five and I were friends.‡ I was even one of the people holding the line while others went astray, which is always great for morale. Next week–or this Friday at my home tower–it’ll be open season again with me and Grandsire however. Some day I’ll just ring it. It’ll be one of the methods that when I go to a strange tower and the ringing master asks me what I ring, I can say nonchalantly, oh, plain bob, Stedman, Grandsire. Hold that thought.
* * *
* Sigh. It’s not a children’s book. Never mind.
** And Computer Man was here for several hours today and all my computers are having competitive nervous breakdowns as a result. There’s a lot of admonishing ding!-ing going on while they querulously insist that they don’ wanna do what he has instructed them to do. I may be on the phone to Computer Man Central really early tomorrow.
*** A brief pause here while I do a little head-clutching about being shackled to early successes for the rest of one’s life. What your or anyone’s favourite book is is strictly up to you and that’s absolutely fine. Different things appeal to different people and different things appeal to different people at different times. Telling an author that thus and such is their best book, however, is a value judgement, and problematic. Telling an author that her first book is her best book is . . . at best unkind. Getting old is sucky enough.^ Being told repeatedly that it’s all been downhill since you were 25 is grisly. I don’t think BEAUTY is my best book, fortunately, but I wasted a lot of time over a lot of years worrying that it might be.
^ Mind you I wouldn’t be young again even if the devil showed up with a great offer plus a letter of recommendation from Faust. Getting old is sucky, but it beats being young. The thing about young, however, is that you have more time left to figure stuff out, and you still believe you’re going to figure it out faster than, forty years later, you have.
† I was once fretting over some novel looking like it was going to turn out short.^ Merrilee said, short is good. Same money, less work. Very good point. Unfortunately PEGASUS looks like running long.
^I think this was DRAGONHAVEN, which, as many of you know, did not end up short.
†† Hey! This is just a dumb short story! Where’s my other eight hundred pages! I want my money back!
††† Since there was a web, I mean.
‡ In a doubles method like Grandsire, with five working bells and the sixth bell always ringing last, the five should be a good bell to ring, because every bell you have to worry about is to your right and you don’t have to keep looking frantically back and forth. When you’re on the four, say, you tend to forget about the five, which is dangerous, since you’re going to be ringing over it just as often as over the others, and on the three you could get dizzy whipping your eyes back and forth.