I shouldn’t be this tired.  I feel like I must have just reinvented the wheel or something.*   And I’m supposed to write a blog entry?**

            However I did have an important bit of story delivery today.  You can fake around the holes to some extent and for a while, especially if you can feel the main story dragging you on*** but eventually you do need to know certain things.  In this case I have a war to direct.†  And the particular consignment that arrived today had some fairly critical Background World Development stuff in it:  I know this world fairly well at this point†† but I mainly know it as, ahem, I might know it.  And I’m not a magician.†††  Magic.  Feh.  If  this were your standard swords, archery and leather armour with some chain war, I could just research the freller.  As it is I have to wait for somebody to send me something.  And you know how delivery companies are.

            But I am reminded of some comments to the forum ten days or so ago, in response to The Cluelessness of Writers.  

EMoon wrote:  I have a character in peril. He may end up dead, or inhabited by a demonic presence, or suspected of same but not inhabited, or fine. I don’t know which it is. I have written all around the critical moments from other viewpoints. I have been inside his head to find out and…when I get near the critical moments there’s a blank . . . not one…single…person will share what’s actually happened. He’s important. . . . But they’re all in hiding from their writer. . . . thus I have to chase that fast-moving blurred shape down a very uninviting hole until I finally catch it and bring it up to the light, squirming in fright and biting my hands. . . .

Yes.  Sometimes they bite.  Sometimes you’re groping around in the dark and you know you’ve found something because it hurts.  YOW YOU LITTLE RATBAG.‡

             On the forum I answered: . . . I had one of those GOOD GODS OF COURSE moments out hurtling this morning–about some other story than PEG II of course, but it’s one that I even know the shape of . . . ‡‡ and there has been something Not Quite Right about it . . . which I think I now know. Where has it BEEN all this time? And what finally flushed it out where I could see it? (Actually . . . Pooka did the flushing. Which I hope means she IS in fact a force for good in this universe. There have been moments when I wonder. And I’m sure there will be MORE such moments.‡‡‡)  

Aaron wrote:  So I gather it is not always seeing new action that resolves these matters. Sometimes you realize you know something that you hadn’t realized you knew, perhaps because you asked yourself a different question. Do you also do detective work on the things you have seen? As if watching a mystery movie over again to see if you missed a clue?

Both ‘seeing’ and ‘action’ are mutable concepts.§  In this case it was more of a kaleidoscope turn:  somebody moved the endpiece and all those same flecks and fragments fell into a new pattern.  Eureka!  Sometimes—as in this case—there is an almost physical jolt to it—like having something bite your hand in the dark.

             Sometimes it is a kind of seeing that there’s been a cat curled up on the cushion all this time and it’s your own fault for thinking it was just a shadow—but cats are treacherous, and maybe it wasn’t there the last time you looked.  –Don’t give me that fat purring sleepy-eyed thing. 

             I wouldn’t call it detective work, the way I do it, which sounds much too calm and rational.  It’s more like looking for the car key (which is supposed to live in your pocket for just this reason) when you’re about to be late for an appointment, or trying to get your shoes tied while being cavorted on by a brace of happy hellhounds looking forward to their walk.  It’s got to be here somewhere/aaaugh I can’t see what I’m doing if you’re licking my glasses.   But going over and over stuff you already know—you think you know—you hope you know but you know you’ve missed something?  Yes.  Very much so.

Diane in MN quoted me:  Meanwhile I’m well over halfway through PEG II and I still don’t know if Fazuur is a good guy or a bad guy. And this is starting seriously to get on my nerves.

And wrote:  Do you find that this is a character who wants to grow as the story has grown? Given that you say he hasn’t been an important character yet, is he trying to become one? I can see that if you don’t know his ultimate role, he could really affect the arc of the story by becoming a bigger presence.

Oh, arc of the story, please, you’re going all rational again.  The arc of the story is one of those hindsight things for me.  Climaxes, for example—and all of PEGs I & II began with a climax that comes I think about halfway through PEG II—are merely the Really Exciting Bits that I don’t get to write unless I write all the stuff around them so they’ll be climactic enough.  The pulling down of a mountain on someone’s head§§—which is where SWORD started—wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if it hadn’t taken over two hundred pages to get there.  There are writers who plan extensively—there are even writers who follow their extensive plans—I’m not one of them.  The nice way of describing my lack of method is to call it organic:   I write as the thing grows.  It grows longer as it goes through drafts, and there are always the bits you know, the bits you don’t know, the bits you wished you knew, and the bits that you think you know and don’t.  Fazuur is a bit I wish I knew and don’t.  The fact that it’s bothering me that I don’t know is probably significant—like one of those hunches fictional detectives get just before they uncover an important clue.  But whether Fazuur has a significant role to play . . . ask me at the end of the third draft.  When I’m handing it in to my editor.  I should know by then.  I hope. 

* * *

*The elimination process that involves dragging all those things that aren’t wheels is really hard work.  It was a very thorough elimination process.  And my condition has been intensified by my being too stupid not to go to Colin’s bell practice tonight—which  for arcane reasons, was held in his garage.  No, really.  He has a mini-ring, which is to say a bunch of bells the size of flower-pots hung upside down above the specially-soundproofed ceiling of his garage (and under the specially soundproofed roof of his garage:  there are neighbours).  And they (the bells) have (teeny) ropes with (teeny) sallies on them and everything.  But because the bells are so small and the wheels they turn on are also so small, your stroke—which is dependent on the rope going round the wheel to spin the bell—is very short.  So your bells are making their 360 degree turns forward and back really fast.  Which means you are ringing whatever method you are ringing really fast.  And I can’t handle the flighty little monsters, they keep going grand battement SPROING at me—and because they’re all so little they sound way too much alike,  dingdingdingdingding, so picking out the sound of your own bell or the treble for guidance is not an option—let alone ring the wretched things at twice the usual proper-big-tower-bell speed.

             They didn’t quite put me out on the kerb after practise for the dustbin men to take away tomorrow morning, but nearly. 

** Remind me what that is again?  I believe I do it every night?  Is it anything like falling asleep in the bath?  

*** Author as square wheel 

† I was really hoping I wasn’t going to have to run any more wars.  Two^ of the several Third Damar Novels have fairly comprehensive wars in them, which are among my reasons for not having got round to writing them.  Damar seems to be a curiously bellicose place. 

^ Probably three.  

††  !!!!!!!!  How do people survive writing series????? 

††† In this world.  There have been worlds I could do magic in.  Ahem.  

‡ I think I’ve mentioned here that there are, as there always are, stories that I don’t dare let loose my feverish grip on PEG II long enough even to write down rough outlines of^ hanging around TORMENTING me.  One of them, which I know I’ve mentioned, presumably here because where else is there^^, is about a middle-aged soldier who unexpectedly survived the assassination attempt she knew was coming, and now has to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.  While she’s escaping further would-be murderers, since it seems ungrateful to let them get her after all, various of her old colleagues catch her up and say ‘I’m coming too’.  The king who wants her dead is not popular.  She’s perhaps a little cranky^^^ about picking up an entourage. . . . And now there’s a baby.  A what?  Her feeling exactly.  And mine.  I strongly object to being kept awake nights by the screams of a fictional baby I’m not even writing about.   

^ I belong to the philosophy that says that if it’s important, it’ll either stick around or come back.  And if it comes back as something else, that’s okay too. 

^^ The idea of multiple blogs—which, for example, EMoon herself keeps—is more horrible than vampires to me.  

^^^ Now, where would that have come from 

‡‡ Tam Lin, in case you’re interested.  It’s a sort of . . . long short story.  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.  Short stories are a little like wars.  I know going in I’m in trouble.  Although the first draft of this one exists, and it is a short story.  Well, maybe a novella. . . .   

‡‡‡ Er.  Yes.  

§ I want, irrationally, to call them verbs.  Which is perhaps a minor metaphor for the peculiarity of the writing process. 

§§ Please admire my lack of spoiler here, although I’d be surprised if there are any regular readers of this blog who don’t know THE BLUE SWORD.

It stopped raining for a few hours yesterday, nicely timed for gardening, during which I went out and strove mightily with dahlias, which is to say earwigs, among other useful and semi-useful things,** and came indoors again as the Scary Mud Monster.  Remember I told you that I’d actually staked all of my dahlias this year, and how this doesn’t happen in my garden(s)?  It doesn’t work.  Well, I suppose if you were out there with your bamboos and your twine every minute, or even every afternoon, you might stay ahead of the little sods, but I wouldn’t count on it.  You may also remember that I’ve been complaining about my seven-foot dahlias—dahlias are supposed to be sort of four to six foot.  Which is plenty.  Even a six-foot dahlia has a slightly triffid air about it.***  But I’ve realised why my dahlias are all monsters this year:  it’s so that they can hurl themselves over any foolish attempts to contain them.  Several of my beautifully-staked dahlias have a fringe of flopped-over, head-down flowers tumbling gracefully, not to say vindictively, over the top loop of string.  SIIIIIIIGH.†

            This morning after service ring†† I was out in front of the cottage, deadheading.†††  I’ve still got pansies in flower—I mean pansies that have been flowering since spring, and in a couple of cases since last winter.  If you’re clever about it you pretty much can have pansies flowering all year long—although they may shut down in self-defense in a cold winter—but this usually requires waves of pansies.  Some of this year’s have gone out back for a serious haircut, a feed, and a rest, but by no means all of them.  Some of them are still frothing down my front steps, flowering determinedly.  So I was determinedly deadheading them.‡  And my neighbour with the posh, national-collections garden at the top of the hill comes strolling down with a companion and says lugubriously to me, Oh, you’re losing that battle. 

            Thanks ever so.  You’re a real friend.

Peter and I went to another posh garden this afternoon‡‡, one of those eye-wateringly so-English cottagey things that I have the almost overwhelming urge to speak loudly and frequently, saying things like Gee whillikers! and Gosh darn!  This place is real gone!  Peter and I used to have one of those gardens . . . but we never went in for the eye-watering aspect;  ours was too clearly not under control, nor under anything resembling an all-over plan.   And I get a little lip-curly about people with full time gardeners.  (Or trust funds and no need to earn a living.)  If I had a full-time gardener I could be opening Third House’s garden to the public in a couple of (somewhat frantic) years.  The funny thing is that I don’t think I’d want to:  the pleasure, if you want to call it pleasure,‡‡‡ of opening our garden was that we were the ones responsible.  If you wanted to know about a plant, we were the ones to ask.  We might not remember, but if we didn’t, there was no recourse.§  I’m just crabby because there was a lot to like about this garden . . . till you got to the two wide bays of really ugly orange roses.  There must have been thirty of the horrible things.  All orange.  I like hot dazzling orange fine in neat little wool-and-silk cardigans such as the one I am wearing this minute.  But neon orange is not a good colour in a rose.  Especially not in ranks at the front of the sculpted topiary tunnel to the lily pond with the summerhouse and the tasteful statuary.  Gah.  No, Gee whillikers!

 * * *

 * Possibly my least favourite critter on the planet, barring things big enough to eat me and standing close enough to try 

** Including potting on two camellias, which have been quietly getting on with things for two years in the pots they arrived from the mail-order nursery in.  One of the best things about camellias is how patient they are.  A kind word and a handful of well rotted chicken crap and they’re happy indefinitely.  You think I’m anthropomorphising about the kind word, don’t you?  HA.  Show me a little old lady who talks to her plants and I’ll show you a little old lady who can barely get out her back door for being throttled by the botanical riot.  No I am not talking about me.  I am not little.  And I haven’t fully arrived at the ‘old’.  And while it’s perfectly true I talk to my plants^ I tend to say things like what are you doing that for, you frelling thing? and ARRRRRRGH.   And, when dealing with rosebushes, OWWWWWW.  But I’m mostly nice to my camellias.  I’ve pretty much even stopped cursing Jingle Bells for being fabulously healthy, floriferous and UGLY.  

^ I talk to almost everything except other people.  Other people, feh.  Way too complicated.  Give me a rosebush or a hellhound any day. 

*** It’s not so much the height, it’s the posture.  Forty-foot roses dangling from trees can be very intimidating, but they’re not at all triffidy.  

† Clearly I haven’t been saying the right things to them.  

†† During which I was Much Put Upon.   Not only did I keep finding myself in the long-thirds position when a single was called for Grandsire, but I fell afoul of the Dreaded Three-Four Down Dodge Single in bob minor several times, about which mediocre ringers lie awake on Saturday nights worrying about being traumatised by if bob minor is attempted on Sunday morning.  I did, by the way—get through all these trials—but I had to be carried home and fed chocolate to recover.^ 

^ And speaking of feeding . . .  Peter has just spilt chicken broth—you know, the stuff that accumulates under a roast chicken—rather lavishly on the floor.  Hellhounds did not stir.  I called them.  They stared at me.  I called them again.  Chaos, always the one more anxious about pleasing,+ crept out at last and crushed himself to me, as I knelt on the floor next to a pool of fresh chicken juice.  Here, look at that, I said, extricating an arm and pointing.  Chaos looked at the finger, the way dogs do++.  I eventually persuaded him to have a sniff at the lovely chickeny puddle.  To please me he did, with his feet braced, still leaning against me, and with his neck stretched to its furthest extent.  He sniffed.  He then looked at me with a ‘Can I go now?’ expression.

            After he had fled back to the dog bed in huge relief, Darkness came nonchalantly out to make sure he wasn’t missing anything.  He had a half-hearted lick and then turned around to fix me with a ‘You got us up for this? look.

            Peter mopped up the spill. 

+ Except, of course, when it comes to food 

++ There was an article in a recent TIME magazine about the intelligence of critters, and how there’s more of it around than generally thought.  Depends on who you ask, of course.  I know a lot of critter people who have been sniggering at the scientists about this sort of thing for years.  But one of the things the article cites is that dogs ‘innately’ understand about pointing fingers being about pointing, and not about the finger.  Well, sort of.  It depends on the dog and the context.  Pointers certainly point, and they know they’re pointing.  But your own pet dog is very likely to be interested in the finger, because it’s your finger.  Chaos has a very bad case of this. 

††† I should try to get someone to take a photo of me deadheading the Non Trailing Petunias in the hanging basket.  I can feel how ridiculous—how increasingly ridiculous—I look, especially as the petunias themselves grow more ridiculous, ramrod straight and soaring out into the ozone. 

‡ Kneeling on tarmac at least keeps the Scary Mud Monster somewhat at bay. 

‡‡ In the rain.  It came back. 

‡‡‡ I didn’t, much.  I’ve told you, I think, that Peter was always out there talking to people.  I used to try to find an especially impenetrable thicket and spent the afternoon weeding.  Peter would occasionally send people in after me who wanted particularly to talk about roses.  

§ We did have a once a week body I used to refer to as our gardeneroid.  His purpose was to move slowly around the garden looking like he was doing something, and adding rusticity to the view.  He also mowed the lawn.

This has been one of your Almost Total Sod weeks when everything that can go wrong does, and everything that can’t possibly go wrong does anyway.  Plus I have an Apocalypse in my pocket.*  I keep reminding myself that one of the reasons I have an iPhone rather than some other instrument of technological torture is because they’re so intuitive.  I know this because this is what everyone tells me.  GAAAAAAAAH.  I was at the tears-of-rage-with-blood-pressure-headache stage** with Pooka yesterday afternoon, out hurtling hellhounds***, trying to play music on her, and every ten or twenty seconds there would be a little trilling noise and a new track would start playing.  ARRRRRRGH.  So, clearly, there’s a shuffle-by-shaking button enabled somewhere† but I couldn’t FIND IT and meanwhile the countryside was getting an earful about what I thought of my Apocalypse.††

            So today Peter (who hasn’t had the best week of his life either) and I decided to cheer ourselves up and go visit a garden.  It sounded like quite a nice garden too—National Garden Scheme garden descriptions are written by the owners, so caution and large handfuls of salt and cynicism are advised when reading that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon have been lovingly recreated in rural Hampshire—its only drawback being that it is far enough away that there was room for debate about the route taken to get there.

            Peter won.

            We got lost.

            We saw most of West Sussex as well as great swathes of Surrey and possibly a glimpse of Papua New Guinea††† on our way.  Fortunately most of it was pretty.‡   And the garden, once we got there, was excellent.  Listen:  a serious English garden with lots of dahlias.   Not enough roses, but maybe they’ll get around to more roses:  dahlias are a lot more movable, since you have to get the frellers up every winter,‡‡ and the admin at this garden are obviously having a good time with their colour schemes.  Yaay for orange and purple and scarlet.  Together.   If they need suggestions on good orange and purple and scarlet roses. . . .

            We drove home my way and got there in about a third of the time it took us on the way out.  Not so scenic though.  Not a single Queen Alexandra Birdwing‡‡‡.  But there’s always next Sunday afternoon.

 * * *

* Some of the people I have flashed my pink leather case at have been inclined to be humorous at Pooka’s and my expense.  This seems to have less to do with the colour than the fact that I went for the full clamshell deal rather than a ‘bumper’ which just protects the back.  Most of these bumpered-only models also live in pockets, like Pooka, but—even supposing I can be expected to remember reliably to keep my penknife in the other pocket with my keys^—most people don’t spend quality time hitting themselves in the belly and thighs with bell ropes.^^  Repeatedly.  Heavy bell ropes. 

             I was thinking about this this morning.  You may remember a plaint earlier that I was going to be ringing six times this week—I generally try to keep it down to three.  My usual whacking-myself-in-the-midsection activity is ringing down in peal.  You’re supposed to take a loop in the rope before you do yourself any serious damage, but I don’t always manage this.  Keeping my place in the row is much more important than a few weals.  But yesterday I rang at Madhatterington for the second Saturday in a row^^^ where the bells, as previously observed, are Possessed By Demons,+ and one of the ways the demonic presence manifests is by the fact that the ropes want to beat you to death, not merely when you’re ringing down in peal, but all the time.  I was delighted to notice yesterday that Felicity on the three, which bell had been my chief misfortune last week, was having to wrestle the rope as one might wrestle a hungry boa constrictor.  And it’s been raining this week, so all bell ropes are heavier, solider and meaner than usual, even basically good-tempered ones such as we have at New Arcadia.  So by this morning, when I was ringing down in peal after service—WHAP WHAP WHAP WHAP—I was thinking I was about ready for a surcease of this self-flagellatory activity.  Except I’m ringing at Little Warbling tomorrow. ++

            But at least Pooka is safe. 

^ I don’t know how anyone actually wears skinny jeans.   Does a minion with a backpack come free with every purchase? 

^^ This includes most bell ringers.  Grace is not one of my greater attributes under any circumstances. 

^^^ The week before wasn’t too good for only ringing three times either. 

+ This is also the tower where practise is forbidden by cranky locals, so the poor bells are only rung very occasionally for services.  It’s enough to make even the most virtuous bells vulnerable to seduction by unholy elements. 

++ I also seem to be ringing handbells at Frellingham again on Wednesday.  Niall strode purposefully up to me after service ring this morning.  Ah, Robin! he said.

            I cringed.

            James and Darcy are away for a fortnight, he said, attempting to appear ingratiating and failing.  I see the ogreish gleam in his eye.  The gleam that says, Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the blood of someone who might be bullied into ringing handbells.  Titus, continued Niall, is hoping that we might convince you to ring with us in their absence.

            Once, I say.  I’ll do it once.  If they come here.

            Niall looks shifty.  I usually go there, he says.  And Titus can only come, you know, if his wife drives him.

            I know, I say.  So teach her to ring handbells.

            I’ll drive us there, of course, says Niall.  To give the ogre his due, he is always willing to do the driving.

            Once, I say again.  Okay.  I’ll come to Frellingham once.

            Once? says Niall, sensing weakness.  But you know how Titus loves his handbells—

            ONCE, I say.  If he wants any more he can come here. 

            You realise that I’ve been end-ran—end-runned?—again.  I haven’t got time to ring handbells twice a week even if it was always here, and we’ll be ringing with Colin as usual on Thursdays.  But I will bet you Jane Austen to yesterday’s newspaper that I ring handbells with Titus at least twice in the next fortnight, and that Niall will try his best to make it three times.  I at least had the good sense not to complain about pounding myself into swiss steak with a succession of bell ropes, since Niall’s advice would inevitably be that I need to ring more handbells.  It is relatively more difficult to hurt yourself with handbells, but it can be done.  Scratching your nose with a handbell in your hand, for example.  Ask me how I know this.            

** As I emailed to Fiona, who is volunteering to teach me to text.  Texting!  Oh gods!  I promised Merrilee I’d learn how to text!   This morning William Gibson retweeted someone saying that he (Gibson) had invented the internet while sitting at a manual typewriter.  Yes.  I remember.  I was there.  I am old.  Siiiiiiiigh.  And I bet Gibson texts away like anything.  Just like Merrilee, who is almost as old as I am. 

*** Who were slinking along at a distance, pretending they didn’t know me. 

† Either that or they sent me the wrong model, and this is the prototype for the one that you really do just plug into your brain.  

†† Eventually I gave up and turned the frelling iPod function off and stormed on in silence^.  And got home, and swam around the home screen for a while, went into settings, and finally found the thrice-frelling button, poked it VIOLENTLY to ‘off’, and today played an entire album through without difficulty.  However I am probably Marked for Life by James Findlay’s As I Carelessly Did Stray which is the music I was being tormented with^^, which was probably a nice album originally, for those of us who like trad folk.  But what is INTUITIVE about having to climb OUT of the programme you’re IN and find some miscellaneous group of totally UNRELATED stuff whose only common denominator is that it lets you muck around with what goes on elsewhere?  Grrrrrrrr.

 ^ barring some fairly heated muttering 

^^ and vice versa, in a grand, epic sense 

††† Okay, I made the Papua New Guinea part up 

‡ Especially Papua New Guinea.  I liked the rainforests and the cassowaries. 

‡‡ Although a lot of us don’t, which means we have to start over next year. 

‡‡‡ http://www.bagheera.com/inthewild/van_anim_buttrfly.htm

It all started so well. Sunday ringing, service ringing, is what bell ringing is FOR. It is the reason that bells were attached to ropes and we (well, I can’t take the credit here, but I am a member, if the least, of generations of campanophiles) began to work out mathematically organised knitting   (Robin’s shown you the lines, and I know some of you knitters out there have taken to making socks out of them, which sort of proves the point…) umm, I mean the patterns which grown up ringers call methods and principles; I’m not letting them pull the wool over MY eyes – it’s knitting, and it’s only too easy to tie yourself in knots.

Come practice night and you can stand outside our tower and hear clanging aplenty – how else can we improve? But Service ring is sacred; we owe a duty to ring our best, and our Tower Captain only asks us to ring well within our competency on a Sunday.

So it’s Sunday again. As I reach the church car park several ringers loiter purposefully in the heat of a late summer afternoon. We straggle up the spiral stairs (and I spare a momentary thought for the agility in climbing while turning which I have acquired as a by product of ringing; it is a pretty non transferable skill [any suggestions?], but essential for bell ringing).

In our tower the bells are left in a down position , and need to be rung up in order to make music (hmm – it is still a matter of opinion whether ringing bells creates music… just ask some of the people who live next to bell towers). And ringing up, especially musically, in peal (that is, keeping in order) is a hard won skill (and in some cases never won at all!) Often only 6 of our 8 bells are rung up simultaneously on a Sunday as there might not be 8 ringers present who can be trusted to ring their own bell up AND stay in the right order of bells 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (called “rounds”) during the whole process.

I sit out the ringing up – I can think of few things currently more likely to cause me grief than attempting to ring up in peal. Bells up, the ringers tie the rope into the prescribed knots, making them safe – stray ropes have been known to cause burns, lift people several metres high and worse – and sit down. Jean looks around sizing up the strength of her team; her eagle eye alights on me and “treble to Grandsire” she cries.

I take my rope and wait for the rest of the band to be appointed, each taking hold of their rope ready for the off. “Look to, Treble’s going… and gone” (it’s usually called as “she’s gone”, and ringing for centuries was a solely male activity – draw your own conclusions…*) and we’re off in rounds. On the treble I’ve struggled for months now to get the precise speed at both hand and back stroke (hand stroke and back stroke together are called a “whole pull”), and now I start slowly but feel my way to what I think is a good speed within 3 whole pulls, trying to keep steady once I reach it. Ringing the treble as a learner feels a bit like riding a horse with your arms crossed and no bridle, or driving a car without holding the steering wheel… Arrrgggghhhh!

The treble leads the whole procession; it’s the 1 of 1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Ringing “between” two other bells gives you a snug place to be, and twice as much information about where you should be, in relation to each of your neighbours. On the treble you are out there on the prow of the ship and it can get lonely out there in stormy weather.

Today it all starts swimmingly – my speed is right, the ropes rise before my eyes in a clear order and my bell goes where I place it, without fighting me or falling out of the sky when I want to hold it up over much larger slower-rotating bells.

Counting places I work slowly to the back of the order, letting bells move ahead of me
12345678,**
12345678…
Finally I reach 7th place and turn for home, passing bells in the same order as going out but ringing faster to get back to the front place; when I’ve gone back into the lead I remember to slow up slightly and lead steadily. I spare a moment to feel pleased with myself, but not too long – I have so MUCH to think about, and not much time to spare.

Off again, a different order taking me up to 7th place, shorten my grip on my rope and quickly back to leading again. I’m enjoying this. And then it all goes pear-shaped. I look for a first bell rope to follow and see two – no time to hesitate, I ring steadily and then look for the next two bells. Eeek!! Another pair of ropes rise together and I try to remember to breathe and to ring steadily again, hand and back.

Only 2 more bells – these are considerate and separate themselves so I can follow first one and then the other.  OK. I know where I am, I’m at the back, and though I know pairs to follow, I’m not sure which is first or second…  which at this instant is making me very confused. I try looking at two bells at once, which just happen to be on my extreme right and my immediate left and keep ringing at what I hope is a good speed. (They never told me, but good peripheral vison and a supple neck are VITAL for bell ringing . )

Counting away to remember where I am (7, 6, 5 …) and “BOB” shouts the caller.   Bobs (where most of the bells do a 3 point turn and swoop off in a new direction) are only called when the treble is about to reach 1st place, at the prow of the row of bells, and ready to lead.. Noooooooooo!!!!!

I’ve been good. I’ve counted, I’ve rung at the right speed, I haven’t even indulged in my favourite habit of dropping my rope (not to be emulated!); most important of all no one is shouting at me! I keep the faith and try to believe that I’m right, and I count down again (…4, 3…)

… and the world and its whippet shriek at the caller (..2, 1 ) Phew!  Back to lead and start all over again. Things get worse, then the fog clears and I can see individual ropes again – a slight ruckus just before the end of the “Touch” (this is what a short piece of ringing which includes those 3 point turns is called) and we make it and back into rounds.

“Stand!!” and we all knot ropes and step away. I’m disappointed. Trebling to Grandsire isn’t a hard skill as ringing goes and I so want to ring “perfectly” – chimes which are balanced and equally struck; sounds which lift my heart. The captain (“Our Leader”) has a quick word with me about clipping the large bells and leaving too much space among the smaller bells and then it’s time for a different group to take hold for another method.

I stop at the end of ringing and wait until it’s only the captain and I. I have to ask her how I did. The answer is heartening – my speed was good, I kept ringing (this is a cardinal rule and is to be seen printed in LARGE capitals on many tower walls) and she explains that if all she has to tell me is about fine tuning of my bell placement that’s good news; best of all, it wasn’t me that went wrong and I rang well to stay in the right place despite some degree of chaos and disorder around me – “be positive” she cries with enthusiasm, “ringing takes YEARS!” – and I’m too old to wait that long – I may well expire before I reach the glories of Bristol and the grandeur of London – and I want want WANT to ring Wangaratta surprise major .

It will take me years to become a ringer – it will take me years and YEARS to get ropesight AND bell control AND memory AND rhythm AND listening skills co-ordinated, but I’m not sure whether it might take me even longer to remember what dyed in the wool ringers know – if no one says anything about your ringing, that’s high praise and you’ve done exceptionally well!!!!!***

* * *

* ringing is replete with “ooh err! missus!” phrases and expressions, which strike the beginner’s ear oddly; it seems to me a measure of bell immersion that these same phrases now run smoothly past the acoustic oddity-filter they were so recently snagged upon.

** and for those of you who like the full explanation, imagine Bell 1 moving to 7th place -

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

2, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

2, 3, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

2, 3, 4, 1, 5, 6, 7, 8

2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 6, 7, 8

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 7, 8

2,  3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 8

- and that’s the simple version where none of the other bells move or swap places :)

*** ringer’s joke:-

1st ringer – “When I started ringing there would be a queue of 3 people waiting in line to tell me where I’d gone wrong once I finished”

2nd ringer “Only 3? You must have been ringing Minimus!”

(Guess how many ringers it takes to ring Minimus?)

The humans are having champagne.*

            I had been foolishly and light-headedly planning to post a photo of hellhounds eating, as a dramatic contrast to their birthday last year.  They do now mostly eat, most of the time, and we seem to be in a goodish** patch right now.  I was aware that I was being imprudent, not to say positively rash, to assume that this scheme could be brought off successfully. 

            And then it looked like I had just got lucky.  Hellhounds have developed the charming, normal-canine-like habit of coming out and cruising for dropped scraps while I’m chopping up the roast chicken that gets mixed into the dog food *** to encourage them to EAT IT.  I’m so totally thrilled at the idea of their contracting an interest in food (much better late than never) that I push bits of chicken off the counter deliberately.  Usually they mill for a bit and then slouch back to their bed so I have to call them out when I actually put the food down.†  Tonight Darkness came out of his own accord and stood there looking alert and hungry.  So if Darkness was being all forward and everything, Chaos decided he could do it too.

            So I had two hellhounds standing up and eating in the middle of the kitchen floor—PERFECT for a photo. . . .

            In the time it took me to get my camera out, Darkness had suddenly realised that he was eating in the middle of the kitchen floor!!!!, had recoiled with suitable emphasis, and had gone and wedged himself back in his corner by the refrigerator, where he usually goes, weary in every limb and generally deeply depressed of demeanour, when I call them out for a meal. 

            Chaos, who, while generally the nutsier of the two, does have normal moments, looked around, noticed that Darkness had left him all alone in the middle of the kitchen floor, paused (I held my breath)—wavered—and decided that was Darkness’ business, went back to his supper, and finished the lot. 

            Darkness was still lying in his corner, staring at me.  I was supposed to bring him his dish, you see.  I have mostly learnt only to put it down by the refrigerator so he can’t do this to me, but tonight I got all excited and lost my head. 

            Chaos looked around for his treats.  They get two little bits of neat chicken for afters.  So with Darkness’ eyes boring into me, Chaos got his treats and went (smugly) back to the dog bed.

            Fortunately at this point Darkness broke—the truth is that if we were in a bad eating patch I would have brought him his dish—rushed over to his dinner and hoovered it up with remarkable speed.  And then smacked his butt down on the floor and looked around for me again—because he wanted his treats.

            I am a sap, of course.  Chaos got seconds.  He came shooting out of the dog bed when he saw Darkness getting his, and hellhound memories are short.  Fine.  Whatever.  They ate their dinner.  I get to sleep tonight.  Maybe.

            But we can still have a few other photos celebrating the beauty, grace and elegance of hellhounds.††

 * * *

 * I need the champagne.  I’m just back from another long evening of handbells.  I got suckered into it this time because last week’s quarter of bob minor sounded so pretty and went so well I’ve got all pensive and yearning about learning bob major^, which requires a fourth person with a fourth pair of hands.  We were two fours tonight—positively a heaving mob.  And I did get to ring major, with Niall and James, but our fourth was Titus.  Didn’t I say a fourth pair of hands?  Ringing with Titus^^ is exciting enough when you know the method. 

            It took us two tries, but we did get through a plain course.  At the end of which James turned to me, beaming, and said, you’ll be ringing a quarter of bob major soon.

            As I say, I need the champagne. 

^ Bob major specifically because you’re two-thirds or so already there by knowing bob minor.  Any other method you’re starting all over from scratch.   Starting from scratch in handbells is like growing your own wheat and milling your own flour and catching your own wild yeast when you want a slice of toast.  

^^ Who has to ring both his bells in one hand.  He holds them crossed, at ninety degrees, and shakes them up and down to make one ring and sideways to make the other ring.  This does work, after a fashion, but there are kind of a lot of rows with too many or too few pings in them, which is disconcerting since you ring handbells largely by counting, and since he usually rings the trebles—because they weigh the least—you haven’t a prayer of seeing when the treble is leading, which is kind of crucial. 

** So long as I don’t alarm them by toxic superfluities like leftover lamb mince, etc. 

*** Yes, I know about BARF^.  We had a couple of traumatic skirmishes with raw chicken wings and once with sheep bones—I think it was sheep:  something large, anyway—and I retired from the field in confusion and dismay. 

^ Bones and Raw Food 

† No, of course they don’t just come out on their own.  These are hellhounds.^ 

^ Hmm.  I wonder if they’d do any better on raw goblin.  

†† And last but not least, on the subject of eating and not eating, I love this:   

English speakers are dumber.  You have to tell them louder.

I’m just back from ringing at South Desuetude.  I seem to be ringing six times this week—having warmed up for this Iditarod by ringing twice yesterday.  Hmm.  I’m not sure how this happened.*  Despite the fact that I’m now being egged on by the likes of Southdowner and B_twin and Ajlr, I try to keep it down to three times a week.  Four at the outside.  Oh, well, arithmetic was never my strong point, and six is really a lot like three, right?  It has a lot in common with three.  They’re like soulmates.  So it’s okay really.

            Meanwhile I have both Fiona and Computer Men coming tomorrow and am feeling a trifle stressed at the prospect of all that adroit, laudable productivity, so I thought I’d organise my wandering mind this evening over a few Ask Robins.

 Now that we know what mik-bars taste like, how about malak? As it is milky with spices, I’ve always imagined it to be something like chai, but I may be off-base.

 I hesitate to reveal the truth.  I have been debating how best to describe it so that not everyone but a few hippie-drippies and food despots who think that carob is an acceptable replacement for chocolate will run away screaming.

            Malak tastes like what grain coffee would taste like if grain coffee tasted good.  Except that it certainly has caffeine** in it, which is maybe why it tastes good.  But it has that deep dark bitter—good bitter—quality that both tea and coffee do in their different ways.  And you can make it strong or less strong—like tea, coffee, and grain coffee—and you can put milk and sugar or honey and spices in it if you want to, like tea and coffee and grain coffee.  I, of course, prefer it terrifyingly strong.  There are also different kinds—like tea and coffee, etc. 

            I’ve meant to find out more about how and where it’s produced, but I haven’t got round to it yet.  Have I told you that Perlith isn’t dead?  He didn’t die in the battle in front of the city***.  Aerin finds him some years later, working on a farm in the Hills, having lost his memory as a result of the fever from the Northern poison in the wounds he received in that battle.  Anyway, he may be working on a malak plantation.

I’ve just finished “Fire”. Very nice, all of it.

Thank you!

Are there plans for novel based on “First Flight”, she asked wistfully?

Sigh.  I wish.  I badly want to know Ralas’ history, as well as what happens to Ern and Dag and Hereyta and Sippy and the rest.  But I don’t do plans.  I write what comes.  I always know a lot more about a story than what gets written down, but in First Flight’s case while I can feel that it has a future, I don’t know much about it.

            I do know another short-story’s worth of what happens to Miri and Flame.  I hope I get a chance to write it down.†  Meanwhile however I’m a trifle preoccupied by the fact that I still don’t know how PEG II ends.  I keep reminding myself that I often don’t know how my books are going to end—and that drastic stuff may change right up through the final draft.  But it’s a lot scarier somehow when book one is already out there.   I’m just hoping all these frelling road markers saying, This way!  This way, you moron!, know what they’re talking about.

            But this more or less leads me to: 

So since “there is no sequel for Sunshine”,  would you tell us a bit more from what you know about Mel.  Is he a sorcerer?  Where and why did he get his tattoos?  How does he feel about the lack of communication between himself and Sunshine.  How much has he guessed of what Sunshine is not telling him.  Is there any chance he and Sunshine could start talking to each other?  If they really started talking to each other, would he be able to help Sunshine with her magic?

Um.  No, I’m not going to answer any of this.  These sorts of queries always make me scratch my head.  I’ve said—often—that I’d love to write a sequel to SUNSHINE.  If one ever arrives††.  Why would I give away the good story material I am in possession of, when I may yet need it for a good story? 

            But yeah.  I want to know more about Mel’s history too.  I do know the answer to the sorcerer question, and about his tattoos, but no I’m not going to tell you.  Which is actually your best hope that there might be another book with him in it some day, because Mel in my story-mind has that warm, live, twisty feeling of something there.   Something that needs storytelling.

 What are your feelings on the literary device of one story being told in separate books, each book written from the point of view of different characters within the story?  Does the possibility exist for a Constantine novel–his backstory with or without his point of view of the events of Sunshine? 

The literary device doesn’t appeal to me much.  I’m pretty simple-minded at heart, and I’m interested in the story and the people in the story as something that feels whole, however much of it may be missing or left out.  And I mostly want the telling of it to feel transparent—while I’m a big fan of style, and nothing throws me out of a story faster than sheer awful writing, as soon as the style starts calling attention to itself, the story loses me.  Beautiful writing only remains beautiful so long as it doesn’t demand the reader stop and say, wow!  What an amazing paragraph/scene/chapter!  In hindsight I may want to reread something because it is ravishingly written, but when I’m reading a story I want the story, and I don’t want anything in the way.  My idea of real style is when the story grows up all around you and you see and hear and smell it, and you’re no longer sitting in a chair (or lying in a hot bath) with a book in your hands.

            Breaking it up into a bunch of different characters’ versions, in sections or separate volumes, is usually way too calculatedly look-at-me! for this reader.  I haven’t read many of these books because I know my attitude is bad.  One that got a huge amount of critical and popular success a few years ago bored me to tears because it was so in love with its own cleverness.  Which is another thing I don’t like about them, when it’s all about the unreliable narrator.  Unreliable narrators when they’re a genuine part of the story—and arguably every book told in first person is partly about its unreliable narrator, and this would definitely include SUNSHINE if you’re choosing to look at it that way—are fine, and you-the-reader get to have opinions about both the character and the story she tells.  But I don’t want to keep doing this over and over.  What am I, a judge?  Just tell me the story and go away, okay?

            Mind you, this is just me.†††  But no, I don’t much like multiple tellings.  And while as a writer whose stories often like playing games with my head‡ I try not to make categorical statements that I will be made to eat later on, I think it’s highly unlikely I’d find myself writing a story from Con’s point of view.

            Oh, gods, what is that cackling noise.  A sort of goblin-laughter kind of noise. . . .

 * * *

 * Although Niall was involved.  Well, of course.  I knew last Wednesday would give him ideas.  And one of his ideas is more handbells tomorrow at his house.  I said yes partly because it will help take my mind off no voice lesson for the second week in a row—and the miserable prospect of my last-ever lesson with Blondel next Tuesday.  I still have the cherub’s phone number in my hip-pocket paper notebook^ but I haven’t tried ringing it yet.

^ No, not in Apocalypse.  That would make it serious, if I put his number in Apocalypse.  

** Or equivalent.  I’ll have to ask someone.  It’s the sort of thing Jack Dedham might know. 

*** At the end of THE HERO AND THE CROWN, for those of you who haven’t read it, and are floundering. 

† She gets a boyfriend.  

†† And I still startle at the sort of whistling noise that might be the sound of a large paper packet^ popping into existence in this world and zooming for my door.  Mind you, most of its contents are all the rules and conditions in pages and pages of tiny print and subclauses and you still have to write the story.  But it means you can.  And the Story Council are total ratbags.  I’ve taken delivery on both the new short story about Miri and a totally rogue one about a beat-up middle-aged army commander who narrowly escapes an assassination attempt—her king thinks she and her rag-bag regiment are both too popular and too loyal to each other—which she knew was coming, and, having escaped by unexpected means, has to figure out what to do with the rest of her frelling life.  One of these days the whistling noise could still be the sequel to SUNSHINE.  Damar, at this point, just has to get in the queue. 

^ The Story Council is so retro 

††† I’m not even hugely fond of different narrators telling a single story once, although there are plenty of good ones out there.  Hey, DRACULA, for example.

 ‡ See:  still don’t know how PEG II ends

Or, it’s actually been a pretty good day** and not only is time hurtling by like a hellhound*** but stuff I really want to point and shout at is stacking up and in another day or two I’ll forget which is my best trick of all, unfortunately, and I figure there’s all this Friday the 13^th energy washing around, waiting to turn you into a tadpole or make you win the lottery even if you didn’t buy a ticket, so I might as well ride a little of it. 

            Emoon [@emoontx] saw it first, and tweeted the link to ‘The Kids’ Books Are All Right’, printed in the NYTimes, no less, about—brace yourselves, this is going to come as a shock—adults are reading books for young adults.  YAAAAAAH.  I retweeted  somewhat ungraciously, adding ‘I am a 30+ year survivor of “when are you going to write a real book?”’—and I’m not impressed.  I ‘follow’ the Huffington Post Books section, and they retweeted, so I retweeted again as follows:

 Oh do stick yr hushed amazement in yr ear RT @HuffPostBooks: Why it’s okay 4 adults 2 love YA books as much as teens http://huff.to/dAxuSS 

I thought about blogging about it myself, but as the above pithily indicates, I was going to have some trouble being professionally polite.  And then, lo, Jodi sent me this link: 

http://www.gayleforman.com/blog/2010/08/10/sandbox/ 

Way to go Gayle.  Yes, flaming frell it.  Yes.  

Which will also serve as a much-delayed lead-in to telling you that if you haven’t read Forman’s book IF I STAY, you have a big, sobbing, heart-wrenching, glorious treat waiting for you.  Jodi† blogged about it a while ago†† http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/760957.html

. . . but I never quite got around to it, partly because Pollyanna and I kept arguing about terms.  See, there was no way I was going to like this book.  My editor sent it to me—it’s published in another part of the Penguin forest from me—and I took one long disbelieving look at it and laid it down again for several months.†††  It ticks all my instant-death boxes:  It’s written in present tense.  The heroine is a Sensitive Teen.  I hate Sensitive Teens.  They give me a rash.  She’s not only sensitive, but fabulously talented, and already has her great musical gift to organise her life around.  I hate sensitive teens who already know who they are and what they’re good at.  She also has a Perfect Boyfriend who not only has his own clear, mature aims and goals but gets hers.  Also, he’s cute.  He could at least be geeky and spotty.  But nooooo.  He’s cute.  I probably hate Perfect Boyfriends the most of all.

            SPOILER ALERT HERE.  Jodi was very good when she blogged about the book—she didn’t give anything away.  My own feeling is that you’re allowed to blow the set up, the first (say) twenty pages—I’m very literal-minded in my little dragons-and-pegasi way and I find it too difficult to get behind a read this book without mentioning at least a few specifics.  So, if you’re willing to take Jodi’s and my word for it, and you like sitting down to a book that you know absolutely nothing about but that the odds are good you’ll like it (which in fact I do, so I will perfectly understand), STOP READING NOW. 

But for the rest of you:  Mia, our heroine, and her much-loved parents and little brother, are on their way to see friends.  School’s been called off because of snow;  but the snow stopped almost as soon as the announcement was made, so the roads aren’t even slippery.  Slippery enough however:  There’s an accident.  ‘The car is eviscerated.  The impact of a four-ton pick-up truck going sixty miles an hour had the force of an atom bomb.’  Mia’s parents are both killed instantly;  she and her little brother are dangerously injured.  Mia tells the story as a disassociated spirit, as her damaged and unconscious body lies in a hospital bed connected to various drips and tubes and life-support machinery.  The point at which the book really grabbed me for the first time happens when Mia first ‘wakes’ outside her body immediately after the accident, and sees the wreckage around her:  ‘You wouldn’t expect the radio to work afterward.  But it does.’  She sees what has happened and can’t bear it.  ‘Wake up!  I scream.  Wake up!  Wakeupwakeupwakeup!  But I can’t.  I don’t. . . . Then I hear something.  It’s the music.  I can still hear the music.  So I concentrate on that.  I finger the notes of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 3 . . . as I often do when I listen to pieces I am working on. . . . I play, just focusing on that, until the last bit of life in the car dies, and the music goes with it.

            ‘It isn’t long after that the sirens come.’

            For my money, one of the reasons the book is so absorbing is the groundedness of it.  You hear, graphically and specifically, about the accident, about what happens to Mia—about how they go about trying to save her life—about her prospects—which are not at all good.  The entire book takes place in the hospital, while the doctors and what remains of her family and friends wait to see if she will live or die.  And this is intercut with the story of her life so far:  the music—shortly before the book begins she’d had her audition at Juilliard—the Perfect Boyfriend (who is a rock star, but he’s okay really, he wears Converse All Stars), the best girlfriend.  And the family.  The family that she is a part of in a deep, genuine way that she knows she is lucky to have.  The family who has been destroyed by a little bit of wet road.

            It’s also a thriller.  Forman does a brilliant job of wracking you silly over the latest section of the hospital vigil . . . and then whoops you back to Mia’s life before, with her music and Adam, the boyfriend, and Kim, the girlfriend, and her parents, and Teddy, her brother, and her dad’s parents, her school, and the ramshackle old house she and her parents and brother live in, and which is something of a refuge for everyone they love.  And as you keep anxiously, lump-in-throat-ishly turning the pages you realise that it’s a real question, about whether Mia chooses to stay.   To live.  Or not.  And the present tense narration?  This may be the only book I’ve ever read where it’s absolutely right;  where the moment-by-moment of Mia’s fragile existence after the accident is perfectly reflected in all those present-tense verbs.                

            Read it.  But have a big box of tissues handy. 

* * *

 * Pronounced YAH.  Or possibly YAAAAAH.  

** So far.  There’s a few minutes of it left.  Things could always change.  But Oisin and I spent a big fat chunk of this afternoon drinking tea and engaging in parallel play with our new toys^—he has a brand-new-this-week iPhone4 too.  It’s pathetic.  Here we are, respected career professionals in glamorous if ill-paid creative callings, both of us a lot nearer sixty than fifty, and behaving like fifteen-year-olds over a couple of pieces of shiny new kit.  Well, I’m still badly mired in the Ooooh!  Shiny! stage.  Oisin is a bit more blasé, having had earlier versions of the iPhone for several years^^, but he’s the one who explained how you can not only take terrible pictures of the person sitting on the other side of the teapot from you but you can then load one of those terrible photos next to the person’s info on your contact page and then assign them their own ringtone.^^^  So the moment your phone begins ringing you know who’s calling.  Supposing you can remember if you assigned the theme from JAWS to your dentist or your accountant.  Oh, well, it doesn’t matter that much really.  You know you don’t want to answer it.

            And then at bell practise tonight . . . I genuinely am beginning to stagger through touches of Grandsire Triples on an inside bell.  ‘Beginning’ and ‘stagger’ still being the operative words.  But given that it was only a fortnight or so ago that I remained clueless on the touches of Grandsire Triples front, this is excellent.  I am going to learn this.  I am.   

^ Piano lesson?  Remind me what that would be—?  Although he did remember my empty threat last week about bringing something to sing.  Well, he’s the one cancelled at the last minute—not me.  And this week is—this week.  Not last.  Besides, I’m hoarse from screaming. 

^^ And in fact bears some responsibility for enmeshing me in this whole iPhone thing in the first place.  That and Cathy’s Fingerzilla.  

^^^ This is getting as appalling as the existence of a cheat app—of several cheat apps—for Angry Birds.  

*** Only twenty four hours left to get a recipe in for the sticky-baked-goods drawing for a shiny gold SIGNED copy of SUNSHINE!  http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/08/07/sunshine-contest-%e2%80%93-round-2-guest-post-by-ajlr/  

† Jodi is everywhere.  Don’t do anything you don’t want her to see. 

†† Right after we’d been talking about how good it was.  Jodi, however, wrote about it.  I dithered. 

††† I finally picked it up again because Hannah and her daughters really liked it.

Well, it’s all about the iPhone.  Oh, and handbells. 

            Let me see.  Where was I?  I’ve tweeted and/or forummed* some of this.  About twelve hours after Gabriel retired from the field in defeat on Tuesday, I happened to glance down** and saw . . . that my latest small enigmatic black box was registering a phone signal.  And, since then, it has—mostly—continued to fly a few tiny bars in the upper left-hand corner.  It’s worst indoors, but that’s what landlines were created for, right?  To back up your mobile?  I managed to ring Peter this morning, waiting for it to cut out the minute he picked up, but—it didn’t.  And the speaker-phone option works surprisingly well.  Okay, I was surprised.  But if I’m not expected to clamp it to my skull so I can listen to my brains frying, I might actually, you know, use it, like, as a phone.***

            Raphael and Gabriel did come back yesterday and negotiate with management for better working conditions.†  I didn’t want to know the details.  But I did demand that they try loading a 2-CD opera before they left me to girn and greet alone.††  So we tried Gluck’s Orfeo, which was the vanguard last time that alerted us to the Walkperson’s treachery.  And it . . . promptly loaded three discs of a two disc opera.  Which is at least an interesting new approach.†††  AAAAAAAUGH. 

            So let’s talk about handbells for a minute.

            Some of you may recall that a fortnight ago I inadvertently stood up poor Titus—and not-so-poor, ratbag, advantage-taking Niall, when I’d thought that Colin was coming to ring handbells, which would mean there were still three of them before I got there.  Only Colin wasn’t, so my absence meant that nobody was ringing anything till I finally arrived.‡  Whereupon I was overcome by guilt and shame and Niall immediately whipped out his diary and forced me, in my shocked and weakened state, to agree to ring handbells with one of his Demon Handbell Friends, who happens to live in Frellingham, which is too far away, as I keep saying, when I have said no thanks to repeated applications on the subject. 

            So last night was the night.  And while we had not discussed it I was not entirely surprised when, in the car on our way over, Niall said brightly, okay, we’ll ring a quarter peal first, and then you can get some practise in on other stuff. 

            A quarter.  Of course.  Of course we were going to ring a quarter.

            And . . . we did.  The Demon Handbell Friend—let’s call him James—is actually one of these extremely nice, easy-going, laid-back ringers who just happens to be able to ring anything.‡‡  And while I won’t say I exactly relaxed and enjoyed it,‡‡‡ I will admit that it was a very pretty noise, which isn’t usually the case when Niall and Colin and I are hacking away together:  Niall’s a good handbeller, but Colin and I outnumber him.  Last night the good ringers outnumbered me.  And the truly awful thing is that the experience has made me rather wistful about, oh, learning bob major§ or something.  Which would mean coming to one of Niall’s other handbell practises. . . .

            No, no, no, no.  I have a novel to write and an iPhone to fill up with apps. 

* * *

* So, what do you think?  Does forummed have one ‘m’ or two?  I vote for two, because then Microsoft’s dranglefabbing autocorrect doesn’t change it to ‘formed’.  

** Probably from my hunched and heavy-breathing posture over the iTunes Store.   Good Golly Miss Molly, a kid in a candy shop doesn’t begin to suggest the instant oversatiation and crazy-mad craving which assaults the new iPhone owner when entering the unhallowed portals of the iTunes Store for the first time.  Or even the second or third.  Or fourth.^  And we’re not even talking all the other stuff, the you-need-never-do-anything-again-but-keep-your-incredibly-battery-hungry-iPhone-topped-up-who-needs-to-eat stuff.  We’re only talking apps.  And the big problem with apps is that far too many of them are far too cheap, which provides you no useful barrier against which to brace yourself against the storm-tide of desire.

            It all started with Fingerzilla, of course.  If I ever go for the digital Olympics, Fingerzilla is my honey.  I’m even getting better at the helicopters.  I—or possibly Cathy—told you that I was particularly taken by the fact that the little people, when you eat them, scream.  Some of them have labels.  Some of them are just little tiny people and they run away and you stomp after them, roaring.^^  But sometimes you get a teeny pop-up banner:  lawyer, it says.  Or banker.  Or tax collector.  Or stockbroker.  I would go for one that says irresponsible dog owner.  Or queue barger.  Or voter for prop 8.  Roarrrrr.

            But one can’t stop there.^^^  And Raphael had kept me quiet for a good half an hour months ago, before Peter got ill or the RaspBerry started misbehaving, with a lunatic exercise called Angry Birds.+  This is the dumbest thing I ever saw, I said, eyes riveted to the screen and finger stretching the virtual elastic on the next autodestruct bird-bomb yet again.  This is so dumb.  It even has dumb sound effects. 

            I downloaded it right after Fingerzilla.  Or rather Gabriel did it for me, because at that point we were still in the early screaming++ stage of iPhone integration.  But he was trying to be, I don’t know, adult or something+++, and only downloaded the lite version.  It only has three levels!!  I had to go back and download the full rich massive 59p version myself later.~

            Okay, now, somebody tell me why there are never any instructions~~ to any of these games?  We’re all telepathic now?  Or maybe everybody but me already has that usb slot in the backs of their necks?   Take The Screetch, for example, which is very pretty and rather hypnotic in a Tetris-on-hallucinogens sort of way.  And if you read the info page in the iTunes shop carefully, you will learn that you’re supposed to line up three swirly spheres of the same colour and they will explode, and if you explode enough of them you win, and go on to the next level.  But . . . but . . . or am I looking for logic where there is none?  Shut up, McKinley.   Turn on, tune in and drop some spheres.  

^ You know I’m strangely short of sleep. . . .

^^ The roars are almost as good as the screams.  The roars could be louder though.  Hey, this is Fingerzilla, crusher of continents.

 ^^^ No, really.  It’s in the fine print.  Read your contract. 

+ Raphael said, my two-year-old loves it. 

++ Speaking of screaming.  I needed to play Fingerzilla. 

+++ He really should know me better by now.  

~ There’s a cheat app for Angry Birds.  In fact there are several.  Dear gods.  Now I’m getting frightened.  Hey, guys, it’s a game.  

~~ Except for Plants vs. Zombies.  There is a truly excellent ‘help’ screen which reads in its entirety:  When the Zombies show up, just sit there and don’t do anything.  You win the game when the Zombies get to your houze.  –This help section brought to you by the Zombies. 

*** Except I hate phones.  Okay, scratch that idea. 

† One of management’s apparent requirements is WiFi.  Sigh.  I’ve kept putting off getting the cottage wired, because I sleep there.  All those wandering waves are implicated in ME.  But it’s increasingly the case that there’s so much of it around that you’re swimming in it anyway—it’s like I wonder how much my initial savage acute phase of ME was aggravated by the fact that at the old house we were surrounded by agrochemicalled farmers’ fields.  So having prospectively yielded to the inevitable, last night back at the cottage I turned on the iPhone’s WiFi search . . . and was offered a choice of five networks.  Soon it will be six.  But I’m going to have a password on mine. 

†† The Walkperson not only declined to load more than one CD of any given opera—we tried three, just in case it was a production glitch—without merely overwriting what went before, I also later discovered that it was harbouring nine copies of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. 

††† It was, for reasons which escaped all of us, objecting to Che Faro, which is the famous aria that every mezzo-soprano in the universe sings, even me.  It decided that this aria was just so special it should have a disc all of its own. 

            It did, however, agree to load all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies.^  

^Well, I think.  I admit I haven’t tried playing any of them back yet. . . . 

‡ I don’t know why nobody seems to ring minimus—four bells—on handbells.  But apparently nobody does. 

 ‡‡ They’re a different species.  Homo campana.  I’m sure I have more genes in common with chimpanzees. 

‡‡‡ You enjoyed that, didn’t you, Niall said firmly, on the way home in the car.  Erm, I said.  And any of you out there keeping track, yes, Thursday is our usual handbell evening and yes, we rang handbells tonight too.   I think I’m probably chiming gently when I move.  No, wait, that’s the iPhone. 

§ Which is roughly speaking the same pattern as bob minor, but on eight bells.  Which means some extra twiddles.

So I rang a very nice touch of Stedman Doubles tonight at Old Eden where the calls were all in weird places (which is something that happens with frelling Stedman*) and I had to perform both cats’ ears and coathangers** and I did it all*** and I feel all flushed with success.†  And this morning wasn’t half bad either.††  So while I’m feeling as if I have the answers to everything††† I thought I’d tackle an Ask Robin. 

My question is about characters’ names. I’ve tried writing some fantasy stories, so I know how hard it can be to come up with new, mythical-sounding names. But when you do it, there seems to be a system to the names. What I mean is that although the names are completely made up, groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in. I’m thinking particularly of the Damar names, where the names all fit the Damarian culture and linguistic sound, even though the culture and the names are all fictional. Do you have a system for coming up with names? I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic. Do you do anything like that? Or do they just come to you?

At least some of the answer to this is somewhere on the web site, but I can’t find it.  I would have sworn it was in the FAQ under one of those general writery questions, but . . . I can’t find it.  Arrgh.  So if this looks kind of familiar to you and you can find it . . . will you please tell me where it is?

            I’m also amused that the asker says ‘groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in’.  Yaay.  Success.  One of the biggest, hairiest challenges about writing fantasy or science fiction is making your ‘imaginary’ countries and creatures feel real, feel like a consistent whole—or an inconsistent one, for that matter, the way the sometimes-more-and-sometimes-less consensual reality we live in here is so often drastically inconsistent. 

            But much of Damar is a fairly unified culture—as are Balsinland and Rhiandomeer in PEGASUS—and so the names, the rituals and traditions, the habits and history, need to feel as if they hang together:  they need to look and smell and taste and sound right.  What an appalling prospect.  I am so grateful I’m not making this stuff up. 

            Now I have said in the FAQ that I don’t make this stuff up:  it’s more like it happens to me.  This is not to say it’s easy;  it isn’t.‡  First there’s the trying to take notes in the whirlwind aspect:  even if you manage to hang onto your notebook‡‡ you may be picked up and thrown several hundred or several thousand miles off-course . . . possibly even into the wrong frelling story.  Well, what you think is the wrong frelling story.  There is also a good bit of Helen Keller at the water-pump:  you know there’s a world out there, and there’s this new person who keeps following you around and won’t leave you alone, but what is she trying to tell you?

            But if you’re a storyteller and this is your story, you’ll eventually make the connections you need to make, and start looking and listening and feeling around in the dark for the stuff you need to know.  I literally‡‡‡ see and hear a lot of the background to a story—mostly in way too dazzling detail—and which frequently doesn’t fit together, and then I have to try to figure out why it doesn’t fit together, or skip that bit as beyond me.§  I hear most of the major characters’ names—and when I’m lucky, most of the minor ones’ too—by the simple expedient of hanging around listening to them talking to each other.  Eventually they’ll call each other by name.  I heard Ebon’s name just the way it happened to Sylvi:  They really don’t tell you anything, do they?  I’ve known you were Sylvi forever.  My name is Ebon.  Sylvi’s own name bothered me for months—I was sure (I was almost sure) I was hearing it right, but there was still something wrong.  It wasn’t till I heard her spoken to in some formal ritual or other—and I don’t even remember which one—that I found out it was short for Sylviianel, and then I felt a lot better.

            Occasionally I cannot, cannot, cannot hear someone’s name, and then I do have to try to make it up, based on what fragments or nicknames§§ I am hearing, and what I have by then learnt about the language.  But I hate this.  I’m always sure I’m wrong.

            My jaw drops at ‘I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic.’  My reaction is totally ewwww.  But every writer is different.  If I found myself doing that I’d be certain I was in the wrong story and start looking around for a whirlwind to catapult me somewhere else.  But this is only the way I work;  if that’s what works for him, and he gets good stories out of it, then that’s all that matters.

            Good stories are what matter.  Write that down.

* * *

* It has to do with the fact that the treble, which in most methods has an easier path through the maze, moves just like all the other working bells, which in Stedman is a very maze-like track indeed. 

** Sic.  It has to do with what the line looks like on the page.   Cats’ ears actually do look like a kid’s drawing of a cat’s ears.  Coathangers don’t look anything like coathangers. 

*** We will not get into the total frelling mess I made of ringing the four to Very Little Bob.  The four squats in the middle of the pattern making thirds and fourths while the other five bells do fancy dances around her.  The point is supposed to be that it will teach me what thirds and fourths feel like, which will help my Cambridge, which has lots of thirds and fourths in it.  Wrong.  It just felt like a really really bad bit of Cambridge that went on and on.

† The hellhounds even ate dinner again.  Gaah.  Last night we had some lamb mince left over so I put it in their supper.  Aaaugh!  What is this!  What are you doing to us!  Death!  Poison!  Betrayal!  Goblins!  Darkness eventually got over it.  Chaos didn’t.  Next generation of domestic fauna it’s goldfish.  Plastic goldfish. 

†† We had a special service for some saint or other at Old Eden.  I spent most of it on the five, which, of all Old Eden’s possessed-by-demons bells, is the worst.  But we were only ringing simple stuff so no one noticed that the five and I were locked in an epic battle for mastery.  This is almost as great a triumph as a touch of Stedman Doubles.  

††† Possibly even how PEG II ends.  I said possibly.  

‡ Ringing the fifth bell at Old Eden is a doddle in comparison. 

‡‡ Or your laptop 

‡‡‡ If ‘literally’ bothers you, feel free to choose your own adverb.  ‘Madly’ might do.  Or ‘obstinately’.  

§  Note:  sigh.  It happens.  Or anyway it happens to me. 

§§ ‘Yo! Dumbhead!’

I’ve told you that after service ring* I go down to the florist’s, who is mad enough to open on Sundays, and scarf the . . . uh, and buy a few cut flowers**.   Peter usually meets me outside the church door with his bicycle, and we trundle down to the florist’s together***.

            The florist has a few potted plants with all the cut flowers.  I’ve been known to indulge in these too.†  Today Peter took a fancy to a salvia.  Oh, it’ll go in my knapsack, he said.  Er—don’t you want me to take it back to the cottage?  I can bring it down in the car later, I said.  No, no, he said.  It’ll be fine in my knapsack. 

 * * *

* Suddenly we have people.  We have not been having people and there have been some pretty grim times, both practise and Sunday service.  Lately we’re overflowing.  This has its good side and its bad side, and both of them are called Grandsire Triples.  I will never learn to ring triples unless there are seven other people who know what they’re doing to ring with me.  Often.  I don’t learn anything except by relentless grind, and seven (or six working plus tenor-behind) other people who—crucially—know what they’re doing and come to practise^ are in short supply around here, especially as this area is rife with six-bell towers, so people tend to learn to ring six-bell things.  And you can have twenty-nine people who know how to ring triples in a six-bell tower and you can still only ring six-bell methods.^^

            The other problem with learning triples is that you’re not at all likely to have exactly seven^^^ other triples-ringing people at a practise;  and the more people there are, the more different things are going to need to get rung to keep everyone happy, which means us lower echelons get less time on a rope.  So I have been despairing lately about Grandsire Triples, which I must learn to ring, because New Arcadia is a Grandsire Triples tower.  By far our most commonly rung quarters~ are Grandsire Triples quarters.~~  Meanwhile I’m stumbling on with Cambridge Minor—six bells, so I’m getting some time in at other towers—and while I still can’t ring it reliably, it is obvious that I will, eventually, and this is not at all obvious about Grandsire Triples.  Which is a bit like being an aspiring Formula One driver when you’re still falling off your tricycle. 

            Last Friday Niall offered me a nice touch of Stedman doubles and I said, sweating, could I please have another go at Grandsire Triples (having bollixed the penetralia out of it the first time), and he blinked a couple of times (I love Stedman doubles) and called for Grandsire Triples. 

            And it wasn’t exactly a triumph, but it was a bit like the G in Dido’s Lament.  It sounded pretty awful, but it was recognisable.  For the first time.   There’s enough there to work with (I hope).  Now if seven people who can ring it will please keep showing up for New Arcadia practise. . . .

            But the point about today at service ring is that there were enough of us to ring Grandsire Triples.  And I went to my usual humble place on the treble with better heart than recently.  And at the end we rang down all eight bells in peal and it was brilliant. 

^ Very very very large pet peeve is the really good ringers who can’t be bothered to come to practise and provide ballast for beginners. 

^^ Niall likes to saunter in to bell gatherings and declare that he rang major (eight working bells) at Ditherington (six bells) or Madhatterington (five bells) and when everyone looks at him like he’s lost his mind, grin.  I don’t fall for this any more.  He means only three other people showed up, so he forced them to ring handbells.  Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells.  I dread being present at these occasions because of course I can ring handbells, which makes it much harder for the other one or two to weasel out.  Even Niall is a bit challenged by trying to get three people who haven’t a clue all pointed in the right direction on handbells.

 ^^^ Better yet eight, so you can have a minder. 

~ Not that I ring quarters—much—but it’s the principle of the thing 

~~ Our quarter for Daniel the other week was Grandsire Triples.  And I noticed just yesterday that my first limping, terrified quarter, on the treble to bob doubles, back in my previous existence, was rung in honour of Daniel’s retirement—I have the official quarter announcement in a cheap plastic frame leaning against a bit of wall at the cottage not covered in bookshelves.  I’d forgotten that bit.  This was a good joke too because Daniel kept de-retiring.  He had three or four quarters rung to his retirement over the years.  

** Since I can’t bear to cut my own.  I couldn’t bear to cut my own even when I had two and a half acres of ’em.  

*** Possibly stopping at the newsagent’s to buy chocolate.  Mostly Peter orders Green & Black’s Mint by the fifteen-bar shop display box^ but occasionally the system breaks down. 

^ I would not joke about a serious matter like the possession of a sufficiency of chocolate. 

† We’re probably also slightly suffering from the day after the day before.  We went to one of the private-gardens-open-to-the-public-for-charity yesterday and it just about knocked our socks off.^  I am turning into an Evil Cow on many fronts, however, and I kept thinking, how many frelling gardeners are involved in this work of art?   Among other things there was an astonishing amount of topiary, which is fabulously labour-intensive—it was also pretty charming, because there were teeny weeny blobs of topiary tucked away in corners all over the place, like there is a colony of gnomes living in the cellars, who rush out with their clippers as soon as all the dull humans are asleep, like the elves and the shoemaker. 

            And further on the subject of Evil Cows, my single tiny, hard pruned, semi-espalliered apple tree looks better than their orchard which furthermore has no peaches at all.  Maybe the gnomes don’t like peaches.  This fell off into my hand today.  There are, I think, four or five more where it came from.  Not bad for a tree two foot high that lives in a pot. 

^ Perhaps that’s why I’m in sandals today.  Nothing to do with the sudden return of hot.