I was climbing through eight hundred years and forty-six thousand miles of church history this evening, which is the system for gaining access to Forza’s ringing chamber, and thinking, you could want to join this tower for its scenic approach alone.  Or possibly as an exciting addition to your fitness programme.  I dragged myself through the last arrow slit, which is at the top of a spiral staircase so tight that even the outsides of the steps are only long enough for Flower Fairy feet, and collapsed fainting on the floor . . . next to Charlotte, who, by her gasping breaths, had clearly only just arrived before me—and who is also a visitor.  Maybe you get used to it.  Maybe the members have a secret lift. 

            I had spent a good bit of today telling myself briskly that I was going to Forza tonight** and that it was just another tower and the years, the miles, the thirty-seven bells and the Rhode-Island-sized ringing chamber*** are all incidental.  Then I got there.  I suppose the fact that your first view of it, every time, is from the floor with a red haze of oxygen deprivation and lactic acid build-up clouding your vision, may have a demoralising effect.  I lay there tonight thinking, well, I did bring my knitting . . . †

            And I did not get off to at all good start with a bell rope in my hands.  Which is to say I once again made a drooling foozle of Grandsire Triples.  ARRRRGH.  It was so drooling a foozle that even standing behind someone ringing it accurately I still couldn’t see what was frelling going on.  I’m going to develop a complex.  I can ring it perfectly well †† in other towers.  But put me in an 800-year-old abbey with a ringing chamber you need satnav to negotiate and I lose my mind.†††  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  If there had been a sword I’d’ve fallen on it.  You’d think in a ringing chamber the size of Rhode Island there would be at least one sword hanging on the wall somewhere, wouldn’t you?  But nooooooo.  Just peal boards,‡ notices,‡‡ and handbells.§  So I crawled away and hid in a dark corner.‡‡

            I was hauled back out again by a call for plain frelling hunt on ten.  I can’t do ANYTHING on ten.  Ten is too many, even when it’s just plain hunt.  The thing about ten is that you have to hold up and wait, every frelling blow, because there are so many other bells in the row to ring before it’s your turn again.  So it’s bong and then you stand there with your arms over your head thinking you could have got half a row of knitting done while you’re waiting§§, and then it’s bong again.  Also there’s always a bit of necessary speed control adjustment—not only do you ring more slowly going out than going in, you also ring closer over smaller bells and with more of a gap over bigger bells.§§§  When there are ten of the frellers all of this is very exaggerated, which makes it additionally difficult for notable foozlers like me. 

            And then . . . it wasn’t too bad.  I was actually getting the hang of the holding-up-and-WAAAAAAAITING thing.  I tied up my rope at the end without having a last despairing look round the walls for a sword.

            I hung around watching people ringing things I should to be able to ring, but probably can’t at Forza.#  And then finally, at the very end, I was offered a rope of my very own again, to ring bob minor.  Dear miserable gods of ringing and disgrace, I OUGHT to be able to ring bob minor.  I ought to be able to ring bob minor dead, drunk, asleep, and suffering severe lactic acid overload.##  

            And, indeed, I did ring it, despite being alive, sober, awake and maybe a little lactically acidulated.  I also did despite the fact that someone else was going wrong, this being the true sign of knowing a method, being able to hold your line when other people are failing to hold theirs.  I was not ringing it beautifully, but I was ringing it—and I was ringing it in one of Forza’s horrible queues, and since I was on the four I had several### people on each side, which means you need 358.5° vision like a horse (or a robin). 

            So.  Yaay.  There is hope.  I will go back next week.  Note that I am announcing that here in public.  I am going back to Forza for next Wednesday’s bell practise.

            And tomorrow I start the third draft of SHADOWS. 

* * *

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand . . . look what arrived in the post today: 

* * *

* Maybe. 

** After all I had told the blog I was going to Forza tonight.  

*** Sure it’s a small state.^  It’s a VERY LARGE ringing chamber. 

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island 

†  I have half a leg warmer on my needles.  Maybe even two thirds of a leg warmer. 

†† sometimes 

††† Maybe I have lactic acid build-up in my brain. 

‡ My situation was made somewhat more precarious by the fact that the Scary Man was in charge tonight.  They have a kind of rotating ringing mastership and you don’t know till you get there on the night who’s going to be beating you with the knotted rope . . . I mean, who’s going to decide what methods to ring and who’s going to ring them, and whapping you up longside the head when you . . . I mean, who tries to wrest a modicum of order out of campanological chaos.  I confess to feeling a little fragile about ringing admins at the moment but he hasn’t done anything to me yet . . . except give me bells to ring and say I’m welcome to come again. 

‡‡ Full peals are these ghastly feats of ringing endurance, and significant ones frequently get painted on a varnished plank—the names of the method and the ringers, the date, and sometimes the time it took, which is usually around three and a half hours—and hung on the wall of the ringing chamber involved. 

‡‡‡ ‘On 18 February there will be a sale of all the umbrellas, bicycles,  spectacles, spectacle cases, mobile phones and small children left in the abbey grounds, proceeds to the after-service cake fund, the canons have been complaining about the shop biscuits’ 

§ I have no idea.  If I keep going, I’ll ask. 

§§ It’s almost as bad as that frelling stoplight on the way to Nadia. 

§§§ Yes.  It’s horrible physics.  And I don’t think you can even get any of the fun quantum stuff out of it.  It’s all that unpleasant fellow Newton. 

# I’ve told you on previous devastatingly humiliating evenings I’ve spent there:  in the first place because there are SO MANY FREAKING BELLS if you’re only ringing six or eight of them, they’re in a queue, not a circle, which is maddeningly confusing for those of us who are easily confused and are used to ringing in a CIRCLE,^ and also, I assume again because of the frelling SIZE of the ringing chamber there’s something peculiar about the acoustics.  Which in my case is to say I can’t hear a thing but a kind of smudgy blast of noise. 

^ Remember that you’re always looking frantically around for the next bell to follow.  Your sheer frelling depth perception is off if you’re suddenly looking along a line instead of across and around a circle.  

## Gemma was there tonight and said to me after, of course we can ring bob minor.  It’s ringing it on only one bell that is challenging.  

### All right, my definition of several is a little loose.

b_twin_1

Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.

It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE.  How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT? 

http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html *** 

* * *

I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment.  What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)?  It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs.  Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it.  Bell methods are all basically canons, you know?  Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.†  But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES.  Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††

            I won’t say we did it well.†††  But we were doing it.‡  And I noticed something.  The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six.  Don’t make me frelling laugh.  Counting to six is sordid enough.  Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong.  Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point.  Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line.  Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.

            I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now.  But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing.  So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring.  Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went.  And it was okay.  It was good.§  And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . . 

ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT.  BACK TO SHADOWS. 

* * *

* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN. 

** FIRST novel!  For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!!   A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well.  Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication. 

^ Really good rhinestones.  Possibly attached to All Stars. 

*** I think it’s a really good trailer too.  Mostly I don’t like trailers.  I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them.  I like this one. 

^ I don’t have trailers 

† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’ 

†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells.  It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower. 

††† Some of us did it better than others. 

‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea.  WHA’?  WHA’ YOU SAY?   What are you doing in my sitting room?  Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells? 

                  The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished.  I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished.  But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether.  So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.  

^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph.  Maybe twice.+ 

+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently.  But I don’t often hang around to label it as such. 

‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break:  you’re still going to die. 

‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm. 

§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge.  Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way:  and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you.  I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .

Yessssssss.

            I got up this morning convinced I was doing a really dumb, time-wasting-when-I-have-even-less-time-to-waste-than-usual, thing, going to my voice lesson when I’m still totally croaking.*   I told myself that I had to go to Mauncester anyway, to pick up more organic composted farmyard manure for the garden(s) so I might as well tack a voice lesson on the end of it.**  I looked dubiously at my music, which positively has dust *** on it, and decided to take the easy end of it along in case Nadia wanted to recommend this pathetic baby thing rather than that.  And I took my notebook, of course, to write down her pearls, rubies and sapphires of wisdom.

            So I got there and she said blandly, I think it would be a good idea just to attempt to warm your voice up a little—I may be able to advise you about how to work this week.  Croak, I said.  That’s fine, she said.  We’ll start with the nnnn sound.  We can add an actual pitch in later.

            Nnnn, I said. . . .

            Teacher magic.  It’s amazing.  Oh, I still have a throat full of crud † but my larynx isn’t made of cement after all and by the end of the hour I was SINGING.  I was not singing well††, but I was indubitably SINGING.  Nadia said (possibly a trifle smugly) that one of the reasons some of the notes just weren’t there—open mouth, nothing comes out—isn’t about my throat at all, but about the fact that because of all this emotional stuff I’ve shut down, and specifically I’ve shut my voice off from my air supply.  And she taught me the Lip Trill, which she says is very good for reconnecting with your air supply because it’s so hard to maintain.   All you singers out there will know the Lip Trill.  What it really is is a blowing-horse imitation:  you blow out through your lips so they go Pbpbpbpbpbpbpb†††  It’s also supposed to relax the muscles around your mouth.‡  Which probably explains why I can’t do it.  So now it’s homework.  I have to learn to pbpbpbpbpbpbpb.  She also made me do the opening-curtains thing to make me more positive, and the drinking-a-glass-of-water-on-a-hot-day‡‡ thing, which I hadn’t done before, to open my throat.  Why does this stuff work.  It is insane.

            I had already noticed that what notes are available—and they’ve been creeping home one by one like party-goers after dawn, the last two or three days—are mostly the upper-middle of my register.  I’m not even trying the top end, but my voice starts cutting out again around middle C, and I should have a whole octave below that.  Nadia kept coming back here and I’d go croak and she’d move back up again.  Finally at the very end of the hour something shifted and I began singing in my chest voice—usually, as these things go with me, the gear change into chest voice is not all that big a deal.  Ah, she said, that’s what I was hoping for.  And I was thinking chest voice = speaking voice = not speaking up for myself = duuuuuh.  As I had said to her in my email asking to come for a non-singing singing lesson, I even wonder if the appalling revealingness of singing, depressingly unconnected with any excellence of said singing as it is, is the reason my body chose this method of trying to get my frelling attention.

            Nadia said, I was planning on getting you singing today, you know . . .

            I had about an hour between singing lesson and Penelope and Niall picking me up to go ringing at Glaciation.‡‡‡  Whapwhapwhapwhap:   person trying to reorient.  Whap.  Which—ringing—felt totally normal . . . and really, really weird and sad and creepy.  I haven’t got a tower any more.  I’m just some random bell ringer who knows some people in this area.  Brrrrr.  But ringing rounds for beginners is always grounding as well as making you feel you’re contributing to the community§ and we managed to ring Cambridge even if I then went on to make a pig’s ear of an innocent touch of Stedman which I ought to be able to do in my sleep.§§  Slightly in my defense I was ringing on the one remaining bell I don’t know for Stedman—the three—and there are always moments of vertigo as you figure out where you are on a new bell in a familiar pattern.  But mostly I just blatfarging botched it.  But they didn’t tell me not to come back, so hey. 

            And I have gone around today thrusting my knitting under everyone’s noses and saying, Look!  Ribbing!  Real ribbing!  

* * *

* Although there is a little Freelancers Must Stick Together too.  Nadia doesn’t charge for legitimately missed lessons, so she’s losing money when I don’t come.  This preys on my conscience. 

** Going to the local farm shop would have absorbed about forty minutes out of my day.  Plus voice lesson made it about three hours.  Being really, really bad at arithmetic^ has its uses. 

^ Possibly I mean ‘logic’ here. 

*** And hellhound hair.  But everything in these households has hellhound hair on it, including me, and I am in almost constant use. 

†  ::Grossness alert::  And I was gacking up horrible gunge on the drive home, after having all those secret inner bits stirred up by Nadia’s intervention.  MAJOR DISGUSTING EWWWW.  One of the oddities of this illness anyway has been how obsessively focused on my throat it’s been so I didn’t even know there was all that crudiferousness lurking.  I find myself wondering if I went down a few archaeological layers and was ripping out stuff from some previous occasion when I didn’t speak up for myself when I should have.  

†† But then I never sing well.  Sigh.  

††† When in doubt, YouTube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt7eTRyRKpA 

‡ I don’t think there’s any of me that DOESN’T need relaxing.  My hair needs relaxing.  My fingernails need relaxing.  Possibly especially a week before the book I’m working on is due.  

‡‡ Beer if I preferred, she said.  No, I said, the way I get into this nonsense of yours, I need to be sober to drive home. 

‡‡‡ My voice lesson got moved later when it got made an hour long, and Colin’s practise has had a quarter hour added to the front end because he has a nice fresh growing crop of beginners who need cultivating.  This is not ideal for me.  On a bad ME day I’ll have to miss Colin, although give me a shooting stick to lean on and I can probably ring rounds for beginners even if I’m seeing double. 

§ Contributing!  To the [ringing] community!  AAAAAAAUGH! 

§§ Although given how well I’m sleeping lately. . .

As I posted fairly early on last night, as the first rush of sympathy arrived on the forum, and before I started trying to go to bed,* you guys are the best.  I don’t want to get into a major watch-Robin-wallow fest here, and I don’t know that I’m all that good at sticky-free gracious**, but thank you all very much.***

         At least one person on the forum posted that she went through something similar and regrets not having written a letter of resignation.  Well, if it’s any comfort, remember that such a letter opens you to reprisals.  I received a pin-my-ears-back, singe-my-eyebrows letter from one of the admin.†  I’m such a bad girl.  Bad me.  Some of you reading this must have been in (psycho)therapy?   One of the first things a good shrink warns you of, as you begin to get to grips with whatever brought you into their office, is ‘change back’ behaviour.  Probably the first thing they’ve wanted you to take in is that the only person you can change is YOURSELF.  That’s the rule, and that’s the rule you’ll be working by in therapy.  But as soon as you do manifest change, any and/or everyone around you who is invested in the status quo is going to start giving you change back! messages.  People who care about you will go with what you need to do.  People who prefer you crippled, subservient, non-stroppy, silent, whatever makes their lives easier, will not like it at all, and will let you know they don’t like it at all.  This letter is a big fat change back! message.  

            Um.  No. 

katinseattle wrote

New Arcadia wouldn’t accept the money because they disapproved of the way you’d raised it? It sounds like you went street walking for it.

SNOOORK.  I know there are people with minority tastes who pay for sex with people pretending to be French maids or Tony Blair or kangaroos or something, but is there a market for skinny, wrinkly, cranky old women?  . . . No.  On second thought, there probably is, and I don’t want to know. 

LRK

It’s hardly as if you’ve been selling improper drawings of… er… dubious morality… so to speak… thus tarnishing the good name of New Arcadia 

SNOOORK.  Now, I could do something with this.  Naked hellhounds.  Bat orgies.  Improper uses of bells never before considered by humankind.  Things that fanged muffins get up to when no one else is around.  You know, I bet I could pull real money for these. . . . 

EMoon wrote

 . . . people who drive friends of mine into such misery–GRUMP!  But not to worry; I’m sufficient thousands of miles away that all I can do is GRUMP across an ocean at them, and they won’t know or care. 

I think a well-focussed GRUMP sent from a good rocket-launcher might very well arrive as a functional whole.  Thank you.  Let me send you the geographic coordinates. 

I hope the book now agrees to be written really, really fast. 

SO DO I.  Whimper.  I did not need dramas right now. 

Re Williams

Years ago, after a horrid day at grade school which involved me not doing something like the ‘in’ crowd and hence suffering their ridicule, I remember thinking, “I can’t wait until I’m an adult so all these silly games will stop.” 

I SO REMEMBER THIS.  I SO REMEMBER THIS.   And then they don’t.  And you think, wha’?  What happened? 

DrDia

. . . And – hello – you’re getting a monetary gift from a world famous author who got this gift by selling her books & autographs to her blog followers – not like she went out & extorted money from people. 

Sigh.  Unfortunately this may be part of it.  There’s a contingent of the population—and I met it in America too, it’s not a British peculiarity—who believes that all authors are either egomaniacs, nuts, or both^, and behave accordingly.  You can’t prove otherwise because they’re seeing everything you do through this perception.  And, you know, my ego probably is a different shape from an accountant’s, because I frelling use it differently.  But it’s a bit like mistrusting a blacksmith because he or she has big bulgy arms and they’re more likely to punch holes through your walls because they can.  Blacksmiths have big bulgy arms^^ from their job.  It doesn’t make them better or worse people, although it might make one a good friend to have when you need to move the furniture.  

            I don’t know this.  But I think it’s possible that my desire to have the work I’ve done both recognized and accepted is being translated as the insane vanity of an author, and they all know what authors are like. 

^ I think some form of this happens to everyone who manages to sell stuff they make, it’s just being an author is what I know. 

^^ Which I think are totally hot, just by the way.  I don’t like the gym bunny look, but muscles from use?  Hot.  Very hot.

The mind-body connection IS very strong and, as a homoeopath, you have trained yours to be even stronger – a double edged sword right now. 

This aspect of it hadn’t occurred to me—that by using homeopathy I’m training my mind/body to talk to, er, itself and me more clearly.  I’ve been startled by the bluntness, the non-metaphoric-ness of my throat closing, hurting and opening, but I hadn’t thought about why it was being, or able to be, so, um, candid.  Now maybe I can get the new communicative mind/body to explain to me about a few other things I wish I could persuade to go away. . . . 

I’m going to let Aaron have the last word.  Yes.  Bells are alive, and the sound they make is more than just a (more or less accurate) bong.  I’ve been saying this for years.  And I’d like to think my contribution didn’t stop the moment I’m not ringing my bells any more.

            Thank you.

The next time you hear the local bells I want you to listen carefully. If you think back to how they sounded when you first heard them you should be able to hear a little more tolerance, an improvement in their determination to show up and ring even on a bad day, a greater degree of care for the nurture of new ringers, and a thousand small things that you did right while you were there, a thousand more that you helped others do right, and, just possibly, a thousand beyond that that the people still ringing will be inspired to do right in the future because you were there.

The things you put into those bells are still there and they are the better for it. When you listen, don’t listen to the echoes of your parting, listen to the joy, and sweat, and care that you put there and which still rings out.

It is still a joyful noise. 

* * *

* I slept lying down last night.  LYING DOWN.  Body horizontal, head on pillow(s).  I cannot tell you how thrilling this was.  I’ve been sleeping sitting up for something like the last fortnight—which is not fun and certainly not restful, and six pillows was only barely enough.^  More than once as I woke up already half strangled by a coughing fit I thought, all I want is to be able to sleep lying down.  It’s nice to have simple wants occasionally.^^ 

^ Someone on the forum—and I can’t find it now, it was a few days ago—asked if I’d considered the possibility that I had strep throat.  Yes.  With alarm.  But . . . after the first few days of fever and sparkly edge-of-vision hallucinations and drenching sweats and other lovelies, I was mysteriously not really sick enough.  I’ve had strep—not in about four decades, but I’ve had it—and you’re sick.  One of the things that was really forcing me to look at the fact that it was centred on my THROAT, with some head and ear involvement, is that the rest of me was not all that bad.  I was keeping hounds hurtled and I was working on SHADOWS . . . and I was writing blog entries.  I didn’t feel good, and this is not my usual level of madness, but with proper flu you’re prostrate.  

^^ Mine usually run to cases of Taittinger’s, yearly best-sellers+, self supporting horse farms and five acres of Hampshire countryside securely fenced in for off-lead, aggressive-other-dog-free, hellhound hurtling.  And a cure for ME and a thirty-six hour day.  

+ Which includes, of course, the fact of writing a book a year.

** Anyone who is bailing now, if you need a suggestion what to do with yourself in the time that you usually spend reading Days in the Life, allow me to recommend back issues of xkcd, possibly starting here, which I have blatantly stolen from rainycity1’s tag line on the forum:  FairyTales – http://xkcd.com/872/   Then you can just go on hitting ‘random’ till you finish your coffee/tea/porridge/jellied eel. 

*** And to those of you who are thinking, actually, I did want my doodle four months ago . . . I’m very sorry.  I’m constitutionally a deadline-misser, but this last year has been worse than usual, even for me. 

† Not the one I was expecting, just by the way. 

Okay, the good news.  I’m better.  I’m still a whole lot less than optimum, and I doubt I’ll be having a voice lesson this Monday either, but I’m definitively better.

            I started getting better pretty much the moment I put my resignation letter through the door of the tower captain of New Arcadia.

            Yes.  You read that right.   I’ve just quit my home tower.  My beloved home tower, where my beloved bells live.  My beloved bells that I’ve been breaking my butt to raise some of the money for the restoration of.  My beloved bells that from where I’m sitting tonight I may never ring again. 

            It’s a long story, really dating back seven years, when I joined.  New Arcadia is one of those towers where Things Are Done A Certain Way.  There are a lot of human groups like this.  It’s one of the reasons I’m not a big group-joiner;  I’m mostly really bad at doing things A Certain Way Because That Is The Way They Are Done.  What?  Why?  But . . . bells.  I love ringing.  And you need other people to ring with.  Okay, I can do this people thing.  Probably.  And it’ll be good for my character.  Probably.* 

            Fast forward to the beginning of this year, when we found out that our bells needed a big expensive whack of restoration work, and considered ways and means to raise the money.  In hindsight I can now remember (also I’ve discussed my no-win situation with people with better memories than mine) that there were several good ideas that were buried without trial because This Is Not The Way This Was Going to Be Done.

            Those other good ideas, however, mostly needed more than one person to make happen, and I was still free to go off in my own clueless little rogue way and try to raise money to my own (clueless) little rogue system.

            You know how that ended.

            In hindsight, hindsight being wild and wonderful and perfect and beautiful and a big pain in the ass, we—that is, you my readers and I—were a victim of our own success.  I suspect that if I’d raised £15.76 they’d have taken my money with a pat on the head and a kind smile.  But noooooo.  I had to go and raise a lot.**  You know, like, a conspicuous lot.  Somebody CONSPICUOUSLY doing something Not The Way It Has Been Decreed It Will Be Done!!!  Arrgh!  The Empire may fall!***

            Sometimes my body is brighter than I am.†  I find it interesting, now, with the savage lens of that relentless ratbag hindsight, that this lurgy first whapped me up longside the head last October, which is when the first crunch between my potential donation and the—ahem—unwillingness of the bell fund admin to view my nasty rogue money and me with any favour became visible or possibly I mean audible.  CRUNCH.  But in the first place, the sale/auction was already launched, and in the second place I loved the idea of drawing silly doodles to earn money for my bells.  And in the third place, I can be dumb as a post when I want to be.

            Well.  There’s more, but I’m veering wildly over the line of discretion as it is.  There’s been other stuff that has cast doubt on my future tenure at New Arcadia, but this business of the bell fund is the big one.  And I’m a homeopath and I totally believe that the mind and body are the same critter—and that if the mind is being dumb as a post the body may well try to get its attention.  I’ve had a swallowing-razors sore throat for a fortnight—something that never happens to me††, just by the way—so I can’t talk?  Er—what is my body trying to tell me?

            So I’ve resigned.  The last paragraph of my letter is as follows:  ‘I have had a lot of time to think this last fortnight, while I’ve been ill.  And what I have decided is that I will no longer remain somewhere my loyalty, commitment and hard work are not appreciated.’  And as I said at the beginning of this post, after two paralytic weeks, the lurgy finally started shifting pretty much the moment I put my letter through the tower captain’s door.

            So, where does that leave me—and you?  Especially the many of you who are still waiting for your books and doodles?  I have done no doodles since I’ve been ill these last weeks;  Fiona was due to come next week, but I’ve put her off because while there’s plenty of other stuff she could be doing, what she ought to be doing is hauling the last or at least the second-to-last load of sale/auction stuff to the post office, and that’s not going to happen.  I doubt I’m going to achieve any major inroads on the doodle backlog till I get SHADOWS in some shape to be read by my editor.  It has really not been a good year.  The overlapping story to this one is about PEG II crashing and burning last summer—remember ‘dumb as a post’?  I didn’t want to notice why PEG II wasn’t cooperating, even when not noticing was driving me to that final edge of despair that I might not be a story-teller any more—and then frantically starting SHADOWS because I need to get paid.  Because of PEG II and SHADOWS I††† was late getting the sale/auction stuff organised for Blogmom to put up;  by the time the orders were in I was hip-deep in SHADOWS and by the time I realised the bell fund was doing the Icy British Ignoring Thing . . . I couldn’t deal with that too, so I didn’t.‡  Subconsciously . . . this is a lot of the reason I’ve been so slow getting on with the orders.  I’ve blamed SHADOWS, and yes, SHADOWS is eating my life.  But it’s less SHADOWS than creeping demoralisation.  Doodling is fun.  But I’m supposed to be doing this for my bells, and . . .

            Okay.  The money is still the money, and it’s still going to go to bell restoration.  There are lots of bells out there that need work, some of them even local.  When I’ve calmed down a little, when I’ve got used to the idea that I’m no longer a New Arcadia ringer‡‡, when I’ve got SHADOWS and the rest of the doodles done . . . I’ll investigate other options.  New Arcadia has a few—ahem—unique problems.  Generally speaking I’m not expecting most bell admins to feel that money a writer raised by selling doodles, books and other oddments to her readers is unsuitable.  I’m hoping that I might find a local-enough tower that I might even ring there occasionally.  

            And me?  I’ll keep ringing.  I can ring for Colin on Mondays.  I’m going to make another attempt to start ringing somewhat regularly at Forza:  according to Gemma, Forza needs ringers, even dubiously mediocre ringers like me.   My old home tower also meets on a Friday;  it’s too far away from New Arcadia to go every week, but I might try to go occasionally.  I can’t, at the moment, imagine joining another tower and getting involved in the day to day and week to week running of it, or even getting put on the ‘regulars’ list for ringing weddings.  But I’m pretty burnt out.

            Burnt out hell.  I’m angry and baffled and miserable.  What I said about lying in bed last Sunday morning listening to my bells and weeping?  Yes.  Big time.  I knew, last Sunday, that I was going to be writing a letter to put through the tower captain’s door this week. 

            Handbells tonight with the usual crowd was somewhat soothing to the broken heart.

            But my bells.  My bells. . . .  

* * *

* It hasn’t been good for my character.  But that’s another story.

** The grisly truth is that I still don’t have the final sums—partly because I’m so behind in getting stuff out and therefore can’t have the final postage figures.  But I promised the bell fund £2000, which I think is pretty near accurate. 

*** You know, the Empire fell a while ago.              

† Not that this always takes a lot.  I haven’t tested it in maths however.  Yo, you, leg, what’s the hydrolateral of the isosceles particle of the square root of parsley?  Okay, maybe that’s botany. 

†† It did once.  After it went away I eventually discovered I had ME.  This is not a story to cheer me up right now. 

††† That’s SHADOWS, I, Robin, not SHADOWS VOLUME ONE.  AAAAAAAAUGH. 

‡ I’m so American.  

‡‡ Waaaaaaaaaah

So let’s have an Ask Robin to distract me. 

I’ve been wondering what was the first ever memorable story you wrote/wrestled with? I don’t mean the first one you had published, but the first one you can recall pouring your heart and soul into and deciding that you wanted to be an author/writer from that point on.

Never.  It is a revelation to me every day that I’m a professional writer.  I’ve become enough used to it that I no longer wake up every morning [sic] expecting to find out that I sell shoes** at Wal-Mart*** but I do still wake up every morning amazed . . . which is not a bad thing really.  It’s not only a rush, it keeps you at it.  How did I get this lucky, you know?  Stop mooning around and keep working.  Yes ma’am.

            I’ve always told stories.  Before I knew that’s what I was doing, I did it.†  I told stories before I had words, and certainly before I could read and write:  and yes, I can remember a few of these, but I’m not sure I can describe them.  Once you have words it’s hard to go back.  But story-telling for me is just part of my experience of living in the world.  Everything is part of a story.  It’s only a question of whichever way the fragment you’re contemplating chooses to run, and whether you have the time and inclination to follow.   How many of you wander around humming random hums?  Hands up, please.  I bet there are a lot.  You don’t do it to do it, you just do it.  You’re built that way.  You just find yourself doing it.  Some of your hums may be fragments of other people’s real composed music, but some of them are just playing with sound.††  And you may go on to nail down a hum on a piece of paper and create (or try to create) a proper piece of music around it, but that’s later, and that’s something else, and it doesn’t discount or disparage the hums if you never turn them into best selling power ballads.  Story-telling is like that for me.†††  I tell stories anyway.  That I can write some of them down and make people pay me for them is a bonus. 

* * *

* Or a hellhound.  I had a am-I-coughing-in-my-sleep^-or-is-that-a-hellhound-yowling-to-go-out-NOW? morning.  Plus delightful clean-up duty.  Plus the guy with the very long squeegee who does my first^^ floor windows showed up^^^ and I didn’t dare let him into the back garden, which was reserved for urgent hellhound activity.

            And then there was the continuing to stream, the continuing to cough, and the continuing to not get enough sleep.  Whimper.  I just don’t get the coughing.  How can bodies be so perverse? 

            And then there was going to the vet.  And this time our client was Chaos, who has a Vet Phobia, and turns into the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper every time he is dragged across that fell threshold, so that was even lovelier.  He has a Vet Phobia, as I’m sure I’ve told you, because some arrogant little chickie of a wet new post grad vet and who didn’t have a clue what was wrong with him gave him one of those full-spectrum antibiotic jabs that are known to hurt, how dare you be stochastic and PAINFUL with my dog??, and then got all shirty when he screamed, and said that whippets were ‘wimpets’.  She’s lucky she got out alive, but I didn’t find out till later that she’d chosen her treatment because she had no idea.  Oh, and this is after she had told me that I ought to get them neutered.  That that’s what responsible owners do.

            She’s gone on to make some other veterinary surgery a joy for everyone, but I am left with a hellhound with a vet phobia.^^^^

            Chaos is also one of these dogs that after you have broken up his pills into tiny crumbs and mixed them in carefully with the nice drooly chicken scraps, carefully eats all around them because of course they are a non-food-stuff and are in his bowl in error.  So then you get to wodge up all the crumbs into a mushy glob and shove it/them down his throat.  DOGS.  YAAAAAAAAAAAH. 

            Handbells, this evening, for some mysterious reason, were relatively successful.  Niall even started making calls.  I don’t DO calls in bob major.  It was another situation, as it so often is, that the other three have rung MILLIONS of touches of bob major in the tower, and they tell me eagerly, oh, it’s just like bob minor EXCEPT WITH TWO MORE BELLS!  Yes, and driving a car is just like riding a bicycle except with TWO MORE WHEELS!  Oh, and an engine.  Spare me.  I can, in fact, get through a course of plain bob major in the tower (probably), because I ring it on handbells.  It’s EASIER in the tower. 

^ which would not be the first time.  I’ll take any sleep I can get. 

^^ American second 

^^^ His schedule is known only to himself, although I believe it has something to do with prophetic dreams, tea leaves and the curious incident of how many times the dog in the night-time barked.+ 

+ Maybe it had the streamings, and needed to go out.  The original silent hound evidently had excellent digestion.    

^^^^ Today’s vet was another recent vintage grad but . . . golly.  Not only was she sweet to my hopelessly neurotic hellhound . . . well, if I were thirty years younger and single, I’d ask for her phone number.  I think I could work out the gay thing as I went along.  

** I think I could get into selling All Stars. 

*** But not at Wal-Mart. 

† I personally believe that the human critter is hard-wired to tell stories like we’re hard-wired to learn language.  But story-telling may get squeezed or belittled or misunderstood out of the functional part of you, like other bits of our potentials got squeezed out of those of us who are convinced we cannot possibly do maths or hard science or whatever else.  

†† And as jumping-off places other people’s work is the greatest.  I’ve said many times that I learnt a lot writing appalling Tolkien pastiche.^  I am one of the humourless frumps who say no to ‘fan fiction’ but as a private learning experience that never sees the light of any computer screen but your own, trash my stories with my blessing, and may you go on to write your own books that will make me laugh and cry.^^ 

^ Infinitely direr than the bad Kipling pastiche for some reason.  Probably because Kipling is not forsoothly.  On the other hand, I learnt not to be forsoothly from Tolkien.  

^^ Or distract me from coughing and no sleep.  Any book that can do that is better than the Pulitzer Prize. 

††† I also wander around the house humming.^  But it took formal voice lessons to get that started again.  I used to hum random hums when I was a kid, but it was disruptive or impolite or whatever, and I was taught to stop.  Of course kids have to learn to behave appropriately, but I wish we as a species or at least as a culture could learn better methods to teach kids, for example, that singing off-pitch is also the precursor to singing on-pitch,^^ or that if you want to tell a story about a flying dragon you don’t have to worry about the frelling physics of frelling flight right away, or even about how Marigold got back from Madagascar/the grocery store so quickly.  It’ll come.  Go with what you’ve got.  

^ Or I did till about a fortnight ago SIIIIIIIIIGH. 

^^ I know.  We’ve had this conversation in the forum.

I WENT BELL RINGING TONIGHT.*  YES.  I DID.**  At Colin’s home tower, East Persnickety.  And there were even eight roughly speaking ringer ringers there*** for the eight ropes, which meant we could ring triples.  Although the ‘roughly speaking’ meant it took us two tries to get launched on the touch of Grandsire Triples which was eventually derailed anyway by overenthusiastic calling on the part of the conductor†.  But I was on the four, not the three, the three being my usual bell for Grandsire Triples, and I Did. It. ††  The roughly-speaking also meant that it took us three tries to get through a plain course of Stedman Triples, but we did that too—barely—and I was again on a strange bell, and therefore starting in the wrong place, in the wrong direction, and over the wrong bells.  This is very challenging when the lurgy has eaten your brain.†††

            But it was good for morale.  Hells, even ringing rounds for the beginner was good for morale.  Ringing is a fatal disease, I’ve told you that, right?  And it takes the rest of your life to kill you.‡ 

Mrs Redboots

I know you feel you are committed to writing a blog every night, but honestly, sometimes a sentence . . . will be enough to reassure us that you are alive and functional, if only just barely. Sleep – and SHADOWS – is more important than the blog (and you can always give us More Mongo, which can only be a Good Thing!).

katinseattle

Me, too. I second this. As much as I enjoy your blog, don’t wear yourself out over it.  

Thank you.  It’s a tricky balance, and one that after four and a half years I still haven’t found.  I’ve told you that I write here every night because that’s how I make sure it gets done—if I dropped down to every other night I would soon be doing it every three nights, and then every four, and so on.  There’s something about the initial getting going obstacle that only diminishes to relative insignificance if it’s a daily charge.  It’s not wholly unlike hurtling hellhounds.  If I ever stopped to think, You mean I have to stomp through the elements twice a day for two hours EVERY DAY for the rest of their LIVES?, I would probably freak out and starting researching very large hamster wheels on line.‡‡   As it is, it’s just something I do.  Every day.  Cough.  More or less.  But mostly more.    

            There’s also a certain quality of YAAAAAAH SCHOOL’S OUT to plunging into the blog after a long day of book-in-progress, like a hod-carrier coming home, ripping his steel-toed boots and hard hat off, putting on his trainers and going for a run.  It’s still all sweaty and muscular, but it’s a significantly different kind of sweaty and muscular.   I imagine many happy short-order chefs come home and make bread, and one of our local farmers has the most affectionate hand-reared orphan lambs I’ve ever met. ‡‡‡

            At the same time . . . I admit the stress level at the moment is a little extreme.  I may yet have to take you up on your kind offer to let me skive off the odd night or two.  At the moment, sleep would be a fine thing if it were a little more available  . . . and unfortunately most of Mongo involves spoilers.  The scene he’s busy *&^%$£”!!!!! taking over at the moment, for example, is all about grmmphflgrrrglklmmph!  

* * *

* Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough . . .  Colin says that his experience of the lurgy is that he has a good day and then a bad day and then a good day and then a bad day . . . I’d be very grateful for even fifty percent good days.  Cough.  

** Cough.  

*** Plus one wide-eyed beginner still grappling with the terror of call changes.  

† Hey, it’s practise night.  This is what practise night is like:  the Peter Principle in action.  Any working bell band—barring the really annoying fabulous ones—on any given practise night will rise to the level where the majority present can no longer quite cope, and stick there, flailing wildly.  CRASH.  CLANK. 

†† Although a veil of kindness will be drawn over the quality of my striking.  Penelope, who is not usually a Monday ringer, was there tonight, and, tying up her rope after our first effort, said to me, that was like getting a bucking bronco through a dressage test.  Yes.  And it’s occasionally reassuring to hear from someone who isn’t used to them that those bells are baleful toads and it’s not just that I have the grace, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness of a bottle-opener.  I suppose it may depend on the bottle-opener.           

††† I always enjoy the furrowed brows of ringers as they say this or that method is, of course, unusually volatile, or difficult to learn, or whatever.  Colin doesn’t go in for this kind of deconstruction:  he throws a method at you and you ring it.  Or not.  But I was thinking about this tonight, because both Grandsire and Stedman are on the usual-suspects list for ringer-flustering methods.  There are two things about Grandsire, first, that it’s not a member of a family of methods, it’s just out there, stark, on its own;  there are no clues or hooks or familiar landmarks.  It’s just you and Grandsire and the wild itch on the end of your nose that begins the moment you pull off.  The second thing is that most of the methods you learn at least early on in your career (I don’t yet know about the later ones) have calls that come slightly before you have to do anything.  So you have about a blow to remember what you’re doing.  In Grandsire for most calls you stop dead in your tracks and double dodge.  This is fine in one way:  while you’re double dodging you have your chance to remember what you do next.  But if your over-enthusiastic plain bob doubles practise-night conductor calls two blows too soon you have time to think, no, wait a minute, this is too soon, and you’ll probably get it right.  If you’re ringing Grandsire, chances are you’ll have automatically started double dodging before your brain has a chance to say, no, wait a minute . . . which means you’re now in a big mess.   Well, Penelope and I were in a big mess, because we’d dutifully stopped where we were and double dodged with each other.

            Stedman’s threat to humanity is different.  The reason there are people in padded rooms murmuring brokenly, No, no!  Not Stedman!, is because there is no anchoring treble line.  Most of the standard methods, the treble has a simpler line through the method, and it remains unaffected by calls.  This means that your first and in many cases most reliable means of finding out where the hell you are if you’ve just come adrift is to see where you are in relation to the treble,^ because the treble’s line does not change however many calls there have been.  Not so in Stedman.  The treble is following the same infernally screwed-up line that all the other bells are following.  If you come adrift in Stedman, unless you have a scarily overachieving conductor, you’re just frelled.  We got through just our plain course tonight (finally) because Colin is a scarily overachieving conductor.  Although I’m sure that much shouting is not good for a man still half under the spell of this unusually vile and degenerate lurgy.  And I still wasn’t quite where I thought I was when he called ‘that’s all.’ 

^ Supposing you haven’t come so far adrift that you’ve forgotten what method you’re ringing, which also happens.  Not only to me. 

‡ Niall’s usual Tuesday handbell group is short-handed tomorrow, so he asked if I’d fill in.  Yes!  Yes!  I said.  I’m not drooling!  That’s the lurgy! 

‡‡ Degus are cute.  http://www.petsathome.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Info_10601_caring-for-your-degu_-1_10551 

‡‡‡ All right, I don’t mean to be disingenuous here.  But you could say that writing about writing is my equivalent of coming home and finding out that I’m supposed to go on carrying hods at home too.  No, no!  I want to ring bells!

            I want to sing, some day.  Sigh.  Cough.

It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.**  I’m catching up on back issues of magazines.  I’ve thrown a few more books against the wall.***  I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I’m keep hearing that it’s the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games.  It’s okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover.  It’s not as good as MONTEZUMA. 

            But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they’ve been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same.  And it really was pretty fabulous.  We didn’t even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡ 

katinseattle

I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.

No pressure. 

Certainly not.  I’m very relieved, since I’ve been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation.  Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . .  noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph].  This is not how this scene went last time.  Yelp!  Arrrgh!  Yaaaah!  —It’s going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it.   I so need sleep.  

blondviolinist

You know how there’s Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡ 

I’m on team Mongo. 

::Beams:: 

* * *

* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the ‘12’ of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it’s still last month?  Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is? 

** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation.  I admit I’m a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days.  Uuuuuuungh.  And unless I’ve developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing.  I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope.  Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony. 

*** I’m an even nastier reader when I’m ill and short of sleep. 

† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing. 

†† I was talking to a friend today who’d been ill in the night too.  She has cats.  And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her.  Hey!  You’re up!  Great!  Aren’t you glad to see us?  Aren’t you going to feed us?   Barring the ‘feed us’ part, hellhounds have a similar reaction.  Hey!  You’re up!  Hey!  All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don’t care which four they’re awake for are very disorienting . . . when you’re pretty disoriented anyway.  But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I’m drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough.  So, we’re going out NOW, right?  I wonder if they could learn the concept of ‘dressing gown’?^ 

^ Mongo could.  The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do.  If you don’t give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.    

††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa.  You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^ 

^ I’m also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+  I’m practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers’ opinions on.  Why don’t people do their homework.  His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be.  Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.    

          I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn’t may be blurry in some areas.  I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I’m asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++  And she’s also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it’s reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids’ books I’d just tell her what I know.  Which is not, in fact, much, and she’d be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.

          And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you’re professional writers?  Say, I’m writing a children’s book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have.  There wouldn’t even have been any blood loss (probably).  But he shows up on our (Peter’s) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand?  No.  Not on.+++

            So I don’t want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV.  So I’m practising.  I’m not watching TV, mind you, but when I’m going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on. 

Ajlr

I’m so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one’s brain is going to be shaken out through one’s forehead at the very next convulsion. 

I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough.  Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains. 

            Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#.  Eventually I figured out how to call up ‘information’ and was apprised that this was a film called ‘The Trail of the Screaming Forehead’ in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads.  Ahem.  I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe. 

+ They breed.  Like coathangers and odd socks. 

++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.  

+++ I am a curmudgeon.  But we knew that.  And I haven’t read it—that’s Peter’s self-immolation.  But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup. 

# Carefully missing the Christmas tree.  I’m not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet.  Hey, I’m sick.  

‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise. 

‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon?  Ewwwwww.  I’m on Team Sam.

I have turkey gravy on my bright green solid coloured shirt.  It shows.

            We finished the gravy* last night.

            This is a clean shirt, put on gravy-free this morning.**

            Do you suppose quantum physics can answer this one? 

* * * 

It’s December 31^st, for about an hour and a half longer, as I write this.  So, what have I done with my 2011?

            FAILED to write PEG II.  Sigh.

            2012 is going to be better.  Starting with getting some relatively readable the-end-is-in-sight form of SHADOWS sent in by the end of January.*** 

            So, other prognostications? 

            By this time next year I will be halfway through the NEW PEG II.

            I will also be ringing touches of Cambridge minor.†

            And on handbells.††

            And, this time next year, the New Arcadia Singers will be hurling impassioned emails at each other about the spring concert, because (after our unexpected success earlier in the year) we haven’t quite nailed the playlist yet and practise starts again the first week of January.

            Fantasy, much?  Oh . . . well . . . 

HAPPY NEW YEAR 

* * *

The woman wants her CHAMPAGNE.

 1.  And gods don’t they stare. 

2.  I left my jumper on.  No one knows.†††  And a good thing too.  I was introduced to someone who reads me. 

3.  Those are my Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse All Stars.  It seemed suitable. 

4.  I am now drinking my champagne. 

5.  I have to ring more bells in seven hours.  Feh. 

* * *

* Peter had to make more, of course.  Next on the list:  More brandy butter.  Next on the list:  living on lettuce for the entire month of January.  Oh, well, in the circumstances I’d better have some protein too.  Fried liver of rival publisher.  Incompetent copyeditor roast. 

** And I have to go ring bells in a few minutes^, and it’s so warm I’m going to have to take my jumper off and stand revealed as a slob.  It’s also so warm that I didn’t have tricky winter weather as an excuse not to go ring bells at midnight.  Which is to say yes, when I rang Felicity back this morning, having still not quite decided what I was going to say to her, she was so delighted to hear from me I heard myself agreeing to come along tonight.  It’s now sheeting.  Ugh.  Also very unseasonable of it.  But maybe all the staring villagers will stay home and watch Singin’ in the Rain or something.  Much better value.  

^ And sulking, since I want my champagne now. 

*** AAAAAAAAAAAUGH.    

† With what band and in what tower, I have no idea.  I’ll worry about that next year.  In an hour and a half. 

†† HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA 

††† Except you, of course.

Bluuuuh.  I’m even more brain dead tonight than I was last night and I’ve already used the available SHADOWS snippet for the foreseeable future.  It’s a great pity that snippets have a dismaying tendency to give the plot away.*  After all, this blog is Days in the Life, right?  SHADOWS is about 90% of my life right now, days and nights.  

Vikkik

(You know, if you like, you can post us a scene from SHADOWS EVERY night until the book is done – we won’t object 

That’s very kind of you.  I appreciate the vote of confidence. 

although your publishers might disagree with me on that one….)

 Well, self e-publishing is all the rage these days, isn’t it?   We could offer a subscription for a New Robin McKinley Fragment service.  

B_twin_1

By then my arms were full of Mongo. “Mongo, you loophead,” I said, burying my face in his fur, “what are you doing here?”

*whispers* They do tend to be loopheads. 

While I do not have your eclectic and inclusive experience of the breed . . . I know.  Mongo is drawn from life.  

Ajlr

And your publishers could perhaps start thinking about a range of objects with Mongo on, in some form (a doodle?) for the launch in 2013? I would so buy a T-shirt or something.  

What a splendid idea.  Thank you.  Speaking of a subscription service . . .  We might think about an extended doodle shop.  Definitely t shirts.  Knitting . . . I mean tote . . . bags.  Mugs.  Fuchsia leather jackets with satin logos.  All Stars.  If there are Blondie and Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse All Stars—which there are, I have both—why not Mongo, Ebon and Gulp All Stars?  

            I did wrench a little time free and go to bell practise tonight.  Three-dimensionality is great when you’ve been staring at a computer screen all day (and night).  Although I’ve mentioned before that there’s a strong fantasy element to bell ringing**—it’s just not satisfactorily explained by large hollow chunks of metal, long ropes with fluffy bits and clusters of crazy people—and it may be that bells suit the brain-blasted writer better than certain other occupations—boxcar derby, say, or pearl fishing—which would require the subject to re-engage with reality in a much more unpleasantly comprehensive way.  Bells, you’re tucked up in a nice little initiates-only bell chamber . . . well, usually.  I had the standard annual phone call from Crabbiton this evening, asking if I were available to help ring in the New Year tomorrow at midnight.  It’s not like I’d be asleep.  But Crabbiton is not only a ground-floor ring but the whole point is that the ENTIRE VILLAGE crowds into the church and stares at you.  It’s probably good for my character.*** 

 * * *

* Note:  Casimir is very good-looking.  

** Which perhaps balances the horrible reality of learning method lines.^ 

^ While muttering frantically to yourself:  it’s not maths, it’s not maths, it’s just numbers on a crooked line, it’s not maths.+ 

+ Speaking of maths.  Some day when I’m awake, so, like, maybe April, I want to talk some more about Shape of Brain and the culture chasm between the lit brain and the maths brain.  I had a couple of ha-ha you lit people are so funny from science brains in response to my blog post objecting to ABSOLUTELY SMALL’S doolally Schrodinger’s cat metaphor—in other words I didn’t get it.  True.  But from where I’m standing it’s a bad metaphor, as is the 50 pound boy travelling at 20 mph a bad metaphor.  They don’t engage me with the material, they throw me farther out—like inconsistent characterisation or a howling plot hole in a novel.  Suddenly you’re not reading a story any more, you’re staring at hen scratches on a page (real or virtual) and deciding you’d rather be getting on with your knitting.  Cats in boxes don’t randomly die because you look at them.  When Fayer eventually gets to the photons being in two places at once but collapsing into one state or another if they’re measured it’s fine.  I don’t want to write a term paper on it, mind you, but I follow it okay.# 

            But all metaphors are metaphorical.  They depend on common ground, common language, common assumptions.  Which is dangerous and unreliable, you know?  I know:  I’m an American who has been living in England for the last twenty years and am still daily baffled by this alien culture I now call home.##   How much of my almost  throwing ABSOLUTELY SMALL across the room when I got to the part about the 1000 cats in boxes, 500 of them marked for death###, is not that the metaphor is bad in an absolute sense~ but because I’m reading/listening to it with a lit brain, not a math brain? 

# Being a fantasy writer may be an advantage here, speaking of shape of brain.  So this earnest science bloke says, okay, these particles, they’re sort of like waves, and they’re sort of like infinite waves, and they can be in two places at once, or maybe they can be everywhere at once, theoretically, just so long as you don’t look at them.  Oh, okay, says the never-having-had-a-lot-to-do-with-classical-physics-and-therefore-having-no-mindsets-to-break-but-liking-without-worrying-a-lot-about-cognitive-dissonance-things-the-size-of-pegasi-and-dragons-flying fantasy writer.~ 

~ And, being a fantasy writer, one of the things I am thinking, while this earnest science bloke is digging himself in deeper with this complex and exotic taradiddle of his, is, there’s a difference between looking and measuring.  The problem with the subatomically tiny stuff is that our eyes can’t focus that small, so we have to have instruments that measure.  What happens if you befriend a flower fairy with very good close vision?  I suppose her body heat or her breathing or something would still upset the photons.  Miffy little beasts, photons. 

## Method bell ringing.  Please. 

### My restraint was chiefly because I was listening to it on Pooka at the time, and I do not throw my iPhone across the room. 

~small or large 

*** No.  It’s not.