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forum is back online
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There was no blog post Thursday night.
Blogmom needs your help
Hi, all – the mods and I have been trying to contact the page admin for this older Facebook page but without success. If you know the admin or, better yet, are the admin, please email me at blogmom@robinmckinleysblog.com.
As you no doubt know by now, this is Robin’s new and shiny official Facebook page. Thanks for your help!
Oh gods and devils, where’s an angel when you want one??
There has been a slight further technical hitch in my reposting last night’s confused and confusing plant photos and I can’t get hold of Blogmom. And it’s midnight and I have to ring bells tomorrow morning. Or rather, this morning, which means I have to go to bed.
So, speaking of bells, here’s the first page or so of The Bells of Mazahan because it’s much too late to come up with an entry from zero. This is the beginning of the draft after I realised it wasn’t going to stay a short story, but you’ll notice its antecedents as an Elementals Air story. As well as some creative input from my so-called real life. And I make no promises as to how much the first page or so will look like this in its final form either.* My stories are capable of death-defying leaps of (in)credibility pretty much up to the last minute.
When the bellmaster of Mazahan told Tathtalar’s father that she was to come to him the year she turned sixteen, Tath was outraged.
“I don’t want to learn stupid bell magic! We don’t go to zharhia in this family! We go to dlora! You went to Esfalamanhidar and mum went to Zilambaz and all your brothers went to Esfalamanhidar too except Fen, and he ran off to the filanon so he doesn’t count, and–”
“Peace,” said her father. “If you have such a gift for the bells then you must use it.”
Tathtalar, nearly weeping, stuttered, “W-why couldn’t you invite a h-horsemaster here? Why a bellmaster?”
“I did not invite him,” said her father patiently. “He wrote to Menlor-sola–or his deputy wrote to Obadan–saying that he was visiting all the villages along our Ridge, and he wished to pay his respects. He was here a dozen years ago, but you wouldn’t remember; you were nearly a baby.”
“Don’t horsemasters ever visit the Ridge?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Her father sighed, and she knew she should stop, but she couldn’t help herself. She had been horse-mad since she was born, and bells were . . . bells. Everyone on the Ridge rang them; you learnt to ring like you learnt to dress yourself; the Ridge was near the Border, and the Border must be rung. But she didn’t love bells. Bells were a bit creepy really. No one understood why the spirits of air that lived in them chose to live there–nor why they sometimes didn’t. Menlor-sola was famous for having sent a bell back to its foundry before it’d ever been hung, saying no spirit of air would live in it; and he’d been right too, because the foundry had tried to send it somewhere else, which didn’t have as clever a sola as theirs, and they’d hung it, and no spirit of air would live in it. But Menlor-sola himself admitted that no one understood what the relationship between human bell ringers and their bells and the bells’ spirits of air were, or why bell magic protected the Border, or could do any of the other stuff bell magic was said to be able to do, although nobody did much of the rest of it any more. Tath’s private opinion was that the whole bell thing got too creepy even for bellmasters and their friends, and everyone had just quietly cut down on doing a lot of bell magic over the years.
Tathtalar didn’t want to go to a zharha and ring creepy bells for years and years. She wanted to go to a dlor, and ride lovely horses. Horses were alive like people were alive, and they ate and slept and were born and got old and died–no one even knew if the bell spirits were mortal–and horses were warm and breathing and glad to see you (or not). You knew where you were with horses.
She wanted to go to a dlor, and then marry someone else who had also been to a dlor, and have some babies and breed and bring up horses for the rest of her life, the way her parents had. You couldn’t breed and bring up bells.
“It’s a different system,” said her father. “There are dlora all over Damar; the zharhia are fewer, and mostly near the Border, and, well, horses are more conspicuous, aren’t they? A horse pulling a plough is still as much a horse as the dlora’s finest ghillhia are horses.” Which was to say that farmers’ children grew up horse-mad just as dlorian graduates’ children did, and even if you weren’t good enough to stay at the dlor and train ghillhia–few people were–even farmer’s children sometimes got to go to a dlor for a year or two. There were horses all over Damar, and Damar would grind to a standstill without its horses.
“Horsemasters don’t have to go looking for students; they come–good and bad.” This last was said somewhat drily. Everyone who had ever trained at a dlor had tales of truly hopeless first- and second-years. Mostly the hopeless didn’t linger beyond their second year, although it did happen. . . . Tath had been looking forward to telling some of her own tales.
”Bell ringers are chosen.” He looked at his daughter thoughtfully. “You should be pleased. Not many are chosen.”
Tath bit down on the words that wanted to fly out of her mouth. I am not pleased! I don’t want to be chosen as a ringer–could there be any curse greater than to be chosen dahamyar and stay at your zharha forever? There were lots of people who trained for only a year or two at the dlora–there would be more, only the dlora couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take them all–people were hauled involuntarily into their local zharha for a year when some patch of Border ringing wasn’t good enough to do its job. To the extent that Tath had ever thought about this, which she hadn’t–to be nobbled to go to a zharha!–she was aware that with Menlor-sola overseeing the Ridge ringing, theirs was good enough, and reluctant conscripts weren’t necessary.
Tath was almost thirteen years old–too old for tantrums–and her father had better things to do than persuade her to accept the inevitable. Because it was inevitable: pleading was irrelevant. The horrible bellmaster would have her in less than four years. Four years. If she’d suddenly and unexpectedly been accepted into a dlor it would have seemed an age; since she was doomed to a zharha it felt like tomorrow.
She hadn’t thought anything of it when her mother had told her that the bellmaster of Mazahan was coming to the Ridge. She remembered, vaguely, that this or another bellmaster did come to the Ridge occasionally; and she was mildly interested in his visit when she heard that he would be bringing an entourage: perhaps that meant they would perform some fancy ringing. The Ridge’s bells wouldn’t know what hit them; there weren’t many local ringers who could scramble through more than Firefly Circles or Gold Coins on Six. Tath knew the diagram–the sliithoon–for Back of Beyond Two Sun; it was the awfullest and wiggliest of the all the sliithooni that hung on the wall of her home Tower, and so of course she had learnt it. (There was plenty of time, while you rang endless Plain Coins for the beginners, to learn every sliithoon on the wall, but once this had dawned on Tath she started, of course, with Two Sun, because it was the worst. She had spent months diving for the number Three bell when Plain Coins was called, because where you stood while you rang the Three was the best view of it. After she’d learnt it she learnt all the others too, but Two Sun was still her favourite.) She’d never heard it rung. Surely the entourage of a bellmaster could ring it.
Be fair, she thought. She’d been very interested in hearing the dahamyari ring. She just didn’t want to be a dahamyar herself.
* * *
* Also note that Word keeps automatically respelling Tath’s name That, and I’m not perfectly sure I caught them all. You’d think all those capital ‘T’s in the middles of sentences would make it nervous, but nooooo. And yes, I could add it to the dictionary, but I don’t want to: not till this book is official book-in-progress.^
^ Authors are weird. Pass it on.
All Change
So. Well. Ahem.
We’re going to have a forum. Now. Blogmom is going to read this entry and make sure I’m not talking through my hat or other inappropriate appurtenances, and then she’s going to post it, shut off the individual entry comments and add the forum link and awaaaaaaay* we go.
The good news is: this means you can talk to each other. Right here! As a part of the Complete Blog Experience! You don’t have to wait for me to get my ‘approve’ finger warmed up every night to release the last 24 hours’ comments to a monitor near you.
The bad news is: for those of you who understand these things, there is no bad news. You can just sit there saying, oh! Great! A forum! We can talk to each other! –Oh, and you can have your avatars back too, which should cheer many of you up. But for those of you who are more like me, who suffer severe and debilitating web cluelessness, I’m afraid you’re going to find the forum initially pretty intimidating. I do. It intimidates the (*&^%$£”!!! out of me, which is one of the reasons we haven’t opened it before now, because I was still hiding under the bed and whimpering. I have finally been driven from this unfortunate position by a lot of impatient moderators and Blogmom, all brandishing bracing advice to the general purport of ‘you’ll get used to it’. Well, yes, I will. It’s my blog. I kind of have to.
I’m worried about you, though. Don’t you touch that ‘close’ button! No, there isn’t anything good on TV tonight! Much better have a first look at the forum and get it over with! Moderators and Blogmom are standing by (depending on your time zone) to poke you out from under the bed with virtual sticks too.
Once we all get used to it, it will be a much better system and more fun too, I promise. As I have said, probably too many times, it never occurred to me, a little over a year ago when I started Days in the Life, that it would develop a community; obviously I was hoping for readers, or there was no reason to do it at all, but I wasn’t expecting so many lively, engaged commenters with things to say. When I was still thinking in terms of readers, this business of ‘approving’ comments for them to go public was a little control freaky, yes, but a perfectly workable way of dealing with breakthrough spam and the occasional troll attempt; and hey, I am a control freak, and it was my blog. It also didn’t occur to me at first that there might be people craz–I mean kind and generous enough to be willing to do something like moderate a Days in the Life forum. And then ajlr gathered the Five Heroines and Playing With Your Food was born; and Maren, who is a kind of Heroine-Plus**, is creating a librarything out of Pollyanna . . . and all of you are posting recipes and book recommendations or there would be no reason for all this heroism. Golly. And it’s become kind of our blog any more. It’s still my name at the top*** but the ‘approving’ system has started feeling kind of ridiculous, while the Occasional Troll Attempt means I didn’t want merely to leave comments open.† What you want is a forum, Blogmom said. I do? I said.
. . . Okay, I lied a little. There’s another reason for a forum, for letting you talk to each other, for the community aspect to have its head. I need to stop answering so many comments. It’s irresistible, answering comments when I have to approve every one, and when, aside from the fact that I Am Robin McKinley Famous Author!!!!!! you’re mostly talking to me because it’s so difficult to talk through me. –And it’s fun. I enjoy writing the entries†† and I enjoy responding to your comments. I have also said at far too regular intervals that I must cut down on the time I spend on the blog . . . and then I don’t. And I still feel guilty about all the comments I don’t answer. The entries themselves are more negotiable, somehow: they’re just me and the thing I do, putting words on a screen, and while I’m expecting to take in a few tucks there too, I don’t feel guilty about it.††† You commenters are people.
But someone asked not too long ago if blog-writing wasn’t cutting in on writing-writing time? And I answered, honestly, ‘not yet’. I’m afraid that’s changed. Since Peter and I got FIRE turned in, since I’ve gone back to PEGASUS . . . PEGASUS looks like running long. I’m into the second draft and it’s bounding enthusiastically forward. ‡ I think I need to spend more time seeing where it wants to take me.
So here we are, on the brink of a forum. I suggest we hold hands and jump. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two . . .
* * *
* Sound of wildly galloping hoofs
** For some reason this makes me think of vitamins. Multi-plus! Now with added antioxidants, omegas 3, 12, and 47, and tiny little hoovering machines for the insides of your arteries!
*** And my absolute right of veto. Don’t fall into the dreadful error of thinking I’ve gone all mellow or anything.
† And let me say about the long dazzling screed of membership rules for the forum, all you have to do is behave like a grown-up. You don’t have to be a grown-up or feel like a grown-up^, but you have to behave like one, which is not the same thing as saying Check Your Sense of Humour at the Door. The Queen of the Penguins is one of my moderators! So is the woman who let her bull terrier read CHALICE!^^ There’s another moderator who posts videos of her ferrets! Silly is good. But from my experience of readers of the web site–especially, perhaps, of Author as Bitch from Hell, or, How to Convince Me I’d Rather Be Cleaning Bathrooms Than Answering Book Mail, who at the moment is in retirement, but she’ll go up on the new web site sooner or later, trust me on this–it’s the people who don’t need to worry who do worry. So if you’re worried, you’re fine. If you’re not worried . . . maybe you’d better read the rules again.
^ I rarely do, despite decades of experience
^^ We have photographic proof
†† Mostly
††† I feel, Yo! McKinley! Learn to write short!
‡ A bit like Connie in her Other Bridle. Ow, my shoulders.
A word from Blogmom: the moderators (aka the mods) and I have been working away at the forum and getting it ready for prime time. Among them, your mods have many years of experience running and participating in online forums, so you’ll be in good hands.
Visit the forum and take a look around. If it looks like fun, go ahead and register. The mods and I are standing by to approve new member registrations so everybody can be up and posting away in no time.
When you register, you can use the same name you’ve used on the blog as your login (username). The login can contain spaces.
And remember, technical questions should come to me, Blogmom. You’ll find my contact info at the bottom of every page. For the nonce, I will also be accepting private messages on the forum if you have any problems.
Errors
If you see any errors on the new site, please send them to Blogmom. Whose address in her alter ego as site master is above. The address appears at the bottom of the ‘contact’ page on the new web site.
Of course there are errors! We’d be DELIGHTED if you’d FIND them and let her correct them! She and I are both totally cross eyed from looking at this text!*
Thanks.
* And I haven’t even told you about how the first thing that happened when it went live is that all the apostrophes in the booklist morphed into question marks. . . .
Blogmom adds: dear helpful readers, please send the link to the page in question and enough context so I can find the error.
