No.  Not quite.  Nearly.  Tomorrow.  I know I said that yesterday.  Well, I’m more caught up than I was yesterday.  It still seems to me going well.  I can risk saying that (I hope) because I know there will be days between now and the rmmph of March when it is not going well, when I am not a writer, I never was a writer, and I’m starting my retraining as a mechanic* in the next uptake.**  Which is to say I know I’m going to be paying for good days whether or not I admit to having them so why not admit it?  See:  wrestling alligators, below. 

Stardancer

I learned how hard it is to make a story. . . . I did learn to take something in the range of horrible/okay and shove it around into okay/pretty okay, even if I didn’t think it was anything I’d want to read. It’s HARD. I’d never realized before how much work it was, even for those gifted people in my classes who did “hear” their stories right off. Drafts and voice and tweaking and word choice and why is that character there again? 

Thank you.  Yes.  It’s HARD.  This is why The Urge to Kill people who offer to split the money with you if they give you their Great Idea and you do the dull stupid labour of writing it up because the idea is the hard part and besides you already have the name and the publishing contacts, is pretty overwhelming.  Fortunately most of these offers come by post/email.  Back in the days when I went to more live things and people used occasionally to offer this blithering asininity to my face civilised restraint was more difficult.

            But.  Yes.  It’s like wrestling alligators.  WHY IS THAT CHARACTER FOLLOWING ME AROUND?  GO AWAY.  YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS STORY.  Er.  Do you?  What have I missed this time?  Writing is also brilliant and fascinating and enormous fun . . . but those alligators bite hard.  And the regeneration of major body parts is tiring and demoralising and takes time, which you probably haven’t got.  

EMoon

It’s downright scary sometimes how much your process is like my process…the whole thing about each character’s voice, each book’s voice, each book’s vocabulary, so sometimes I can’t hear the word I need–none of the first/second/third choice words works in that sentence and I can spend hours digging through dictionaries hoping to find the one right one. The stuff I have to write down (revolving door, uniform, etc.) that has to come out later because who cares, it doesn’t matter only some of the details DO matter and I don’t know which ones until the book’s done or nearly done. 

Scary?  Hmm.  I find it exactly the opposite—this seems to me so obviously the way stories must break into storytellers’ brains, get heard/figured out, get written, that I find it far more unsettling when I hear about some other writer’s entirely different process.  Those people who write out complete outlines—story arcs, what happens in each chapter, characters’ names, descriptions and relationships—people who create files on different aspects of story and characters before they ever settle down to write the story part of the story—that’s scary.   I went through a period when I was a teenager of (mostly) secretly reading everything I could get my hands on on how to write—secretly as one pursues any vice, or any unadmitted longing—and some of the advice clings round me still in cold, sticky, cobwebby sorts of shreds.  I absolutely believe in ‘whatever works’ but . . . brrrr for the file-keepers.

            I mostly don’t write down stuff that will come out later.  I tend to have faith that if I’ve left something out it’ll clamour to get into the next draft.  Certainly stuff does come out, but not usually the revolving door and the doorperson’s uniform.  But I do keep some notes as I go, and sometimes the marginal notes to the notes to the notes (to the notes) get a little cramped.  

* * *

* jaccairn

Also, MOT – I think I remember that yours is due sometime this month, It’s the sort of thing that might slip your mind when you’re so busy. 

Snork.  The things some people’s blog forum members remember.  Thank you.  Yes, Wolfgang is due this month and I’ve already booked him in.^  I hope you’re impressed.  I’m so impressed I can hardly bear myself.  (I think this is the first year I’ve ever remembered before the last minute.)  Now I just have to implore the weather gods to be kind since the remains of the bus system between here and Warm Upford is not worth discussing.  Hellhounds and I can perfectly well walk home one day and walk back the next, but not if we’re having gales and hail and winged monkeys and so on.  Which we’re apparently going to have overnight.  This is all because Peter had planned to go to Oxford tomorrow and have lunch with one of his cousins.  No, no! said the weather gods, shaking themselves out of their long winter slumber, we can’t have promiscuous peregrinations!  Where is that blizzard, we know we put it somewhere!  —It hasn’t got up to freezing the last three days^^ and now we’re supposed to have SNOW.  Ah . . . frell.  Well, my yaktrax have been lonesome so far this winter . . . and snow will certainly keep me at home where I have nothing better to do than work. . . . ^^^ 

^ And he has to pass.  Has to.  In the first place I can’t afford a new car this year.  In the second place . . . I still don’t want a new car.  I want a new car less and less as I hear friends with shiny new cars talking about the way the computers in new cars run their lives.  And go wrong, of course.  You can learn to ignore that little flashing red light on the dashboard after the third time you’ve taken it in and paid £100 to be told there’s nothing wrong.  Not so much the robot voice continuously telling you to fasten your seatbelt/add grinchflobby fluid to the ziggury system/placate the trolls with ham sandwiches. 

^^ And my chocolate cosmos hate being indoors, so they’ll probably frelling croak this year too.  Arrrgh.  Furthermore, my gladiola bulbs arrived today.  Gladiola bulbs are tender.  Mail warehouses are rarely heated.  At least mail warehouses where tender plants are held are rarely heated.  Arrrgh.  Don’t these mail-order bozos ever, you know, listen to the weather forecast?  Hey, guys, we’re supposed to get three foot of snow tomorrow!  Let’s ship all the banana trees!  

^^^ Ajlr

I also wondered what the reaction of the hellhounds had been to the new Amazingly Loud Voice? 

Chaos has always found my singing . . . disturbing.  Darkness has always assumed that it’s just another daft human activity.  It is perhaps hard on hellhounds that both at the mews and the cottage their bed is next to the piano/cheap electric keyboard.  Chaos gets up and moves toward me cautiously, staring at my distorted face for clues.  GO LIE DOWN YOU WRETCHED DOG. 

            I’m more worried about the neighbours.  Do you remember—probably nearly a year ago now—I was fretting about singing at the cottage, where my office, with the keyboard in it, has the common wall with my semi-detached neighbour?  (The keyboard itself, plugged into headphones, is silent.)  The wall is floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, but I can still hear my neighbour climbing the stairs on the other side.  Don’t worry, said Nadia, you don’t make nearly enough noise.

            I think I probably do make enough noise now.  Ah, the disadvantages of success.  I can still sing while I do the washing-up—it’s on the far side from the common wall.  I also sing out hurtling, while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me, and my impression is that people are starting to move to the opposite pavement (I used to think this was just a reaction to rampant hellhounds).  Hey, this probably happens to Deborah Voigt too.   I wish it had any effect on aggressive off lead dogs.     

** The GUARDIAN is running a publicity draw to win a full degree Open University course.  Details tomorrow.  The OU is highly thought of so I, who don’t have nearly enough to do, had an idle look through their course list.  Their language department is terrible.  French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Welsh (Welsh?^) and Latin and (classical) Greek.  That’s it?  

^ Yes, I know, good for them, Celtic languages are struggling for survival, but in the context of only six modern languages offered it seems to me a bit startling.

I have just been figuring out how much of SHADOWS I have to get through every day for the next thirty days.* 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.**    

* * *

* Yes, I know.  It’s already the 2^nd of February and February is a short ratbag to begin with.  But I’ve already told you I’m going to whine for a few days of March because February is indecently short.^  If my editor says ‘no’ I’ll sic Mongo on her.  

^ Ask Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance. 

** In case you’re wondering, yes, this does mean that I failed to reach my quota today.  This is of course Very Bad . . . but it’s also not at all surprising.  Or catastrophic.  (Probably.)  There are advantages to being old, wizened and cronelike in your chosen career:   your standard errors and pitfalls become familiar, as do ways of coping with same, and less blood and hysteria are spilt. 

I don’t know how common this is among the author sorority^ but one of the ways I know a story is ready to be written is that I know the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page, the first scene.  I know where to begin.  Since my experience of writing is more about channelling or translating rather than some kind of pure feat of creation^^, and that the worst of the job is choosing the EXACT words, including what to write about and what to leave out—the famous getting character A from point B to point C problem^^^—being given a run at the obstacle to begin with is one of the ways I manage to wind myself up enough to begin.  The first few pages of the first draft usually go down relatively straightforwardly and, as I work, which is not fast, relatively fast.  Those first few pages of first draft usually feel—no, must feel—like a nice solid base . . . to start going spluuuuurgh smush GAAAAAH on, later.

In fact my first pages often change pretty dramatically over the three drafts.  I get back to the beginning#, having learnt a lot about the story and characters in writing the previous draft, and realise that while the ‘voice’ is there it’s obscured by a lot of fluff and fuddle.##  This awareness, not to say shock, tends to be most dramatic in stories told in first person, as SHADOWS is.  Yeeep, Maggie would never say that.  And then by the time I’ve got the first pages sorted (again) so that the book’s voice sounds as clear as I can get it at present, that draft is that much stronger because the first pages are . . . that much stronger.  There’s a lot leaning on the first pages.  If I haven’t got the first pages, I probably can’t write the book. 

So I’m back at those crucial first pages again now.  And this is the last draft.###  Every frelling word needs to be right.  I’m going to get words wrong because I can only write as well as I can, and I’m only too drearily mortal.  But I need to get about 99% of the words right in the first half dozen pages.  I can slip to 95% later on. 

One of the peculiarities of this business of hearing the story’s voice is recognising it as different from your own.  Well, duh.  But it makes the translation/channelling/word-choice that much hairier, because you can’t just go for saying or describing something the best, whatever ‘best’ may be, you can.  You have to do it with, and within, the story’s voice.  There are times when I CANNOT think of another word for this or that~ that fits in the story’s voice.  I can only think of how to say it in my voice.  Arrrrgh.  (So I highlight it, and keep going.)  And I’ve given myself—or no, I haven’t, the frelling Story Council has given me—a trammel and a trickiness, this book:  first person narrator, seventeen years old, in an alternative-modern world.  (At least she’s a girl.)  What I think of as my semi-forsoothly style, so any of my high-fantasy third-person-narration books, including PEGASUS~~, is the easiest base line for me the struggling scribe—although even semi-forsoothly varies from book to book because no book’s voice is like any other book’s voice.  The bright sharp individual edge of a first person narration is a lot of fun, as is trying, an especially taxing exercise in these alt-mod stories, to ride the frelling slang till it settles down enough I start understanding it—but it also means that great swathes of my own vocabulary and my own way of expressing things are gone.  Speaking of ‘yeeep’.

So.  Anyway.  I’ve done about half my necessary word-count today, but that’s not actually too bad.  I’ve got several pieces of important slang imperfectly heard for two drafts nailed at last.  I tend to ‘hear’ slang the way I ‘hear’ characters’ names, and especially when these are not words or names I know, it can take a lot of repetitions before I finally have what I need~~~. 

Onward.  Tomorrow I will catch up.  By the end of tomorrow I will have accomplished the full page count for day two, as if day one had . . . behaved.  —This sentence originally had the word ‘schedule’ in it but . . . that word and I have a matter/anti-matter relationship and I have a book to write.    

^ Or even fraternity 

^^ I wish.  I’d love to feel that I was in control.+ 

+  Yes.  I would write a sequel to SUNSHINE.  And I would have finished PEG II this year.  No, wait, I would have finished the one volume version two years ago.  No, wait . . . it was an ELEMENTALS AIR short story. . . . 

^^^ NO WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW IF IT’S A REVOLVING DOOR OR WHAT THE DOORPERSON’S UNIFORM LOOKS LIKE OR HOW MANY STEPS THERE ARE ON THE STAIR(S) OR WHAT THE COLOUR OF THE CARPET IS OR HOW MANY DOORS THERE ARE ON THE CORRIDOR OR HOW MANY GOBLINS WAITING IN THE LINEN CUPBOARD.+ 

+ An estimate of the goblins will do.  

# Remember that I tend to write three drafts serially:  first draft, beginning to end.  Second draft, beginning to end.  Third draft, beginning to . . . please the gods, end.  I will go back and make notes or minor changes for consistency mid-draft, but mostly I keep going, and what I absolutely do NOT do is get bogged down rereading and tinkering.  For me this is death and disaster.  The story tells itself to me in flow and motion.  My first priority is to keep it moving.  I will read through the final draft after it’s FINISHED and tinker then. 

## This time around this is reminding me of Nadia saying, at my first lesson, that she can hear what my voice is, and that we’re going to let it out of prison.  The most extraordinary thing about leaving New Arcadia has been the live metaphor of my throat/voice/speaking up for myself—and singing.  Nadia has always been able to get noises out of me I can’t get out of myself, but this week I swear I’m twice as loud as I was a month ago—before the sore throat closed me down.  Twice as loud even when it’s only me reminding myself to relax my tongue and jaw and to let the air all the way in and to engage. 

            Wheeeeee. 

### I hope. 

~ Of course I am also afflicted with Menopause Brain. 

~~ Despite the rabid gremlin infestation of other aspects of PEGASUS. 

~~~ CHARACTERS MUMBLE.  And since I’m mostly a ghost in their world saying ‘would you repeat that please’ doesn’t work.  At best they probably stare at me and wonder what the cold patch in the room is.

YES. 

DONE. 

I just sent the finished second draft of SHADOWS to Merrilee and my editor.  Pressed that email button.  Zap.

            And I’m so tired I could sleep for a week.  Except I’m not going to sleep for a week. *   I am going to take hellhounds on a long country hurtle tomorrow morning, I am going to order some plants for my garden(s) tomorrow afternoon**, and then I am going to go RING BELLS at Forza tomorrow evening.

            And I will start on SHADOWS’ third and final draft on Thursday.  Which I have promised for the end of February.***

            But at this moment I am falling down with tiredness.  †

* * *

 * Well, maybe I can sleep for a week between now and tomorrow morning?  Has anyone figured this out yet?  It’s not quite the thirty-six hour day (or thereabouts) we all want, it’s just a little bulge off to one side about a little extra sleep. . . .  

** The backlog of plant catalogues with corners of pages turned down has become a bit extreme.  Also I have empty space to fill.  There is nothing more beautiful to a gardener than empty space.  

*** But I’ve already begun whining for a few days of March because February is so short. 

† But I bet I could sing just a little before I fell down.

* * *

* I did go to my voice lesson.  I told you yesterday, I’m getting even stranger, bent over my computer twenty hours a day^, and I thought it might even be good for me to go get strung out in a different direction, even if SHADOWS is frelling due frelling tomorrow.^^  Also I only just started singing again last week and—I wanted to go.  It’s been a slightly dubious week in terms of practise—there’s still crud in my throat and all this emotional-aspect stuff makes me kind of jumpy—if you manage to miss with the carving knife you go to A&E, get some stitches and a lecture, come home, mop up the blood, keep the bandage out of the bath, be a little careful of yourself till the stitches come out, and hey voila, there you are.  Another interesting scar.  But when you’re trying to patch yourself together from some kind of immaterial wound, where and how you put the stitches in, and what constitutes the kind of bath you should keep your damaged limb out of—and what exactly the limb is—is not so straightforward.  So I’ve been singing sort of cautiously, and of course I’m wildly out of practise and I have no time.^^^  Also, my voice still keeps disappearing on me—less than it was doing before, but every time it does I’m convinced that this is The End and I’m too old to be reaching for this nonsense anyway.^^^^  Nadia waggled her eyebrows at me in that disbelieving-teacher way and said, now as I remember it we found out last week that the chief reason your voice was dropping out was because you were letting it get cut off from its air supply.  Oh, I said.  Um.

So she made me frelling breathe for a while, and connect, and all that really annoying stuff you shouldn’t NEED to be told over and over and over and over and over and OVER.  But you do, because you’re a moron.  And then she ran me up and down some scales and some exercises and kept reminding me to breathe and to connect, and I could actually feel the air sinking down and lying with this lovely rounded, grounded weightiness at the bottom of my pelvis, and every now and then I also remembered to let it out again, and carry my voice with it.  I had already admitted that occasionally this week when I wasn’t convinced I still couldn’t sing and was therefore producing a self-fulfilling prophesy of squawks and silences, I’d made a few noises that were fuller and freer than what I’m used to . . . and with the teacher-magic she teased them out of me today, and convinced them to bring friends.  I was singing back up at the top of my range again—which I haven’t even tried at home since before I was ill, because I have been too busy feeling fragile, convalescent and overworked—and I was loud—me!  Old no-voice me!— the kind of loud your average local amateur choir would be happy to have yelling from its benches—loud the way I don’t sing, especially at the top end where my brain is busy saying, no, no, wait, we don’t do that.  Nadia stopped me where she did not because my voice was failing, she said, but because my brain was closing me down.

But.  There’s life in the old cow yet.  Mooo.  Yaay.  And I came home again all exhilarated and threw myself into SHADOWS.

^ That leaves two for hurtling hounds and two for sleeping.  Other crucial activities like eating chocolate can be performed coincidently while typing.

^^ Later today.  Shut up.

^^^ And the twenty-fifth hour is for singing practise.

^^^^ I actually raised this with Nadia today.  How big an embarrassing moron am I being, taking voice lessons at nearly-sixty?  For some reason I’ve heard like half a dozen times this last week that sopranos lose their voices really early and it seems sort of fated to be hearing this over and over again when I’m convalescent from the throat infection that had stopped me singing altogether—and ten months off my sixtieth birthday.+  And she said, two things:  there’s no reason you shouldn’t last a good while yet as a choir singer—it’s professional sopranos that fold predictably early because of the colossal demands they put on their voices—and you’re lucky—you’ve got all the alto notes too.  If you need to slip down to sing alto, you can.

::Beams::  Good.  On with the voice lessons, then.

+ And before you answer that, I added, let me say that while this is all contingent on you being willing to teach me, I’ve already figured out that I’m in it for the journey.  Never mind that thirty years ago I’d’ve had no voice to train either, all this trying to bind yourself together in a seamless whole to produce a sound is fascinating, even if the resultant sound is nothing much.

Note that I could die for Mongo Fangirl.*  But if I write another word of SHADOWS right now I will explode into messy little pieces.  And I am going to my singing lesson tomorrow.  And probably bell ringing tomorrow night.**  I’m starting to get all strange and lumpy from being bent over my computer so all-consumingly.*** 

               I have no brain to organise a blog post, but I might be able to blither along a little.  So let’s have a couple more Ask Robins for framework.  Which I may or may not manage to answer sensibly.

I realized during this readthrough that I had been taking for granted that the different ways to be a vampire meant Con is the vegetarian of vampires. Rarely killing, rarely human meals, etc. But this time through, I realized that he made no such statements. Am I reading too far into his beneficence?

Yes.  He’s a vampire.  He’s a proper vampire.  What he doesn’t do is torture people, the way Bo does.  The thing about Con is that he has a genuine sense of honour.  He accepts the obligation accepting help from Sunshine has put him under . . . and then later recognizes that an alliance is the best chance for each of them to survive Bo’s vengeance.   Despite the charge between them being allied with a human woman does not make him happy.  

            What I don’t know, and one of the (many) reasons I’d love to write that missing sequel to SUNSHINE if it ever came through the mail-slot and landed on the door-mat†, is what effect a long-term alliance with Sunshine would slowly wreak upon him.  Because it would.  I have a better idea of what would happen to Sunshine if she continued to hang out with him, although I’m sure there would be surprises in the telling because there always are.††

My question is: Was Pegasus intended from the outset to be a multi-volume story? 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.  Here clearly speaks a reader who does not read the blog.  PEGASUS started life as a short story.  As a story for ELEMENTALS SPIRITS:  AIR.  Waaaaaaah.  

I ask because I have found you notable for avoiding the ubiquitous trilogies, sequels & series that have dominated the fantasy industry since Tolkien.

Nearly all your tales, even if set in Damar, are uniquely fresh, creative & different.  Esp. the new kinds of magic in each, like the weather control in “Water horse” and the honey-based magic in Chalice. 

Whimper.  You know I do hope this doesn’t mean that the second two gliggerfrandanging volumes of frelling PEGASUS are going to be stale, lacking in creativity and over-familiar.†††  And if I live long enough I’d like to write another story or two in both the Water Horse and the CHALICE worlds—among others.  On the one hand I like the way most of my stories have tended to burst out of new holes in the walls between the worlds, but on the other hand . . . I’d quite like to have a chance to consolidate a bit, get some decorating done, put down carpets and put up bookshelves in some of these worlds.  I’m a nest-builder (you should see my house(s)).  I’d like to do some nest-building in my stories.  

I have read Beauty and The Beast 3 times and I am going to read Rose Daughter soon! Since the story of Beauty and the Beast is such an old tale I was wondering where you got your information from, which you used to base your books off of. Reason being I always love to see where a story first came from. I would be thrilled if you could tell me the books or other sources where you got your ideas from. 

This is one of the questions that comes up over and over.§  Beauty and the Beast was my favourite fairy tale when I was a kid, partly because it was the only one readily available to a kid growing up in the 1950s, which was not generally a hotbed of fantasy literature anyway, where the heroine did something besides wring her hands and wait to be rescued by the hero.  If there is an original source for my Beauty and the Beast(s) it’s the Andrew Lang retelling which I read for the first time at about the age of six, and obsessively for years after that, even when I pretty well knew it off by heart.  Since then I’ve read every version of B&B I can lay hands on, but my Beauty and the Beast is a part of me, like an arm or a leg.  Or like the ground a rose-bush is planted in:  I can’t do without it, it nourishes me.  I used to say—truthfully—that I was jealous of readers who ‘went’ to BEAUTY as an escape from boring ordinary life, because by writing the story I’d exorcised the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST in my head.  It grew back.  Then I wrote ROSE DAUGHTER.  This time there wasn’t any nonsense about exorcism.  My Beauty and the Beast is still in the back of my mind or the bottom of my heart, full of roses and romance.  If I’m very, very, very, very, very lucky I may get to write it a third time.  Or a sixth or a sixtieth.  Most of my stories are more or less versions of Beauty and the Beast.  In the afterword to ROSE I say that someone has declared that each author has only one story, it’s how they retell it.  Yes.  Mine is Beauty and the Beast. 

* * *

* mockorange:

I am absolutely adoring all these Mongo snippets. Clearly he is going to steal the whole book.

Thank you.  Adoration is always welcome.  I kind of adore Mongo myself.  And he does keep getting in the way.  I told you the other night that he’d just party-crashed a scene he had been specifically ordered out of.  I am so glad he is not my dog.  But then I don’t need to save the universe, just write about it.

** Yes.  My bells woke me up this morning again.  Sunday mornings are just going to be hard for a while.

*** Stranger.  Lumpier.

† Although right at the moment I have a powerful desire to have a late-life career change to something easier and more suited to someone of my advanced years, like shark-wrestler or cat burglar. 

†† I am going to write ALBION^ one of these days—you know, the not-a-sequel to SUNSHINE, but in the same world—and I’m not quite sure of the timeline.  I’m not sure if the heroine might have heard of Sunshine and we might conceivably get some news of her that way—except it wouldn’t be reliable news, it would be myth and gossip.  But myth and gossip can be pretty cool.  And I’ll take what I can get.^^ 

^ It was next after the SINGLE VOLUME version of PEGASUS, you know.  And I was looking FORWARD to it.  ^%$++@}~#??£”&£”!!!!!!!!!!!!             

^^ If I could impeach the frelling Story Council I so would.

††† Us authors are mostly a pretty neurotic bunch.  Make a note.

§ Julia, wearing her OCD research-librarian hat, found where I’d answered the question about Aerin’s dream and Hetta from Pool in the Desert before:  http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/11/30/further-manifestations-of-creative-reader-baked-goods-ask-robin/

What interests me is (a) it’s exactly the same question (as Julia remarks).  So it has to have come from the same person.  But I delete Ask Robins as I answer them, and furthermore, the one I answered a few days ago is fairly recent—certainly not from 2010.  So, a mystery:  did the person who sent it (since I’ve deleted it this time too I can’t check for clues) miss the answer the first time and resend it, does he/she not read the blog^ or has sodding Outlook found a brilliant new way to persecute me by suddenly coughing up new copies of years-old emails?  Now there’s an awful thought.  (b)  I’ve got a lot crankier in the last year and a bit about Hetta and Aerin’s dream . . . because I’ve had several other people make the same assumption and can’t remember one who has said, erm, actually, that’s not Hetta in Aerin’s dream, is it?  There ought to be one.  As I said in my (cranky) answer the other night, I read stuff wrong in other people’s books all the time.  Life is short, and when you’re reading a story for escape you aren’t paying diamond-laser attention.  Which is as it should be.  But there still ought to be one person who is interested enough in the question also to notice that it’s not Hetta in Aerin’s dream.

            Or possibly I’m just losing my mind.  This is always the best guess concerning any lapses and/or mysteries during the arduous novel-finishing phase, and especially the super-arduous novel-finishing-against-a-ghastly-deadline phase which is the (arduous) novel-finishing phase to be avoided when possible.

^ Oh . . . gods . . . or does my little copy and paste ‘read the blog’ answering email not go out for some reason?

. . . I’d been this really disgustingly sweet, cooperative kid, always worried about everyone else (this got worse after Ran was born.  I am never having kids.  Moms with new babies have no life), which is to say this total dreary little dreep.  What actually started giving me my own personality was when I got old enough to volunteer at the shelter.  It was mostly dogs and cats, but even then there was one parrot (who was totally bonded to Clare, who said, I’m never doing this again), a chameleon (who still runs to the back of his tank and turns blue to go with the walls every time anyone comes into Clare’s office) and three ponies (who had started biting kids at the petting zoo in Electrowest).  Since then there’ve been alpaca and sheep and goats and a crippled bobcat the Big Cat Rescue didn’t have room for and then it bonded with Clare too so they let her keep it.  But I was thrilled at being allowed to shovel dog crap and scrub bowls.  The self-confidence issues of a ten-year-old can be pretty weird.   

            But I was still pretty disgustingly wet, it’s just now I was mostly disgusting about animals.  For example, I wanted a dog.  I’d wanted a dog since I was born, but this was about six months after Dad died, and Mom was still trying to be extra-nice to Ran and me, especially because she was working about twenty-six hours a day and exhausted and cranky when we saw her at all.  So while she gave me the old ‘a dog is a big responsibility’ lecture and reminded me forcefully that she was working twenty-six hours a day and back up from her was a non-option, her heart wasn’t really in it.  I knew who I wanted—and Clare had been saving him for me—so we brought home Mongo (short for mongrel, although really he’s a border collie).  He was about six months old and already crazy, and you can guess that some ordinary family hadn’t been able to cope with a hairy attack squad caroming off the walls and trying to fetch pieces of furniture so somebody would throw them for him.  Mom, even having basically folded on the subject of my dog, was a little leery but Clare said I’d cope, which made me feel better than anything ever had in my life before—at least anything since Dad died.  But Mongo is also really, really happy and cheerful and loving (as well as crazy) and he was totally a good idea and just what we needed. 

            But the point is, he was my dog.  We had him because I wanted a dog.  I had to walk him twice a day and feed him and brush him (way too much fur.  If I’d realised I might have tried to fall in love with something with short hair) and make sure his water bowl was full and all that.  Which in Mongo’s case included a lot of remedial training, starting with SIT.  Sitting to have his lead put on, sitting before he was allowed out the door, sitting before he could jump in the car, sitting before his food bowl was put down—and the accidental swallowing of the hand holding the bowl is not allowed.  Sitting a lot at least made new sort of loops in his caroming and got him used to paying attention to me as something more than dog-food and thrown-stick provider.  Then there was learning no eating sofa cushions or baseboards or shoes or origami figures that happen to fall on the floor—he ate the best dragon I ever made and the fact that Takahiro made me a better one later on doesn’t change anything—and finding a more or less chew-proof dog bed because there are limits.  I thought teaching him the long down was going to kill us both, although I have to say that possibly my attention span wasn’t totally up to it either.

            But I did it.  I did it all.  He barely even ate newspapers or gloves after the first six months with us.  I was the kind of kid who actually did walk the dog every day.  Twice.  Just getting enough exercise was a big thing with Mongo. . . . *** 

* * *

* I think it’s number three 

** See!  Footnotes!  ::waves:: ^

^ Stardancer wrote:

I had to look up “ecphonesis” too. But what I got out of that paragraph was mostly the fact that I kind of want to see a scene now that includes an eggplant and a philosopher

Aaron wrote:

But does a Dining Philosopher* need one or two forks to eat an eggplant?
*Problem

And you would think eating comes into this equation why? 

*** Remember:  this is only second draft.  Mongo may start saving the universe sooner in the final copy.

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. . . .

SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS FRELLING SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS GAH SHADOWS SHADOWS MAGGIE SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS BLEEEEUUUUH SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS I HAVE WRITTEN AT LEAST 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 FRESH NEW SHADOWS SHADOWS WORDS TODAY SHADOWS MORE GAH MORE SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS LOVELY LOVELY MONGO BUT I CAN’T AT PRESENT REMEMBER IF I HAVE ANY MORE SPOILER-FREE MONGO SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SO YOU’LL FORGIVE ME IF THERE IS NO BLOG TONIGHT? THERE MAY BE A FEW MORE BLOG-FREE NIGHTS IN THE NEXT WEEK BUT I’LL TRY TO LOOK OUT MONGO BARS ONE NIGHT SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS JILL SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS VAL SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS A LITTLE KISSING SHADOWS BUT NOT MUCH SHADOWS SHADOWS MAGIC AND TECHNOLOGY AND CRITTERS AND WEIRD SHADOWS CRITTERS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS TAKS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SILVERBUGS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS ORZASKA SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS AND MAGGIE’S MOM GROWS ROSES SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS COBEYS SHAAAAAAAAADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS CASIMIR  SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS SHADOWS THE 31^ST OF FRELLING BLOODY JANUARY IS NEXT TUESDAY HAVE I MENTIONED SHADOWS IS DUE THE END OF JANUARY?  I MEAN HAVE I MENTIONED IT LATELY?  LIKE IN THE LAST 200 WORDS?

Blah erg eh gah erfft groan snivel.  I’m pretty sure I’ve used this title before, although the ‘etc’ may confuse the ’bot waiting to title it ‘extreme-brain-death-1407’ when I turn it into a shortcut to hang as a thread in the forum.*  There get to be a lot of extreme brain death days toward the end of writing a novel, especially when the deadline is beetling down on you and you’re not done yet.  What I haven’t been telling you, because there’s no point, is that I ran aground on SHADOWS with a horrible grinding noise about a week ago.**  This is why I try not to write novels in a hurry, because forcing them along at a pace they don’t want to maintain tends to lead to this kind of thing.  This is what I originally thought had happened with PEG II:  I knew it was going to be long (ahem) and I thought it was just demanding a more leisurely pace, and I could wait it out.  Politely.  *** 

            You can miss signposts if you’re going too fast.  I’ve been going pretty fast on SHADOWS, but mostly it’s been doing the mettlesome-steed thing and galloping along willingly.  With the result that I was pretty far down the wrong byway when I realised that the landscape was going all peculiar.  You may not know the difference between Piddling-on-Slepton and Greater Hatchflummery—they both have village greens and duck ponds—but you can make a good guess about whether you’re in a rainforest or the Riiser-Larsen ice shelf.†  And furthermore while the story is delivered by the Story Council, some slack, not to say grace, is given to the scribe for rootling for vivid details, and I have a fertile little mind.††  I can not only have gone extremely wrong, I can have plucked all kinds of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time-details out of the surrounding dramatic dazzle by the time I realise it should be parrots, not penguins.  Oops.  And of course the blizzard has eradicated my tracks. . . .

            So, not to flog a poor innocent metaphor to death or anything, I’ve been kind of crouched in my tent, pushing earlier details around like checkers on a small travelling checkerboard, and waiting for the wind to die down so I can get my compass out and figure out where I went wrong.  It’s a TOTAL FRELLING BITCH, waiting.  It’s even a total frelling bitch when you’re not staring at a deadline.  But there’s not a lot I can do until the blizzard subsides/the dust settles/the story forgives me for being a dork.  Last few days I haven’t been listening to quantum physics while hurtling†††, I’ve been trying to, as you might say, deplot myself.  Today I finally heard the parrots. . . . 

So let’s have an Ask Robin to celebrate. 

So I’ve been wondering this one for years, and I think I’ve checked everywhere else for the answer. In Hero, after Aerin defeats Agsded, she falls asleep and dreams three different scenes. One is of Hetta from Water and one is Harry, I thought. But the last one is of three men, one of whom we hear is called Tommy and one called Leo. Is that a story that is published somewhere and I missed it, or is it a story not yet written, or is it in a drawer somewhere? 

I would totally swear that I have answered this one, but one of the new tenets of the rejuvenated Ask Robin, a bit like the rather inescapably evolved basic tenet of this blog, is that stuff inevitably comes round more than once. 

            No, that is not Hetta from POOL IN THE DESERT.  Good grief.  Check it out, people, I hear this a little too often.  Even if you can get ‘the white walls around her were so high there seemed to be clouds resting on their heads’ out of a tatty little suburban garden, Hetta’s pool is specifically described as being surrounded by crazy paving, which is not ‘the flat earth around the pool was covered with squares of white stone.’‡  This wouldn’t matter, at least not till I finish writing the story about the girl in the other garden (Hetta doesn’t have long black hair either, but I don’t think that’s mentioned one way or another, since I’m mostly allergic to physical descriptions of my characters), whereupon everyone who’s assumed it’s Hetta is going to be confused.  And I read stuff wrong in other people’s books all the time, and you can’t focus your best brain power on everything‡‡, and I write (and mean to write) curled-up-on-the-sofa, downtime kinds of books.  But I do suggest you check this kind of thing if you’re going to write to the author, you know?

            And yes, that is Harry.

            Leo and Tommy and their companion are from the very first story I started writing about Damar . . . the one I lay aside because I realised it was too big and complicated and probably several books’ worth and I couldn’t cope . . . and wrote BEAUTY instead.  Then when I went back to Damar I decided to start at what you might call an angle, with SWORD, and HERO was always going to follow immediately after SWORD (yes!  It’s a prequel!  I wrote it that way deliberately!).  So Leo and Tommy are now one of the umpty-jillion Third Damar Novels still waiting in a series of beat up paper files and spiral notebooks.‡‡‡  If I live long enough. . . . 

* * *

* Alternatively I could wait till a mod hung the thread for me, and then I wouldn’t have to notice.  

** This is not wholly a bad thing, as it gave me a kind of break in concentration to get my bell tower resignation letter polished up and sent, which had to be done more or less right then.  For all I know bits of my subconscious had been holding high level consultations about this.  Including the bit that was holding my throat hostage and getting increasingly frustrated that I was ignoring the ransom notes.  I feel this situation could have been arranged better but then I would think that, wouldn’t I?  And by the way, about 75% of what Nadia did to me yesterday is still working—I was singing out hurtling today^ for the first time in weeks—and I may even practise tonight before I crash. 

^ I wasn’t singing, however, when I frelling slipped in the frelling mud and fell frelling down squish.  ARRRRRRRGH.  At least I was wearing my raincoat which is old and falling to ruin anyway and I don’t have to worry about how it’s going to wash.  (It probably isn’t.  It is probably going to take this excuse to fall apart.)  My jeans however brought half the frelling landscape home with them.  Hellhounds were bemused.  Usually they like me at their level but not so much when I’m screaming and floundering.  

*** Convulsive shudder.  Not infrequently in the last five months when I’ve been getting mental whiplash at the pace I am trying to make^ I’ve thought that having a story that WANTS TO BE WRITTEN even if it doesn’t want to be written quite this fast is ENTIRELY to be preferred to a story that . . . well, all right, it wasn’t PEG II’s fault I was refusing to listen to the whole ‘another two more books’ business.  Still.  I kind of feel it could have just let me write to the end of II and then stare into the abyss when I got there.  

^ I know, I know, there are lots of authors who write two books a year, and some of them are even good books.  I am not one of those authors.  This is totally trampolining my tiny intellect.+ 

+ OH FOR PITY’S SAKE.  Listening to Late Junction on Radio 3.  Some intellectual# has taken AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells and turned it into a thoughtful piece of drooling ambient nonsense.  Who are you trying to fool here.  Those lyrics are not up to being whispered resonantly into a microphone too close to your mouth.  GAAAAAAAH.## 

# ‘An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.’  —Aldous Huxley  

## Note that BACK IN BLACK is one of my all time favourite albums.  Right up there with the Beverly Sills LA TRAVIATA.  And equally patriarchal tripe in their different ways. 

† Oh, look, there’s a penguin.  Probably not a rainforest then. 

†† Not much intellect.  But lots of imagination. 

††† SINGING is very good for encouraging brisk blood flow through the brain. 

‡ One of the reasons I specified the crazy paving was that I thought I was preventing people from assuming it’s the pool—and the girl—from Aerin’s dream.  Oh well. 

‡‡ I think about this every time I go horribly wrong on a bell method I know perfectly well, possibly because I’ve been working too hard and have No Brain.

‡‡‡ There are some dead floppies^ involved in a few of the Third Damar Novels too, but I print everything out, so it doesn’t matter;  if I picked any of them up now, I’d start a new draft on page one. 

^ Floppy discs.  Remember floppy discs?

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.