Continued caresses
I keep thinking today must be Sunday, because I had a bell rope in my hands early in the day. Of course I had a horse in my hands even earlier in the day, which is a proper Saturday thing.* Speaking of caresses. There’s nothing nicer than a silky horse (except possibly a silky hellhound**). And I’ve realized Connie positively likes having her ears mauled. I think she stands on her head secretly in the field at midnight*** so she can come in in the morning with disgraceful ears. But today I was scrubbing away and discovered that her head, eyelids and bottom lip were all drooping lower . . . and lower . . . I put her away with very clean ears.
Ringing a wedding at my Wednesday tower is weirdly hermetic. At my home tower we have, you know, windows. That you can see out of. And we have them on three sides of the tower, including one that looks inside the church, so you can see what the bride is wearing and whether she was into torturing her bridesmaids. This is very useful; we can see at once when we need to leap to our ropes.† At towers without convenient windows you have to post a scout. At my Wednesday tower the only window is ten feet overhead, which you don’t think about during evening practice, and the scout has rather a way to come, so we’re poised for the sound of feet thundering up the stair. I suppose the locals are used to it but it makes me nervous. I also miss seeing what everybody is wearing.††
However. Enough of the chat. Here’s what you all have been waiting for.††† Elspeth is wasted on the literature-chopping industry. If she has a holiday in England I hope I can at least meet her for a cup of tea so we can fulminate together. Peter can come along if he wants to, but he’s really too mild-mannered to fulminate properly. Maybe it’s an American gene.
Subj: “Caress”
From: Elspeth.Winkle@Pancake.com
To: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
Mr. Dickinson,
Thank you for your kind email! Nothing would please me more than to have a list of no-no words. However, this is an unwritten list and very fickle to say the least.
Each State Department of Education assembles various committees (during the test development period) that will consist of various types of people, cutting across the layers of their populace. Various educational levels, variations in financial status, religion, color and creed. Every single member of the committees has the right to reject words (or complete stories) that are offensive to the individuals and the community which they represent. The final decisions do not always include all the craziness that is suggested, but it does get pretty “funny” some times. One wonders what kind of world these people live in, or have they been around children lately.
As far as the testing industry is concerned
children are never hungry,
they do not get lost or hurt,
they are not exposed to any abuse,
they never fight or are witness to any fights,
they love everyone and everyone loves them,
no one ever passes away,
or is very ill,
there are no floods,
hurricanes,
tornados
or fires…………….ever.
Children also will only be able to concentrate during specific word count numbers, or else.
I am most likely forgetting several other disasters that are not allowed, but I have to stop, because I am getting very depressed thinking of all this bad stuff. There are times where Alzheimer’s comes in handy.
Depending on the state, the passages may be found by teachers, contracted passage finders complying with specific state standards and grade levels, and also by the development team here and at the state level. Between what is available in the public library or can be found on the internet, the world is their oyster.
I hope that this will not prompt you to drink too much wine………or maybe it should. In any case, keep on writing.
Thank you for your understanding!
Best to you!
Elspeth
Elspeth Winkle
Permissions - Intellectual Properties
Pancake Publishing
* * *
* ‘Early’ is of course relative. I did not get to bed ‘early’ last night.
** Yes, yes, and silky cats, ferrets, rabbits–are birds silky? I wouldn’t really have characterized Angel as silky–and various other caressable creatures.
*** Since midnight is early evening to me, I should go have a stroll that way some time,^ and check.
^ Do not take hellhounds, they will see it as a precedent.
† Unless you are on one of the back bells and very gymnastic with it^ you can’t see out the window over the front door while you’re ringing but you can usually hear the tumult of a wedding ebbing away from you, even through the noise of the bells. We have at least one window open pretty much year round: eight people pulling briskly on ropes in a small room, it gets pretty sultry in there. And bell tower windows tend to be first cousins to arrow slits.
^ Which would not be I
†† Note there were a second pair of Converse All Stars ringing the wedding this afternoon.
††† And yes I did ask her if it was all right if I posted her email on my blog.
Clear days on the publishing front . . .
. . . a title I believe I’ve stolen from The New Yorker, which used to publish lovely little bottom-of-column fillers about various insanities of modern life, including publishing life.
The following is an excerpt from Peter’s A BONE FROM A DRY SEA. The novel is two stories: one about an ancient prehistory when humans were, perhaps, first becoming human; and one about a modern archaeological dig that is discovering those early almost-humans’ remains. Each story features one of Peter’s signature scarily intelligent preadolescent girls, who sort out the slow local grown-ups, because the grown-ups are incapable of doing it for themselves. This bit is from the prehistoric story; the tribe has just successfully hunted a shoal of fish with the help of some dolphins.
Read carefully, there will be a test in a minute.*
. . . Twice more the cycle was repeated before the remains of the shoal escaped, scurrying along below the southern crags. As Li stood panting on the rock spit two of the dolphins came cruising through the clear water beside her. All around her lay dead and dying fish. She picked a couple up and flung them out, and the dolphins rose and took them just as they hit the surface. Almost at once the other dolphins arrived and hung below her, waiting expectantly. Ma-ma, Hooa, and Rawi were already harvesting the fish on the other side of the [harbour] entrance. Goor was carrying one up for Presh. The ones this side, Li felt, were rightly the dolphins’ share.
When she had all but cleared the rocks around her she picked up the last two, slid down into the water, and kicked gently toward the dolphins. They backed away, so she waited, treading water, with a fish held in each hand until they became inquisitive and drifted in. Two of them took the fish, but suddenly they backed away again.
Goor had appeared beside her. She made a Be still sign and then they waited, rising to the surface only when they needed air. Li knew the dolphins were still nearby, because of the sounds they made, their wailing whistles and clicks, call and answer, filling the sea around her. Shadowy shapes loomed, neared, took shape, came close, circled until she could stroke the long flanks as they passed, and returned to caress themselves against her body.
Then they swam together, dolphins and people, through the greeny-golden sea world, not in a wild dance full of rush and foam but in a slow, close, gentle weaving of bodies in the friendly water, while the dolphins’ song went on and on, filling the sea like the wavering sunlight. Li understood it to be song because the only sound she knew at all like it was the song of the tribe waking in the morning to greet the returning day.
The dolphins left without a signal, but the song continued in the water, dwindling as it went, until they rounded a headland and it was lost. Li and Goor waited a long while, hoping, but they didn’t come back.
Subj: Pancake permission request
From: MFidgit@FamousWriterAgency.co.uk
To: FamousWriter@thingummy.com
Dear Peter,
I hope you are well. We’ve had a permission request from the publisher Pancake, who would like to include an extract of 792 words from A BONE FROM A DRY SEA on their website http://www.politicalcorrectnessrunmad.com/ and as part of their secured on-line testing through that site. The material would be available for the academic year 2010-2011. We would suggest a fee of US$notnearlyenough. Please do let me know if you’re happy for this to go ahead on these terms.
Best wishes,
Melusine Fidgit
Assistant to the Hon. Fabian Thrib, Famous Writer Agent
Subj: Re: Pancake permission request
From: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
To: MFidgit@FamousWriterAgency.co.uk
Thanks for sending me the extract from BONE that Pancake want. I see that they’ve marked the word “Caress” “edit”. I’d much rather they left it as it is, but if they still want to change it would they please consult me about how they do it. Thanks, PD
Subj: Dickinson permission
From: MFidgit@FamousWriterAgency.co.uk
To: FamousWriter@Thingummy.com
Dear Peter,
Further to your email about the use of the word ‘caress’ in the permission extract, here is the response from the American publisher. How would you like us to respond? We’d be quite happy to insist that they use the word as originally written! But if you’re happy for them to run some suggested compromises past you, then please let me know.
Best wishes,
Melusine
From: Elspeth WinkleTo: Melusine Fidgit
Subject: RE: DICKINSON permission
Melusine,
Thank you for your email. The word “CARESS” is a “no-no word” in the assessment test development world. It cannot be used. I understand Mr. Dickinson and his concerns. However, if that word is not edited out, we will not be able to use the work.
When the passages are presented to our client for passage review, many committees will scrutinize each work, looking for all kinds of potential problems and sensitivities. Since the taxpayers’ money is used, the entire populace must be taken into consideration. That can get pretty ridiculous sometimes, but that is the world in which we are trying to function.
Elspeth
Elspeth Winkle
Permissions - Intellectual Properties
Pancake Publishing
I was grist to a similar mill when HERO was young: after it won the Newbery it came up a lot for textbook excerpts. I was an intransigent brute, however, and refused to let them change ‘witchwoman’–which kept me out of at least one textbook. And, you know, what were they going to change it to? Elf? Gnome? Nice old lady? Peter’s going to let them change caress, but he’s asked if there’s a list of the no no words. Stay tuned.
* But any typos are my typing
Publicity
That’s the good news. Now here’s the bad news. Southdowner, I think it was,* suggested that I tour over here for it, since after all the UK is small, and I said it’s not that small and I have this little hellhound digestive issue that keeps me on a short leash, but that I could come up to London for half a day if she wanted to harass my publisher into setting it up. And she** wrote back and said to get her an address to direct her harassment at.
I wrote to my editor who said she’d look into it. And this is what I got back:
info@transworld-publishers.co.uk
Any request will automatically get forwarded to the publicity department.
This is not hopeful. What we wanted was a name and preferably a title, like Minor Marketing Gnome in Charge of Dubious Projects. So if all three and a half of you British readers out there want to make a dent, I’m afraid you’ll have to get organised as well as strident. One or two polite emails isn’t going to wake anybody up, let alone grab their attention. I have no idea how many emails and how many signatures you’d need–anybody out there know more about this than I do?–but, you know, more than several. And don’t worry, I’m more than happy not to come up to London to do a signing where the only two people who show up are the two people who wrote all those emails/letters on all those different computers/from different e-addresses. Well, no, if it’s southdowner it will be one person and a dog. ***
* * *
* One of you unnervingly frisky types
** friskily
*** Or possibly eleven dogs.
Voyeur
It’s a good thing I looked at my diary this morning because tonight was Penelope’s* writing group night. She’d asked me weeks ago if I’d come talk to her group about being a professional writer and I said certainly, wrote it down, fortunately, and then forgot. So I scrambled around this afternoon finding props–Editions through the Ages kind of thing, and sample page proofs, copyedited ms, galleys, etc, much hampered by the fact that most of this is in taped-up, erratically labelled boxes in the attic at Third House. My Editions through the Ages of BEAUTY is not the same without the (French) edition of the naked girl covered in blue feathers or the (American) mass market edition of the simpering little git with the pink horns growing out of her head–most of which I left in the car, but it’s reassuring to know you have a back up plan if no one wants to talk to you.
Turns out they start their evenings with a Writing Exercise. Gods. What an unnatural concept. However, I am always up for a new adventure.** This is what you might call the extrapolated version of what I wrote:
So I’m supposed to be doing a writing EXERCISE. For the first time in forty years or so. I can probably think of other things I’d rather be doing for the first time in forty years.*** I drop out of creative writing groups. The group part is fine† but the creative writing part is . . . unh. I’ve never taken direction well. And I’ve elsewhere compared my writing process to trying to stay on a runaway horse while taking notes on the scenery.
They gave me the Writer’s Block–which I’d given Penelope a year or so ago when she had hit a creative rough patch–which is a tiny square block of a book with an illustration and a bit of text on every two-page spread. Thus we will choose our exercise topic. Open at random and . . . I opened to a man with binoculars and the word ‘voyeur’. So, who is voyeuring whom? I can do the public thing when required, but it’s easier when I don’t know anybody–and can feel relatively secure in not ever meeting any of them in the street tomorrow or next week, since I live several hundred to several thousand miles away††–when the veneer of someone else, someone not me, some public author figure, can be allowed to be complete. So they are voyeuring me, although I’m here voluntarily.
But I’m voyeuring them too, because I’m going to go home and get a blog entry out of it.††† I’m a good girl, however, so the only person I’ll be rude about is me‡. But I had it half thought out before I came: Outside View of Famous Writer (as I was rather unnervingly greeted at the door) Robin McKinley: Needs a haircut. Has eczema on her chin‡‡ and tea stains on her teeth and she should clean her fingernails after she’s been gardening.‡‡‡ And what’s that funny smell?
Oh. Well, the sterilised chickensh*t purveyors were supposed to ring me before they delivered ten bags of variously smelly plant nutritional substances, and they didn’t. I can’t leave the stuff in the driveway–they may be sterilised but golly do they pong–because I prefer to stay on good terms with my neighbours. But as a result I can’t wear my Chapter Seventeen t shirt till it has been divested of its chicken connection, and I put it on for the writing group. Thus reality impinges on literature, as it so often does.
I think it went okay. The everyday ‘I’ tends to hide under the bed while the extrovert personality construct does her schtick. Most of the questions were pretty normal§ but there were a few nonplussers. A few people admitted to having looked me up on the web before this meeting, but the only one of my books I was asked about was BLACK BEAUTY. Yes, I did a hatchet job on Anna Sewall§§ many years ago so it could be beautifully illustrated by Susan Jeffers, and as a picture book intro for the littlest pony clubbers I think it works just fine, and I hope they all grew up to read the original. But it’s been out of print for yonks and it’s not exactly a seminal work. Someone else said he’d been reading my blog and I was so angry about everything. Uh? I am? I certainly do anger and I’m aware I do it rather liberally but as the thing to single out of this blog . . . well, that was a nonplusser.
And one poor woman asked me what was the best book I’d read in the last six months and of course my mind went blank instantly. And then I said, no, I know! Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK and it’s not available till the end of October! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!
* * *
* And to anyone who was there, and is only reading this to see what I’m going to say about all of you^, yes, Penelope. Everyone on this blog but Peter and me has an alias. Which is also why I’m not going to say anything about you. The only person’s privacy I’m allowed to invade is my own. Peter also allows certain incursions.
^ Hint: nothing.
** No I’m not! What am I saying!
*** Reading LORD OF THE RINGS for the first time. Although that’s forty-five years.
† Sometimes. Which is another tale for another day. With the names changed to protect the ugly evil ratbags.
†† I do try not to take advantage of this
††† Yes I did have to read mine out, like everyone else, and at this point everyone laughed
‡ In the original I add: especially if I have to read my writing exercise to the group–then I’ll really be polite
‡‡ Which is worse from having eaten cheese last night, idiot woman, what was she thinking? She was thinking, that’s a very nice piece of Brie that my idiot husband bought for my friend’s visit last weekend and then forgot to make her take away with her and it’s a pity to waste it. What were cheese-eating neighbours invented for? Good grief.
‡‡‡ I spend my life cleaning my fingernails. I think I have little tiny Dirt Magnets embedded on the tips of my fingers.
§ Including one that I’d better start getting used to: Why do you write a blog?
§§ Except for a few connective ‘buts’ and ‘ands’ they’re all her words. There are just a lot fewer of them.
Shoes
Tuesdays are usually good days. I have my riding lesson on Tuesdays.* Today I had to go to the dentist.**
It took three stabs to render me sufficiently numb, which means that now it’s worn off again my jaw feels like it was broken like a potato chip/crisp and then stapled together, supposing you can use staples on a potato chip/crisp, and after only the first jab I found the top of my head lifting off and the rest of me juddering like a sapling in a tornado.*** I feel very odd, I said, hanging on to the chair to keep from falling out of it, I feel as if I’m having a . . . like an adrenaline attack.
Oh yes, said the dentist blandly. That happens sometimes.
!!!!!??!???!??!?!????????!!!!!!!!?
There’s adrenaline in the anaesthetic, he went on, to constrict the blood vessels, so the anaesthetic lasts longer. Occasionally a little of it leaks directly into a blood vessel during the injection, and then this may happen.
So then we had to wait for it to wear off before he could get on with the show.
I was in there for the relatively nontraumatic-in-terms-of-physical-pain matter of having the three crowns put on the three teeth he disassembled last time†. So he banged and hammered and pulled stuff off and put stuff on for a while and then he said . . .
These crowns just aren’t good enough. I’m going to send them back to the lab.
SO WE HAVE TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN! AND IT’S WORSE THAN THAT, BECAUSE HE’S GOING TO REDO THE MOULDS AND BLAH AND WHATEVER TOO! So rather than coming out today having something finished, I’ve just regressed two appointments. In a game of Snakes and Ladders I’ve hit a snake. And they can’t fit me in till the end of September. The second appointment is the beginning of October. And I was already demoralised†† by his having run through the options for the next piece of major reconstruction (similar in scope and expense to restoring Windsor Castle after the fire) while we were waiting for the adrenaline to wear off.
So I rushed wailing out onto the street and . . . bought shoes. Of course. Anyone would. It’s not quite that bad. No, it’s worse. But, I mean, buying shoes. Peter came into town with me, and we were going to meet back at the car after my appointment, long enough for me to run a quick errand. The errand in question was to go to the Surprisingly Comfortable without Being Small-Child-Scaringly Ugly Shoes Shop, and look for sandals, which should be on sale by now. This is a perfectly legitimate errand. The problem is that they were having a major end of season Everything Must Go sale and about 90% of it was in my size.††† Well, at least I did get the sandals. I was also twenty minutes late back to the car. I said, I prostrate myself grovellingly at your feet. Peter said, No, no, I knew this would happen, I brought something to read.
We could now take bets that I’ll finally get around to the organised-and-thoughtful tomorrow.
^^ Do you remember the pigeon?
** But I barely got my book out of my knapsack before he came bounding down the stairs for me. This was after the receptionist said with awful emphasis, He’ll only be two or three minutes!
*** Or a chucklehead after her third mug of tea. Well, I don’t always count very well. My mind is on other things.
† And kept me waiting forty minutes and then charged me £1,000,000. The forty minutes is true. The £1,000,000 is slightly exaggerated, but it’s all relative. Relative to my bank account, it was £1,000,000.
†† Well that’s a non sequitur. I’m demoralised automatically, walking across his threshold.
††† This happens to me kind of a lot. The rest of me is small enough that there are often really interesting things on the sale rack in my size^, and my feet are enormous, so there are quite often shoes in my size too. Oh, sob, poooor me, such torture. Trying not to buy everything! Ak! Agony! Affliction!
^ See: Best Hot Frock