Christmas
Yes, I worked on SHADOWS today.* Next question**.
The front door of the mews since last night after dark.
Wreath. Tactful, Peter-placating***, reusable wreath.†
Tree. You will note Large Box to the right.
I admit I didn’t manage to hang every ornament we own on it, but it’s definitely decorated. The important baubles are up. The robins. The horses. The roses. The bells. Some time between yesterday and New Year’s I’ll probably finish getting the tinsel over the lampshades, picture frames, candlesticks, and piano.
Another view of Large.
Yes. It’s Large. Peter said, You wouldn’t buy me a microwave. I said, No, I wouldn’t, and it doesn’t weigh enough, unless they’re now making plastic microwaves in which case I’m not going to buy you one twice.
::LOUD RUSTLING AND RIPPING NOISES::
Highlights:
Gasp!
Yes. It’s true. I bought Peter a Kindle. Now all we have to do is figure out how to use it. Georgiana and Saxon will be here tomorrow: I’m proposing they do it. Hey, I bought it. My job is over.†† But the point is that you can dial up the typeface size, and even with his reading specs Peter finds tiny mass market paperback type size trying.
Oooh! Roses!
Peter bought me a book on roses. How . . . surprising. Okay, so I’ve been eyeing it on line for months. But the gorgeous slipcover is a surprise—as is the fact it’s signed and numbered.
Yes, it's still a thrill when other people sign their books.
I had assumed it was just another drop-dead-glam coffee table book full of glossy pictures but it’s a lot more, well, beautiful than that, and a pleasure to handle as an object and never mind its subject matter.††† It’s smaller and fatter than a coffee table book—like a book you would, ahem, read—and the edges are gilt!—and the pages are matte not shiny, and it’s paintings not photos. You even have a sewn-in bookmark.
La France. Usual historical suspect for first Hybrid Tea. Blah blah blah.
I grew her at the old house. She was a frail heroine, prone to fits of the vapours, and a terrible head-hanger.
The GUARDIAN is always full of helpful suggestions this time of year, and look at what I found only a few days ago on offer at http://www.tattydevine.com/ :
Hee hee hee hee hee hee
I immediately turned to Peter and said, don’t you really want to buy me a Perspex bat necklace? What? he said.
Oh and the large parcel/small coffin/medium-sized old-fashioned maiden aunt?
It's a bin.
No, really, this is a great present. We have terrible bin luck at the mews. This kitchen is where most of the heavy cooking happens, and you want a serious bin with a lid, and you want something that it doesn’t take both hands to open. We’ve had a series of expensive foot-pedal-lid-opening bins which are the joy of our hearts for about six months and then they break. But they’re so expensive you don’t just rush out and replace them. Well, the last (broken) one is over a year old and . . . I saw this in a catalogue (yes, I have some strange tastes in catalogues) and it had all these rave customer reviews and . . . ask me in six months.
. . . And now I seem to be extremely full of turkey and champagne and Christmas pudding and brandy butter and . . . I forget . . . zzzzzzzz . . . .
Hope yours was merry.
* * *
* Not, perhaps, for very long. But on four and a half hours of sleep I’m doing very well. Bells were rung, hellhounds were hurtled, SHADOWS was gently drawn a little closer to being finished . . . oh yes, and it’s Christmas.
For the first time in my life I have a Christmas cactus blooming on Christmas. By garden centre error and mismanagement. On one of those raids last autumn, when I went for a £2.99 replacement spool of green gardening twine and came home with so many plants I could hardly wedge them all in Wolfgang, I bought another Christmas cactus. I need more Christmas cacti like I need . . . uh . . . more rosebushes. At least the roses live outdoors. But this one was a particularly pretty pink with white edges. It was just starting to come out. So I bought it and brought it home.
And all its flower buds immediately fell off. ARRRRRRGH.
Christmas cacti are generally extremely tough so I assumed that it would be fine next year but that this year was going to be a bust. Nope. About a month ago I noticed it was producing little pale tippy knobs . . . a fresh lot of flower buds. Yaaaay. I’m not even going to complain that it’s reverted to the standard pale pink of which I have lots. I have lots because fallen-off or pruned-back branches root really easily.
Stop press! A Christmas cactus blooming on CHRISTMAS!
** And yes, I’ve been singing. But I haven’t touched Dove Sei in three days. I’m singing Christmas carols.
*** ‘I don’t need a wreath.’
† With my eccentric bent for befriending inanimate objects, I find this is another advantage of things like fake, that is, reusable, wreaths and trees. So every year it’s like, hey, how are you, how’s it going?, good to see you again.
†† I told the archangels when they were last here that I’d bought Peter a Kindle for Christmas and it was so sleek and shiny that if he didn’t like it I’d take it over. Raphael and Gabriel exchanged a long look. Robin, said Raphael after a minute, do you really want another piece of technology in your life?
No. And besides, Astarte has Montezuma too.
††† Well, okay. Do mind the subject matter.
Doodle update
Fiona was here today, so the first wodge of auction stuff has finally been shipped out. Everything takes longer than it’s supposed to. The wodge that was posted today was much smaller than it should have been, for a variety of reasons, chief among them that I’m trying to write a novel in five months, and two of them are already over. The irony is that one of the reasons the auction finally went live so late is because I was preoccupied with the final throes of this summer’s PEG II crisis—and then I hurled myself into SHADOWS, needing to believe this was a story and I could write it—and now of course I’m slowly doodling my way through all your lovely bell-supportive orders—while continuing with this madness of trying to finish* SHADOWS by the end of January.** I was telling Fiona that most days I keep thinking I can maybe extrude one more paragraph, one more sentence, and then I will certainly do a stint of doodling . . . and what happens is that I hammer away on story-in-progress to the point of collapse, pirouette through about three doodles, and fall off my chair.***
Roses for ROSE DAUGHTER. Not all the book + doodles are so . . . um . . . um . . . snork.
Also there was a terrible accident with a cup of hot tea about ten days ago which I will leave to your imaginations because it was far too emotionally scarring for me to describe it in all its graphic horror here. Then Darkness frightened me half to death† with the projectile geysering, and as a result this week my general energy level has resembled an underachieving pancake or a badger-gnawed doormat.
But EVERYTHING takes longer than it’s supposed to. I wanted to get the first load of books off today, but the auction is finally forcing me to do something I should have done years ago, which is hire a frelling mail box for a return street address that isn’t where I live and that has business-hours staff who will sign for parcels that require a signature.†† The nearest mail-box-hire is in Zigguraton, which is not ideal, but it could be a lot worse. I examined the web site carefully, and nowhere does it say that they need a blood sample, a retina scan and £400,053.27 collateral. So I sent Fiona in to do it for me, while I kept doodling. Which, when she got back again, is how I found out about the extra requirements. ARRRGH.
Fox. With tail. Tails are IMPORTANT.
Fortunately my bank’s local branch office is a full-service agency so I obtained a blood sample and a retina scan from the clerk, and then I wrote ‘£400,053.27’ on a piece of paper and he stamped it††† with the bank’s seal of authorised fiscal reality‡, and I sent Fiona off again. About half an hour later I received the critical text on Pooka: SUCCESS!
Sleeping dragon. You don't want to be downwind.
Meanwhile, however, the day was mostly over. Fiona has printed off the rest of Blogmom’s batched orders and organised as many of them as I’m likely to get through in the next fortnight, when she comes back again for a Special Auction Put-Through Day, which will include an awful lot of book-packaging, and I will keep doodling. I want to emphasise here that I enjoy the doodling‡‡—including the excuse to doodle—what is turning my eyeballs red and my hair white is the time. I don’t like making all of you wait, although I am making you wait, and the complicated stuff—the doodle-icious books, the knitting, the musical composition—is at the bottom of the pile. I’m sorry. But I am a disorganised scatterbrained‡‡‡ dipstick at best, and I do need to keep eating. . . .
But look at what Fiona brought me:
Hermione the hellbat
Why do I doubt the original pattern called for PINK?
* * *
* Well, ‘finish.’ No way in any of the eleven hells^ am I going to finish finish. But I’m hoping to have it to the final-frantic-yanking phase by the end of January.
^ According to Damarian cosmology
** If I’d been in any shape to think, I should have slammed the auction into action (Blogmom did keep asking me when I was going to provide her with x or y so she could get on with building the thing) as early as possible. But although blaming myself for being a purblind git is one of my favourite leisure-time activities, it’s hard to get around the fact that when you’re in the middle of a book crisis, one of the symptoms of its being a crisis is that you can’t think.
*** I should never attempt to pirouette.
† No, three-quarters
†† Curses! snarl the carrier companies. We’ll have to think of something else!
††† Sucking on his sore finger
‡ Which is at least as reliable as anything else in the in the global financial market these days
‡‡ Although I reserve the right to laugh hysterically at some of the special requests. More about these in future blog posts.
‡‡‡ —brain?
A Keeping My Head Down Day
Today has been mostly head down over the writing desk (or the writing kitchen table, as it may be), looking up occasionally long enough to regret a good gardening afternoon . . . the things I do to get paid.*
Atlas has been hacking back Mme Alfred Carriere who was showing signs of pulling down my semi-detached neighbour’s house wall, and while Phineas is an exceptionally easy-going fellow, I think even he might protest being involuntarily catapulted into my back garden. I wouldn’t like it either: the garden’s small enough already, I don’t want the contents of two bedrooms, a study, a kitchen and a bathroom scattered around** although loose bricks are popular as plant-pot stands. Since I don’t do heights, Atlas is the one who’s been out there with the ladder and the loppers. It’s astonishing how much more light there suddenly is: Mme Alfred is kind of a monster. But the best kind of monster: the kind that produces lots of big fat roses. She needs her autumn feed, as does everything else in this garden and Third House’s. Meanwhile I’ve got the autumn bulb orders arriving any day now—yeep. With less of Mme Alfred shadowing that side I can get more tulips in.
Autumn has kind of snuck up on me*** partly due to the coldest August in seventeen years†† . . . I am not ready for it to be autumn.† I used to like autumn better than I do now; that first crackle of cold meant adventure; it used to feel like the time of year I woke up after the sultry hedonism of summer. But I’m not very interested in adventures any more—or rather the adventures I am interested in are things like learning to ring Cambridge minor or having a high A available during choir practise, and not only erratically after midnight and a glass of champagne on a good day. Back in the days when autumn meant adventure I didn’t have increasing numbers of tender begonias, geraniums, dahlias, cosmos, fuchsias, blah, blerg, blug to try and frelling overwinter. Have I told you I keep thinking about buying a second, extra-small grow-lamp and hanging it over the Winter Table that goes over the hellhound crate at the cottage—? The summer/greenhouse at Third House is starting to get kind of crowded.
* * *
* Yes, in many ways very like what most people do to get paid. I keep telling you writing is not glamorous. It has its brilliant moments, but glamorous?^ No. And I splattered salad dressing on my white shirt today (again).^^ Frelling springy frelling lettuce frelling leaves.
^ A friend was telling me about the book convention she’s just back from and I was thinking yes, I remember why, when I moved over here, I wasn’t particularly sorry to be too expensive to import to most American book cons any more. It’s the same thing in a different medium as book mail: most of the people who want to talk to you about your books are really nice, or at least complimentary, even if both of you are so desperately embarrassed and uncomfortable by the encounter you each run away afterward to hide under the bed. But it’s the skirmishes and confrontations—including the occasional downright scary one—I remember.+
The main drawback, for someone like me, lacking in most public social skills++, is that I have totally lost what habituation I once had+++, and when my poor publisher starts talking about promotion and that of course they’ll pay my travel expenses I’m like, What? Are you kidding? I only so much as cross the Hampshire border with a written permission from Queen Mab. She’s not noted for her good temper either, and I don’t want to press her too far. An extra thimble of Laphroiag is acceptable as a thank-you for allowing me to go to London for the day: I don’t want to imagine what she’d demand for a trip to New York.
+ And the frelling patronising ones. The whole ‘oh, when are you going to write a real book?’ brigade, and its outliers, like the hug from the perfect stranger who says, BEAUTY was such a sweet little story. I want to believe there’s a lot less of that around these days when YA is hot, but thirty years ago . . . especially with this face which thirty years ago looked about sixteen. I looked like someone who might have written a sweet little story. This involuntary circumstance was not good for the development of my attitude toward my public. I’ve told you all this before, haven’t I? Sorry. The unexpected shaping experiences of one’s life are, I find, harder to integrate and forget. —Grrrr. There’s one stranger-hugging woman I could probably still pick out of a police line up . . . but that scrimmage was also when I was still in the early, first-book, I’m a Published Author! phase, and hadn’t started biting people yet~. She probably went away thinking she’d brightened my sweet little life.
~ Yes, Jodi, I’m looking at you. But I don’t think you’re the natural viper that I am.
++ And for anyone who has met me at a con and thought I came off fairly human: thank you. Clearly you made it easy for me.
+++ And gained a sweet little case of ME . . . and more lately, a sweet little couple of majorly flaky hellhounds.
^^ Yes, I should wear a bib or an overall or something. Except that I hate it. It makes me feel like a drooling idiot.+ Of course I’m not thrilled with using spot remover several times a week either. These critical dilemmas of life.
+ If the shoe/bib fits . . .
** Not to mention the potential for highly distressing contact between the ex-hellkitten and the hellhounds.
I think I tweeted about the hellhounds attempting to chase the statue of a cat. I entirely agree it’s a very lifelike statue of a cat but I thought dogs had a highly developed sense of smell?? And yes, I know, sighthounds, but they pick up scent-trails like foxhounds and cruise along with their sterns in the air and their noses to the ground. Maybe there’s a switch buried deep in their medulla oblongatas^ that auto-sets for whichever stimulus comes in first, eyes or nose, and then turns the other one off. But hellhounds have taken this daunting rebuff to the way things are supposed to be—cats are cats, and they run away—very much to heart. Chaos checks that statue now every time we hurtle by—he has grasped that there is something wrong with this cat: it doesn’t run away and, upon closer investigation, it smells funny—but he’s still sure he’s missing something. Darkness keeps an eye on Chaos keeping an eye on the non-cat.
Today we met a cat—a live, breathing, tail-twitching cat—of very much the same colouring and demeanour as the non-cat . . . and the hellhounds didn’t know what to do. Ears and tails went up, and butts sank halfway to the ground in that ready-for-anything posture and . . . nothing happened. I’d already put the brakes on the leads in case anything did happen. But the cat just went on lying there, curling the end of its tail up and down, and the hellhounds went on looking at it, waiting for it to prove that it was not a non-cat . . . and eventually we pottered on, befuddled hellhounds following on a loose lead.
^ Or equivalent. My knowledge of the architecture of the canine brain is nil. +
+ Yes I know I could google it. Tomorrow. If I remember.
*** Not that everything to do with the passage of time isn’t, in my experience, essentially sneaky.
† Ho hum. Like I don’t say this about every season, month, year, week, hour, blog post, bolting hellhound. . . .
†† Which is fine with me. And reminds me that when I first moved over here we used to have English weather, which is to say cold and wet, including in August. Ah, nostalgia.
Rose Dreams
An annually dreaded moment happened today: the arrival of the new David Austin Rose Catalogue. It’s not like I don’t have both his and Peter Beales’ sites favourited*, and it’s not like they’re not both places I go when I’m cross/tired/cranky/frustrated/procrastinating. ** But there’s something about a shiny new paper catalogue. . . .
Ooooh. Aaaaaugh.
This particular rose, the lead-off for this year’s introductions, is called ‘William and Catherine’ (Catherine??). Snork. I may have to give it/her/them a go anyway. Austin is claiming that it/her/them is ‘extremely healthy’ which would be a first in a repeating white rose.
Ooooh. AAAAAAUGH.
I grow St Swithun (on the left) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (on the right). I do not yet grow Teasing Georgia or Snow Goose (in the middle). Yet.
OOOOOOH. AAAAAAAAUGH.
I grow Mortimer Sackler–that’s the flowering pink triffid on the right–in a pot by the front door of the cottage. Apparently I will be in trouble soon. I have noticed she’s a little more exuberant than I was entirely planning for. Oh, I also grow Scepter’d Isle–middle on the left–and Wedgewood, bottom left. And clearly I have to add Maid Marion–top left. I missed her last year somehow. One of the nice things about keeping a list–of, say, roses to be acquired–on your iPhone is that it keeps looking short even when it . . . isn’t.
. . . . But this also brings me nicely to what I’ve been meaning to blog about for several days and things keep intervening.
There are two high-ticket items in the auction. One of them is the personally tailored masterwork by that hitherto little-known composer, Robin McKinley.*** The other one is the limited-edition ROSE DAUGHTER illustrated by Anne Bachelier.
http://www.cfmgallery.com/Anne-Bachelier/Anne-Bachelier-Books/Anne-Bachelier-Rose-Daughter.htm
And before you freak out because you’re not high-end gallery-art collector types—with which I sympathise: keeping oneself in reading books† tends to be quite enough—I wanted to flash a few of the illustrations at you. I think those are all the plates on the CFM site, but I think they look a little bland lined up in rows like that, if you don’t know Bachelier’s work and don’t know that ‘bland’ is approximately the last word applicable. They’re much more fabulous in situ in the book. Bachelier is not to everyone’s taste—but then neither am I, and neither is anyone whose work is genuine and individual—but I adore this book. As an explicit rendering of my ROSE DAUGHTER, no, it’s not, but if you’re asking me it’s not supposed to be. What it is is a magnificent dreamscape of Beauty and the Beast with my ROSE as a jumping-off place—or a jumping on place, where she can bring her vision back and tie the red thread of story to it so all may follow.
Roses. Well of course. It's a slightly shiny, jacquard-y fabric, like expensive bed linen.
Title and facing page. They're all already signed, but Your Name Is Added Here.
First page.
Random gorgeous picture from the middle somewhere.More random gorgeousness.
The glasshouse. (And yes, all the illustrations are tipped in.)
Oh, and yes--ahem!--I own one or two of the originals. (Don't strain your eyes. It's Purcell's Evening Hymn.)
* * *
* http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/Advanced.asp?PageId=1988
http://www.classicroses.co.uk/
** Now joined by Etsy http://www.etsy.com/ and Ravelry http://www.ravelry.com/ , both of which wave cheerfully and say, hi, hellgoddess!, when I go there. Well, ‘Robin’ was already taken when I needed a username. A username I could remember.
*** But four of you are going to club together and commission me to write something for French horn, bodhran and two mezzo-sopranos, right? Fine. Just don’t make me learn to orchestrate.
† And yarn.^
^ A friend has just been yanking my chain about my knitting needle collection. Feh. I’ll do a knitting-needle post some night and you’ll all just crumble away with admiration.+
+ You non-knitters . . . I don’t know . . . you’ll have to go bowling that night or something.
Okay, I knew I was pushing it. WordPress has eaten one of the photos and added its caption to the previous photo. ‘More random gorgeousness’ was another photo. But it’s late and I’m tired and I’m not going to try to re-insert the missing photo, and WordFrellingPress won’t let me cut the superfluous text. At least the formatting is back (I hope): it disappeared the first time I hit the ‘publish’ button.
Rain and Fiona
Fiona has been here today. The minions of entropy and mayhem tremble and, wailing, flee.* She hauled another 1,000,000 books off to Oxfam . . . which leaves me only about 1,000,000 left to deal with. It is fatal to re-sort through books Marked for Dea—I mean, marked to go to the used-books shop where they can find nice new owners who will APPRECIATE them. Siiiigh. However, Fiona had quite enough to drag off to Oxfam today—I don’t want them to lock the door and run away the next time they see her coming. And you don’t know . . . I might have RE-re-sorted the books I re-sorted today and put them back in the Oxfam mountain by the time she comes again next month. I might. And pigs might fly, it might STOP raining, and I might finish PEG XXIV tomorrow. But it’s not very likely. Especially the flying pigs.
Fiona then went on to tackle our backlist. Was there ever a heroine so heroic? She began by carrying an awful lot of it upstairs because I keep not quite getting around to doing this. I will carry a box or two and then remember that my roses need feeding and clearly that needs to be done first.** So while I was resorting*** Fiona was staggering up a lot of stairs.† And hellhounds were lying aggrievedly in a corner of the sitting room where I could quell them with a Hellgoddess Look. This actually works pretty well, it’s just it keeps needing to be reapplied . . . like a sort of high-speed fertilisation plan. I shovel food onto my garden a few times a year. I pin my hellhound with a beady eye a few times a minute. Chaos in particular—Darkness has the occasional impulse toward adulthood††—has the most extraordinary creep. The moment I looked away he was halfway across the floor—still obediently lying down, mind you—merely by stretching out his long hellhound legs and somehow arranging that his body should remanifest at the other end of all those legs—without actually moving at all. While staring at me hypnotically with huge golden eyes.
Hellhounds think that Third House exists to torment them.††† But they were spoilt for choice today in terms of hellhound affliction. It’s been raining so heavily that I think some nasty old git of a rain god has got rain’s gravity designation changed so it literally falls harder. Ow. We’re now working on our third inch of the stuff since someone at headquarters found the ‘on’ button again. So when after our abbreviated morning hurtle I brought them indoors at Third House you could see them trying to decide what to, you know, object to. If they objected too hard to Third House I might make them go outside again.‡
The Original Plan had been that I would meet Fiona at Third House, having already hurtled hounds. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. So, she came to the cottage first. And as we were (finally) collecting ourselves to go up to Third House she said, You know, I think you’re the only person I know who has flowers in their attic.‡‡
It's a total waste of a window NOT to have flowers. And geraniums will grow ANYWHERE.
But Fiona also says that Secret Project #1 doesn’t look nearly as awful as I think it does. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? She’s IMPLICATED. ‡‡‡
* * *
* Do you suppose I could train them to run away at the sound of her name? —If my Training Effectiveness Rating with the hellhounds, those spirits of lawlessness, is any indication . . . No.
** My Tour de Malakoff is flowering nicely. She’s been sitting in a dark shady corner and a pot too small for her for the last three years not because I’m like this, although I am like this, but because Tour de Malakoff is purple http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/showrose.asp?showr=402
and the creature wearing her label, whoever she is, is white. I suspect that whoever she is, she’s going to turn out to be large, and after three years I’m still deciding where I want to put an unscheduled, unknown Large White Thing That Furthermore Only Flowers Once—and am meanwhile stunting her growth by keeping her in a weeny pot. However she gets full points for tenacity since I have tended to forget her in her corner. I finally fed her during the early summer top-up this year . . . and next year she’ll be mugging passers-by on the footpath.
*** Resorting to threats of violence. You, there! Yes, you! You book! Get back in your box or I will re-re-re-sort you!
† I could hear tiny minion cries of frustration and despair in the background.
†† In that idiotic-but-not-entirely-useless dog-years calculator, they’re in their mid-thirties.^
^ Okay, I have known human males who are still pretty silly in their mid-thirties.+
+ I was saying thoughtfully to Fiona about some embarrassing aspect of hellhound behaviour, that I was just very unused to Entire Males, that the hellhounds were pretty much the first time I’d ever dealt long-term with Entire Males. Fiona with a perfectly straight face said calmly, I think Peter might object to that remark.
††† Lie on THOSE BLANKETS? Are you JOKING? Those are the WRONG BLANKETS. We can’t POSSIBLY lie on the WRONG blankets.
‡ One has critters because they’re fun to watch, of course. Jodi has drawn up an inventory of How Being a Writer Is Like Being a Ferret
http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/870815.html
And I was thinking that it’s a lot like being a hellhound too. I have a great creep away from my desk. Zero attention span? Check. Looks to fickle goddesses (whose omniscience I dare to doubt: see: The Away-Desk Creep) to get me out of trouble? Check. Likes to lie on sofa with a good book? Check. And all three of us watch TV. When we get the chance.^
^ It’s quite disconcerting to glance down at two pointy little faces staring straight at the screen with their ears pricked. What are they seeing?
‡‡ And, speaking of my aversion to horror fiction, I’m glad I didn’t know V C Andrews.
‡‡‡ But she’s also bought a pair of rosewood needles AND subscribed to the same evil yarn site that I am in thrall to.^ Mwa hahahahaha. Hellgoddesses always get some of their own back.
^ Which this week is having a sale on the other yarn I’ve been looking at.