Signing. Survived.
I AM SPECTACULARLY OFF LINE. SPECTACULARLY. I CRASHED AND BURNED WITH DAZZLING, NAY, EPIC GRANDEUR LAST NIGHT, AT BOTH THE MEWS AND THE COTTAGE, WHEN I TRIED TO POST WHAT FOLLOWS HERE NOW, AND I CAN’T GET BACK ON. THIS COMES TO YOU BY WAY OF A FRIEND’S MOBILE TOGGLE, AND WHEN I’VE POSTED THIS I WILL DISAPPEAR FOREV . . . I MEAN, UNTIL COMPUTER MEN CAN COME AND SORT ME OUT WHICH, SINCE THIS IS A FRIDAY, BECAUSE ALL DISASTERS HAPPEN ON FRIDAYS, MAY NOT BE TILL NEXT WEEK.~ HAVE A NICE SOMETHING OR OTHER. GAAAAAAH.
OH FRELL’S BELLS. You’re going to have to wait at least till tomorrow for some photos, I’m afraid. Cathy R took lots, as per my request, and she’s even loaned me her camera’s memory card and . . . it won’t fit in my computer. I thought I had an extra super-sized slot*, but . . . no. And Mrs Redboots, while eight of us were sitting around at the café afterward waiting for our food,** emailed me the ones she took, but Outlook has managed to lose them.***
So. There was a signing. I think it went pretty well. The nice man at the shop was smiling when we left, but that could of course be because we were leaving.
There were no bats last night either, and I’m pretty sure there really weren’t, because I was sleeping badly enough that I’d’ve noticed if there were.† Got out of bed finally in a weary, resigned sort of way and stared owlishly at the heap of pink leotard, lacy blouse, black leather mini, sparkly silver tights and sequinned leopard print All Stars.
It was sheeting rain. Okay, that’s fine, it means I don’t have to worry about watering my pots, and it may mean I get to sleep tonight due to the signing being over plus a continued absence of bats.††
Hurtled hellhounds.
Put on the pink leotard, lacy blouse, black leather mini, sparkly silver tights††† and sequinned leopard print All Stars.
It stopped raining. Perhaps this was a good omen.
I went to train station.
Got on train.‡
Knitted, somewhat frantically, all the way to Waterloo. Golly, the blood-pressure headaches and tension stomachaches I might have avoided, all those early years when I did do a certain amount of business travelling, if I had discovered knitting. It’s not like it makes all the anxiety go away, but it is like managing to run just fast enough to stay ahead of the ravening monster chasing you. Or like sometimes, when you’ve taken a painkiller, and it’s worked, but you can still feel the thing with teeth trying to get in and bite you: the drugs can hold it off but can’t make it go away. Knitting on the way to a public author thing is a bit like that.‡‡ And in this case frelling PEG II has been messing with my head again, and so I was thinking irritably about the amount of ratbaggery I’m putting up with over this thing-I-said-I’d-never-do, a more-than-one-book story, as I was on my way to sign copies of its elder sibling. . . .
* * *
There are dramas unfolding even now, after I’m home again. First I found out I wasn’t going to be able to get at Cathy R’s photos, and then I discovered that Mrs Redboots’ took a left turn when they should have taken a right and are now in Heilongjiang Province. I emailed Vikki K, who has a slight parallel tendency not to go to bed early, and she promised to email her photos. This was going swimmingly . . . always a bad sign . . . when the last few photos refused to open. Oh, frell, I said, and was about to email Vikki again and ask if she could resend, when I had a sudden attack of paranoia . . . at which point I discovered that the earlier ones, which had been opening, weren’t opening any more.
None of the photos that Vikki had just saved my day/night/blog post/credibility with by sending tonight was now available.
And then I crashed off line.
And I have spent the last hour trying to get back on line again, and screaming.‡‡‡ My computer is performing acts of aggravated iniquity I have never seen before.
And I’m now writing this wondering if I’m going to manage to post anything tonight. There will be a nice irony in the night of my signing being the one I bomb off the air, right? You’ll all think we all went out and got spectacularly drunk and danced on tables and were chased through the streets by the Met’s finest and then reeled home so late I barely made it to my piano lesson.§ Unfortunately . . .
So I’m now going back to the cottage, and I’m going to try to sign on there, and . . . And then I’m going to bed. Some day I will finish telling you about the signing. Some day there will even be photos. . . .
* * *
~ It might amuse you to know that my first thought, as I reeled from the overwhelming implications of being off line, was, well, I have lots to read. Oh, and knit.
* In fact I remember it. It’s directly under the smaller one. Clearly on some other computer. Possibly in some other life.
** And waiting . . . and waiting . . . and
*** I can hear that crackling static that passes for its laughter.^
^ And that was before everything else went wrong. Predictive crackly laughter. Arrrgh.
† I dreamt, among other things, about the Muddlehamptons’ concert^. I dreamed that they were actually putting on CARMEN, and that I was singing Carmen. I have a really mean subconscious. Really mean.
^ Which, it now being after midnight, is TOMORROW.
†† Tomorrow night, of course, I’ll be awake from worrying about the frelling concert. If I wake up Saturday morning humming the Habanera I may run away.
††† I had forgotten how ITCHY the flaming things are. It is one of the great failures of modern science, that they appear not to have yet developed a non-itchy sparkly fibre.
‡ With ticket helpful Penguin minder had preordered and sent to me. How’s that for efficient minding. And the train was on time. Penguin apparently also has pull with the travel gods.
‡‡ One thing that can be said in favour of doing public things a little oftener than I do is that then they’re less eeep-making. A bit like ringing quarter peals. A quarter peal feels like a harrowing major event. Then if you do a few in a row it’s like, oh, a quarter peal. I can do that.
‡‡‡ What a good thing I’m not singing Carmen tomorrow.
§ At 3 pm.
Return of Ask Robin
In honour of the fact that PEG II has not been kicking me in the head for about a week now*, which is to say for a change, I thought I’d revert (briefly) to admitting that I am, in fact, a writer, and not only a hurtler of hellhounds, a multi-piercings veteran of life with roses**, a maker of strange noises that might under careful laboratory conditions be counted (dubiously) as musical, a wrangler of bells*** (various), and a reader of other people’s books. No, it’s true, I write books. Sometimes I even answer questions about the process.
So I thought I’d give you an Ask Robin.
The whole rattling-on-about-myself thing is tricky to negotiate even when I’m yacketing about stuff that has only just happened: how many times can even a daily-blog audience be expected to bear the news that the hellhounds aren’t eating again? Or that they’re keeping me home suddenly and inconveniently . . . the way they usually (suddenly and inconveniently) keep me home? But at least by declaring it (almost) a DAILY BLOG it’s both warning and guideline. Writer stuff is much harder—at least for me. Writing is about going somewhere else. The best I can explain it is by saying, read the book I wrote about/from that somewhere else. That’s the best I can tell you. Why would I want to tell you the less-best?
But, because people do keep asking, and keep asking even when I’ve been over this writer-ground before, here are a few of today’s thoughts about some of the standard writer-type questions from someone who clearly has too much time on her hands.
What do you consider your writing strengths? Weaknesses?
If I stopped to think in those terms I’d cripple myself. I’m one of your less secure and self-valuing writers, you know? The stuff that’s good is good because Story took me over more rather than less. The stuff that isn’t good isn’t good either because Story had an absent-minded moment and loosened its grip or because it hit one of the places in the McKinley Channelling System so squashy that it fell over, like a Lamborghini hitting the Honey Island Swamp.
Have you ever written a scene and thought, “By gods, this is utter crap!”? What do you do then? (ie, tear it out, crumple it into a ball . . . only to rescue it hours later and smooth it out, reread it, and think, “Well, it’s not THAT bad.” …..)
I try to stay out of it as much as possible. I write whatever it is I am given to write the best I can and keep going. If I stop for value judgements . . . see previous answer. Keep going, keep going, keep going! When I hit a spot I know is swampy on the next draft I try to pay as little attention as possible to the dreck on the page, and as much attention as possible to the STORY which will tell me what I need to do if I can only hear it clearly enough. This is also why I am a nightmare to edit. Stop confusing me! I’m trying to listen to the Story!
How often do you edit your own work in progress? Do you start from a basic outline and go from there, or just have a general idea of a plot, plop it down onto paper, and then let it take shape? When do you reread your own stuff… in the middle, when it’s ready to go to the editor, or constantly?
I mostly slog through it draft by draft from the beginning to the end and then over again till I can feel it coming together . . . in spite of me. See previous answers. I cannot afford to get bogged down in my own shortcomings. It’s not about me, it’s about THE STORY. My responsibility is wholly and totally to THE STORY. Wasting time calling myself names is just . . . wasting time. And I know my own tendency to think that I am The Worst Person Who Ever Did X. I am the worst bell ringer in the history of bell ringing! I am about to become the worst choir member the Muddlehamptons have ever imagined! And I am DEFINITELY the worst knitter who ever lived!!! My great gift is, I finally realised, embarrassingly not all that long ago, obstinacy. I’ve talked about this before. Obstinacy keeps you going. Nurture it. Appreciate it. Granted I may need it more than some. But when my head is full of voices shrieking invective, I turn my metaphorical coat collar up against the really nasty weather, and trudge on.
Where do you keep your notes (if you have any)?
When I still wrote first drafts on yellow legal pads I used to write in the margins. I now mostly write notes when I think of them in the body of the manuscript on the computer screen—in another colour. Usually pink, if you’re asking. Ahem. If they have to do with what is going on right now, in that scene, I just write them and keep going. If they are about some other part of the story I’ll leave blank spaces on either side of the (pink) note. What I do not do is try to find where they do go. I’ll pick that up on the next draft.
What does your writing space (if you have one) look like?
I’m a nest-builder. I dare say I was born like this, but it was definitely aggravated by being a military brat and moving on every year or two when I was a kid. The perhaps somewhat peculiar result of this is that while I always have an official writing space I’m conscious that I can write anywhere. At present while my licensed (not to say authoritative) office is at the cottage, and it’s full of favourite books and journals and pictures and bristling bulletin boards and little noodgy things and bits of paper with quotations on them taped to what wall space is left (not very much) . . . I can and do write anywhere. It’s all about Story, you know? The rest is just vanity—or part of my life as a human being rather than a channeller of Story. Because of the weird business of Peter and me living in different houses, at the moment I do a lot of my writing on Peter’s kitchen table. I almost always write the blog here. I’m here/there now. Finishing a glass of (fake) champagne, and preparing to go back to the cottage for a nice hot bath and the reading of someone else’s book.
* * *
* Although I’m not necessarily enjoying the tenor of its blandishments either, but that’s another blog for another day.
** It’s like this if you’re going to cohabit with alien species. There are inevitably scars. Now ask me about bats.
*** Indeed tonight’s expansive attitude is also in honour of the fact that in the absence of the treacherous Niall^ I was in charge of bell practise tonight^^, and no lives were lost. There were maybe a few nicks in some auras, mainly mine, but hey. Peter made mayonnaise to comfort me. Life is good.^^^
^ Ringing masters aren’t allowed to go on holidays. Didn’t he read the by-laws?
^^ ARRRRGH
^^^ Especially because I am getting out of the next tower reps’ meeting. Tower secretaries are automatically tower representatives too, unless they tell off some other poor flunkey to do it. That would be me at New Arcadia. I went last winter, I had thought I’d put myself on the email list for future meetings, and assumed (grimly) that I was now permanently for it. I knew there was supposed to be another meeting around here some time soon so I finally asked the district secretary. No, he said, Vicky is still tower rep of record, and I understand that Roger is her representative. —I blinked once or twice because Vicky is usually the rather terrifying model of organisation, and it was funny she hadn’t said anything to me. But she’s had one or two other traumas going on recently so I guessed this had just slipped into the shadows. No big. But tonight at practise I was puzzled by the note on the board in Vicky’s handwriting asking if I was going to the meeting. So when Vicky looked in briefly on her way from trauma one to trauma two, I said, Aglovale says that Roger is going to the tower reps’ meeting for you?
He is? said Vicky, looking nonplussed.
Roger, pulling on a bell rope at the time, faltered, and said, I’m what?
Going to the tower reps’ meeting, I said, helpfully.
I am? said Roger.
You are, I said. The district secretary says so.
Mwa ha ha ha ha ha.
Listen up
http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/867771.html
Please note you only have till TOMORROW to get yours in.*
I so totally want a pair of those mitts.** Cables. The only way I’m ever going to get cables is if someone else knits them.***
So. Ahem.
Um. Mask. I may have got the 'mask' thing a little bit wrong.
Helmet is good though. Isn't helmet good?
It's a sort of helmet mask. Sure, that works. I'm sure that works.
* * *
* Yes, I am a careless slob, and I haven’t been paying attention. But Mean Jodi didn’t send me the link till this morning. And look at the date! She only posted it at all yesterday!
**So why am I TELLING you about this and LOWERING my chances?? Well, she does say that if she gets over a hundred entries she’ll give away a SECOND PAIR. And trying to figure out some kind of sliding odds thing about over and under a hundred entries and a second pair of mitts^ makes my poor PEG-fagged brain ache.^^
^ Which, you know, might be PINK. WITH CABLES.
^^ I hate battles. Hate, hate, hate. I’m going back to fairy tales after this. Or possibly I’m going to reinvent myself as a florist.#
# And if any slightly less than totally sane person is looking really closely at these photos you may notice shadow-stripes on the helmet-mask. Yes. I am making use of second sides of early draft pages of frelling PEG II.
*** I’m in one of those beginner stages where the skill in question, in this case knitting, is EVIL. Soft sweet cuddly pretty friendly cooperative adaptable tolerant forgiving yarn?? Don’t you believe it. Yarn is evil. Yarn is out to get you. Well, it’s out to get me anyway.
Being a girl
I was thinking about this this morning—about being a girl—because I pulled a few forum comments about it out last night, and then went off in some other direction in last night’s blog, as I am wont to do. But this morning I was thinking about it as I stared at the cardigan I was planning on wearing, which has a lot of different colours in it*, and deciding which t-shirt—a nice, pretty, girlie t-shirt—would look best under it, the blue? the turquoise? the orange? the yellow?** I settled on the blue, but with the orange coral bead necklace. All of this matters to me, you see. And it matters whether anyone is going to see me but Peter*** and the hellhounds or not; I dress for me. Although dressing for me includes that I waste enough time on articles of clothing, which are frequently as possessed by demons as technology ever is†, so I’m damned if I’m going to tangle with make up too, so I don’t††, and that from the waist down I’m always in jeans or a jeans-equivalent because of the whole hellhounds/gardening/outdoor/messy thing. I love skirts, especially big full swirly ones, but trousers are easier. And All Stars, of course. I’m what you might call a practical girlie girl. Still . . . girlie. This was one of my shattering moments of late, reluctant self-acceptance . . . oh, in my late thirties somewhere. I’M A GIRL! GET USED TO IT!
These are all from Silly Day, Part the First . . . and this first one’s not about girlyness at all, but forgive me for succumbing to the temptation . . .
Catlady
. . . My favorite Diana Wynne Jones book is probably The Dark Lord of Derkholm
Which is dedicated to MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Just by the way. Although anyone with the first American ed won’t have it. The British does. I’ve posted a photo of the dedication page of—I think it’s the Finnish—edition, haven’t I? For some reason it amuses me immoderately.
boddhi_d
I spent most of my adolescence & early adulthood struggling with ‘femininity.’ I have wider-than usual shoulders & ribcage, so no matter what I weighed, I always felt ‘sturdy’ – more like a football player than a cheerleader. Then add to that a number of ‘masculine’ traits (good at math & science; never wore make-up; independent; read sf & mystery novels; shopping for clothes was a chore) – there were times when I questioned my gender.
I’m certainly with you on the struggle, but my angle, somewhat curiously, has been rather different than most of you who posted about yours. I prided myself on being a tomboy but I was also quite a bit girlier a girl than I was at all happy about. I’ve always loved clothes and jewellery and dressing up—as above—even if I’ve learnt a compromise that allows me to be in gardening-and-hurtling jeans too—and I’ve always loved cooking; I was about eleven when I started spending Saturday mornings making pies while I watched the cartoons. And while I failed on the knitting front the first time, I did an awful lot of embroidery, and enjoyed it too. But I wanted to be a boy. Oh, gods and glory, did I ever want to be a boy. I knew I wasn’t one—this has nothing to do with questions of transgender—I was a girl, that low, despicable, nearly useless thing. I grew up in an old-fashioned military family and I’m telling you, girls were nothing. Girls were less than nothing. And of course—as I’ve written elsewhere—all the best books were about boys having adventures and girls staying at home. (As I’ve written elsewhere: one of the places THE BLUE SWORD comes blazing from is THE SHEIK by EM Hull, where a girl dares to have adventures . . . and is kidnapped by a sheik and raped, which is to say punished and broken until she likes it, because, after all, she’s a girl, and it is not for girls to go out and do things . . . and then it’s okay after all because he’s really a scion of a fine old English family. This is an English novel, you know, with a nice English heroine. INSERT THE EXTREMES OF BAD LANGUAGE HERE. And it was a gigantico-gazilliono-monstero best seller in its day.)
In hindsight I wonder how much my extreme allergy to (most) science and (most) maths was learnt rather than innate; by the time I got to school I already knew that I was a girl and doomed. Peter, by the way, thinks there’s nothing wrong with my maths brains, only with my attitude.
Emoon
I came to hate the term “feminine” because it always seemed to mean someone else. I have two X chromosomes, never wanted to “be” a boy, but was always drawn to “traditionally” more male interests–outdoors (YES!), active (YES!), science (YES!), etc. I like the colors men are supposed to like (dark or intense colors) rather than pastels most of the time. It took decades to believe that since I am, in fact, female…what I am is female ENOUGH.
Which is interesting, because you’re my age, so I can’t just blame it on my era. But then your mum was a single mum, I think? And an engineer. Mine was a housewife. I was raised to believe that a woman should have a college degree in case her husband died and she had to go to work to support her children. I’m not joking.
I felt too female in the wrong ways. I wanted to be more of a tomboy, since that was the nearest I was going to get to being the True Autonomous Power Thing, which was a real boy. Sure I liked the outdoors, but even girls could go for long walks and love horses. In fact loving horses was one of those despised girlie things, which is kind of interesting, since what’s wussyish about horses, for pity’s sake? And I liked colour, full stop. I like dark colours, I like bright colours, I like pastels. I like COLOUR. This is also girlie. So I gathered. Men were allowed to be faintly concerned about the precise crease of their trousers, and to choose the tie with the narrow navy stripe or the muted red plaid. But a preoccupation with colour and pattern and style and so on was . . . girlie. Whichever gender you belonged to. And I still read certain clothing and jewellery catalogues the way romance readers read Mills & Boon.
B_twin said and white_roses responded:
| Yeah, that. Nothing like being told “gee, you have really good swimmer’s shoulders” …. But by then I had been reading about Girls Who Do Things and I knew I wanted to be on the farm. Big shoulders were GOOD I told myself. (Handy for bell ringing too! mwahahaha) |
I understand these feelings very well. Working with horses helped me stop hating my figure: there is nothing in this world to make you grateful for atypical physique like a 17-hand draft stallion who utterly ignores your tugs on the longline.
One of the strikes against me as a functioning human being is that I’m, you know, thin. I look like a . . . girl. Mind you, I’m ex-fat, so I know more than I want to about being fat in a world that despises fatness; but I’ve been thin now for a long time—and am not yielding to frelling menopause’s zero-metabolism without one hell of a struggle—and the problem with being able to pass is that you’re assumed to be what you are superficially presenting as. When you’re really weary of the struggle it’s just so easy to put a dress on and let the guys carry your parcels for you. This phase doesn’t last long with me: I have never patronised well: say that again, mister, and I’ll hand you your head, and possibly some other body parts, on a platter. But the temptation to fold, when you can, can be rough on tired days.
HeiQ responded to Diane in MN:
| You are not alone in this. Do you know Peggy Seeger’s song “I’m Gonna be an Engineer”? |
Nope, I can’t say I ever have. I just read the words, and there were some pretty good lines in there . . . but it was a bit TOO angry for me, and I never actually wanted to be a boy haha… I never felt like I had those sorts of decisions forced on me by anyone I really cared about, so it’s a little hard to relate to the song.
How times change. Although you don’t get the full flavour just reading the words on a page, and she sings it so deliciously; you could dance to the tune. I loved this song; it was my national anthem for years. Too angry? Are you kidding? It wasn’t angry enough. It was only the truth.
And that truth still hasn’t anything like gone away. There’s probably someone who reads this blog who knows it in her own skin right now. I’ve escaped; Diane in MN and E Moon have escaped; apparently you didn’t have to escape. But women are still not getting equal pay for equal work in the first world, never mind the third.
Oh, and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCRRe72mwwY
. . . And, on the subject of my girlie liking for things to be pretty, this came from my I-told-you-I-was-knitting post the other night:
Cathy R
Wow! I am impressed!
And not only by the quantity of the knitting . . . but by the quality of the stash bags!
No plastic supermarket bags—slides two such stash bags out of sight under the table—for you, I see. Very classy!
Start a blog. Start needing to dust off and brush up as much as your life as you can bear to flourish in public. You will find it has an electrifying effect on many of the more admissible ways you spend your time (and possibly your money). Although I admit I’ve always had a weakness for tote bags, and I’m delighted to have so clearly perfect a use for that Kew Gardens bag.
. . . She says, rummaging for her square-in-progress. . . .
* * *
* Intarsia, if you want to know^, and I was also staring at it and thinking I like multicoloured yarn that does this for you . . . if perhaps not in quite such fetching patterns.
^ Where all the colours are knitted together as one thing, rather than over each other—for you nonknitters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intarsia_(knitting) Which article I find pretty confusing, but then I’m only a baby knitter.
** Yes, lots of colours. On a muted khaki background. Mmmm.
*** Whose idea of a happy relationship with his wardrobe is getting dressed in the nearest three garments hanging dry on the washing-line. Occasionally I envy him—when I’ve just emerged, bloody and considerably bowed, from an epic struggle with my wardrobe. Mostly I think he’s missing a gigantic treat. You have to wear clothes—society demands it^—why not have some fun?
^ I am so not built to be a nudist/naturist. No clothing: what a waste. Besides, I would be cold all the time. Or sunburnt.
† Makes me wonder where technology got the idea. . . .
†† Besides, all that getting it off again at night? Uggh.
Writing like a feminist
I had an interesting email from Julia* from our forum:
I have a question for you about the blog which I hope you don’t find too impertinent or completely inane. (Or completely insane, either.)
Can you say ‘the pot calling the kettle black’? Barring your trying earnestly to convince me that the moon is made of spaghetti Bolognese I wouldn’t DREAM of calling you or your question insane.**
I’m currently taking a course on Feminist Rhetorical Theory, an area of study which, to my great surprise, I’ve found completely fascinating, especially in terms of academia/ applications therein. . . . This is feminism . . . which is non-confrontational, non-hierarchical . . . Equality and respect, a consciousness of the dignity which is everyone’s due . . . the professor bears out the theory in her teaching methods.
Ooh. I’ll have some of that, please.
But why am I telling you all this? . . . here’s my question:
In class this week, we were discussing an article about the gender gap in Wikipedia contributors (as the significant percentage of those writing on Wikipedia are male, etc), when my professor mentioned blogs. With the internet appeared this new medium which was supposed to be a great equalizer/leveler—but instead so often the problems of print (as she termed it) are reproduced on the screen… the same group of people are creating the same type of text.
And instead of taking advantage of possibilities afforded one by the interactivity that makes the internet so different, my professor continued, blogs often are polemics/polemical, and written in the same sort of one-way expression of thought/specific opinion as they would have been in print, in the same traditional writing style that typifies the academy or the patriarchal system.
But your blog isn’t at all like that. You write informally, conversationally . . . Days In The Life is just that, and your footnotes’ footnotes’ footnotes have footnotes. This is as far from the cumbersome hierarchy and formal academic writing that one can get, just about.
Don’t my footnotes count as satire or parody or something?*** I’m crushed.
. . . I’m also being a little unfair, hanging an email written late at night (as Julia told me in both the postscript and her ‘okay’ that I identify the source) and to a specific point, because of course there are lots of informal blogs out there, including a lot written by SF&F writers.† But I’m interested by her professor’s point (even if her professor clearly needs to read more SF&F and YA blogs) about changing technology changing (or not changing) the people who use it. It’s obvious when you think of it, but I don’t think of it; I’m too busy scrambling for the next thing.†† One of the things I’ve been wondering lately however is where the tipping point of the ability or willingness to change may come—Peter, for example, was bullied into creating his web site, but I think he’d stow away on a spaceship to Epsilon Reticuli††† before you could make him keep a blog. Hey, I was bullied into creating a web site‡ . . . and then it took super-bullying, nay, supreme bullying to harry me into starting this blog,‡‡ although I think that may have to do more with an essentially mule-like nature than inevitable age-related creeping mental paralysis.‡‡‡ I was recently asked for a blog-erview from someone who thinks that most author bloggers are the younger ones—not merely the ones who feel the need to support a young career, but the ones who grew up with and on the web and don’t think twice about a blog being a part of a marketing strategy. Looking at the SF&F blog list I see a fair few names from (more or less) my generation—but yes, I would expect there to be more young ones than old ones because that’s the way the world goes about most young things, and the evolution of the internet and its uses are still relatively young. But is the curve more dramatic when there’s a new technology involved? Is that an obvious question? I suspect that enhanced Zimmer-frame technology is going to have greater uptake among the old and tottery.
It’s also true that I come from an old-fashioned academic background. I only got as far as my BA§ but the BA has blood spots on it. I kept trying to be the hermetic, comma-counting, Northrop-Frye-worshipping§§ scholarly student who would get straight As and be beloved by her teachers . . . and kept getting called down for going off on strange tangents, and having a disturbingly non-standard approach to the creation of and argument toward a thesis. Insipient fantasy-writer-itis, a very bad disease to have in college, majoring in English lit.
I realize that you have said that you write the blog the way you do because it is what you have to write about, that you can’t sit down and write a blog post about the writing process itself, and so on…
Every NIGHT? A blog post about the writing process EVERY NIGHT? Dear gods, goddesses, and other tricky immortal beings, preserve me.
However . . . you have said that you are a feminist. So, I have to ask: was it a conscious decision to write your blog in what is a decidedly feminist mode/model?
No. Not even close. As you’ve already said—and as I’ve said before here—I write what I write in the blog because this is the blog that’s in me to write. I couldn’t write polemic if I tried, and I’d also splutter to a halt sooner or later if there weren’t some proof that there are people out there reading what I am writing.§§§ At the same time . . . I’m a feminist, as I understand feminism, the way I’m alive and breathing. Feminism to me only means that women and men are of equal worth.# It does not mean that we manifest our equal worth in identical ways—which of course is where a lot of the trouble sneaks in—and yes [CONTROVERSIAL OPINION ALERT] I think there are some differences in aggregate, even if you’re going to find some boys falling on the girly side and some girls falling on the boyy side. And my controversial opinion is that the chatty, engaged, interested-in-her-readers## Pollyanna-heeding### blogger is more likely to be a woman than a man.~
If it is accurate to claim that with each new medium, written expression seems to proceed to a certain point, and then, with the emergence of a newer form or technology, start back at the beginning again within that new medium, then it makes me wonder about the application of this cyclical thing when it comes to feminist writing.
Well, I like it. Usually ‘what goes around comes around’ is used as proof that if you pass crap on you’ll get a faceful of it later. But sometimes it means human nature is human nature and we’re all connected and yaay etc. I think this is one of the latter examples. We may be yielding to the web but the web is also yielding to us.
Authorship (authority) for women at the time of Fanny Burney, for instance, was tied to a very specific form of writing—novels were written in letters, diary-style, because that was the only forum or medium available to women. Women could gain agency, some measure of control over their lives, through the letters they wrote. And thus, we get epistolary novels like Evelina. Hooray!
I cannot share your enthusiasm for Evelina, which I found interminable, but I take your point.
You know all of this, I’m sure… and I am rather tired and I fear that I’m not explaining this as clearly as I ought to, anyway.
Well, neither am I. I’m usually short of sleep on Sundays.
But the personal journal or letter, where women would write their lives, modifying reality as they chose… A conversation, a letter, something conflating the public and private (to a certain extent)…
Sounds very much like the blog.
Yes it does. Especially the modifying reality part. Which is worth a blog or a master’s thesis in itself.
But not tonight.~~
* * *
* Yes I asked first if I could identify her.
** The moon can’t be made of spaghetti Bolognese, all indications to the contrary notwithstanding, because the Gflytch have a base on the far side, and they don’t like spaghetti Bolognese, especially not in 17% gravity.
*** As well as the indisputable sign of a terminally disorganised mind.
† Research: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2005/05/sff-writers-who-blog/
†† My butterfly mind. —I have to sing tonight, I have a voice lesson tomorrow. At the moment I’m trying not to be preoccupied with the thought that I don’t have a good reason to go early and stop at the yarn shop. Curses. There must be something.
††† It has at least one planet. Wiki says so.
‡ Well, our noble and generous friend Vonda N. McIntyre did the actual creation part. And when mine started looking like being way too much work for fun, I swapped over to Sainted Blogmom. Vonda still minds Peter’s.
‡‡ Merrilee is still recuperating—how many years later? I believe she gets through a lot of champagne and chocolate for strictly therapeutic reasons.
‡‡‡ ‘When I was your age I walked five miles through the snow to get to school. Barefoot. And I had to cut my own papyrus and screwing the press down gave me blisters.^’ And I only bought my first computer when my office-machine shop could no longer get parts for my IBM Selectric I typewriter. I’m sure Gutenberg’s dad kept telling him to stick to goldsmithing, this movable type thing wasn’t going anywhere.
^ When the elder generations are busy having had it worse than the current soft, lazy young ones, they rarely let little things like climatic consistency trouble them. Although maybe this one was a military brat. First few years in Wisconsin. Then the family moved to . . . er . . . ancient Egypt. Okay, sorry, I’ve let the pterodactyl out of the bag: yes, the military prototype Time Machine is functional.
§ I have told you that my Phi Beta Kappa key hangs from a zipper on my original Harley-Davidson motorcycle jacket, haven’t I?
§§ Shudder. But hey, I write despicable genre twaddle, what do I know?
§§§ Why you’re reading it . . . I prefer not to think about too closely. But I like forum comments about your lives. And emails I can cannibalise for blog posts.
# Which ineluctably includes equal pay for equal work.
## Aside from questions of how many of her books they’re buying.
### Although I’m still thinking about the Why Pollyanna: Revisited blog I haven’t written yet.
~ And—ahem—one of the highest accolades I can give to a male friend is that he Talks Like a Girl.
~~ Although you’d be welcome to write a guest blog about any of this.