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News
So I flung myself weeping on the (virtual) neck of my Marketing Person about the awfulness of the PEGASUS issuu excerpt (citing, among other things, some of the comments on the blog thread here and thank you all very much for taking the time to respond) and look what she has done for all of us!!!!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36512923/Robin-McKinley-Esampler
I think this one is hugely, hugely, HUGELY better, and I hope you will agree, which is to say I hope it looks better on all your computers too.*
Now then. On to my NEWS.
I HAVE A BRITISH PUBLISHER.
PENGUIN UK** HAS JUST BOUGHT PEGS I & II***
Let the feasting and diverse merriment begin.
* * *
* Maren adds, for the comfort and succour of people like me: you might want to mention that the zoom buttons are at lower left under the page image. Also right next to the zoom buttons is a drop-down menu where you can switch to “book” (layout).
** Yes, I’m published by a division of Penguin USA in America. This apparently has nothing to do with anything except that they talk to each other. But all publishers talk to each other. I have no clue, so don’t ask.
*** So I’d better get back to it. I’ve got at least two more sentences in me tonight before I fall face forward into my Green & Black’s.
Interview
It’s not even 4 pm yet. What am I doing posting? Makes me feel like the world is on backwards.
However. Lucy, as she told me she would, hung her interview early so I will briefly drag my concentration away from PEG II and post the link. Here: http://scribblecitycentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/mythic-friday-interview-number-21-robin.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
I didn’t get it to her till slightly past the last minute thanks to the awkward timing of stomach flu, so we didn’t have a chance to confer. And I notice that my tendency to extreme typography didn’t make it through the email gremlin filter* when I sent my answers. Regular readers of this blog I feel however will have no difficulty reading unmarked emphases in for themselves.
And I promised you some Beguiling News, didn’t I? Mmmmm. . . .
Oh, who tells secrets at four o’clock in the afternoon? Flapdoodle. I’ll tell you later.**
* * *
* That’s filters of gremlins, you know, not filters to remove gremlins
** More mwa ha ha ha ha. Although in truth only a minority of you will be interested. But I’m interested.
More contest winners!
It’s been a murky sort of day, both exteriorly and interiorly. Interiorly neither my brain nor my digestion is returning my phonecalls.* Exteriorly it’s been another dashing-among-the-raindrops day with slitty-eyed and grumbling hellhounds. This morning I eventually said All right! Fine! But if you think we’re going to play throw the tennis ball up/downstairs just because of a little rain** you are sadly mistaken! —And stomped back outdoors myself to stand with the rain running down my neck to deadhead petunias. Especially that frelling hanging basket at the foot of the front stairs, with the nonhanging petunias: gone-over petunia flowers are among the least attractive anyway, and even more/less so when sodden, and these are so awfully dranglefabbing conspicuous. Since the wretched plants insist on growing UP they are also getting harder and harder to deadhead. Even my gorilla-length arms eventually reach their limit. And getting smacked in the face with falling smeary wet ex-petunias is one of those remind-me-why-I-like-to-say-I’m-a-gardener experiences.***
I was lurking around the cottage in a restless and unable-to-concentrate manner because the Aga Man was due. Herself† has been cold for over two months because after a hot spell severe enough for me to decide to turn her off I couldn’t get her back on again and thought, never mind, it’s summer, we can wait till her annual tune-up and shampoo and get a refresher lesson on the proper ritual.††
My Aga is now on. I have an oven at the cottage again.
So what better day for an announcement about baking?
Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the contest thread will already know that mayasings’ Bloody Doomsday Chocolate Raspberry Swirl (Vampire) Muffins won the recipe contest. Huzzah mayasings! Huzzah Vampire Muffins!†††
I also promised you‡ a random winner among the voters. And that winner is Stephanie, who very properly lists ‘baked goods’ among her interests, and while I will not breach her privacy by quoting her email address here, I wish to remark that it has a very pleasing and suitable Green & Black’s atmosphere about it.
Congratulations, you two! And now if you would please contact a mod—Ajlr, perhaps, since she’s done the actual work on the contest—with street-mail addresses and instructions for dedications, if any, I will go fish out two more glittery gold SUNSHINEs from my dwindling hoard and prepare to dispatch same.
Contests are good. Thanks, you lot, for making them good.
* * *
* Not that I have (i)Phones on the (missing) brain or anything. I had a seriously bad night last night. Sleep? What would that be again? And then the phone rang at 8:30 a.m. KrzzzznARRRRGHblhhhhhhhnnggg. I decided to go back to bed afterward anyway, despite the re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings apparently going on across the road and the four-part dog chorus^ at the top of the hill, no doubt in response to Devil Cat sitting just on the other side of the (closed) iron gate from them and washing his paws thoughtfully. I could seriously do without Devil Cat. I could probably even more seriously do without the 1,712 vehicles belonging to his owner, who has one parking slot on our cul de sac and therefore has to be creative with the other 1,711.
Anyway. I went back to bed. Whereupon Pooka started erupting with sound effects. I’m sure it’s very clever and thoughtful of the programmer to give different ringtones to email, voicemail, texts, twenty-one gun salutes and elephants, but it’s not at all popular when you’re pretending to sleep. I have noticed that there’s the odd ping, pong or trill overnight in Pooka’s live and lively company, but it hasn’t been a big deal. Maybe I’ve had the pillow arranged over my head better. Maybe I had been sleeping lately. Maybe I suddenly became fabulously popular overnight. But this morning it was the Chinese water torture only with dings, chirrups and gibbles. So the first thing I did when I finally gave up the unequal struggle with the Normans^^ was figure out how to turn the sound effects off.
^ Three dachshunds and a Labrador
^^ Norman arrows caroming off the English shield wall sound remarkably like messages arriving on your Apocalypse.
** It’s more to do with almost losing four shelves of books and china that hang at the bottom of the stairs, the last time we played this interesting game.
*** At least there were no earwigs involved. Ewwwwww. There are almost always earwigs involved when you deadhead dahlias. Note: if you are harbouring any seven-foot dahlias this year, stand at arm’s length when you deadhead.
† You’re right, I’ve never named her. Shameful. I think it has seemed impertinent since she was here long before I was. But I hereby declare that five—no, wait, six years, big yeep—six years is enough to presume upon the company of a nameless Aga, and address myself to the lack.
†† No, no, no, not a black goat. A bowl of virgin popcorn, and don’t forget the butter^.
^ Which I’m sure ought to be from a virgin cow, but this might be a little hard to arrange, milk being tied to the non-virgin end of things.
††† I’m convinced it’s the fang holes that did it. Although as Ajlr says: . . . which, as a title alone, may be one of the most all-encompassing collections of ‘Words Likely to Appeal to Readers of Robin’s Books’ that we’ve seen here.^ Add that to the end result of the recipe and we have a very worthy winner. And I may say that the recipes assembled through this competition are probably one of the best gatherings of foodstuffs with few socially-redeeming features^^ that I’ve seen for some time…
^ I wish to observe that on the contrary, this is a SUNSHINE specific recipe, and very appropriate too. A truly all-McKinley-encompassing recipe would have to include something about dragons, swords and horses, at very least. Which might prove challenging even to this reservoir of forum members.
^^ Few? You mean there are any? Oh dear.
‡ That is, I promised after I had double-checked with Blogmom
Ask Robin on a Monday
So I rang a very nice touch of Stedman Doubles tonight at Old Eden where the calls were all in weird places (which is something that happens with frelling Stedman*) and I had to perform both cats’ ears and coathangers** and I did it all*** and I feel all flushed with success.† And this morning wasn’t half bad either.†† So while I’m feeling as if I have the answers to everything††† I thought I’d tackle an Ask Robin.
My question is about characters’ names. I’ve tried writing some fantasy stories, so I know how hard it can be to come up with new, mythical-sounding names. But when you do it, there seems to be a system to the names. What I mean is that although the names are completely made up, groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in. I’m thinking particularly of the Damar names, where the names all fit the Damarian culture and linguistic sound, even though the culture and the names are all fictional. Do you have a system for coming up with names? I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic. Do you do anything like that? Or do they just come to you?
At least some of the answer to this is somewhere on the web site, but I can’t find it. I would have sworn it was in the FAQ under one of those general writery questions, but . . . I can’t find it. Arrgh. So if this looks kind of familiar to you and you can find it . . . will you please tell me where it is?
I’m also amused that the asker says ‘groups of names fit the cultures/countries they are in’. Yaay. Success. One of the biggest, hairiest challenges about writing fantasy or science fiction is making your ‘imaginary’ countries and creatures feel real, feel like a consistent whole—or an inconsistent one, for that matter, the way the sometimes-more-and-sometimes-less consensual reality we live in here is so often drastically inconsistent.
But much of Damar is a fairly unified culture—as are Balsinland and Rhiandomeer in PEGASUS—and so the names, the rituals and traditions, the habits and history, need to feel as if they hang together: they need to look and smell and taste and sound right. What an appalling prospect. I am so grateful I’m not making this stuff up.
Now I have said in the FAQ that I don’t make this stuff up: it’s more like it happens to me. This is not to say it’s easy; it isn’t.‡ First there’s the trying to take notes in the whirlwind aspect: even if you manage to hang onto your notebook‡‡ you may be picked up and thrown several hundred or several thousand miles off-course . . . possibly even into the wrong frelling story. Well, what you think is the wrong frelling story. There is also a good bit of Helen Keller at the water-pump: you know there’s a world out there, and there’s this new person who keeps following you around and won’t leave you alone, but what is she trying to tell you?
But if you’re a storyteller and this is your story, you’ll eventually make the connections you need to make, and start looking and listening and feeling around in the dark for the stuff you need to know. I literally‡‡‡ see and hear a lot of the background to a story—mostly in way too dazzling detail—and which frequently doesn’t fit together, and then I have to try to figure out why it doesn’t fit together, or skip that bit as beyond me.§ I hear most of the major characters’ names—and when I’m lucky, most of the minor ones’ too—by the simple expedient of hanging around listening to them talking to each other. Eventually they’ll call each other by name. I heard Ebon’s name just the way it happened to Sylvi: They really don’t tell you anything, do they? I’ve known you were Sylvi forever. My name is Ebon. Sylvi’s own name bothered me for months—I was sure (I was almost sure) I was hearing it right, but there was still something wrong. It wasn’t till I heard her spoken to in some formal ritual or other—and I don’t even remember which one—that I found out it was short for Sylviianel, and then I felt a lot better.
Occasionally I cannot, cannot, cannot hear someone’s name, and then I do have to try to make it up, based on what fragments or nicknames§§ I am hearing, and what I have by then learnt about the language. But I hate this. I’m always sure I’m wrong.
My jaw drops at ‘I heard from one writer that he takes common names and re-invents their spelling so that they look exotic.’ My reaction is totally ewwww. But every writer is different. If I found myself doing that I’d be certain I was in the wrong story and start looking around for a whirlwind to catapult me somewhere else. But this is only the way I work; if that’s what works for him, and he gets good stories out of it, then that’s all that matters.
Good stories are what matter. Write that down.
* * *
* It has to do with the fact that the treble, which in most methods has an easier path through the maze, moves just like all the other working bells, which in Stedman is a very maze-like track indeed.
** Sic. It has to do with what the line looks like on the page. Cats’ ears actually do look like a kid’s drawing of a cat’s ears. Coathangers don’t look anything like coathangers.
*** We will not get into the total frelling mess I made of ringing the four to Very Little Bob. The four squats in the middle of the pattern making thirds and fourths while the other five bells do fancy dances around her. The point is supposed to be that it will teach me what thirds and fourths feel like, which will help my Cambridge, which has lots of thirds and fourths in it. Wrong. It just felt like a really really bad bit of Cambridge that went on and on.
† The hellhounds even ate dinner again. Gaah. Last night we had some lamb mince left over so I put it in their supper. Aaaugh! What is this! What are you doing to us! Death! Poison! Betrayal! Goblins! Darkness eventually got over it. Chaos didn’t. Next generation of domestic fauna it’s goldfish. Plastic goldfish.
†† We had a special service for some saint or other at Old Eden. I spent most of it on the five, which, of all Old Eden’s possessed-by-demons bells, is the worst. But we were only ringing simple stuff so no one noticed that the five and I were locked in an epic battle for mastery. This is almost as great a triumph as a touch of Stedman Doubles.
††† Possibly even how PEG II ends. I said possibly.
‡ Ringing the fifth bell at Old Eden is a doddle in comparison.
‡‡ Or your laptop
‡‡‡ If ‘literally’ bothers you, feel free to choose your own adverb. ‘Madly’ might do. Or ‘obstinately’.
§ Note: sigh. It happens. Or anyway it happens to me.
§§ ‘Yo! Dumbhead!’
Consolations, when there have been too many of Those Days
Consolation #1: Daylily going for it. 
This is probably her* best year yet, and last year I swore I was going to ‘lift’ (as the ridiculous euphemism for ‘dig yourself an amazing crop of blisters and a back that will no longer straighten’ is) and divide her because she’s jammed into that pot by now and is due to stop flowering in despair. Ahem. All she’s had is a couple of biggish handfuls of flower food. And I really really am going to hack her out of the pot THIS winter, and split her up into several eager little world-devouring blobs. I love a good daylily.
Consolation #2: This is the final paragraph of an email from a reader that arrived today.
Anyway, although my experience has at no point involved bees I just wanted to say that I haven’t read another book that has more realistically described the experience of being suddenly responsible, of not even knowing the words for the things that you have to do, of finding out suddenly that there was something important that you should have known but no one told you because you were supposed to already know it, of finding that people who were your friends now see you as someone that they have/ought to have respect for and of feeling like a fraud and knowing that everyone can see through you and of being terrified that you will damage this already damaged structure further.
Thank you. As I keep saying, the story is the story, but some stories find you when you’re ready to tell them**, and some stories you realise only after it’s too late are being informed more directly by your own experience than you wanted or planned. CHALICE, as I’ve told this blog before, is saturated, not to say soggy, with my experience of trying to learn to use homeopathy. Homeopathy works—I don’t care how many ‘quackbusters’ you’ve read to the contrary—which means that when it doesn’t work, you’ve done something wrong. And it’s a gigantic subject, and there are no sure ways through the thickets or around the bottomless chasms. And meanwhile people are asking you for help. . . .
Consolation # 3: Other people’s books.
I am such a wash-out as a book reviewer. Sigh. A lot of it, as I’ve told you before, is that since books matter, and I’m only going to tell you about the ones that I think are good, I get all seized up about doing it well enough, and I haven’t got time to get all seized up about writing blog posts. So I keep putting off writing about other people’s books.
There is also the late-to-the-party aspect. Writing about old favourites or the unjustly obscure is one thing. Writing about something that has been on the best seller list for the last x years and everybody has already read but you is something else.
So let me just mention in passing two series that have (recently) given me a lot of lying-in-the-bath-till-the-water-gets-cold, must-keep-turning-pages pleasure***, and you can chuckle condescendingly since you’ve read them both several times all the way through. The first are Melissa Marr’s WICKED LOVELY books. How can you resist a centuries-long faery feud that produces a conversation like this one:
‘She wiped her cheeks, trying not to flinch as she saw that the tears were golden. . . . . “I don’t know how to rule anyone.”
‘He shrugged . . . “So you learn. I’ll be there. I do know how to rule. But today we don’t think about all that. . . . There are balls to have and dancing to be done. If we rejoice, our court will too. It is as much a duty as waking the earth.”
“Right, sounds like an easy job. Wake the earth, rule the unruly, repair the broken stuff and party.”’
Also there are cool tattoos. And a boa constrictor.
The second series is Cassandra Clare’s MORTAL INSTRUMENTS. There was no way I was going to read these books.† Aside from who likes them †† they are too long. Romantic YA urban fantasy trilogy that runs 1500 small-print pages or so? Ewww. But . . . wrong. I kept running into references to these books and finally said oh all right and found an excerpt to read.††† Oh. Okay. Ordering now. And not only is the story pretty much an adventure per page, it’s funny. ‡
‘Jocelyn even had a graceful way of walking that made people turn their heads to watch her go by. Clary, by contrast, was always tripping over her feet. The only time people turned to watch her go by was when she hurtled past them as she fell downstairs.’
. . . ‘“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Simon said, blinking. “Demon slayers take the subway?”
“It’s faster than driving.”’
. . . ‘“There are demons in the White House?”
“I was kidding . . . I think.” He shrugged philosophically. “I’m sure someone would have mentioned it.”’
Consolation # 4: Peter’s mayonnaise.
It’s right up there with chocolate and champagne.
And in an attempt to FOIL Wordpress’ villainy with photo placement, we’re going to have the footnotes FIRST, and Consolation #5 at the end.
* * *
* Apparently all daylilies are girls, like all roses are, even General Kleber and Benjamin Britten, to mention two that are on this year’s ACQUIRE list.^
^ And Peter Beales is introducing a new pale-pink rose named Beatrix Potter. Just in case anyone else would like to know.
** Sometimes they don’t care if you’re frelling ready to tell them or not. Write me or die, they say.
*** And in fact still are, because I haven’t finished either of them yet, okay? So don’t tell me anything.^ I’m a slow reader. And I’m still struggling with Music Theory for Dummies and YOUNG ROMANTICS by Daisy Hay. And I’ve just ordered CLARA SCHUMANN by Nancy B. Reich. And I’m always behind on homeopathy journals.
^ I followed Cassandra Clare on Twitter for a while, but I had to stop. She spent a lot of time answering fan questions, and these were full of spoilers.
† Remember my one official exception to Pollyanna? There’s a big fat plug from her splashed across the covers. I totally understand why they’re using it, and I’m sure there was champagne all round at the publishers’ the day the quote came in. But it totally put me off, because I am an Evil Cow.
†† Ahem
††† I love on line book excerpts. They’re one of the absolute best things about the internet. Never mind blogs and Twitter and Google. Excerpts.
‡ I am, let me say, a sucker for funny. Everything is better with a few good lines.^
^ I know. I should like Shakespeare. I don’t.
Consolation # 5: The unbearable cuteness of hellhounds.
And if you’re thinking that looks like a rec ground with lanes drawn for runners . . . it is. Occasionally I am an irresponsible fool and let them off lead in town. Baaaaaaad hellgoddess. I don’t do it very often.
