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Bleeeeerg etc
It has not been a good week, barring skylarks. You heard about Monday on Monday. Computer Men said they would return yesterday, bearing Peter’s computer and my printer, but they have decided they are coming tomorrow. They will, I hope, be able to return me to printability* here at the mews, but I have a Friday more Fridayish even than usual tomorrow, and so I will not be available to enable them to dedragon** the cottage desktop of its various little ways, like denying exit from the nuraddin address*** and refusing to open Windows all the way, so an open window scampers around the monitor like someone playing hopscotch. Nor can they investigate why the Walkperson refuses to take both CDs of an opera instead of merely overwriting the first with the second. Hey, it’s the same title, isn’t it? And the ‘disc 2’ probably gets lost after the repetition of the credits, containing as they usually do sixteen sopranos, a counterbassoonist, and the kookaburra for the mad scene at the end of the second act. I want my Gluck.†
Tuesday I bollixed my voice lesson. Whimper. I half knew I was going to; I was way too tired, I’d found two small but sordid inconsistencies in PEGASUS that I had to solve in exactly the same amount of space they were made in—your publisher will probably let you get away with resetting a very occasional line at the page proof stage, but that’s the limit—and the awful truth is that the five-star marketing plan is scaring me.†† So I went in there jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and sang like a person who was jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and it was pretty discouraging.†††
Wednesday I went to Ditherington bell practise for our first meeting on the sad new schedule of only second, fourth and fifth-if-any Wednesdays . . . except that it didn’t happen. Niall, Denis and I showed up . . . and spent an hour and a half ringing handbells—Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells—in a freezing cold transept because there was no one else there. I went home, emailed Marilyn and Wild Robert, saying, what happened?, and got a really annoyingly chirpy email back from Marilyn with a copy of the email she had sent all of us about the fact that there was only one Ditherington practise this month. Which Niall and I had both failed to write down.‡ Denis isn’t on Marilyn’s list; his honour remains unimpugned.
And I didn’t have a guest post.‡‡
Today because Colin cancelled and there were no handbells this evening‡‡‡ I decided to give myself a half day off from reading proofs and finish, or semi-finish, or get through draft 2B of, Frost and Fire and Ice to take to Oisin tomorrow: I will probably die of a broken heart if I frumple two music lessons in a row.
I’m a good girl: I hit ‘save’ a lot. I’d been working three hours or so, and was getting pretty tired, but I was also near the end of draft 2B and was feeling reasonably chirpy—ready for a hurtle, a cup of tea, and a return to page proofs. I was pretty sure when Oisin played it back to me tomorrow I’d go, yerp, what was I thinking of, at intervals, but that’s okay. I had something down to work with, and there were actual bits of it I liked. And I’d quite recently hit ‘save’ when I got an error message saying that Windows had a fit of the vapours coming on and was going to close Finale down. Yah boo sucks, I said, as it went KACHUNG off the corner of the piano, but, no big deal, I prodded it with a stick after a minute and woke it up again. And started resignedly putting the last few minutes’ work in again.
And noticed that there was kind of more missing than I was expecting . . .
It had eaten my entire afternoon’s work, despite the fact that I had ‘saved’ about ten minutes before the crash.§
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to find a ‘contact us’ on the Finale web site that was a ‘contact us’ instead of a come on for lists of dealers and how you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook§§ or join their blog—GAAAAAAAAH—and then I emailed Oisin and a Wise American Friend, both of whom have suggestions for the possibility of ferreting the saved version from the bowels of the beast . . . but I still had to hurtle, read proofs, and write a blog entry, and I’m also a coward. A, furthermore, incompetent coward.
Maybe I’ll try their suggestions now.
Maybe I’ll just go to bed.§§§
* * *
* To the extent that I am ever ungleblarging printable
** Debug is nowhere near powerful enough
*** System Administrator says you’re a bad person and must not be allowed to run at large among the innocent populace
† I want my Gluck Orfeo with my Marilyn Horne and my other Gluck Orfeo with my Janet Baker—if the Walkperson can’t cope with 2 CDs of one opera it’s really going to have palpitations if I expect it to take on more than one recording of the same opera.
I can’t remember now when I watched the much-hyped Met production of Orfeo ed Eurydice on Sky. Recently. I do try to be colour/gender/poundage blind—if someone can sing and act I will avert my attention from the fact that they won’t see forty or a size twelve again, and are playing a tubercular seventeen-year-old. But the k d lang look wasn’t doing our short-Coke-machine-shaped Orfeo any favours, whose acting also had a strong Coke-machine flavour. However I would have encompassed all of this—since she did have a big, thick, rich—one might almost say chocolaty—voice . . . until we got to Che Faro Senza Eurydice^, an aria so familiar that even people who wouldn’t know an opera if it bit them on the leg^^ often recognise^^^, when she kumquatted the ending. What? —Yes, my reaction exactly. WHAT? You mess with Che Faro, I hunt you down and kill you. A Metropolitan Opera mezzo can’t possibly be unable to hit a top F, for pity’s sake??+ So what happened? Goblins in the TV crew?
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w
^^ And often assume it wants to when it’s only trying to, you know, play . . .
^^^ What is that? —Wasn’t it that ad for drain cleaner?
+ Even I have a top F, although no one in their right mind would call my voice thick, rich or chocolaty. I’ve been trying to ignore questions of range because as soon as I’m aware of being above C-above-middle-C I start closing myself down from sheer funk. But Blondel pointed out this week that as soon as I have a reliable G I can sing Dido’s Lament. Oh. Okay. Goal. Goals are good. Meanwhile, speaking of goals and Gluck, I have a new one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paride_ed_Elena
I am shamefully unfamiliar with all but about four of Gluck’s operas—the fact that he seems to have written almost as many as Handel is a trifle daunting—and I knew nothing about Paride ed Elena till Radio Three played one of Paride’s arias the other day which stopped me dead in my tracks. Want. To. Sing. That. It will be good if I can manage to find the frelling music; it’s not something that rolls to the top of your average search engine.
†† And then there’s stuff like the latest edition of SUNSHINE which I’ll show you as soon as I have a copy in my hot little hand. But due to Screw Ups By Persons Who Shall Remain Nameless^, this is having to be pushed through at the speed of a hellhound after a hellbunny, and I fall over too easily. This evening I got an email from my editor saying, hi, we need this cover text now. I sent it back to her in about an hour. But I’m still shaking like a leaf.
^Neither me, Merrilee, nor the editor in charge, which is all you need to know
††† And it may be just as bad next week, because I’ll only have just turned in the PEGASUS corrections on Monday, and will still be looking around trying to see where I left my life. I did tell Blondel that my so-called life has spells like this. But the week after that I’m planning to be brilliant. Um . . .
‡ We ring too many handbells. Really it’s bad for you.
‡‡ I have mentioned this on the forum, but just so no one gets the wrong idea, NO, even if no one sends me any guest posts between now and the 2nd of November, I am not going to keep printing bits of PEGASUS on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‡‡‡ So last night was a good thing really.
§ And while this is not in the same category of meltdown, as I was typing that sentence, my email pinged. And when I went a few minutes later to look and see if anything cool was coming in^ I discovered that someone I have already put on my ‘blocked senders’ list has frelling come through again, as he/she has done several times already. What the bleeding (*&^%$£”!!!!!!
^ The Tyranny of the Ping
§§ Bite me
§§§ And furthermore Philip Langridge died. He actually died last Friday, but I didn’t hear about it till Monday and only caught up with the obituary yesterday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/07/philip-langridge-obituary
He was, speaking of acting singers, an actor. Last time I saw him he was scaring you silly as the witch [sic] in Hansel and Gretel: an opera I’ve never had much use for, partly because it’s usually played for a high smarm level. Not this one. More Bluebeard’s Castle than Goldilocks. I have him on CD singing Britten’s Peter Grimes and the weak, venal captain in Billy Budd . . . both of which are so brilliantly evoked I find them hard to listen to: I like the occasional speck of dawn in my unrelenting darkness. I love Britten, but he was maybe a little too good at the snake pit that is humanity.
I never met Langridge, nor know anything about him but what I heard in a few interviews, but I feel like I’ve lost a friend.
Lullaby from Pegasus
Yes. It worked. Finally. And no computers were killed. (So far as I know. Check with Blogmom to be sure.) Although this one is behaving a little strangely. . . .
And yes, Finale and I still have a few little wrinkles to iron out, but THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH FOR NOW and I’ll try to get (for example) the ties sorted by, say, next Friday (or possibly Sunday) when, I hope, I’ll have part two to post as well.
Click to view/download PDF.
Lullaby_from_Pegasus
Redux, various
I WANT MY WOLFGANG. WAAAAAAH.
The good news is that Peter got out of Scotland about thirty seconds before they closed the border.* He came home this afternoon and instantly began reorganising my life.** This included ringing up the garage which, to my amazement, seems to think we can have Wolfgang back tomorrow morning. Fourteen year old cars and MOT tests are not usually a happy merger and I’ve been bracing myself for the conversation about the new car again.*** Even if we manage to limbo under the government bar however and get our sticker I imagine there will be a little list.†
Meanwhile today would be the day that I started to get out of bed and the ME sighed and stretched luxuriously and said, are you sure that’s what you want to do? Oh. Frell. You again. Well, yes, I do want to get up. I have hellhounds to hurtle and a piano lesson this afternoon and bell tower practise this evening.†† And no car.
I know we did this trooping up and down main street thing during the snow, but I’m not in the mood when I’m trying to hold it together with the ME riding me like a bulldogger with spurs. I am also reminded of how forcefully I object to walking anywhere without the hellhounds in attendance—two hours a day of hurtling is enough of the shanks’ mare option. Hey! It’s ten minutes to walk to Oisin’s from the cottage and back . . . having been back and forth to the mews to pick up my music and have a bit of a go at the piano.
Anyone who is paying the wrong kind of attention will have ascertained by now that I’m not posting the lullaby to PEGASUS this Friday either. I finally managed to get the freller printed off so that Oisin could actually see what he was playing . . . and he made several Small But Excellent suggestions††† that I now want to incorporate and I still have to relearn how to make dynamic markings on dranglefabbing Finale and then I will finally post it here. No, really. It exists.‡ It even sounds reasonably lullaby-ish. In fact I like it well enough that I’m going to ask Peter if he wants to write another verse so I can compose some variations.
I felt fairly dire while I was with Oisin although as I said to him I was expecting to feel suddenly a great deal better as soon as I left and any danger of my having to sing was past till next week. Sigh. I sometimes think I got into composing as a way not to have to perform.‡‡
I had already had an email exchange with Niall about tomorrow‡‡‡ and had warned him that I was feeling like something that ought to be pickled in formaldehyde in a jar on a mad scientist’s shelf but that I’d probably just about make it to tower practise, since we’re usually short handed these days and I ought to be able to manage rounds and call changes for our beginners. And then we had a funny band—three beginners and six hot bananas.§ And me. I was helping hold up one of the walls in a semi-comatose state while one of the beginners wrestled with ringing rounds on four, five and six §§ bells and then Niall made one of his passes round the room as a good ringing master will do and when he got to me he said, Are you ready to ring Cambridge?
Am I frelling what? No I am frelling not frelling ready to frelling ring frelling Cambridge. Am I clear?
Okay, said Niall. You can have a few minutes to look at the line.
Ah, adrenaline. What would I do without it. You know that’s one of the working definitions of ME? Exhausted adrenals? Yes. Well. At this point—Niall having passed on to fresh victims—I could feel my eyeballs throbbing to my suddenly heightened blood pressure. So I got out my diagram book and began staring at Cambridge while it went all glmxxxxxx on the page. Anthea came over to be supportive—two of our hot bananas tonight were Colin and his wife Anthea, who is one of my favourite people. You look at her face and you know It’s Going to Be All Right. Possibly Even When It Includes Ringing Cambridge. She is also a completely brilliant minder, which is a significant gift. Just because you can ring something doesn’t mean you can boost somebody else through it—especially boost them in a way that they learn something rather than merely collapsing into blindly doing what they’re told, which is probably more demoralising than breaking down. Anthea got me through my first couple of goes at Kent and it’s a lot of thanks to her that it began making sense to me as soon as it did.
I really did think that Cambridge was a bridge too far however. You don’t ring your first surprise method after a couple of sudden unexpected ten-minute cramming sessions because your ringing master(s) is/are wholly effing mad and your adrenals aren’t quite exhausted. Roger on the five was complaining that he didn’t feel like ringing Cambridge tonight and I said, don’t worry, this won’t last long, and Colin on the three, next to me on the two said, oh, yes it will.
And it did. We got through an entire plain course of Cambridge. I do wish to emphasize that this is absolutely due to Anthea’s crack minding . . . but I’ve been here before, learning something with Anthea at my elbow. We got through it. And I knew what I was trying to do even when I wasn’t seeing the bells to do it with.
I can do this. I am going to learn Cambridge.
Maybe I’ll even sing for Oisin next Friday.§§
* * *
*Joke. But apparently it’s pretty vicious up there. Our lot still have electricity and can feel their way through the snowdrifts, but a lot of people don’t and can’t. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/scotland/7325843/Wintry-weather-sweeps-Scotland.html
And then of course there’s New York. http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=119564§ionid=3510203
And I was complaining earlier about being pummelled by a little hail. I’m such a wuss. But look what came in the post for me today from Hannah (in NYC):
I’m trying. Clearly my solar capacity isn’t quite up to 3500 miles.
(Yes. That’s what you think it is, underneath, on the table. I’ll give you a better view one of these days. I know, you can hardly wait.)
The thing that amuses me even more about this item however is the tag: 
Post consumer material???
** It’s shocking how much disorganization can creep up on you in a mere day and a half.
*** No. But I admit if we have two winters in a row like this one, this time next year I will be thinking hard about a new four-wheel drive car. With waterproof locks.
† Frushipergug rods and bistamudze belt need replacing. Gradundabble connections should be tightened. The whimmerwhammer needs realigning. And while you’re at it you need a new engine, four new tyres, and a CD player.
†† And a novel to write.
††† I asked him if he wanted credit and he said no, no, no, just keep writing the stuff.
‡ So do the little flute piece I promised Jodi and the truly tiny violin piece I promised violinknitter. I’m just . . . a horrible coward. And I keep thinking I want to twiddle them a little more. . . .
‡‡ I wonder if it would work with Blondel. . . . I am such a hopeless case. I’m afraid to sing for Oisin, and I’m afraid to take one of my songs to Blondel. What do I think is going to happen? The end of the world?
‡‡‡ The other reason the ME was kind enough to come back today, aside from not singing for Oisin, is being able to say no I am not going handbell ringing Saturday morning. Although . . . sigh. I would like to ring with Titus and Rupert.
§ So to speak.
§§ One of the reasons ringing seems, when you’re first learning, to be coming at you from all directions is that the eenie weenie difference in timing and rhythm between, say, four and six bells, which when you’re learning to handle you have no sense of, makes a drastic practical difference in keeping your place.
§§§ Or take one of my songs in to Blondel. Maybe I could get him to sing the lullaby.
Complete Sentences Optional
Majorly knackered here. Fridays are always a bit of a sprint because I have both piano lesson and home tower bell practise.* This week there has been the additional drain on resources of trying to relearn how to use Finale.** I am totally glad to have composing software and, since Finale is what Oisin uses, I’m very glad to have what he can bail me out of. But . . . oh . . . gods.*** I didn’t get nearly as much shoved and rammed into the computer as I meant to because I wasted so much time over the ‘make me’ arbitration.
But it is extremely pleasing to be composing again, even if perhaps only briefly, till the waters of PEG II close over my head.† And I had enough more of Frost and Fire and Ice to take in today for Oisin to complain more bitterly—last week he had the perfect excuse of failing to read my handwriting—and furthermore with this song the vocal line has become seriously detached from the piano accompaniment so trying to play all three at once is like trying to pat your head, rub your stomach and tie your shoelaces. Obviously one of us should sing. No.††
Oisin said, I don’t want to put you off or anything, but this is slightly more diatonic than sometimes with you.†††
It’s probably the voice lessons, I said, wincing as he pointed out a few of the rather dramatic leaps my vocalist must get round. I have this gruesome idea that if you give someone a rest, you can do anything to them after it, because they’ve had time to pull themselves together. Oisin suggested, smiling evilly, that I should practise singing it, that picking up those perilous notes after the rests will do wonders for my development of relative pitch. I forgive him, however, because he also said that it sounded a little like late Vaughan Williams, after he’d got the English-pastoral out of his system. Beam.‡
Then I had to come home and hurtle hellhounds before bell practise. Tired person. Fortunately going hand-over-hand up a ladder such as the one into our ringing chamber is considered normal, and a lot of people tend to slump in corners on Friday evenings anyway. But we had enough of a turn-out that I got to ring triples. Yaay. I even managed to claw enough still-semi-responsive brain cells together to remember to keep counting places‡‡ to seven (triples) rather than five (doubles) or six (minor). I can’t say that my Grandsire Triples were a delight to the ear, but I did get through . . . and then we rang Stedman Triples and there were actually two of us who weren’t quite sure what we were doing and we still got through it so this is Very Good.
Right at the moment we’ve got the holidays and weather from hell as an excuse for some fairly thin on the ground practise nights as well as the ones that have been outright cancelled, but I’m mournfully aware that I am now squarely into that murky midrange area where it’s no longer a given that simply turning up for practise regularly will get me much farther: the stuff I want to learn requires a good band, not just any old band—and I still only learn anything by grind. I do not want, five more years from now, still to be saying ‘well I managed to get through a plain course of Stedman Triples tonight, I wonder how long it’s been since the last time I had the opportunity?’
However. Tonight is tonight, I rang Stedman Triples and my piano teacher says he can hear some late Vaughan Williams in the piece I’m trying to write, and the snow is melting. ‡‡‡
And I wonder if I can stay awake long enough to walk back to the cottage.§
* * *
* Once upon a time I had my piano lesson on Thursday. Oisin moved me to Friday because it worked better for him^ and I always meant to negotiate about moving back . . . and then Thursday became handbell practise. Oops.
^ His most entertaining students for Friday afternoons?
** &^%$£”!!!!!!!!!†††+={@????<++*#~‡!!§§!!!!!!!!!! etc. Who designed the ugleblarging thing? Mad wombats?
*** And speaking of troubling deaf heaven^ with one’s bootless cries, Oisin has an almost unbearably thrilling new toy. He’s got a whole sound studio in his attic already but apparently organ software has recently taken a giant leap forward and he’s just bought the digitalised version of some prodigious French organ the size of two or three Lockheed C-141 StarLifter Heavy Transport planes.^^ Although a somewhat different shape, and with less crew and more keyboards. Anyway, never mind what the thing sounds like—he hasn’t loaded it yet so I can’t tell you—it’s beautiful. I want one. I just . . . want it.^^^ Want. I guarantee that I would find its company very inspirational.^^^^ Meanwhile . . . Oisin says he needs a new computer to run it properly. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. The old ‘new computer’ scam.
I did tell^^^^^ him (again, with feeling) that if in his travels he comes up with any better playback options than Finale’s basic, which furthermore do not involve taking an advanced degree in Musical Instrument Digital Interface Protocol, I would be grateful to be told. And I’ll worry about the inevitable ‘new computer’ wheeze later.
^ Ie the Finale help files
^^ I love google. http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/transport-m/c141/ And . . . ‘StarLifter’? Whose idea was that? I think some military mind had been reading too much space opera.
^^^ As previously observed, what I want is to be 13 years old and talented, and I’d be all over organ lessons.
^^^^ And it seems to me large gorgeous pipe organs are seriously underrepresented in fantasy literature.+
+ Phantom of the Opera does not count.
^^^^^ ‘Whimper’ might be more accurate
† I’m too tired to try to describe how composing is just like word-writing only different. Some day I want a chat with a professional, earns-a-living-at-it music composer who also writes occasional word-stories. I want to know how much of the apparent difference is only the result of what you’re used to.
†† It’s true. It’s for mezzo.
††† I like creeping around chromatically. What can I tell you.
‡ Mind you, I adore Vaughan Williams’ English pastoral. But I also remember, many years ago, when I was first making small tentative forays into classical music beyond Verdi, smacking into one of Vaughan Williams’ later symphonies. Whooa! Yeep! Bring me Greensleeves! Bring me more Larks Ascending! Yeep!
‡‡ Where I am in the row. Remember that every bell has to ring once before any bell can ring a second time. All x number of bells having rung once is a row.
‡‡‡ Although as I reported slightly hysterically on Twitter a few hours ago, we’re supposed to get gales, torrential rain and flash floods tomorrow. Maybe I’ll just sleep all day. If I let the hellhounds on the bed, they’d probably go for this.
§ Unless the torrential rain has started. Latter half of the night, they said. Which is . . . er . . .
Another day, another ratbagfest
So, do you want the bad news or the bad news?* I dug out what used to be the rest of the first draft of PEGASUS, back when it was all one book.** There’s about sixty pages of it, which, as first drafts of my novels go, might be about a third of PEG II. There are two characters I’m very glad to see again; I thought about trying to winkle one of them into part one, but decided against it. He’s not really someone who can hang around semi-invisibly in the background. Once he’s on he’s on. The other one . . . the other one’s worse. I didn’t even think about trying to introduce him early.
But . . . I’m not sure how much of my old 25,000 or so words I can use.*** I was kind of afraid of this. PEG I developed a life of its own, as it was supposed to, and it went, predictably and unpredictably, if you follow me, off in all kinds of new directions—including at least one I had had no notion of, erk—while the sixty pages of what used to be Part Two snored faintly and waited for daylight and the wake-up call.
Just how bad the news is is yet to be revealed. But what I’m not going to be able to do is sit down and start typing page sixty-one.†
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I had forgotten how much I HATED FRELLING FINALE. Finale, you may recall, is my music-composing software. ARRRRRRRRGH. I haven’t touched it in several months because I am a bad person and because I had this novel to finish.†† I’ve got a few things lying around semi-legibly on manuscript paper that it would behove me to get onto the computer before ‘semi-legibly’ becomes a mere memory of believing I knew what those squiggles meant. And while I’m hanging around worrying about what the copyeditor is finding in PEGASUS I’ve been banging and discordanting through Frost and Fire and Ice and I would quite like to be able to take it to Oisin tomorrow. Finale seems to have other ideas.††† They all seem to have pointy ends and smell of brimstone.
* * *
* Bad news is, of course, relative, as is good news. Update on Luke is good, but docs say we still have to wait another two or three months even for a long-term prognosis. So we applaud what progress there is, and keep praying.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programme of frivolous crankiness.
** And . . . just by the way . . . this is good news. I had had a little trouble locating it. Does. Not. Bear. Thinking. Of. I’m frelling sure I printed it out for safe keeping, after I whacked it into two books. I’m a paper girl still; if it’s not ink on something I can cut my thumb on^ it’s not really real. But I haven’t been able to find the actual pages of hard copy. Eventually I tracked it down on my old retired memory^^ stick, which is a loyal and noble creature, and hastily and gratefully ran it off. Which of course first required my printer to have its standard hissy fit over the use of American-size pages.^^^ This is always fun. First you turn the printer on. Then you click on ‘properties’ and reselect, for the umpty millionth time, American 8 x 11 paper. Then you click ‘apply’. Then you click ‘print’. Then you stand back while the printer starts beeping loudly that it’s a British machine and it’s not having anything to do with that crude misshapen colonial stuff, and please to observe a gracious sufficiency of red error lights and flashing error boxes and if I don’t pull myself together and treat it with proper respect it’s going to throw itself off the table it sits on and ruin the carpet when its toner cartridges explode.
^ OW. Blood. Frell.
^^ This being me, possibly the use of the word ‘memory’ is ill-omened. My case-hardened steel-trap stick. My small granite monolith stick.
^^^ I’m presently using up the backs of galleys of the Berkley trade edition of THE HERO AND THE CROWN. Now here’s a little story of authorial despair to brighten a grey January evening. While I was arguing with my printer I noticed that the next page waiting to have its blank side fed into the machine, supposing that the machine ever stopped having its hissy fit and commenced printing something, had two typos on it. This is pretty bad, I was thinking, for a book this old and this often reprinted; I mean, the reason I had proofs to read is that every time something is reset, it’s possible that a brand-new error may creep in. But not two a page, for pity’s sake. And then I saw the third one that I had not caught on the same page. Pleeeeease the gods that the publisher’s proofreader nailed it. I’m afraid to go check the book itself.
*** Twenty five thousand words I can’t use? Twenty five thousand written words I CAN’T USE? Waaaaaaaaaaaaah.
† I’d also forgotten how many major name changes there were in this one. What happened was that too many of them were Cr names. This is the sort of thing that happens in real life that you can’t do in fiction. There may be a group of friends named Crichton, Christine, Chrestomanci, and Crystal, but when John Buchan or Michael Chabon decided to make them into an adventure novel, he’d change their names. Sylvi’s dad won: he got to stay Corone.
†† For about five minutes I’m going to be rolling in cash. The check for PEGASUS has been seen and documented by Writers House and a really spectacular refund cheque^ has arrived from the British Infernal Revenue. I hope to manage to bank both of them long enough for one statement to come through, you know? With all those numbers at the top. Then most of it goes away again to dark ugly boring necessary places^^. . . .
^ Because I earned no money to speak of last year. Sigh. These years happen.
^^ Although I did buy myself a cashmere sweater on sale.
††† And yes, I forgot to record the second half of the MEDIUM I watched the first half of a few days ago. Of course. I feel I could have just forgotten instead of remembering I’d forgotten so now I have to wonder how it ends.
I want to suggest however that those of you who feel that nurses’ station alarms are routinely ignored, you may be confusing fiction with reality. In the programme this hospital has been set up as a good hospital. Although I may be missing the magical properties of nail clippers, wherein things cut with them carry on as if uncut.
I also find myself wanting to mention that while there are undoubtedly a lot of horrible hospital stories out there, and generally speaking I yield to no human being in my dislike and mistrust of the standard medical model, in one of my previous incarnations as an ambulance driver^, I’ve stood at a number of nurses’ stations where alarms went off and people ran. Just like on a TV programme.
^ It’s called wanting to make one’s microscopic imprint in the right direction. This is also how I’ve ended up a homeopath.
