Coming November 2010
Fire
Available from Amazon.comComplete Your Collection!
Visit Robin McKinley's bookstoreon Amazon.com for any of Robin's books you may be missing!
I Have the Nicest Mods in the Universe*
I overslept this morning.** Hellhounds and I got back*** to the cottage after our morning [sic] hurtle and found: 
It’s from my mods. Congratulating me on getting the frelling† corrections on PEGASUS done on time.††
THANK YOU. YOU ARE WONDERFUL HUMAN BEINGS.†††
I was hoping to save some of the wrapping paper which you will note has roses on it, but it’s so damn fragile I’m hoping it’s biodegradable to comfort me for failing. And while I love the new standard cut-flower delivery thing where they come with their stems in actual water . . . there is the little matter of removing the bulge of plastic wrapping that contains the water . . . remember I said about fragile? There was language. As well as water all over the floor.
But hey. There are flowers. Beauuuuuutiful flowers. Beam. Awwwwwww.
I may have to post another photo tomorrow after I, you know, arrange them. It’s been a ridiculously busy day. I have no idea what I’ve been doing.‡ I was going to spend all day on the sofa. Pardon me, what happened? I got about twenty minutes on the sofa. Hellhounds couldn’t believe it when I turfed them off again after less than half an hour.
And I was still almost late for bell practise tonight. Niall after a mere fortnight as Ringing Master is rapidly morphing into a major demonic fiend. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But I don’t recall Machiavelli mentioning the horns and the spinal plates. I’m sure I can see the glitter of incipient green and purple scales on Niall’s forehead and his teeth are definitely growing. There were only six of us plus two beginners so we were ringing pretty much all the time, but because I am also Niall’s partner in handbell crime he picks on me.‡‡ You, do thus and such, he says. —Regretfully repressed rude gestures.‡‡‡
Including making me ring Kent. I haven’t rung Kent in at least a couple of months. Leo is also learning Kent, but he’s rung it more recently; last time we had a good enough band I rang Stedman. I grabbed the treble and held on, which worked the first time through, while Leo got his practise in . . . although I hadn’t actually rung the complex treble on a treble-bob method in probably two months either, so it was a little more exciting than was strictly desirable. I then slunk off to rememorize the inside line frantically in case Niall remembered me later, except I kept getting dragged out of my corner to ring rounds with beginners. Somebody else can do it! I’m busy! You, said Niall. Ring the four. Fiend.
But I got through Kent. It was, as I have a habit of saying about touches I’ve been ringing in, not a thing of beauty, but we got to the end. I was trying not to congratulate myself audibly when Richard started giving me one of his little frelling essays on ringing—I like Richard’s essays, and I particularly like the way he presents them in this calm, reasonable tone of voice as if you have half a clue what he’s talking about—but this one began with the shocking declaration that the line for Kent was easy to learn, it was the practicalities of ringing it accurately that are the problem, and I lost focus a trifle. Easy to learn. There speaks someone who has been ringing for sixty years.
I’m not going to get my day on the sofa tomorrow either. I have a frelling wedding to ring at Ditherington. Never mind. I will come home to flowers.§
* * *
* No, I haven’t warned them to brace themselves for a deeply embarrassing public expression of appreciation. What would be the fun in that?
** Don’t even ask.
*** And it’s been a beautiful day. April in February, as I said on Twitter earlier. Nearly shirtsleeve weather and sunny.^ Wha’? Huh? Hellhounds and I couldn’t cope. We tottered around feeling unstrung and looking nervously in the shadows. Sunlight produces such dramatic shadows. And shivering keeps you awake.
^ Mud to the ankles though. Whew. Some connection with familiar reality.
† The card does not say ‘frelling’. I’m not sure if this is restraint on the mods’ part or an understandable desire not to complicate matters. That’s f, r, e, l, l . . . oh, never mind. I know from experience florists’ clerks can be rather creative even when you spell things out really carefully.
†† They apparently arrived in English, too, which is a bonus. I wasn’t at all sure. By the time I hit the ‘send’ button yesterday evening the stuff on the screen was starting to swim around and form strange new clusters, racemes and inflorescences hitherto unknown to science, botany, or human visual range. But I got a note from my editor’s assistant today saying that she was working her way through them and while you can’t get bloodstains on email it didn’t break off in the middle of a word or anything.
††† There are moments when this frelling blog is worth it.
‡ Oversleeping. And I had another cup of tea with Oisin. Who is going all mean and fierce and telling me he’s expecting something musical out of me next week. Just because I got my novel turned in! What a big bully!^ He had even finally got me my own copy of the Capriol Suite^^. Mind you there is no reason I couldn’t go on playing off the photocopies he’d made for me^^^. I also may have led him on a little because I said that some of my blog people had suggested I set the lullaby at the beginning of PEGASUS and he replied kindly and sympathetically that while he will look forward to it, the thought of what I might consider a suitable lullaby for a three-armed witch and a feminist dragon gives him pause. Ha ha ha ha very frelling funny ha ha. You be nice or I’ll write it for organ.
^ Blondel will probably whap me around on Tuesday too
^^ Which has been OS at the publisher forever. Sheet music publishers make book publishers look like unfallen archangels and shiny harp-plucking seraphim.
^^^And because I am a lazy slut I will undoubtedly continue to play off the photocopies for some time because they’ve got all my painfully worked out fingering on them, and the large red slashes that mean pay attention to this bit, you idiot, and I’m going to resist going to the extra effort to move it all over. Aside from the fact that I am intimidated by all those glossy new clean pages with, you know, covers on either end.
‡‡ I am surrounded by musical male bullies.^ Where did I go wrong?
^ Of course this includes the hellhounds. It does not include Peter, however, who is slightly prouder of being unmusical than the facts support. But it will do for keeping him off this list.
‡‡‡Vicky would not approve of rude gestures. Our tower is even cleaner than this blog. Sigh.
§ More beaming. More awwwwwww.
Little walled jungle
I’ve spent way too much time writing entries the last two nights . . . that’s the drawback to having something to write about.
So tonight I’m going to dazzle you with garden photos and go to bed at what passes in my case for a reasonable hour. Although I have so many garden photos–I love this time of year, when everything in the garden suddenly goes YAAAAAAY. SPRING--it’s taken me almost as long to sort out just a few as it would have to write an entry*.
The view from my office window. Oh dear. I’m better off working on the kitchen table at the mews, where the garden is a whole room away.
This is one of my little New Zealand clematises. They have a reputation for being borderline tender and generally tricky but this is the second and third year for mine (I have . . . several) and only one of them looks to be in a bad mood . . . and I did not bring this one indoors: I can’t lift the freller. It was swathed in bubble wrap however.
This is the other one currently in flower. It’s on the front steps because things in pots that I can lift tend to get put on the front steps when they’re in flower, but in this case there’s an additional frisson, which is that the Very Posh Gardener at the top of the hill with the Very Posh Garden and its national collections and its hundreds of visitors streaming in every open day** once told me that he can’t keep New Zealand clematis going and has given up.
There were petunias in with the pansies last summer (I probably posted a photo), and the petunias, of course, died over the winter . . . and the pansies have taken over. I didn’t think about the long-livedness of pansies when I put them in a hanging basket, hanging baskets being kind of a maintenance nightmare. And that’s my little patio lilac, except that while it’s a syringa all right, which is to say lilac, it’s not what any normal lilac-loving person thinks of as ‘lilac’ which is to say it doesn’t smell right. But it is very gallantly flowering for its fourth year in a pot that is much too small for it (I do feed it) and I figure it’s earned its place. I still want a patio lilac–ie small enough to wedge in at the cottage–that smells like lilac.
Blue. Gentian. This is what they mean when they say gentian blue. Blue. I have to grow ‘em in a pot, however, because they need acid soil, and mine is alkaline.
Art shot. Couldn’t help myself.
Someone at the Tulip Selecting Factory came in with a bad headache that day. I ordered the orange and purple ones: that red and yellow striped one was not in the plan.
* * *
* And I could have told you about treble-bobbing to Kent and Cambridge Minor tonight at ringing practise. This is Very Good and I did it Almost Rather Well. It’s particularly pleasing because we haven’t had a Cambridge-level, ie upper level, band at that tower in yonks. If all these extra surprise^ people would show more often I’d get a chance to learn to ring Kent and Cambridge inside.
^ surprise the category of upper-level methods, I mean, not surprise! All these ringers turned up!
** Some of whom inevitably stop and smirk at my front steps in a superior sort of way.^ I am considering boiling oil.
^ I do not colour-code. If it’s in flower, it goes on the front steps. Bite me.
I love this time of year
OH GODS, GODDESSES, NATURE SPIRITS AND BESOTTED MIDDLE AGED WOMEN, I LOOOOOOOVE THIS TIME OF YEAR. 
My bulbs are mostly a little behind themselves this year. Some of this is probably because of the extended stretch of unusually cold weather this winter.* Some of it is probably because some of the bulbs got in rather, ahem, late. Ahem. But they’re all coming up, bless their pointed little heads.
Yes, there are lots of stakes in this garden. ** But the one at the particularly bizarre angle up against the wall isn’t a stake but a brace. It’s holding the apple tree up, which, later in the year, is inclined to lean over and embrace people. When it’s heavy with apples–and it becomes very heavy with apples–you pretty well have to crawl under it on your hands and knees, and that’s my heavy traffic path. Not to mention lack of ground space for hands and knees at the same time, since that area in front of the greenhouse–you can see its dark-green girders on the right–is where all my Little Things in Pots Waiting for Something to Happen sit.
Apple blossom. Speaking of apples.
Explodadaff. I can’t believe I ordered these. Either someone sent me the wrong thing–a trick usually most magnificently manifested by rose nurseries, in my experience–or they were one of these ‘order this that you do want and helplessly receive this which you don’t’ offers. And when I’m in bulb-planting frenzy, I plant everything. Salt shakers, old batteries, hellhounds. The hellhounds usually dig themselves up again.
And I have epimediums after all!!! I thought the frost had nailed ‘em. I think the frost had nailed them and they just did a little hey-presto and produced a new batch of flowers overnight. I swear they appeared out of nowhere. Usually you see, like, buds first.
I think these are darling, of course. They’re pink. But in my heart of hearts I believe epimediums are supposed to be yellow. Peter has yellow. So he’s going to hack a bit off for me and next year I will also have yellow.
That fuzzy green bunny eared thing on the left (there are three of them, but you can’t see the other two very clearly) in the second tier of pots in the big white pot . . . is a meconopsis, one of those extraordinary blue Himalayan poppies. It takes two years to grow one. Three years ago I had a beautiful one growing with a huge flower head on it . . . and when it was just ready to pop, something knocked the pot over and broke it off at ground level. I have been a vicious ratbag to the neighbourhood cats ever since, since I don’t think there’s anything else around here with enough body weight to have knocked it over that comprehensively. It took me a year even to regain sufficient morale to try again. This year I may start posting armed guards. Or at least teach the hellhounds to patrol.***
And . . . I just love pansies. Some day I’m going to do a Pansy Only Photo Entry. These are the most extraordinary colour: yes, orange, brick-red and plum, all together.
* Bronwen was here again tonight and she and Niall and I foregathered in the cottage sitting room and rang handbells^. While Niall was explaining the finer points of plain bob minor to Bronwen, my eyes kept rising involuntarily to the grow light which is still hanging–tucked up above harm’s way for any but the tallest heads–from the big beam that holds the ceiling up.
^ And were periodically investigated by hellhounds, who seemed to feel that handbells were no bar to hellhounds on the sofa.
** And after yesterday’s en route raid, there will be even more.
*** I admit I am hoping the hellhounds’ mere existence will prove sufficiently discouraging. I haven’t seen a cat in this garden since hellpuppies arrived, even though they stay inside their fence.
Person falling down
Person got to bed late last night, even for me, and then didn’t sleep very well, which is tedious.* So I’m even shorter of sleep than I would be if I’d at least slept the hours I was horizontal and if I weren’t in an ME phase when I need extra stupid sleep. Am I making any sense? I doubt it. I have already spent all my allotted sense-making time today on PEGASUS and Peter’s book, and possibly on walking hellhounds, which does require enough sense-making to get home again on. Walking hellhounds also requires a majority of staying-upright rather than falling-down time, which is a further strain on a floppy system, especially when sheets of leftover black ice keep rushing out of the undergrowth at one murmuring mwa ha ha ha ha. And now I have to go to bed again, early tonight, because I have to get up in the morning and go ring bells.
So this is me, going to bed before I fall down any more. . . .
* * *
* Very tedious, lying in the dark with eyes wide open thinking, you know, I need to get to sleep. I’ve got stuff to do tomorrow.^ There’s a short brutal list of crucial things that the harder you pursue them the faster they flee. Sleep. Money. Love. Hellhounds.
^ The self-employed always have stuff to do. Probably the human being always has stuff to do, but bosses and project schedules can blur the lines a little. Other people can tell me if blaming your boss is any use at 4 am. I’ve been self employed so long that I am my own worst nightmare. Mind you, many writers work competently and efficiently to deadlines, and do things like answer when some frelling editor wants to know where they are on some piece of writing they have, perhaps, contracted for and agreed to a date for delivery of: they answer both because they are professional and also because they know where they are.+ Some writers work hysterically and frantically to deadlines too, but the point is they acknowledge deadlines. I’m in the Douglas Adams camp on this one, except that I do not enjoy the whooshing sound as they go past.
One of the nicest things any editor has ever done for me is now many years ago. I know I’ve told you that winning the Newbery, while extremely pleasant for my bank balance, was very hard on the rest of me, because I was thirty-two years old, not the most self-confident woman ever to put on a pair of extra-high high heels so as to be taller than as many people as possible at the parties and things she is going to have to go to because she’d won the Newbery, and had people, at the parties and things, coming up to her and saying, so, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?, ie, now you’ve won the Newbery and reached the pinnacle of literary achievement. I went home after all the flimflam and had a kind of series of itty bitty nervous breakdowns. Or maybe not so itty bitty. It was five years++ between HERO and OUTLAWS, and then OUTLAWS only did so-so, which aggravated the I-knew-it-was-all-a-mistake-and-I’m-not-really-a-writer downward spiral.
Meanwhile I was running out of money. The Newbery does great things for your bank balance, but not nearly as great as winning the lottery or marrying the Queen of England, and I’d bought a little old house, and a medium-sized new car+++. So I’d signed another contract with another editor back before I turned OUTLAWS in. ++++
. . . Turned OUTLAWS in and regressed to staring at the walls. It’s not that it was another five years between OUTLAWS and DEERSKIN: it’s the fact that for about three of them I wasn’t getting anywhere with anything. I was writing, but I had no faith, and a story can only do so much for you if you refuse to believe in your ability to write it.# Then DEERSKIN sank its teeth into me and I was writing whether I wanted to or not.## DEERSKIN was the book that would go to that other editor who, at this point, had been waiting something like seven years for it. DEERSKIN wasn’t what she’d asked for or that I’d said I was going to produce, but it was a book.
And so I was thundering away on the first draft of DEERSKIN and had got to the point of being pretty sure this one was going to go after the last several years of not going with anything, and of thinking that I should write this editor–let’s call her Miranda–and tell her that she was, against all probability, going to get a book out of me after all.
When she wrote to me. Have I told you this story before? Very likely, because it’s one of my favourites. And I’ll tell it again some day too, so sit back and relax. When I saw her name and the publishers’ logo on the envelope### I was terrified: it had been seven years–maybe eight–and she was obviously calling the debt in. This is the real reason not to sign contracts too much ahead of yourself: if you don’t turn the book in the publisher is going to want their money back eventually. I can remember walking home from the post office, having not opened her letter yet, marshalling my arguments: surely she’d let me have another year now that I was actually writing the beggar.
And I got home, and opened the envelope . . . and it was a letter, completely out of the blue, because we’d had no contact about anything in a very long time, saying that she knew, because she knew me, that I was worrying about the old contract, and that she just wanted me to know that she absolutely knew that she would get that book from me some day, and that she was looking forward to it–whenever it happened. And whatever it turned out to be. And that she hoped I was well and happy.
Life frequently sucks, and events kick you in the head after they’ve knocked you down first. Which is why I like telling this story####, because it’s about events tenderly helping you to your feet, brushing you off, and giving you a big bouquet of roses.
+ These people, of course, should be killed. They make it so much harder for the rest of us.
++ although the copyright dates will tell you four
+++ And a washing machine. I’ve told you, haven’t I, that I finally knew I had arrived when I had my own washing machine and didn’t have to go to laundromats any more? Different devices for different people, of course. Mine was a machine à laver couchant proper.
++++ You want to be a little careful about signing multiple contracts with multiple publishers–for the obvious reasons. But it is one way of scrounging money, so long as there are still editors who will take a flyer on you.
# There are a few things from that shadowy era I hope to get back to, now that I’m older and crankier and take less crap from my demons. Shut up, guys! I’ve heard it all before and it’s boring!
## And as rough stints go, a lot of that book was
### I didn’t even have a computer yet
#### Especially on a day/evening/entry when I’m too cross-eyed and brain-wasted to think what I’ve done today
Get Thee Behind Me, Rose!
I was webless for several hours again today: semi-webless: email, blog and web site went into candlelight and quill pen mode,* although my internet connection was still scintillating. So instead of briskly answering a few emails as a way of sharpening up my brain for using the English language and plunging thence into work, I spent way too much of a (shamefully enjoyable) afternoon choosing roses. Some of you** may remember that I mentioned a few days ago that Peter Beales Roses is having a twenty per cent off sale.*** I had ordered from them for this past autumn† and . . . it’s not my fault! They require your email address! I can’t help it that they send me bulletins of special offers!†† And the sale is over the end of January! You wouldn’t want me to miss it!
I was chiefly just going to, you know, cruise . . . which is the worst really. You need to have a list, and then you need to Get In. And. Get Out. Which I signally failed to do. My single mandate was that Peter wants a rose for a north wall.
I seem to have bought ten. . . .
Aimee Vibert
Duchesse d’Auerstadt
Long John Silver
Lady Waterlow
Phyllis Bide
Prosperity
Bishop Darlington
Cameo
Margo Koster
Marie Jeanne
. . . Which I will annotate for you some other dark freezing evening. This is already long enough††† and hellhounds, in these ME-hagged days, have grown accustomed to the idea that we spend some of our evening on the sofa and I’m being importuned. . . .
* * *
* I want a head to roll. And I am gonna roll that sucker.
** With perhaps similar preoccupations
*** Of course several of the roses that ended up on my short^ list weren’t eligible for the sale. Of course.
^ relatively
† That’s the rose hedge, now climbing the side of the kitchen sink at the cottage, saying hello to the camellia on the stool by the door (which, when it isn’t holding camellias, is extra cough-cough counter space), and peering over the edge of the sink at the dish drainer on the far side, no doubt estimating distance. –I can hook that wine glass! I can! The rose hedge, for full disclosure, consists of
1. Tipsy Imperial Concubine, which is where the trouble started this cold winter since she’s known to be tender and cranky^
2. Danae, which is, at least in England, a seriously underappreciated Hybrid Musk, and I’ve only not replaced her since we moved because she’s a trifle, uh, enthusiastic. But I find increasingly as the years pass that I buy the roses I miss the most and figure out what to do with them later. Well. I have always bought roses I want the most and figured out what to do with them later, I just used to have two and a quarter acres to do it in.
3. Comtesse du Cayla, which is, or anyway was for me, one of the tougher Chinas and comes under the new-small-house category of, oh I can put her in a pot which in rose-greed-think means ‘won’t take up any room’^^. Uh huh. In practise I’m going to have to ask Atlas to design pot-rose shelving.
4. Mutabilis . . . for the third time.^^^ Although number two is not definitively dead yet, I didn’t feel like hanging around. I know Mutabilis of old: she has a perverse sense of humour. If I didn’t buy another one for this year, number two will absolutely die. Since I have bought another one, number two may very well pull herself together. Really I brought this on myself, having thought to plant her over the grave of my cranky and perverse first whippet, Rowan, although I did it feeling that they’d get along. They’re obviously getting along famously. But it’s nice really to know that Rowan is still yanking me around from the next world.
Even if it weren’t for Tipsy Imperial I’d've had to bring the hedge indoors, because a new bare-root Mutabilis would take a degree of frost as an excuse to croak. Never mind that The One That Grew at the old house (as opposed, you understand, to the One That Did Not Grow), shot up spectacularly above the wall that was supposed to be protecting her and stood in the teeth of any number of gales going ‘nyah nyah’ and blossoming like crazy every summer. Chinas, like teas, are often tender. If they feel like it. Or not. If they feel like it. Louis XIV, who is sharing the geranium’s cardboard igloo^^^, is also a China, and this winter I’d probably be nervously wrapping her up even if she weren’t sharing planter space with a geranium. I shouldn’t have Chinas–or geraniums–in that corner in front of the house: Note to self. Which I will, of course, ignore, because there’s nowhere to move that particular planter to. At least not till Atlas builds me some shelves.
^ As a general rule, anything that is exclusive to Peter Beales is going to be tender and cranky. They’re often a lot of fun in a challenging sort of way, but they are not anything you stick in the ground and forget about.
^^ Margo Koster, Marie-Jeanne and Cameo of today’s order all come under this category also. Sigh.
^^^ I’ve got Mermaid coming for the third time from David Austin. And Souvenir du Docteur Jamain for the second. Or fourth, depending on how you’re counting: it took me two tries to get her+ going back at the old house.
+ I’ve told you all roses are she, haven’t I? And of course who’s to say Dr Jamain wasn’t a Nicole or a Musetta? Although since she’s from 1865, it’s not very likely.#
# I’m totally failing to convince Google to produce the name and date of the first French woman doctor.
^^^ Ah yes, the cardboard igloo. After almost an inch and a half of rain in forty-eight hours+, last night we had another hard frost, for which the new igloo system was initiated, which involved a second, inner cardboard layer. Tonight we’re going to have another pretty serious frost . . . and then it’s going to warm up and start raining by morning. Great. Thanks. Given my usual hours I suppose I could just stay up . . . but even if it happened as predicted, which it wouldn’t, I don’t actually fancy going out on the street, even my tiny side street, at 3 or 4 am in my dressing gown. Not that the neighbours would bat an eye: in the first place, any eye open at that hour deserves what it gets, and in the second place, they’re already well-broken-in to my being out there somewhat earlier in the day and saying What the hell is the matter with you you stupid piece of lion-maned tamarin dung, or words to that effect, when the cardboard box hangs up on the stake as I’m putting it on, which it always does.
So: the answer: large black plastic garbage bags over the igloo! –The neighbours really are going to report me to the Landscape Fashion Police. I’d better check when the Posh National-Collections Garden at the Top of the Hill is open–because they start being open soon, for snowdrops++–and get my igloos down betimes on those days.
+ I bought my new rain gauge just in time for some really great complaining. Yesssssssss.
++ I saw my first snowdrops today! Yaaaaay! Crazy little beggars, out in this weather. Mine aren’t, yet, but they’re coming: the white is cracking through the green.
†† They also sent me notice of their sale on standard roses. Uh . . . a pair of nice little weeping standards for Third House’s front door. . . .^
^ Note that when I spoke to my builder week before last, work was going to start last week. It didn’t. Are any of you amazed? I didn’t think so. Neither was I.
††† !!!!!!!!!!!
