DAYS LIKE THIS SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A DOG.*
So let’s have an Ask Robin to distract me.
I’ve been wondering what was the first ever memorable story you wrote/wrestled with? I don’t mean the first one you had published, but the first one you can recall pouring your heart and soul into and deciding that you wanted to be an author/writer from that point on.
Never. It is a revelation to me every day that I’m a professional writer. I’ve become enough used to it that I no longer wake up every morning [sic] expecting to find out that I sell shoes** at Wal-Mart*** but I do still wake up every morning amazed . . . which is not a bad thing really. It’s not only a rush, it keeps you at it. How did I get this lucky, you know? Stop mooning around and keep working. Yes ma’am.
I’ve always told stories. Before I knew that’s what I was doing, I did it.† I told stories before I had words, and certainly before I could read and write: and yes, I can remember a few of these, but I’m not sure I can describe them. Once you have words it’s hard to go back. But story-telling for me is just part of my experience of living in the world. Everything is part of a story. It’s only a question of whichever way the fragment you’re contemplating chooses to run, and whether you have the time and inclination to follow. How many of you wander around humming random hums? Hands up, please. I bet there are a lot. You don’t do it to do it, you just do it. You’re built that way. You just find yourself doing it. Some of your hums may be fragments of other people’s real composed music, but some of them are just playing with sound.†† And you may go on to nail down a hum on a piece of paper and create (or try to create) a proper piece of music around it, but that’s later, and that’s something else, and it doesn’t discount or disparage the hums if you never turn them into best selling power ballads. Story-telling is like that for me.††† I tell stories anyway. That I can write some of them down and make people pay me for them is a bonus.
* * *
* Or a hellhound. I had a am-I-coughing-in-my-sleep^-or-is-that-a-hellhound-yowling-to-go-out-NOW? morning. Plus delightful clean-up duty. Plus the guy with the very long squeegee who does my first^^ floor windows showed up^^^ and I didn’t dare let him into the back garden, which was reserved for urgent hellhound activity.
And then there was the continuing to stream, the continuing to cough, and the continuing to not get enough sleep. Whimper. I just don’t get the coughing. How can bodies be so perverse?
And then there was going to the vet. And this time our client was Chaos, who has a Vet Phobia, and turns into the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper every time he is dragged across that fell threshold, so that was even lovelier. He has a Vet Phobia, as I’m sure I’ve told you, because some arrogant little chickie of a wet new post grad vet and who didn’t have a clue what was wrong with him gave him one of those full-spectrum antibiotic jabs that are known to hurt, how dare you be stochastic and PAINFUL with my dog??, and then got all shirty when he screamed, and said that whippets were ‘wimpets’. She’s lucky she got out alive, but I didn’t find out till later that she’d chosen her treatment because she had no idea. Oh, and this is after she had told me that I ought to get them neutered. That that’s what responsible owners do.
She’s gone on to make some other veterinary surgery a joy for everyone, but I am left with a hellhound with a vet phobia.^^^^
Chaos is also one of these dogs that after you have broken up his pills into tiny crumbs and mixed them in carefully with the nice drooly chicken scraps, carefully eats all around them because of course they are a non-food-stuff and are in his bowl in error. So then you get to wodge up all the crumbs into a mushy glob and shove it/them down his throat. DOGS. YAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Handbells, this evening, for some mysterious reason, were relatively successful. Niall even started making calls. I don’t DO calls in bob major. It was another situation, as it so often is, that the other three have rung MILLIONS of touches of bob major in the tower, and they tell me eagerly, oh, it’s just like bob minor EXCEPT WITH TWO MORE BELLS! Yes, and driving a car is just like riding a bicycle except with TWO MORE WHEELS! Oh, and an engine. Spare me. I can, in fact, get through a course of plain bob major in the tower (probably), because I ring it on handbells. It’s EASIER in the tower.
^ which would not be the first time. I’ll take any sleep I can get.
^^ American second
^^^ His schedule is known only to himself, although I believe it has something to do with prophetic dreams, tea leaves and the curious incident of how many times the dog in the night-time barked.+
+ Maybe it had the streamings, and needed to go out. The original silent hound evidently had excellent digestion.
^^^^ Today’s vet was another recent vintage grad but . . . golly. Not only was she sweet to my hopelessly neurotic hellhound . . . well, if I were thirty years younger and single, I’d ask for her phone number. I think I could work out the gay thing as I went along.
** I think I could get into selling All Stars.
*** But not at Wal-Mart.
† I personally believe that the human critter is hard-wired to tell stories like we’re hard-wired to learn language. But story-telling may get squeezed or belittled or misunderstood out of the functional part of you, like other bits of our potentials got squeezed out of those of us who are convinced we cannot possibly do maths or hard science or whatever else.
†† And as jumping-off places other people’s work is the greatest. I’ve said many times that I learnt a lot writing appalling Tolkien pastiche.^ I am one of the humourless frumps who say no to ‘fan fiction’ but as a private learning experience that never sees the light of any computer screen but your own, trash my stories with my blessing, and may you go on to write your own books that will make me laugh and cry.^^
^ Infinitely direr than the bad Kipling pastiche for some reason. Probably because Kipling is not forsoothly. On the other hand, I learnt not to be forsoothly from Tolkien.
^^ Or distract me from coughing and no sleep. Any book that can do that is better than the Pulitzer Prize.
††† I also wander around the house humming.^ But it took formal voice lessons to get that started again. I used to hum random hums when I was a kid, but it was disruptive or impolite or whatever, and I was taught to stop. Of course kids have to learn to behave appropriately, but I wish we as a species or at least as a culture could learn better methods to teach kids, for example, that singing off-pitch is also the precursor to singing on-pitch,^^ or that if you want to tell a story about a flying dragon you don’t have to worry about the frelling physics of frelling flight right away, or even about how Marigold got back from Madagascar/the grocery store so quickly. It’ll come. Go with what you’ve got.
^ Or I did till about a fortnight ago SIIIIIIIIIGH.
^^ I know. We’ve had this conversation in the forum.
Team Bell (Ringing)
I WENT BELL RINGING TONIGHT.* YES. I DID.** At Colin’s home tower, East Persnickety. And there were even eight roughly speaking ringer ringers there*** for the eight ropes, which meant we could ring triples. Although the ‘roughly speaking’ meant it took us two tries to get launched on the touch of Grandsire Triples which was eventually derailed anyway by overenthusiastic calling on the part of the conductor†. But I was on the four, not the three, the three being my usual bell for Grandsire Triples, and I Did. It. †† The roughly-speaking also meant that it took us three tries to get through a plain course of Stedman Triples, but we did that too—barely—and I was again on a strange bell, and therefore starting in the wrong place, in the wrong direction, and over the wrong bells. This is very challenging when the lurgy has eaten your brain.†††
But it was good for morale. Hells, even ringing rounds for the beginner was good for morale. Ringing is a fatal disease, I’ve told you that, right? And it takes the rest of your life to kill you.‡
Mrs Redboots
I know you feel you are committed to writing a blog every night, but honestly, sometimes a sentence . . . will be enough to reassure us that you are alive and functional, if only just barely. Sleep – and SHADOWS – is more important than the blog (and you can always give us More Mongo, which can only be a Good Thing!).
katinseattle
Me, too. I second this. As much as I enjoy your blog, don’t wear yourself out over it.
Thank you. It’s a tricky balance, and one that after four and a half years I still haven’t found. I’ve told you that I write here every night because that’s how I make sure it gets done—if I dropped down to every other night I would soon be doing it every three nights, and then every four, and so on. There’s something about the initial getting going obstacle that only diminishes to relative insignificance if it’s a daily charge. It’s not wholly unlike hurtling hellhounds. If I ever stopped to think, You mean I have to stomp through the elements twice a day for two hours EVERY DAY for the rest of their LIVES?, I would probably freak out and starting researching very large hamster wheels on line.‡‡ As it is, it’s just something I do. Every day. Cough. More or less. But mostly more.
There’s also a certain quality of YAAAAAAH SCHOOL’S OUT to plunging into the blog after a long day of book-in-progress, like a hod-carrier coming home, ripping his steel-toed boots and hard hat off, putting on his trainers and going for a run. It’s still all sweaty and muscular, but it’s a significantly different kind of sweaty and muscular. I imagine many happy short-order chefs come home and make bread, and one of our local farmers has the most affectionate hand-reared orphan lambs I’ve ever met. ‡‡‡
At the same time . . . I admit the stress level at the moment is a little extreme. I may yet have to take you up on your kind offer to let me skive off the odd night or two. At the moment, sleep would be a fine thing if it were a little more available . . . and unfortunately most of Mongo involves spoilers. The scene he’s busy *&^%$£”!!!!! taking over at the moment, for example, is all about grmmphflgrrrglklmmph!
* * *
* Cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough, cough . . . Colin says that his experience of the lurgy is that he has a good day and then a bad day and then a good day and then a bad day . . . I’d be very grateful for even fifty percent good days. Cough.
** Cough.
*** Plus one wide-eyed beginner still grappling with the terror of call changes.
† Hey, it’s practise night. This is what practise night is like: the Peter Principle in action. Any working bell band—barring the really annoying fabulous ones—on any given practise night will rise to the level where the majority present can no longer quite cope, and stick there, flailing wildly. CRASH. CLANK.
†† Although a veil of kindness will be drawn over the quality of my striking. Penelope, who is not usually a Monday ringer, was there tonight, and, tying up her rope after our first effort, said to me, that was like getting a bucking bronco through a dressage test. Yes. And it’s occasionally reassuring to hear from someone who isn’t used to them that those bells are baleful toads and it’s not just that I have the grace, hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness of a bottle-opener. I suppose it may depend on the bottle-opener.
††† I always enjoy the furrowed brows of ringers as they say this or that method is, of course, unusually volatile, or difficult to learn, or whatever. Colin doesn’t go in for this kind of deconstruction: he throws a method at you and you ring it. Or not. But I was thinking about this tonight, because both Grandsire and Stedman are on the usual-suspects list for ringer-flustering methods. There are two things about Grandsire, first, that it’s not a member of a family of methods, it’s just out there, stark, on its own; there are no clues or hooks or familiar landmarks. It’s just you and Grandsire and the wild itch on the end of your nose that begins the moment you pull off. The second thing is that most of the methods you learn at least early on in your career (I don’t yet know about the later ones) have calls that come slightly before you have to do anything. So you have about a blow to remember what you’re doing. In Grandsire for most calls you stop dead in your tracks and double dodge. This is fine in one way: while you’re double dodging you have your chance to remember what you do next. But if your over-enthusiastic plain bob doubles practise-night conductor calls two blows too soon you have time to think, no, wait a minute, this is too soon, and you’ll probably get it right. If you’re ringing Grandsire, chances are you’ll have automatically started double dodging before your brain has a chance to say, no, wait a minute . . . which means you’re now in a big mess. Well, Penelope and I were in a big mess, because we’d dutifully stopped where we were and double dodged with each other.
Stedman’s threat to humanity is different. The reason there are people in padded rooms murmuring brokenly, No, no! Not Stedman!, is because there is no anchoring treble line. Most of the standard methods, the treble has a simpler line through the method, and it remains unaffected by calls. This means that your first and in many cases most reliable means of finding out where the hell you are if you’ve just come adrift is to see where you are in relation to the treble,^ because the treble’s line does not change however many calls there have been. Not so in Stedman. The treble is following the same infernally screwed-up line that all the other bells are following. If you come adrift in Stedman, unless you have a scarily overachieving conductor, you’re just frelled. We got through just our plain course tonight (finally) because Colin is a scarily overachieving conductor. Although I’m sure that much shouting is not good for a man still half under the spell of this unusually vile and degenerate lurgy. And I still wasn’t quite where I thought I was when he called ‘that’s all.’
^ Supposing you haven’t come so far adrift that you’ve forgotten what method you’re ringing, which also happens. Not only to me.
‡ Niall’s usual Tuesday handbell group is short-handed tomorrow, so he asked if I’d fill in. Yes! Yes! I said. I’m not drooling! That’s the lurgy!
‡‡ Degus are cute. http://www.petsathome.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Info_10601_caring-for-your-degu_-1_10551
‡‡‡ All right, I don’t mean to be disingenuous here. But you could say that writing about writing is my equivalent of coming home and finding out that I’m supposed to go on carrying hods at home too. No, no! I want to ring bells!
I want to sing, some day. Sigh. Cough.
Lurgy Update*
It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.** I’m catching up on back issues of magazines. I’ve thrown a few more books against the wall.*** I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I’m keep hearing that it’s the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games. It’s okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover. It’s not as good as MONTEZUMA.
But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they’ve been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same. And it really was pretty fabulous. We didn’t even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡
katinseattle
I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.
No pressure.
Certainly not. I’m very relieved, since I’ve been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation. Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . . noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph]. This is not how this scene went last time. Yelp! Arrrgh! Yaaaah! —It’s going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it. I so need sleep.
blondviolinist
You know how there’s Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡
I’m on team Mongo.
::Beams::
* * *
* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the ‘12’ of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it’s still last month? Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is?
** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation. I admit I’m a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days. Uuuuuuungh. And unless I’ve developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing. I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope. Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony.
*** I’m an even nastier reader when I’m ill and short of sleep.
† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing.
†† I was talking to a friend today who’d been ill in the night too. She has cats. And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her. Hey! You’re up! Great! Aren’t you glad to see us? Aren’t you going to feed us? Barring the ‘feed us’ part, hellhounds have a similar reaction. Hey! You’re up! Hey! All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don’t care which four they’re awake for are very disorienting . . . when you’re pretty disoriented anyway. But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I’m drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough. So, we’re going out NOW, right? I wonder if they could learn the concept of ‘dressing gown’?^
^ Mongo could. The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do. If you don’t give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.
††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa. You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^
^ I’m also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+ I’m practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers’ opinions on. Why don’t people do their homework. His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be. Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.
I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn’t may be blurry in some areas. I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I’m asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++ And she’s also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it’s reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids’ books I’d just tell her what I know. Which is not, in fact, much, and she’d be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.
And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you’re professional writers? Say, I’m writing a children’s book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have. There wouldn’t even have been any blood loss (probably). But he shows up on our (Peter’s) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand? No. Not on.+++
So I don’t want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV. So I’m practising. I’m not watching TV, mind you, but when I’m going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on.
Ajlr
I’m so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one’s brain is going to be shaken out through one’s forehead at the very next convulsion.
I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough. Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains.
Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#. Eventually I figured out how to call up ‘information’ and was apprised that this was a film called ‘The Trail of the Screaming Forehead’ in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads. Ahem. I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe.
+ They breed. Like coathangers and odd socks.
++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.
+++ I am a curmudgeon. But we knew that. And I haven’t read it—that’s Peter’s self-immolation. But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup.
# Carefully missing the Christmas tree. I’m not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet. Hey, I’m sick.
‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise.
‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon? Ewwwwww. I’m on Team Sam.
Cough
I am a walking cough; a cough on two legs; cough made flesh. Cough. Talking is a mistake.* Eating is perilous.** I think the arrival of the cough is supposed to indicate you’re improving.*** I’m too tired from coughing to tell. Cough.
But SHADOWS is still going.†
I am however cranky†† about the bad news about ultrasonic jewellery cleaners. I had thought part of the point of the ultrasonic gadgets is that they’re gentle on jewellery, possibly to the point of being so gentle they don’t really clean anything. (I do know that you can’t do anything to pearls except smile at them and wear them against cashmere.) I also didn’t know, or had forgotten, since I’ve barely worn my tourmaline ring in twenty years, that tourmalines are fragile. Feh. And yes, of course I can ask our nice local jeweller for advice about cleaning, but he will feel obliged to go all professional on me and I was hoping some of you guys might have the answer without the official hedging.††† Ah well. More little brushes and washing-up liquid in my future then. I guess I can bear it.
And before I bore you all to death . . . I am loitering frivolously with the thought of going ringing at Forza tomorrow. This is a really bad idea. I don’t have the time, I don’t have the energy, I have a novel to finish—the bells there are tricky sods, I already know Gemma is not going to be there, and I might find myself the only mediocre ringer present, with my usual additional burden of not being able to handle those particular bells and the supernumerary burden of the lurgy.
Maybe I’ll just stay home, and post a recipe. And cough.
* * *
* Why do hellhounds insist on waiting till I say something? Isn’t the mad waving of hands containing harnesses enough to tell them they should sit?
** Eating is always perilous. Ask Darkness and Chaos. AAAAAUGH. Having given the impression that he was on the mend last night, Chaos barely made it outdoors this morning to start the diabolical double-ended geysering all over again. AAAAAAAUGH.
*** http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/09/new-year-health-regime-last The headline in the paper version is more eye-catching to me in my present state: ‘Dr Luisa Dillner Says Switch Off the TV, Stop Snacking and Start Exercising to Ensure You Feel Good Beyond January.’ I haven’t watched TV in YEARS,^ I am post-menopausal and my daily energy allowance is 3.5 calories and I NEVER snack, and I walk an hour and forty five minutes to two hours EVERY DAY. WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE?^^
^ I talked to Hannah today. “Hi,” I said. Cough. “Wow,” she said. She still hasn’t read CHAOS. After she does we’re going to read either JANE AUSTEN or CHARLES DICKENS by Claire Tomalin. Or both, because we have so much time to read. She was telling me about the TV programmes her daughters are watching and I’ve never heard of any of them. I haven’t been deeply involved in a TV show since BUFFY. No, really. ANGEL? Too gruesome. FIREFLY? Eh. It had its moments, but it never entered my heart and mind the way BUFFY did.+ It’s probably safe to say that I wouldn’t be writing my first high school novel at fifty-nine if I hadn’t watched BUFFY at an embarrassingly advanced age which was nonetheless more impressionable than it should have been. Which may or may not be a good thing.
Oh, and the mysterious non-cooperation affliction of our de-cabled TV? We changed the batteries in the remote and it still refused to climb away from BBC 1. So there was a knock on the door one afternoon and there was the Nice Man who had installed our freeview box who wanted to ask if one of us would read his CHILDREN’S BOOK MANUSCRIPT. Fortunately Peter answered the door and dragged him into the sitting room and thrust the remote at him. There are too many buttons on the wretched thing. And Peter is reading his manuscript. I had my mouth all open to do my rant on this subject which is that ASIDE from the fact that I am a cranky cow, what I think about an unpublished manuscript has no more to do with its chances of getting published than what Chaos or Darkness thinks of it.++ Go start researching AGENTS. What you need is an AGENT who likes your work. But I was forestalled by Peter’s old-fashioned gentlemanliness AKA the man is nuts.
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
++ Er—you aren’t expecting us to eat it, are you?
^^ Of course they also tell you to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night. They must be joking.
† And my email seems to have settled down . . . for the moment. Sort of. Or, possibly, not, and I just don’t know it. It was even weirder than I told you yesterday, as I eventually found out when I stopped abusing my damaged larynx with screams for vengeance and had a look for the easily findable stuff that had reappeared. When I got back to the mews and turned the old laptop on—which is the one I’ve been using the last several flu-demented days of filing and deleting—I was braced for what I’d just seen on the cottage machines. But what had come back was NOT what I’d deleted that morning. It was some OTHER stuff. Whimper.
So . . . I basically have no idea. GIBBERGIBBERGIBBERGIBBER. Right. Enough of that. I have a novel to finish.
As to why I still use Outlook . . . I forget. I will ask Raphael to remind me. I think it’s to do with my apparently somewhat unusual requirements combined with my total lack of patience, interest in, or skill in understanding anything to do with computers. I think it’s what they’re willing to support me with. The bright spot, such as it is, is that the shiny new laptop with the vibrantly hated Win 7 on it did in fact discharge its battery by 50% overnight despite being turned off. YAAAAY. For once something goes wrong even when there is an archangel present.
However, those of you hopefully offering advice about the hellhounds: I think you’re probably late to the party. Long-time readers have heard all this before. My hellhounds are five and a half years old and I spent the first two of their years of life on this planet trying to find out why they had diarrhea all the time. The answer is, as I eventually figured out with absolutely NO help from any of the fantastic and expensive panoply of vets, specialist vets, and specialist vets’ laboratories and techno-gizmo whatsits that I consulted, that they are allergic to all cereal grains. (Pancreatitis, as someone mentioned on the forum but I can’t find it now, is one of the things they were temporarily diagnosed for.) I’d tried an elimination diet nearly first thing, but I took them off brown rice while continuing to use barley and oats, and then swapped. It took me a long time to think of all cereals. But two years of eating something they were wildly and violently allergic to has left them with some permanent damage.
And the only time they won’t eat when I’m nearby is when they’re already looking for an excuse not to eat, and me being an ogre will do. (I think this has more to do with the fact that they know I want them to eat and I’ll be testy if they don’t.) I’m actually not very fond of the alpha theory. Why would a good leader want his/her colleagues not to eat? The alpha business as the great comprehensive answer to everything is less popular than it was, for which I am grateful. When it first came crashing out it was The Solution, and I thought, since it clearly didn’t apply all that well to my experience, that I just had weird dogs. Well, I do have weird dogs, but the alpha theory has also lost centre stage. I am, however, a great fan of what works. If something makes you and your dog(s) happy and healthy and comfortable and satisfied, then it’s the answer for you.
†† Cough
††† Note to self: The Answer never exists.
I can’t very well ask the fellow who bought the stones for us. That was twenty years ago in Maine and I have more or less deliberately^ forgotten everything about him except that he was a self-absorbed twit.
^ Ie making a virtue of Middle Aged Brain
Wha’?
Bluuuuh. I’m even more brain dead tonight than I was last night and I’ve already used the available SHADOWS snippet for the foreseeable future. It’s a great pity that snippets have a dismaying tendency to give the plot away.* After all, this blog is Days in the Life, right? SHADOWS is about 90% of my life right now, days and nights.
Vikkik
(You know, if you like, you can post us a scene from SHADOWS EVERY night until the book is done – we won’t object
That’s very kind of you. I appreciate the vote of confidence.
although your publishers might disagree with me on that one….)
Well, self e-publishing is all the rage these days, isn’t it? We could offer a subscription for a New Robin McKinley Fragment service.
B_twin_1
By then my arms were full of Mongo. “Mongo, you loophead,” I said, burying my face in his fur, “what are you doing here?”
*whispers* They do tend to be loopheads.
While I do not have your eclectic and inclusive experience of the breed . . . I know. Mongo is drawn from life.
Ajlr
And your publishers could perhaps start thinking about a range of objects with Mongo on, in some form (a doodle?) for the launch in 2013? I would so buy a T-shirt or something.
What a splendid idea. Thank you. Speaking of a subscription service . . . We might think about an extended doodle shop. Definitely t shirts. Knitting . . . I mean tote . . . bags. Mugs. Fuchsia leather jackets with satin logos. All Stars. If there are Blondie and Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse All Stars—which there are, I have both—why not Mongo, Ebon and Gulp All Stars?
I did wrench a little time free and go to bell practise tonight. Three-dimensionality is great when you’ve been staring at a computer screen all day (and night). Although I’ve mentioned before that there’s a strong fantasy element to bell ringing**—it’s just not satisfactorily explained by large hollow chunks of metal, long ropes with fluffy bits and clusters of crazy people—and it may be that bells suit the brain-blasted writer better than certain other occupations—boxcar derby, say, or pearl fishing—which would require the subject to re-engage with reality in a much more unpleasantly comprehensive way. Bells, you’re tucked up in a nice little initiates-only bell chamber . . . well, usually. I had the standard annual phone call from Crabbiton this evening, asking if I were available to help ring in the New Year tomorrow at midnight. It’s not like I’d be asleep. But Crabbiton is not only a ground-floor ring but the whole point is that the ENTIRE VILLAGE crowds into the church and stares at you. It’s probably good for my character.***
* * *
* Note: Casimir is very good-looking.
** Which perhaps balances the horrible reality of learning method lines.^
^ While muttering frantically to yourself: it’s not maths, it’s not maths, it’s just numbers on a crooked line, it’s not maths.+
+ Speaking of maths. Some day when I’m awake, so, like, maybe April, I want to talk some more about Shape of Brain and the culture chasm between the lit brain and the maths brain. I had a couple of ha-ha you lit people are so funny from science brains in response to my blog post objecting to ABSOLUTELY SMALL’S doolally Schrodinger’s cat metaphor—in other words I didn’t get it. True. But from where I’m standing it’s a bad metaphor, as is the 50 pound boy travelling at 20 mph a bad metaphor. They don’t engage me with the material, they throw me farther out—like inconsistent characterisation or a howling plot hole in a novel. Suddenly you’re not reading a story any more, you’re staring at hen scratches on a page (real or virtual) and deciding you’d rather be getting on with your knitting. Cats in boxes don’t randomly die because you look at them. When Fayer eventually gets to the photons being in two places at once but collapsing into one state or another if they’re measured it’s fine. I don’t want to write a term paper on it, mind you, but I follow it okay.#
But all metaphors are metaphorical. They depend on common ground, common language, common assumptions. Which is dangerous and unreliable, you know? I know: I’m an American who has been living in England for the last twenty years and am still daily baffled by this alien culture I now call home.## How much of my almost throwing ABSOLUTELY SMALL across the room when I got to the part about the 1000 cats in boxes, 500 of them marked for death###, is not that the metaphor is bad in an absolute sense~ but because I’m reading/listening to it with a lit brain, not a math brain?
# Being a fantasy writer may be an advantage here, speaking of shape of brain. So this earnest science bloke says, okay, these particles, they’re sort of like waves, and they’re sort of like infinite waves, and they can be in two places at once, or maybe they can be everywhere at once, theoretically, just so long as you don’t look at them. Oh, okay, says the never-having-had-a-lot-to-do-with-classical-physics-and-therefore-having-no-mindsets-to-break-but-liking-without-worrying-a-lot-about-cognitive-dissonance-things-the-size-of-pegasi-and-dragons-flying fantasy writer.~
~ And, being a fantasy writer, one of the things I am thinking, while this earnest science bloke is digging himself in deeper with this complex and exotic taradiddle of his, is, there’s a difference between looking and measuring. The problem with the subatomically tiny stuff is that our eyes can’t focus that small, so we have to have instruments that measure. What happens if you befriend a flower fairy with very good close vision? I suppose her body heat or her breathing or something would still upset the photons. Miffy little beasts, photons.
## Method bell ringing. Please.
### My restraint was chiefly because I was listening to it on Pooka at the time, and I do not throw my iPhone across the room.
~small or large
*** No. It’s not.