(Someone else’s) Puppy, con’t
So last Sunday Niall fixed me with a glittering eye* and suggested that I would Like. To. Ring. Handbells. Again. Next. Sunday. Of course. Of course I would. Of course.** I have so much free time. So Niall picked me up this evening and pressed the rocket-launcher button and we were in Helsinki almost before we’d finished our fascinating discussion of long-draught towers.***
Titus’ wife Andromache heard us coming† and opened the door with Haro†† under her arm. I came for the puppy, I said. I knew that, she said, and handed him to me. . . . a few hours later Niall picked me up off the floor and said, We’re here to ring handbells, you know.
Oh.
ARE WE TOO FRELLING CUTE FOR WORDS OR WHAT
Yes.
I am Fang. I am the Terror of Continents.
He's not biting me. I just happen to have a finger in his mouth.
One of the things I love about puppies is the way they don't have to be actually biting anything. They just like to hang out with their mouths open. Just in case.
AWWWWWWWWWWW. (Hey, nice ring.)
MORE AWWWWWWWWWW. As Andromache was prying us apart at the end of the evening she said, you can sure tell the dog people. --Oh?
The worst of it is that Jasper will be back next week so Titus and Niall won’t need me any more. Sob. †††
* * *
* I wonder if the Ancient Mariner rang methods on handbells? It could explain a lot.
** Of course I overslept this morning after the bells woke me up and I couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s not even a loud noise through two doors^ and a window. But it drags me out of sleep like the sound of a hellhound suffering urgencies does.
^ Although I keep forgetting and reopening my bedroom door. Since the room is only just big enough for my small double bed+ and a lot of bookshelves it is a trifle claustrophobic with the door closed.
+ Although the four-poster aspect adds loom#
# Which reminds me arrrrgh that I need mosquito netting by mid-April. If my bats were climbing out of their cosy little space under the roof into my part of the house in search of water last year . . . maybe I’d better have that netting by the end of March. If they’re thirsty they may come back early.
*** Nasty. Avoid long draught towers if at all possible.
† The retro-rockets need adjustment.
†† So I was cruising a Japanese boys’ names list because—because—why not, and the meaning of Haro caught my eye: wild boar’s first son. Oh my. I admit I haven’t found another list containing it to crosscheck with, but I still have to have it.
††† You know there’s only three regulars for Sunday nights with Titus. Maybe they’d like to ring major for a change? Which needs four?
I don’t even like little frelling terriers.
–Oh? Really? No one would ever know.
Update . . .
YAAAAY. I may be the proud future owner of a copy of JAPANESE COOKING: A SIMPLE ART by Shizuo Tsuji after all.
NHInsider
Robin, have you tried emailing the seller directly and offering to pay the difference in shipping via paypal? Might be worth a try.
I had already written to her last night before I posted the blog, thinking, as you say, that it can’t hurt, since she was nice enough to write to me in the first place and tell me why it had been cancelled. But I hadn’t thought of PayPal, which makes everything so much easier,* and I mentioned it today, when she wrote back with options. I’ve just said ‘yes’ to one, so . . . tentative YAAAAY. Mind you, I’m doing my insane thing. The postage is going to cost about three times what the book does** and I don’t know anything about the book except what a nice lady on Days in the Life’s forum said plus a few random amazon reviewers, than which there can be nothing more unreliable in this world and several imaginary/fictional/quantum*** ones as well, probably including the one in SHADOWS†. And I only plugged back in to Japan and Japanese a few weeks ago, when www.audible.co.uk had a sale on language-learning books and I, who had been worrying about Takahiro, who clearly has secrets, thought, ha ha ha ha ha, I bet they don’t have Japanese . . . but they did.
But, you know, a cookbook . . . that’s harmless. It’s harmless, right?†† I already know I like Japanese cooking††† and everyone has to eat.
* * *
It has been mostly a rather gruesome day. I had to get out of bed at AN UNHOLY HOUR‡ to take Peter and me to our rescheduled appointment to be hammered and pummelled by our massage lady, Tabitha. I hurtle hellhounds while Peter is bludgeoned into submission and then it’s my turn. It feels so good when it’s over.‡‡ Then we had to race home ‡‡‡ so I could do a little of my own hammering, on a keyboard, before it was time to dash back to the cottage for handbells. Gemma wasn’t there so it was just the boys and I and they were trying to make me conduct. They’re such sneaks. They approached the question obliquely, which is to say we attempted some unconducted touches, which means you all have to agree in advance when the calls are, so you do them at the same time and to the same pattern. And then you just ring the touch without anyone saying anything. Well, all conducting is is remembering where the bobs and singles are! they said gleefully. So you can call wronghomewrongplaintwelvefortysixtruffledoodahhome! It’s easy! And I’m the Emperor of Japan.
And then there was Muddlehampton Choir practise, the experience of which was made additionally harrowing by the fact that it was colder inside St Frideswide than it was outside. And I guess unfunny throat problems are endemic among amateur choir singers since no one batted an eye about my having missed the last approximately twenty practises to mine. I was expecting us to be working on the music for the wedding, since that’s in April, but instead we started on John Rutter’s Five Childhood Lyrics which is supposed to be on the playlist for the summer concert in July. What’s the rest of the programme? I asked. Oh, we don’t know, was the reply. Um. Oh. And, furthermore, the frelling lyrics end on a sustained top A for the sopranos.
I wonder what Colloquial Icelandic just, you know, looks like?
* * *
* Including doing startlingly and unexpectedly well when you have this fabulous/deranged idea about running an on-line sale/auction
** Still cheaper than the only UK copy I saw, but I’m now wondering if there’s an automatic mark-up from what you’d pay in the shop to cover postage shortfall. UK postage is like something out of a Kurosawa film: bloody and surreal.
*** Which may or may not involve cats which may or may not be alive.
† Which is pretty frelling unreliable.
†† This discussion will pass rapidly by the 1,018 dictionaries, grammars and assorted how-to-do-Japanese-stuff books I seem to have collected recently.^
^ Oh for godssake. As I am writing this blog entry, amazon has just sent me an email offering me special discounts on language learning books. Including . . . wait for it . . . Colloquial Icelandic. I wouldn’t kid you about this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0415207061/ref=pe_178531_28916251_pe_epc_dt2
There. See? Blech. I’ve probably got inadvertently put on a ‘people who like learning languages’ list. I DON’T LIKE LEARNING LANGUAGES. THE ONLY LANGUAGE I’VE EVER LEARNT SUCCESSFULLY IS ENGLISH. I had years and years of French in school . . . and can barely say . . . um. My three words of French have been overlaid by my twelve (new) words of Japanese.
But I was thinking about this as I lay on the sofa covered in hellhounds and books on Japanese yesterday. They do warn you (in books on teaching English speakers) that it’s going to take you—you the real language students as opposed to fluffbrains who happen to have had a Japanese character pop up in a book they’re writing—two or three times the number of hours and pints of blood to become fluent in Japanese than it would to become fluent in a romance language. Feh. Well, I don’t have the threat of needing to become fluent hanging over me, so I can dispense with that one immediately. And living five years in the country leaves a mark. But there’s at least one more thing—or two—what did I hate, hate, hate worst about trying to learn French? Irregular frelling verbs. Irregular frelling verbs. And really, conjugating the suckers at all, regular or triple gonzo. Also declensions. Hate. Japanese has two irregular verbs. Two. How wonderful is that. And two verb tenses: past and everything else. That’s all. How wonderful is that.
But then you look at the written language. AAAAAAAAAAAUGH. Something like ninety-two symbols in the two syllabaries—plus 2000 kanji. Two thousand. And that’s only the beginning. That’s only scraping you over the base literacy line. Maybe French declensions aren’t so bad after all. Except . . . I love kanji. I think they are totally, absolutely and scintillatingly cool. Never mind I can’t do them. Can’t remember them, can’t write them, can’t make sense of them. I could never do French declensions or conjugations either. But I never loved them.
Meanwhile. I found myself helplessly and involuntarily writing a tiny extra bit of a scene today in which the important stuff happens in Japanese. It’s only about twelve words, but it has to be the right twelve words. I may have to take it out again.^ Or run away to sea. Or, of course, learn Japanese.^^
^cassbag16, if you are reading this, look at your DMs.
^^ I’m sorry, but bell ringing and singing were there before you.
††† At least certain extreme aspects of Japanese cooking. As a kid in Japan you went up to one of the street vendors and pointed—although I personally never developed a taste for the blindingly salty, powerfully dead and rubber-crutch-textured dried fish and seafood—and back in the States once the Americans discovered sushi that was all I ever wanted.^
But I did have a favourite Japanese cookbook and . . . I have no idea why I got rid of it. The problem with being a hoarder is that when you are finally compelled to throw stuff out^^ you tend to do a really lousy job. It was something about Japanese rural cooking or Japanese cheap rural cooking and it had recipes for stuff like feeding ten people on a handful of rice and one medium-sized shrimp.
^ But I’ve always liked tofu. And miso. And tempeh. And chopsticks.
^^ Say when you are moving from a house with nine bedrooms, five attics and an assortment of outbuildings to two houses with three bedrooms between them. Although it was longer ago than that. Probably when I moved over here which is twenty years in which to have forgotten even its title.
‡ That would be . . . 8:30. I mean, you know, a.m.
‡‡ She was nicer to me when my ME was worse. Hmmm.
‡‡‡ In our glorious and resplendent sixteen-year-old MOT-passing car
Puppy
There was a PUPPY.
Of course that’s why I agreed to sacrifice my Sunday evening away from SHADOWS.* Niall had rung up yesterday saying that he’d just heard from Jasper, their usual Sunday evening third, that he was contagious [convincing sound effects, I understand, were deployed here], and could I be persuaded to free Sunday evening to ring handbells with Niall and Titus?
I was out hurtling when the message came in, and after I got back it took me about half an hour to consider the matter.** By the time I’d rung back Niall had already rung Caitlin, since time was short and I might have a manticore-vanquishing scheduled, and Caitlin had already said yes. That’s great! said Niall to me. Now we can ring major! Titus should ring more major!***
And we did ring major. It was rather . . . exciting. Moan. Well, I mean, we did ring major. We rang quite a few plain courses and staggered through most of a few touches, although these latter tended to find all the bells but Niall’s swapped around to baffling and unseemly locations. (You can’t have been doing parallel five-six down! I was doing five-six down! No, you were making seconds and dodging at the back! Well, maybe I should have been, but I can assure you I wasn’t!) And then Titus sat back and said his hand needed a rest, and that the three of us should go ahead and ring a quarter of bob minor. I don’t do quarters! I said. Oh, go on, said Titus, you can get your name in The Ringing World. Niall, whom I do know not to trust by now, said, oh, don’t worry, we’ll start with a 120 [this is a short touch]. I wasn’t at all surprised when we were clearly not doing a 120. And we went on, and we went on, and I was already tired because I had done a sizable whack of SHADOWS before I came out† and I was totally losing it . . . and then, having gotten through most of the freller, Niall called us round because he said he’d lost track, and so we lost it. I just need more practise conducting quarters, said Niall.
Fortunately there was a PUPPY.
It’s still only about the size of my hand although it’s thirteen weeks old, because it’s a Jack Russell/Border terrier cross. Little terriers are not generally my favourite thing in the whole world but . . . a puppy. And of course it liked me because I smell of its friends and relations. So I had a puppy on my lap during tea while everyone else had cake.†† And it’s no doubt because of the puppy that I seem to have agreed to do this again next Sunday evening. . . .
* * *
* Well, no. I’d entirely forgotten about the puppy. Niall, who is not a big critter person, had mentioned there was now a puppy, but I have Things on My Mind^ and since I had no immediate expectation of meeting it this fascinating fact was allowed to slip into the . . . er . . . shadows.
^ Mind? Things?
** Voice One: Yes! Yes! Yes! Ringing with Titus^ is terrific practise and last Thursday’s handbells were cancelled because two of us were unavailable!
Voice Two: No! No! I have to keep on with SHADOWS! I have to keep on with it every minute!^^
Voice One: If I keep on with it every minute I will melt and run through the cracks in the floor!
Voice Two: You are an irresponsible feather-brained flibbertigibbet!
Voice One: Thank you! I’m ringing Niall now to say yes!
^ He’s the one who had a stroke fifteen or so years ago and has only one functioning hand. So he rings both bells in one hand, held in a cross shape, so his hand—and the bells—go in four different directions depending on which stroke of which bell he’s ringing. This is more confusing than you can begin to imagine for the rest of us. Especially because he rings the treble and the two, and everyone learning handbells learns to depend on knowing where the treble is. If you can ring something with Titus successfully, you can REALLY, REALLY RING IT. We’re a spiffing crack troop, we with-Titus ringers. Serious upper-level super-surprise ding-dong doo-dah million-peal handbell ringers have been known to burst into tears when attempting to ring with Titus, and to have urgent appointments in Nevis when invited for another opportunity to do so.
^^ That I’m not hurtling, singing, ringing tower bells, writing the blog, studying Japanese or reading maths+ in the bath. Or—sigh—doodling.++
+ Or, possibly, Peter Dickinson, after pulling out GLASS SIDED for the blog the other night. In the conversation on the forum about where to start if you haven’t read him before, I don’t think anyone has mentioned EMMA TUPPER’S DIARY yet? I would add my voice to those who have suggested THE KIN, THE ROPEMAKER, THE BLUE HAWK and TULKU. I also have to remind you of CHUCK AND DANIELLE (which was in the auction/sale merely because I love it so much) which is the littler-kids’ book about Danielle and her whippet, which I think is totally darling, and I would think so even if it weren’t based on one of our previous generation of dog-hair factories, because I am a critter person. Peter himself has a particular soft spot for THE DANCING BEAR which is about a slave and his dancing bear in Byzantium in 558 going after his master’s daughter, who has been stolen by the Huns who killed her father. But speaking of his murder mysteries, which is where we came in, I want to mention THE LIVELY DEAD which has always been a favourite of mine because of the heroine, who is very much a (grown-up) girl who does things: the first line of the book is ‘Bending to adjust the claw of her crowbar against a joist, Lydia saw the man’s feet.’ The copyright is 1975: back in 1975 you didn’t have women who do major house renovations, as Lydia does, let alone also have a strong happy relationship with a non-standard bloke like her husband (she also has a nice non-standard son). It would have been so easy to make Lydia a ball-breaker and Richard a wuss, and that’s not what they are at all. I may have to reread that one after I finish SLEEP AND HIS BROTHER.
++ I had an email yesterday or the day before from a new blog reader wanting to know if there was any hope for someone who hadn’t been paying attention last autumn and longed for her very own doodle(s). There are, of course, a good many people still wondering if there’s any hope for people who were paying attention (and money) last autumn. Yes to both questions. The little pile of doodles on the other desk in my office is beginning to mount up—slowly, I admit. But I really am going to do NOTHING BUT DOODLES for as long as it takes to catch up as soon as something possibly resembling the finished SHADOWS is off my desk for long enough to concentrate on anything else. As I’ve said before, the one-offs like the musical composition, the commissioned cartoons and, for that matter, the knitting, will still take a little longer after that.
Meanwhile Blogmom has found a gizmo so that we can—eventually—have a permanent doodle box on the blog. But she’s not going to put it up till I’ve fulfilled last autumn’s orders. Check back in . . . um . . . I think someone on the forum suggested 2017 as my new deadline. . . .
*** On the way there Caitlin, who has two young sons, and I, who have two hellhounds and an assortment of refrigerator magnets that say things like ‘housework is evil and must be stopped’ and ‘a mind is a terrible thing to waste on housework’, agreed that Jasper’s flat is the cleanest domicile we have ever visited and we slightly suspect him of not being human. That might also explain the extreme precision of his handbell ringing.
† Points out Voice Two smugly
†† My stress-reactive digestion has been more often in a bad mood than a good one for months. I’ll be glad to have both SHADOWS and doodles off my desk(s) for a whole assortment of reasons.
Late
It is unduly late.* Well, I slept nearly ten hours last night. That Grandsire Triples will really take it out of you.** And so everything has been late today, including slamming on with SHADOWS till about six minutes ago.*** ARRRRRGH.†
And there were handbells. Hellhounds and I had only barely got down to the mews when we had to slap ourselves back into our coats again†† and crunch back to the cottage.††† We’re still beating bob major to death but . . . we’re beating it to death more briskly. Gemma missed ringing at the abbey last night but she was full of back-patting encouragement and positive remarks today‡ as I went blither-blither-blither rounds-on-ninety-three‡‡ leopards-in-the-shadows.
CathyR
Oh gosh, I know that feeling exactly (Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, huge industrial ringing chamber, 12 bells, heavy – and having to stand on a doughnut-like 3ft raised platform to ring!!!). Total nervous breakdown, looking into the abyss.
I would not have done it. I would have taken one look into the abyss, and turned around and fled. I think I’ve told you about ringing at Chichester Cathedral? It has a separate tower . . . which is the size of Arundel Castle ‡‡‡ I swear. The ringing chamber is nearly the size of Forza’s and it’s long draft§ and . . . the whole experience still makes me wake up in a cold sweat swearing that I’m going to forget bells and take up knitting.§§
. . . It’s the heaviest and highest peal of bells hung for change ringing in the world. . . .
Mind you, it’s skill not brute strength (although it does usually take two people to ring the tenor up). I’ve seen a fairly slight teenage girl ring that tenor.
I watched them ringing up the tenor at the abbey last night—they started off with three. Once they got it going the third person dropped out (panting). They do have one madman who likes to ring it up by himself when he’s there and in the mood, but I don’t think I’ve met him yet.§§§ And yes . . . these little wisps of people who ring colossal bells are a little daunting to those of us . . . who would be happy to be able to ring a touch of Grandsire Triples on ordinary bells reliably.
We’ve probably a second visit there in a couple of months. Hopefully I’ll do better. I’ll think of Robin to give me strength!
THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO THINK ABOUT TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH IS ME.
We will, however expect a full report. . . .
* * *
It’s still snowing.
* * *
* It’s also SNOWING. And I left my yaktrax at the cottage.^
Julia
I had [to walk to school in the snow] this week. . . . I’m currently in France (working as an English teacher in a primary school), and it snowed over the weekend. The French aren’t used to dealing with snow… and so the buses weren’t running. In order to get to work on Monday, I had to walk. Through the snow. Uphill.^^ It took an hour. I only fell down once, so I felt quite successful when I finally arrived!
I would like to eschew the standard falling-down part. I did manage to fall down on Chaos yesterday or the day before, but that was one of those everybody-in-slow-motion-AM-I-REALLY-FALLING-DOWN-RATS-YES moments and I was lifting Darkness off his feet with my death-grip on his (short) lead with the other hand as counterweight, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I’m not entirely sure Chaos noticed. He may have just thought it was a sort of upside-down lying-on-the-sofa-but-outdoors thing.
But the ‘not used to dealing with snow’. Yes. I leave Wolfgang wherever he’s parked after the third snowflake falls not because he’s hopeless in the snow, which he isn’t, but because most of the locals are hopeless in snow. One of my least-favourite fantasies is a side-on SUV coming at you at frictionless speed.
^ You don’t want to know. Living in two (or three) houses has serious drawbacks especially if you’re perhaps a trifle disorganised in the first place. See, my yaktrax mostly live in my canvas briefcase equivalent when the weather gets hinky, but occasionally they are transferred to some other mobile living unit. I took them with me to the abbey last night because while the main roads are all clear, the footpath from the abbey car park to the enchanted portal is a mixture of 14th-century cobblestones and 16th-century paving, a trifle unevenly worn, and mostly in shade all day. I thought it might be yaktrax or hands and knees last night, and I preferred yaktrax. As it happened, extreme measures were not required, and then when I got home again my knitting came back out of the small evening knapsack and went back into the large day knapsack+ but the yaktrax, somehow, did not.
There. You didn’t want to know, did you?
+ Which frankly wouldn’t fit up the last flight of flower-fairy stairs at the abbey anyway.
^^ Both ways!
** Grandsire Triples, hell, it was the rounds on eighty-four. Or was it eighty-seven?
*** I talked to Hannah today, who is approximately the only person besides agent, editor and husband who gets a look at a book before it’s done, and she said that she thought I got the emotional reality of a teenage girl (ie in the particular opening set-up of this story) down really well. I was pleased, of course, but after we rang off I was thinking . . . is it a good thing to be able to write a persuasive modern, if alternative-world, seventeen-year-old—who goes to high school and lives with her parent(s)—when you’re sixty?^ Don’t answer that. Besides, I need to earn a living, and I’d be really bad at robbing banks.
^ Okay, I know I’m not the only elderly kiddie/YA writer around. But it hits me harder when it’s FIRST PERSON AND SHE’S GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL. Good grief. High fantasy seventeen-year-olds are different.
† I also talked to Merrilee today who said, you, that is, I, do need to remember that I may not make the deadline and SHADOWS may not come out in the spring of ’13. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Yes. True. I know. One of these years my hurtle toward the last possible scheduling moment is going to fail. Merrilee was giving me the standard agent lecture about not hurrying but taking the time the story needs and I said, MERRILEE. HOW LONG HAVE WE BEEN WORKING TOGETHER? I can only write as fast as the story will let me. If the third draft takes longer than I’m hoping^ then . . . it does.
So this is your warning too.
^ The good sign is that her list of notes matches mine. There were no, What do you mean, you were not convinced by the history teacher who turns into a manticore and eats the students that piss her off? Have you forgotten what high school is like?+
+ Merrilee is nearly as old as I am.
†† OOOOOWWWWWWOOOOOOO, say the hellhounds.
††† It was afterward, Colin, leaving, who said, in sepulchral tones, It’s snowing.
‡ She’s a GP and has three kids. She absolutely knows how to be supportive and encouraging.
‡‡ Yes. They breed.
‡‡‡ http://www.arundelcastle.org/_pages/03_visitor_info.htm
§ Which means the ceiling is very, very, very far away, and the rope is a million feet long. In the first place that much rope tends to flap around unless you have FLAWLESS handling skills—do I need to tell you I do not have flawless handling skills?—and in the second place . . . the weight of the rope has an effect on how a bell rings, depending on how heavy the bell is and how much rope there is. This can be DISCONCERTING—and on long draft, probably is.
§§ I’ve been having this nightmare for years. When you wake up out of an old familiar nightmare you may not remember acquisition of recent skills that may have a bearing on your equally old and familiar escape mantra.
§§§ I want to know how he gets ringing-up-the-tenor-by-himself shoulders up that last flight of stairs.
Mostly coherent. And with lots of footnotes.
b_twin_1
Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.
It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE. How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT?
http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html ***
* * *
I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment. What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)? It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs. Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it. Bell methods are all basically canons, you know? Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.† But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES. Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††
I won’t say we did it well.††† But we were doing it.‡ And I noticed something. The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six. Don’t make me frelling laugh. Counting to six is sordid enough. Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong. Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point. Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line. Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.
I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now. But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing. So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring. Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went. And it was okay. It was good.§ And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . .
ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT. BACK TO SHADOWS.
* * *
* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN.
** FIRST novel! For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!! A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well. Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication.
^ Really good rhinestones. Possibly attached to All Stars.
*** I think it’s a really good trailer too. Mostly I don’t like trailers. I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them. I like this one.
^ I don’t have trailers
† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’
†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells. It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower.
††† Some of us did it better than others.
‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea. WHA’? WHA’ YOU SAY? What are you doing in my sitting room? Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells?
The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished. I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished. But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether. So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.
^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph. Maybe twice.+
+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently. But I don’t often hang around to label it as such.
‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break: you’re still going to die.
‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm.
§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge. Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way: and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you. I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .