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
Flu, hellhounds, SHADOWS and Jodi Meadows
Okay, that’s not your average mixture. Let’s have the good news first:
http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525
YAAAAAAAAAAAY. It’s alive!
* * *
. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope. I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.* Unfortunately not so in this case. I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds. And SHADOWS. Which is still due the end of the month. I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again. I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**. I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu. At the moment the jury is still out. But I feel like stale death on toast. AND CRANKY.
So I got out of bed at about . . . noon. I barely fell down at all. There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.
I got dressed. I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares? It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.*** I hurtled hounds. Yes. I did.† Twice.††
And I worked on SHADOWS. I did.
. . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.††† Good night. May you sleep better than I’m likely to.
* * *
* Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL: It’s all maths. I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics. You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke. It’s all maths.^
What is true is something else he said in the introduction however: that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it. And you’re supposed to read the equations. What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words. The equations are still there. You still have to deal with equations. They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations. But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^
If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating. It’s so insane. It’s so not Newtonian.^^^ I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly. HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. HA HA HA HA HA. Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down. This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^ And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong: it means . . . approximate.
Anyway. It’s fascinating. But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness.
^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners. There are two scientists and a lawyer. I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer. And probably the author’s best friend since childhood. I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life.
+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only. If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal. But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy. For the equations. If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end. Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . .
^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples. Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands. Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics.
^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being. It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.
^^^^ Look at human nature. Look at hellhound nature.
** I think it was October. Autumn anyway. A few months ago. And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name. ARRRRRRRGH. And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium. I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES. RARELY. Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH.
*** One right foot. One left foot.
† I also deserve a medal. But so do they. At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside. I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch. They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day. Multi-application hellhound training.
†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow. Another medal.
††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes. So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul. Here’s my favourite:
It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square. So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman. “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.”
“Brown Paper Pete? Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor.
“Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
“Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?”
“Rustling.”
She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny.
Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister! I like your tie!” He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody. A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!” Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender. A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!” So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on. The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”
MYSTERY NOVEL
Both Darkness and I are feeling a trifle thin on the ground. Darkness is monumentally better, I hasten to add, but he’s clearly not right yet and from the severity of this, er, outburst, I know it’s going to take a little while to calm down completely. But I’m not sure what I should be expecting and I worry easily.* I did not make it to service ring this morning and have pretty much felt like a flag at half mast all day. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes the ME come back full bore—sudden crisis followed by clean-up and worry. In theory I have a voice lesson tomorrow. And tower practise at Glaciation. Not to mention a novel to write in five months.
Mrs Redboots wrote: No, don’t tell us anything about the not-Pegasus novel you’re doing just now! Tease us by referring to it as NOT-PEGASUS and tell us absolutely nothing else until it is set in stone and the editors have given you the proof. We will all plead and beg – myself included – but it would be such fun not knowing what, or who, to expect!
This really made me laugh. I think the readers who want to know something about MYSTERY NOVEL outnumber those of you who don’t—and I had been planning on telling you enough to be annoying. I’ve pretty much had this conversation with both Merrilee and my editor—how much is enough** for various audiences—blog readers as opposed to marketing departments, for example. Because nobody knows anything at all about this book yet (except me) I had to write some copy for my editor’s presentation at her big autumn sales meeting.*** Aaaaaugh. Writing any kind of advertising copy is a unique and exacting skill, and being able to write novels and semi-truthful blog entries is no indication of success in this demanding area. And the short and snappy is not my forte. You also do find yourself thinking, what is there new and original to say about pegasi-dragons-vampires-fairies-goddesses-magic in a paragraph or two? Merrilee and I sweated over this for a while and I believe the ultimate outcome was something along the lines of: New Robin McKinley fantasy novel!!! No, not PEG II! That’s later! To be followed by PEG III even later yet! New!
. . . Tick the box and move on to the next item.†
So here are a few random facts about MYSTERY NOVEL:
(a) It is not a mystery novel.†
(b) It’s modern-alternate-this-world. Contemporary fantasy.
(c) There are no vampires. Just to get that out of the way. ††
(d) There is origami. This is why I was trying to drag what little I used to know of it, dusty and creaking, out of the back cupboard. Which is fine.
(e) There may be trying to be some . . . maths.††† I am resisting this. This is also why I pulled ALEX IN NUMBERLAND off the shelf where it’s been sitting for over a year, and when I discovered www.audible.co.uk had it, bought,‡ downloaded and listened to it. ‡‡ I haven’t decided yet if this was a good idea or a bad one. It doesn’t seem to have had any influence on the story, but then my futile attempts at research rarely do. These attempts do, however, occasionally allow me to keep up.
(f) I’m going to get this random fact over quickly: If all goes as planned‡‡‡ this will come out the year I’m sixty. It will also be my first official YA novel, with a heroine in her senior year in high school. Feh.
(g) Its working title is SHADOWS. And I’d rather call it SHADOWS than NOT PEGASUS or MYSTERY NOVEL, if you don’t mind. Well, even if you do mind. Author’s prerogative. I have to write the thing.
Audrey Falconer: Mind you, I do also want that one that featured bells….
If I’d had any sense, I’d’ve got that one out and had a run at it; there’s a lot of it already on paper.§ Although SHADOWS isn’t totally a bolt from the blue, just almost. The initial idea drifted past about eighteen months ago, and I wrote a few pages of it to check the, um, storyness of it, but I had PEGASUS to be getting on with,§§ and put it (nameless at the time) in a folder and forgot about it. But it’s SHADOWS that came boiling out of the . . . shadows . . . when I knew I had to put PEG II aside, and said meeeeeeeeeeee.
But THE BELLS OF MAZAHAN is still on the list. It’s just ‘list’ in my language is probably not what it is in anyone else’s language. §§§ Like ‘sanity’ or ‘organisation’.
* * *
*Yes, I’m going to ring the vet tomorrow and ask.
** . . . to be annoying
*** And I’m certainly not going to tell you that much.
† Eeep, I said. It’ll be fine, Merrilee said. Eeep, I said. But I’ve been reminded that she was right the last time. . . .
jmeadows: See? Merrilee told you it [the announcement] wouldn’t be bad AND IT WASN’T. You should listen to your agent more. *g* (*may have just experienced something like this and should take her own advice*)
††When I was younger, and also thought I would write ‘straight’ fiction some day, I also wanted to write at least one mystery. Even then I knew I wasn’t going to be good at the plotting and the deviousness but I thought I might manage one.
You never know. I wasn’t going to write a trilogy either.^ As several of you have pointed out, however, PEG is not really a trilogy, it’s a Novel in Three Volumes.^^ Like Tolkien’s LOTR, as one or two people further helpfully suggested.^^^ I appreciate your faith in me, but this is not a reassuring thought.
LRK:
|
PEGASUS is a trilogy. |
Oddly – and I mean oddly as I have no idea why – I’m not surprised. It just feels like one of those things that, when you find out about them, had to be.
Sigh. Yes. I should have known. . . .
^ anef: OMG you’re having triplets! Many congratulations!
Snork. Thank you.
^^ Diane in MN: Oh, Robin—not a trilogy, a three-volume novel, right?
Right. Think of all those Charles Dickens novels that were published serially in volumes.
^^^ Whom I will not quote here, for fear of bursting into tears. I can deal with Charles Dickens’ three-decker novels. I can’t deal with even remote and superficial similarities to the author who probably made me a fantasy writer, even if a significant part of how he made me a fantasy writer is by inspiring a burning ambition to have some girls involved in the story.
†† Although I think it is in SUNSHINE’s . . . continuum, as you might say. It’s not the same world, but I think it’s the same universe. I’m pretty sure all my ‘high’ fantasies join up somewhere; it wouldn’t surprise me if all my alt-moderns do too.
††† No, no, no, you maths phobics. Stop screaming. It’s not like that. It’s like . . . if there’s going to be a desert, there’d better not be a pine forest and polar bears. This is the writer’s problem. You the reader are only going to see the desert. Relax.
‡ Again. As a study aid, this two-media thing is a very good deal. From a financial standpoint . . . not so much.
‡‡ Not without difficulty.
‡‡‡ Erm. Better to say hoped for.
§ And on a floppy disc somewhere. Although you probably need an Antique Tech Translating Device to extract it any more. The floppy is not hugely crucial since when I go back to it I’ll start on page one of the hard copy and write a fresh draft.
§§ Hollow laughter.
§§§ “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – - that’s all.”
Major Rant Alert
I got a chirpy email from a friend in which she extols the virtues of a new ebook site she’s found that she’s sure I’ll want to check out as soon as I have my own ereader and mentions (chirpily) in passing that she downloaded a free copy of SUNSHINE.
The frelling gods frelling wept.
I will tell you this for free: if there’s a big bad nasty out there that is going to destroy the whole business of producing stuff for people to read—and the digital world is changing so fast, it seems to me even the word publishing is starting to sound a bit hoary—it’s piracy. There’s masses and masses of stuff out there—in our digital universe—about piracy and its effects, and I’m not going to thrash it all out again here because among other reasons I’d burst a blood vessel. This is the top link in a Google search for ‘author blogs piracy’: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/forum/blog-posts/ebook-piracy-one-authors-opinion/ and if you need a quick brush-up you can find it here. He doesn’t even froth at the mouth. I’m proud of him. I’m frothing at the mouth.
How much worse is it—how much more hopeless is it, trying to keep a lid on it, since piracy will always be with us*—if the good guys are stealing from us too? How many of you out there have done something similar to what my friend did? No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
My friend said, oh, I didn’t think, because it was one of your older books. What? How do you—any of you—think writers earn their living, supposing they’re among the lucky five or ten percent of published writers who can make a living by writing? The money we receive from publishers is absolutely and strictly tied to sales. The ‘advance’ we receive, usually on signing a contract, is against sales. If, at the end of the day or the year or the print run or when they yank your book out of print, you haven’t earned back in sales as much as they paid you for your ‘advance’, you’re in deep trouble, because they’re losing money on you and unless they think you’re about to morph into J K Rowling with your next book, they probably won’t take your next book. And there you are reading the want ads and wishing you’d learnt sheep-shearing when you had the chance. Royalties? Yes, a writer eventually receives royalties, if her book sells well enough to earn back her advance and keeps selling . . . but of that five or ten percent of writers, which includes me, who do manage to earn a living by writing, a vanishingly weeny sub-percentage ever builds up enough royalties to, you know, retire. We live from advance to advance. We can’t afford to retire. I can’t.
And we need those advances to earn out by sales. Our future lives as writers depend on it.
Yes, of course, lots of people who buy cheap or free pirate editions wouldn’t pay full price for the legitimate book. But some would. Who doesn’t like a bargain, if they don’t realise what it’s costing someone else? And some of those that wouldn’t buy the book would go to the library. Libraries buy books—and a book particularly popular with librarians will sell more copies, because they’ll talk it up to each other and to their clientele. And there’s the whole model thing. There’s now a model out there that says that everything on the internet is free, and everything on the internet should be free.** We need to keep that model of money being paid for goods and services alive and healthy. By paying for goods and services. Because the providers of goods and services themselves need to pay mortgages and taxes and school fees and car insurance.
So when you’re out there cruising for bargains, engage your brain. And if, brain engaged, it looks too good to be true, it probably is. None, repeat NONE, of my books is available for free. That includes the out of print ones—I still own the rights. What happens to used copies of paper books is out of my hands. But you should pay the going rate for an ebook—which I realise is a very mutable concept—and you should buy it from someone who has the right to sell it—which will also give you some clue about that going rate. And what I say about me is pretty universally true of all living and recently dead—copyright lasts for a while after you pop your clogs—authors. There are a few loss-leader experiments with free books—but they’re the exception. They are not the rule. Be suspicious. And if you find a pirate site—tell someone. Publishers have entire departments to deal with piracy these days—they have to. It’s their livelihood too. They want to know about pirates.
It was only an accident—an offhand, throwaway remark—that my friend even told me about her free download of SUNSHINE. That’s the thing that completely haunts me. And I almost didn’t even notice, because it would never have occurred to me that someone I know could be this, well, daft. The purpose of her email was to remind me of something I’d promised to do . . . ahem . . . a while ago, and I went ‘aaaugh’ and rushed off to do it. It wasn’t till I settled down to answer her email properly that I registered the ‘free’ and ‘download’. Even then I thought she must have just left a sentence out about, I don’t know, for every eighty-seven ebooks you buy you get a free one or something, and she chose SUNSHINE.
It has not been a great day. I’m even shorter of sleep than usual for a getting-up-for-service-ring Sunday because the Bats in the Walls*** were unusually chatty last night†, it’s been doing TORRENTIAL RAIN all day with occasional apparent breaks which delude you into believing you could get hounds hurtled before the next downpour and, speaking of hellhounds, Chaos took two hours to eat lunch. That tragic look of his would melt the hearts of entire audiences of bankers, newspaper-empire owners, and politicians, if I could figure out how to deploy it. I think he’d have trouble learning his lines for an open audition of HAMLET.
* * *
* If there are goods, there are pirates of those goods. There were book pirates back in paper-book-only days too.
** Economics is one of the many things I don’t understand very well or very much of, but how anyone over the age of, say, twenty, can claim that we should shovel everything onto the internet that we possibly can and that all of it should be free, is absolutely beyond my comprehension.
*** A little known H P Lovecraft sequel. I hope it ends better than the original.
† I was lying there listening to the flap-flap-flap cheep cheep cheep rustle-rustle-scritch cheep cheep CHIRRUP SQUEAK and thinking that if I were Melampus I’d know the secrets of the universe by now. Or at least some really interesting details about the bug populations of my neighbours’ gardens.
Signing Eve
Thanks to everyone who entered the Silly Signing Clothing Contest. I’m afraid it’ll probably be Friday before I can cope with the counting and the random number generator, but . . . THANK YOU. A copy of the UK PEGASUS will be coming toward one of you soon.
* * *
OH GODS THE FRELLING SIGNING IS TOMORROW. ISN’T THERE A NICE ANONYMOUS EMERGENCY IN HARROGATE OR MIDLOTHIAN OR SOMEWHERE WHERE MY PRESENCE COULD BE CRUCIAL TO SUCCESS?
No, no, wait, I didn’t mean that, of course not, what was I thinking?, I mean, OH! YAAY! THE LOVELY SIGNING IS TOMORROW! I’M GOING TO LONDON TOMORROW FOR A LOVELY SIGNING! I WILL SIGN LOTS OF COPIES* OF PEGASUS** AND I WILL HAVE A LOVELY TIME CHATTING TO ALL THE NICE PEOPLE! I LOVE PEOPLE! I’M SO GOOD AT CHATTING, ESPECIALLY TO STRANGERS!***
I don’t think I can keep this up for long. . . .
As I think I tweeted to someone recently, the only real attraction of public appearances for me is the excuse to wear silly clothing. I’ve always loved dressing up, it’s just that having got dressed up and made my entrance I’m ready to go home again and put my jeans back on. Parties. Shudder. One of the additional problems with parties is that generally speaking you’re trying to look your best at a party, rather than like a raging loony, and my idea of fun threads tends toward the raging loony end.† At least with an author gig I know what I’m there for††, which is to Engage Directly with Some Small Portion of My Audience—aside from the nightmarish possibility that no one will come†††—and so long as whatever you’re wearing doesn’t restrict your mouth or your writing arm you can answer questions and sign books dressed as the Lambton Worm‡ or the Houses of Parliament as well as in a twinset and a modest tweed skirt. I suppose you shouldn’t frighten your publicist.‡‡ In my experience your audience can usually swing with whatever is on offer, although that may be due to the flexibility of the fantasy-reading intellect.
I’m at the never mind, it’ll be over soon stage. As I was also tweeting to someone recently (I think), the vast VAST majority of my readers are lovely. They are both polite and enthusiastic, they buy books, they form a queue to the right when someone tells them that’s where the queue forms and they are generally either articulate or have pleasant giggles. . . . But I, of course, remember the ones who have travelled five hundred miles to tell me how much they hate my books‡‡‡, the ones that feel that my feminism distorts my view of reality, the ones who think my books would be pretty good if I’d only had the benefit of their insight sooner, and that my next books could be better if I’d keep their advice in mind . . . and the ones that have brought a specially printed out copy of their 1000-page manuscript (the first of a series) so I can take it home with me and read it.§ I am short on people skills! I can blow you off by email much more efficiently! I also am a terrible wuss. Unless you piss me off—which, granted, is perhaps not that hard to do—I hate hurting people’s feelings. I’ve been wrong-footed so frelling many times simply by giving way when I should’ve grimly held my line like the Greeks at Thermopylae.
But tomorrow is going to be great, right?
It’ll be over soon . . .
* * *
There were no bats last night. At least I think there weren’t any. I did turn my light out and promptly dive under a carefully prior-arranged rampart of pillows, having also spent what energy I had in telling myself they were only little bats, they were not a big deal even in the bedroom with me, and if it came to that I could just sleep through the beating of tiny wings and the ambling of tiny bodies over the hummock under the bedclothes that is me. And if I believed that I had a nice bridge I could sell myself later. I lay there under my pillows straining to pretend I wasn’t straining for any sound of tiny beating wings. . . . And there wasn’t any such sound. I think. Maybe I’m just deafer than I realise.§§ Eventually I fell asleep . . . And Atlas has now spent two more days sealing up anything that REMOTELY resembles a hole§§§, and we wait upon events.
Also, it’s raining. Fiona mentioned this yesterday#, but I’d been thinking about it. It’s already been put forward as a theory that one reason my bats may have broken through into the house this year is because of the drought. A lot of their usual sources have dried up, and they can smell the water in my tank—and to a bat smaller than the palm of my hand, the splashes in the sink may count as a good drink.## Atlas plugged a lot of the obvious holes . . . and it started raining. I didn’t have bats for several weeks, and we had a fair amount of rain, off and on, for several weeks. Then it stopped raining again. I started having to water my garden again. And the bats returned. I still want TO FINISH BLOCKING ENTRY HOLES. I DO NOT WANT BATS IN THE HOUSE EVEN IF IT’S A DESERT OUT THERE. But it is a bit suggestive. It rained yesterday and today too. Not a lot—my monarda is still moaning that it’s thirsty, it’s always thirsty—but what I hope might be enough for bats no bigger than the palm of my hand. Even four hundred and ten of them.
* * *
* Okay, the ‘lots’ would be good.
** And possibly a few others
*** ::Whining noises:: —Who, me? It’s the hellhounds. Who are, for the moment, eating.
† An additional reason why I am loath to give up the black leather mini is because it’s such good theatre. One of the major drawbacks of the SUNSHINE tour, aside from the simple fact of it being a tour, is that I did not want to get into the vampire chic thing—I am so not dangerous or Goth, you know?—so I regretfully left the sillier end of my leather collection at home. But PEGASUS? Totally the moment for a black leather mini. Never mind my age.
†† Unlike at a party. What am I here for? Is there champagne? Is it properly cold?
††† ::Suppressed rant on the subject of advertising:: Sometimes you’re just not J K Rowling and that’s all there is to it. But the occasions that have left marks on my soul have been totally frelling frelled by the shop in question. Grrrrr.
‡ They deserved to be cursed to nine generations for killing the dog.
‡‡ The Houses of Parliament may be over that line.
‡‡‡ Or anyway have travelled 500 miles to attend the convention partly so they could come to my panel and tell me what a festering pustule on the face of literature I am. Eeep.
§ And the junior high track one English lit teachers who have assigned SUNSHINE to their seventh graders without having read it first.
§§ Any of you other middle-aged and growing deaf out there, have you noticed the way you only go deaf for stuff you want to be able to hear? The idiot conversation at the next table or the sound of tiny wings you hear as clearly as a twelve-year-old.
§§§ And I bet the Bat Conservation Trust does not allocate grants to beleaguered householders paying for weeks of a professional carpenter’s time.
# Possibly while we were in the car on our way to the yarn store. I needed cheering up, okay?
## And yes, I’m aware that my saucers of water strategy may not be in my own best interests, but if I must have bats I prefer live frisky bats rather than sad dehydrated dying bats.