It’s Sunday, therefore I am short of sleep*
But we had eight ringers this morning. EIGHT. I’m trying to remember the last time we had eight ringers for our eight bells. After a howling gale with rain hammering on the windows at 7:45 am when the frelling alarm went off, and me lurching swollen-eyed around the cottage saying, I don’t want to go out in this, I don’t WANT to go out in this . . . at 8:45 it suddenly cleared off and became blue and dazzling and glorious. And all the bells rang out. . . .
Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.** I envy her the amount she can still eat, but other than that I’m okay to stick with the elderly decrepit me. She’s also a lot better constructed*** to cope with the intrusive magic besieging her landscape than I am. I was thinking about this again after posting about how unsettling I found Aeon Flux the other night at the cinema: I’m what you might call professionally off balance, I’d really rather not fall down the rest of the way, I might hurt myself†. So if a dragon†† flew into the courtyard at the mews††† tomorrow would I be more or less likely than the average bystanding human to say, oh, hey, cool, that’s a dragon, or run screaming?
Blither blither blither blither. It’s been another good day as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie and as a result (a) I have no brain and (b) I’m having some trouble climbing back out of the vocabulary of an alternate-reality teenager. I was also thinking‡ about the way I think of SHADOWS as my first ‘genuine’ teenage high school novel, which probably ought to be DRAGONHAVEN. Except that Jake’s a grown up by the end with a kid of his own‡‡ . . . and more crucially, since a lot of my protagonists start out teenagers, he doesn’t go to high school. Maggie goes to high school. Yeep. She takes algebra. Double yeep. With reference to my saying on these virtual pages some time recently that my hard sciences/maths phobia is probably largely due to very bad teaching . . . it’s probably taken me these forty-plus years also to come to a point where I can face going with a character back through the doors of an average suburban high school. Well, maybe not quite average, but . . . ‡‡‡
Meanwhile, speaking of hard science, I’m about to download§ James Gleick’s CHAOS. www.Audible.co.uk, that ratbag, is having another 25% off sale for members so I was cruising for more tasty hard(ish) science. As I’ve told you before I tend to avoid customer reviews of fiction—what ordinary readers want out of fiction is just too, um, various—but I usually do read reviews of nonfiction because there I am a very ordinary reader and may learn something from the same. Not infrequently you see some aggrieved and outraged person saying, you’re going to have to buy the hard copy too! You’re not going to be able to make sense of the maths from the audio! Snork. I wouldn’t frelling dream of trying to cope with any of this stuff without having the underlinable-paper copy also at hand. Self-improvement is expensive.§§
Having said that, I got out of step with BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME and, having finished the audiobook a couple of days ago, the paper version finally fell through my door yesterday. And . . . um . . . well, there are no equations§§§ but the illustrations make it worse. Electron interference (p 98)? Feynman diagram of Virtual Particle/Antiparticle Pair (p 123)? What? If I’d picked it up in a shop, instead of on Audible, I’d’ve put it down again.
Meanwhile . . . Hannah is going to read CHAOS too. We’re going to have a book club of two. And if anyone had told me thirty years ago that Hannah and I were going to agree to read a book describing The Third Great 20th Century Revolution in the Physical Sciences (after relativity and quantum mechanics) at all, let alone over the Christmas holidays for light distraction from the figgy pudding, I’d have probably made myself sick laughing.
Menopause Brain Rules.
* * *
* I was distracted from the passage of time by reading UNDER MILKWOOD. Haven’t read it since college, I think. Golly. I may have to blog about this. I read Dylan Thomas in my teens, of course, As One Does, or at least As One Did if one fancied oneself a sensitive literary intellectual in the 1960s (adolescence, I believe, optional). But . . . GOLLY. Also WOW.
** Over-identification with fictional characters? What you say?
*** You should forgive the term
† Also being elderly, decrepit etc.
†† Although there aren’t any dragons in SHADOWS. I don’t think. Er.
††† And good luck to it: parking is already an ordeal and a torment.
‡ Which is generally considered to be a function limited to those in possession of brains
‡‡ This is not my idea of a spoiler, but if it is any of yours, apologies.
‡‡‡ It’s not as if all my teachers were dire. I had a lovely algebra teacher—I’ve told you about her. We left Japan, and the algebra teacher who told me I was the stupidest child she’d ever taught, mid-school-year, and when we got back to America two months later the principal at my new school laughed a lot and tried to put me back a grade. I could cope with the catch-up everywhere but algebra—and they would have put me back a grade if it hadn’t been for Penelope Windsor Curry. If you’re out there anywhere, and have taken to reading fantasy writers’ blogs in your retirement, thank you very much.
§ I hope I’m about to download . . . insert a few practise screams of rage and frustration here.
§§ And it’s not, it seems to me, as if they’ve got all the bugs out of the electronic delivery system yet either. An iPhone is a finite entity.^ After I’ve listened to something I delete it, of course: if I want to listen to it again I can always re-download it^^ from my Audible ‘library’. But—as the little iPhone warning box tells you—if you delete it you will lose all your notes and bookmarks. Gee. Thanks guys. That’s really foresightful programming.
^ Speaking of finite, as in computer memory, I had an email from Raphael, Computer Archangel, on Friday, and he says what a good thing I went for the ridiculously huge hard drive, that he’d been doing the sums, and . . .
I should have my new laptop next week.
^^ . . . theoretically
§§§ As I recall this was one of the red herrings about the previous one—there were no equations, how hard can it be? Um. . . .
Tangents
I just this minute received an email from someone who says that PEGASUS is the best book she ever read. ::Beams:: *
. . . And at this point I went off on a whole series of tangents, so I’ll just have to tell you about today’s singing lesson** and tonight’s tower practise tomorrow.
* * *
* As I keep saying, the good, friendly book mail far outnumbers the bad and/or hostile book mail.^ But some of the stuff that comes up regularly, if infrequently, from the antipathetic division still baffles me. Now, not all books and not all writers appeal to everyone^^, which is fine. I have a few bizarre prejudices of my own.^^^ But if you don’t like my books, don’t read them, you know? Life is short. Find books you do like. I’m resigned, after over thirty years in the business, to the people who think my books are toooooooo slooooooow.# But there’s a new variant of this, which is the people who think nothing happens in PEGASUS. What? Is there another book out there called PEGASUS? And the post-blog variant on the evergreen question of the character, personality and shortcomings of authors is the ‘I have read your blog and you are the most loathsome, arrogant and self-absorbed pillock I have ever [virtually] met and I’m certainly never going to read any of your books again.’ Oh. Well, aside from whatever happened to ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, shut the frell up’## . . . I totally understand wanting to back away from the writer of this blog slowly, murmuring words like ‘Valium’### and ‘how much tea does she say she drinks?’, and watching me closely for sudden moves and/or sharp shiny objects. Everyone in my life tells me I need to learn to calm down. If you want to tell me too, get in line. And the self-absorbed . . . sigh. Well, yes, but do you know how hard it is to write a daily blog? I’m the best material I’ve got, because if I say anything too outrageous I’ve only got myself to sue. This includes getting my own research wrong, which can be embarrassing if it’s about anyone else. I also totally understand that I’m not to everyone’s taste any more than my books are. But the same principle applies: no one’s holding a gun to your head. You don’t have to read this blog. I object to the epithets loathsome and arrogant. I probably don’t like you very well either, whoever you are. I suspect you of having a deficient sense of humour.
^ For which I am devoutly grateful. Believe me. Devoutly. Grateful. People who like your books are much likelier to buy them, and the bottom line is still that to keep writing, most writers need to keep eating. Having a day job works for some writers but I don’t have enough brain to have two real jobs. Back in the days when I couldn’t earn a living off my books I mostly did low-brain-activity stuff, like [ancient lost occupation alert] typing up clean submissible copies of other people’s papers and mucking out stalls+. I spent two years full-time in publishing—in a proper job in publishing—and had to quit because I didn’t have enough brain left over to write my own stories. So are we clear about this? I am VERY GRATEFUL for my readers. THANK YOU. They—you—mean I don’t have to retrain as a till operator.++ I have to write stories, so I would be sweating sentences and paragraphs on evenings and weekends+++, whatever else I was doing to keep eating. But if I was having to waste eight-plus hours a day delivering flowers or pumping petrol, I would be writing a lot slower. And I’m slow enough as it is.%
+ Yes, often very similar.
++ I was just talking to someone who said, never mind the tedium of holding millions of items over the bar-code reader—and the eternal poisoned chalice that is plenary contact with the public—think of having to listen to that beeping all day.~
~ There’s a flap going on over here at present about raising retirement age because the population bulge of oldies is going to break social services some day soon. What I am not seeing, although I admit I’m not following the debate very closely, is some discussion of the practical constraints on the elderly end of your work force. Your average builder is not going to be up to carrying hods when he (or she) is seventy, whatever the government says. Nor is your average nursery-school teacher going to be up to chasing three-year-olds all day when she (or he) is seventy—whatever the government says. What are we going to train these people to do instead? And when are we going to do it? If your occupation is listed as ‘nursery school teacher’ or ‘builder’ will you get a postcard through your door on your fiftieth birthday telling you to report to the nearest retraining centre? You also get less trainable as you get older. And you need more downtime: will the over-65s be allowed longer lunch breaks and shorter days? Or are we trying to pretend that old age and death are something that only happen if you’re careless?
+++ Or equivalent. I would probably be looking for graveyard shift jobs. I could go to bed after service ring on Sundays.
% Ten novels in thirty years, approximately. Ugh.
^^ And a good thing too. I wouldn’t want to live in the Big Brother world where they did.
^^^ Shakespeare, for example.
# I permit myself to say that while no writer ever got it exactly right, I do write what I want to read. As a reader I like slow—not too slow, but slow—I adore George Eliot, okay? I’m one of those people who think MIDDLEMARCH is as close to perfect as any novel has ever got.+ Discursive is good. Discursive makes the world open up around you the reader, whether it has fairies and unicorns or snappy barouches drawn by matched pairs of bays in it. The books that annoy me are the ones that are all action adventures. Sit down and look at a tree occasionally, will you? And tell me something about your mates besides that they have legendary swords with names like Meatgrinder and Eyeball Poker.++
+ Except for Will Ladislaw. But I will entertain the argument that he’s supposed to be less than Dorothea is worth, and it’s all about irony and reality.
++ I would not be good at writing this kind of story.
## I’m so old. Yes, I remember wearing white gloves and a hat when you got dressed up too.
### I’m allergic to Valium. —I arrived at this place of believing that standard doctor medicine is guilty until proven innocent—and that the side effects are usually worse than the disease—honestly.
** I feel a bit guilty for the amount of time I’ve been spending on music and singing lately since I do try to swap what I write about around a bit to keep it more interesting.^ But it’s really nice having so many of you on the forum talking about your own experiences. Which reminds me. I was chasing something in the forum today and fell into Talk for the first time in months. And discovered several references that indicated that some of you posting believed that I would see them. No. Wrong. If you want me to read a comment it HAS to go on a blog thread. I’m a little time-challenged, you know? I’m not ignoring you because I am arrogant and loathsome, I’m not reading Talk because I don’t have time—but I like the idea that the Days in the Life ‘community’ can have its own conversations without me. I should perhaps check with the mods and Blogmom about this, but I wouldn’t object to a comment in a blog thread that you wanted me to read that wasn’t about the blog post, if you follow me. Or maybe we need a sticky thread at the top of the blog thread category for ‘yo Robin read this’. I’m still probably not going to answer—see: time-challenged—but I do read through all the blog threads. Okay, I don’t absolutely guarantee to be awake at the time, but . . .
^ You are obliged to be passionately interested in method ringing however. You saw that in the fine print when you joined the forum, didn’t you?
Chinese Cresteds and Giraffes
Note: the following is my usual nightly flippancy. But I’m lighting candles for all of you watching Irene come closer and closer.
* * *
The first thing to say about audiobooks is . . . there aren’t nearly enough of them*. And, while I’m on the subject, here’s an Ask Robin that comes up again and again and again—and I have answered it before but maybe if we can get it into the archive loudly enough people will start finding it there—or at least I can stop feeling guilty for failing to answer the steady stream of queries.
Audiobooks—like ebooks—tend, or anyway have tended, to be your publisher’s concern. Usually your standard book contract includes that you’re selling your audio- and e- rights as well as the 3D with pages option.
This is changing. Sigh. Generally speaking, and despite the amount of work it all is, I think that this being on line and a human being among other on-line human beings and producing something, in my case a blog and some tweets, is a good thing for those of us with some public profile—although this is of course going to vary with the kind and intensity of that profile. But the techno-whizzy stuff that makes this direct communication possible makes other things possible too. Sitting at home with your typewriter was at least simple.
Merrilee is busy trying to sort out the perilous shambles of my thirty-plus years of book contracts containing frequently vague, muddled, and un-foresightful language about non-dead-tree editions. She thinks I might have something useful to say about both audio- and e- sooner rather than later. Meanwhile . . . anyone reading this . . . please don’t ask me again. I’ll tell you here as soon as I know anything.
The next thing to say about audiobooks is that I downloaded my first digital masterpiece onto the freshly polished up and fully functioning Pooka for this morning’s hellhound hurtle and . . . twenty minutes later my earphones died. Siiiiigh.**
* * *
Sometimes you get a break you don’t deserve. But then there are a lot of breaks you probably should have had and didn’t*** so you might as well enjoy one that comes along dressed up like a birthday present. I’m still diabolically short of sleep† and working too hard and by this evening post-hurtle and time to go to tower practise I very nearly phoned Niall and cried off. I didn’t only because I know how short-handed we usually are; I told Peter if enough people turned up I’d come home early. There were five to begin, so I couldn’t leave; a sixth turned up and then I really couldn’t leave, because none of us were beginners so we could ring minor. My first break of the evening occurred when Niall, who is curiously deaf to pleas of tiredness, called for St Clements, which has way too many dodges on the front and way too much weirdness at the back and furthermore you have to make places in the middle. It’s one of the methods I’m supposed to know how to ring because he and Colin drag me through it on handbells occasionally. GAAAH.
And then . . . I actually did ring it. What? How did that happen? How mysterious. How gratifying. It was only a plain course, but even a plain course was clearly beyond me tonight.†† Niall and I were just entering into negotiation on the subject of Cambridge††† when Colin and Anthea showed up, which made eight—which meant I still couldn’t leave (gently glowing from my St Clements triumph) because now we could ring major.
I admit I got myself into this one. Niall called for plain bob major and I shuffled my feet a little and asked if I could ring inside. Of course! they all chorused. It’s practise night! So I grabbed the two and trembled. Now, old ringing hands will tell you in an attempt to be reassuring that all the plain bob methods are exactly alike, you just keep adding bells on the back end. Ahem. This is exactly alike like a hairless Crested Chinese Dog is like a giraffe because they’re both mammals. It is true that the basic structure is the same—but the basic structure of the Chinese Crested and the giraffe is the same too. The devil is in the details.
I know what the line is to bob major. I know what the calls mean, and if one of them knocks you off your perch, I even know (theoretically) what you should do next. Theory is great. And in practise you have one-third of a second to get your bell to go ‘dong’ in the right place. Just before we pulled off Colin, who was conducting, looked at the clock and said, I don’t think we quite have time for a quarter peal. I had my mouth open, but Amy, next to me, got in first: No. Better hadn’t, I added. I’ve only ever rung a plain course a few times—I’ve never rung a touch at all. Ahhhhh, said Colin.
I would have been doing well to stagger through a short first touch on a good night, when I was awake and had some brain left. I only ever learn anything by grind, and I haven’t anything like ground bob major to a fine tilth. But . . . every now and then you get a break you don’t deserve, and maybe Niall has a point about ringing handbells (eventually) having some (positive) effect on your tower ringing—and maybe all those hoary old veterans comparing Chinese Cresteds to giraffes aren’t totally out to lunch either—and we had a good band tonight. We rang a long hot, terrifying touch, during which I was frequently convinced there were at least sixteen ropes bobbing up and down—especially as the temperature in the ringing chamber rose—and Colin was taking no prisoners, and some of the calls did knock me off my perch. And once or twice I had to be dragged out of the thickets and pointed back in the direction I was supposed to be going.
But I did it. Twenty minutes of frelling bob major. And to think last week I was complaining about twenty minutes of mere bob doubles.‡
Yaay me.
* * *
*Audible.co.uk shouts Over 50,000 titles! Which, if it were your personal choice of 50,000 titles, would be an overwhelming abundance of riches. But when it’s 50,000 of somebody else’s choice of titles, including a lot of categories you have zero interest^ in, suddenly it’s not a lot of titles. And some of the omissions are astonishing: no Stephen Jay Gould? What? No Patrick Leigh Fermor? And why are the only two William Dalrymple books heavily abridged? The only E Nesbits are some spooky short stories, and a dramatised RAILWAY CHILDREN. (They do get extra points for having even one Edward Eager—and six Marguerite Henrys. No Walter Farley though.)
There aren’t even categories for poetry and music. If you search ‘poetry’ it offers you 217 titles . . . which do not include Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore or W H Auden except glancingly in one or two anthologies; poor Sylvia Plath is interesting mainly for her life; there is zero mention of Robert Lowell or Jane Kenyon.
‘Music’ as a key word only produces 188 hits, and the first one is Soul Music, Discworld #16 . . .
^ Business: over 3000 titles. Erotica: over 1000 titles.+ Sport: to my surprise, only 350 titles. Still, that’s 350 titles I don’t want to listen to.
+ I know. I’m so old and boring. It’s very sad.
** I never did tell you about my surreal experience of trying to join audible, but it’s now muddled up in my ME-dazed, sleep-deprived mind with Pooka’s spectacular descent into sin. Maybe it was audible’s fault.
*** Dogs that eat, say.
† Although I snarled when my alarm went off, turned over and . . . slept till noon.
†† Please do not let him have any ugly ideas about calling a touch.
††† Quote: NOOOOOOOOOO
‡ Bob doubles has a mere five working bells and a nice steadying tenor-behind. Bob major has eight working bells and no tenor-behind.
A night semi-off
I need a night off.* Which is also to say I’ve been working late.** So I thought I’d leave you with two really excellent articles . . . and four books recommended for reading while lying on the sofa with hellhounds. Or equivalent. A hammock in the garden on a day like today was here would also be good. Supposing you have a large enough garden to hang a hammock in.
I keep thinking, as I have my regular fits of I-spend-too-much-time-on-the-blog anguish and head-clutching***, that one of the things I should do is instate round-up blogs of my favourite links/titles/sillinesses of the week. The main drawback to this is that it requires prior planning. I tend to fall into the blog head-first, last-thing†, and have to clutch at any straw immediately available. As it happens in my hastily-hitting-a-few-high-spots belt through Twitter today I not only clicked through to but read two equally fascinating but otherwise utterly dissimilar articles. Anyone who didn’t catch them on my retweets—either because you are wise enough not to be on Twitter, or because in your hurrahing through your own feed you decided you didn’t have time—I recommend them now. The first is on the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, which I knew nothing about—certainly not that it had been this important, crucially important to both of them. But as I also said on Twitter, while I realise this is an excerpt from an entire book, and it must have been a complete ratbag for the poor author to try and decide which sliver of his book to use for the article. . . . I would have liked a line about Frost’s wife, and possibly their children, and what they made of Frost’s executive decision to move to England—it’s a major undertaking, as I have cause to know. The only thing we hear is that she was doing the ironing while Frost flipped the coin that was to choose their future. Yeek.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/robert-frost-edward-thomas-poetry
The second one . . . I assume all of you know about the riots inLondon, and that they’ve spread to other cities. Here’s a link about it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14436499
I’ve been listening to and reading the news with distress—and fear—and disbelief—this is England. Oh, I know the UK has a long history of social unrest, plenty of it violent—but the caricature of the reserved, self-deprecating ‘mustn’t complain,’ ‘keep calm and drink tea,’ Brit is also based on truth, and it’s the truth I’m more acquainted with. Most of the usual-suspect commentators and the media interviewers and so on are going with the ‘mindless violence’ and ‘criminal youth’ line. Here’s another view:
http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html?spref=fb
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And now in the fine tradition of fiddling while other people burn, four cheerful page-turners:
MAGIC BELOW STAIRS by Caroline Stevermer is a younger-reader spin-off from the SORCERY AND CECELIA books. From the back flap: ‘This book takes place after events in THE GRAND TOUR and before THE MISLAID MAGICIAN.’ (Hint: Lady Schofield is pregnant.) And here’s a link to Stevermer’s web site, where you can read more about it: http://members2.authorsguild.net/carolinestev/ It’s just out in paper, but I’m not seeing any flags for a sequel. Everybody writes sequels these days. ††
PARANORMALCY by Kiersten White. I knew I had to read this one when Jodi told me—a long time ago now: you know by now I’m slow—about the heroine’s pink rhinestone-studded taser: ‘Tasers are a one-size fits-all paranormal butt-kicking option. Mine’s pink with rhinestones. Tasey and I have had a lot of good times together.’ You can read about the series here—the second one, SUPERNATURALLY, is out now, and the third one comes out next year: http://kierstenwhite.com/paranormalcy_series
KNIFE by R J Anderson. You can read an excerpt here: http://browseinside.harpercollins.ca/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061554742 From the front flap: ‘Deep inside the great Oak lies a dying faery realm, bursting with secrets instead of magic . . .’ And a few pages in: ‘ . . . The full-length mirror on its carved stand was the one lovely object in the room, a relic from the Days of Magic. It had belonged to the previous Seamstress, who was Bryony’s own egg-mother and namesake, and Bryony had spent many hours in front of it, whispering secrets to her own reflection. There were no other children in the Oak, so the white-haired girl in the mirror was the closest thing to a playmate she knew.’ I believe three of these are out, and a fourth one to come next year.
A MOST IMPROPER MAGICK, subtitled: The unLadylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson, by Stephanie Burgis, which is Regency England with magic, and a hoot. Here’s her web site: http://www.stephanieburgis.com/ The second one, advertised as out the first of this month, is, according to Book Depository, available, and you’ve got the first three chapters of both books plus a free short story on her web site.
So, what are you waiting for? Go slack off.
* * *
* My iPAD 2 ARRIVES TOMORROW. You don’t seriously expect me to be able to think about anything else, do you?
** Hint: this is good.
***I finish the blog and think, hey, where did my evening go? Oh, never mind, I’ll just have it now. Don’t look at the clock.
† Last theoretical application of brain thing. I can still cruise yarn and ‘read an excerpt of this new exciting novel about zombie roses^/demonic computers^^/flame-eyed hellhounds^^^!’ sites. And I do. ^^^^
^ I have several of these.
^^ I have several of these too
^^^ Er . . .
^^^^ Plus Montezuma.
†† Groan
26 July 2011
. . . is the twentieth anniversary of the famous day when I picked up that eccentric English writer Peter Dickinson, whom I slightly knew, at the Bangor, Maine airport, saw him coming through the gate, and went ‘oops’.
The rest is history. My twentieth anniversary of living in England—and specifically this little bit of Hampshire—is the end of October. And our twentieth wedding anniversary is the third of January next year.*
We will now briskly fast-forward to today. Peter had spent most of yesterday going to a funeral**, came home shattered, and is only semi-de-shattered today. I had nine hours and twenty minutes of sleep last night and I still feel like death and dog crap.*** We have Luke and his family arriving tomorrow, and I’m supposed to be making Third House differently-abled-friendly. We hadn’t really decided what we were going to do for our summer twentieth when we found out this was when Luke could come; and so in our usual never-mind-I’ll-think-about-that-tomorrow way we decided we’d have a gentle half-day outing to Wisley, which is the big RHS garden† not undoably far from here . . . but ‘not undoably’ is a relative term and in this case involves a long stretch of motorway driving. That was not going to happen today.
Peter and I stared at each other over the kitchen table.†† We could go to Zigguraton, I said tentatively. The media centre††† has a little art gallery and a nice café. There might even be two or three books on a shelf somewhere they haven’t reassigned to a computer docking station.‡
So that’s what we did. The art gallery contained an unexpectedly charming exhibit and the café is a really nice space‡‡ . . . But the thing that really caught my eye was the knitting exhibit in the case by the front door.‡‡‡ There’s a KNITTING GROUP that meets in the café every Tuesday morning. All welcome. Just bring your current project. . . .
* * *
Honey_bee
Please forgive me if this has been answered but are the book doodles going to be book themed? Say…muffin doodles in Sunshine (or muffins with fangs) or a sighthound for Deerskin and so forth? Not that I wouldn’t appreciate any doodle but a specific book themed one would be really fantastic.
As what I say keeps evolving it is not surprising you are having trouble keeping up. People buying anything that includes a doodle will have the option of specifying what general category of doodle they would like. I’m hoping there will be an actual email submission form which will include a space for doodle requests—with a limit of, say, ten words, and with the caveat that my doodle skilz are limited and I can only do what I can do. I should start keeping a list of the things people suggest for doodles and post samples. (I can do a muffin with fangs for example but I’m not sure you’d like it.) But ‘themed-to-book doodle’ is certainly an option.
katinseattle
I know I can’t outbid for an autographed book, but I’d love a dragon doodle to go into my copy of Dragonhaven. I’d also love a doodle of the whippet. Just because. These will be autographed doodles, won’t they?
Remember that in-print hardbacks, signed and doodled, are going to be available at a flat fee of $35—it’s only the out of print stuff that is going to be some kind of auctioned. But the loose doodles will TOTALLY be autographed. The basic premise is: ‘best wishes and thanks to YOUR NAME HERE, Robin McKinley’. The $5 doodle will have a smaller doodle than the $10 is all. I wanted to have them on two different sizes of paper, but barring that I get to what looks like the nearest really good art supplies store—which is not near—they’ll both have to go on the WH Smith standard A6. Which means the $5 will have more white space as well as fewer lines.
Ajlr
And – you may snigger, at this point, if you wish – the timing of Sunday morning service where I ring is going to be brought forward in October so that we’ll need to start ringing just after 08.45 instead of 09.45! Can you give me any tips on how to survive such horror?
If you will forgive a brief excursion into semi-seriousness—and, may I add, well aware that you are pulling my poor sore ME-raddled leg, since you routinely get up at 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning§ during the working week—the way I get myself out of bed on Sunday mornings, hours before my usual, is by remembering that this is what us bell ringers are for. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not—and I’m not—the reason our bells exist is to call Christians to worship. The way we frelling pay back for the honour of ringing our bells is by ringing for service in the churches where they hang. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine—people who can’t be arsed to ring for service infuriate me. It’s dishonourable. It’s stealing. The only literal financial cost to any bell ringer is a piddling yearly guild membership fee. The rest of our subscription is paid by ringing for service.
I don’t actually say this over to myself every Sunday morning when the alarm goes off much too early. It’s just something you do, if you’re a bell ringer, like if you have a dog, you take it for walks. There are people who have dogs who don’t take them for walks too. . . .
Don’t get me started. But Aj, I’m not worried. You’ll get up.
* * *
And just in case anyone was worrying . . . yes, there was champagne for supper tonight.
* * *
* Over halfway. I told Peter I’m expecting thirty-five years. More is negotiable. It’s all in the contract.
** Of a branch of the family I’ve never met, which is why I didn’t.
*** Our local pet shop, which orders the hellhounds’ monster bags of cereal-free kibble, greeted me with cries of triumph when I went in to pick up the latest delivery the end of last week. You’ll like these! they said, and flourished a packet of biodegradable dog-crap bags at me. Biodegradable dog-crap bags are remarkably elusive, or possibly illusory: the ones I used for a while turn out, on close inspection of the fine print, only to be degradable if you have a major metropolitan recycling complex available. I found this out as one might say the hard way—and after they’d changed their advertising. This new lot avoids all such tricky questions by declining to provide any justification whatsoever for the label ‘biodegradable’. They just say they are. Well, everything is ‘biodegradable’, given sufficient eons. When I have a spare minute and at least one spare brain cell I will look them up on line. Meanwhile, I’m using them . . . and they feel biodegradable, which is to say they have that slippery corn-starch feel . . . and they are so thin as to be seriously alarming to the person employing them. I will endeavour not to tell you if . . . anything of a distressing nature occurs.
† http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardens/Wisley
†† Haggard and red-eyed optional.
††† which used to be a library. Cue extreme local controversy.
‡ Temper, temper.
‡‡ Even if it should be full of BOOKS. The thing that bugs the grangblatting, rumplehammering hells out of me is that they have room for a lot more books than they’ve bothered either to have shelves for or, having shelves, put on them. The café is gigantic, the first/second^ floor is a frelling rotunda, there’s more SPACE than there is anything else, they could frelling well have wedged in a few more shelves in the pathetic amount of square footage they have allotted to bookshelves and then put books on them. ARRRRGH.^^
Oh, and there’s a shop. Having utterly failed to find any of the books I thought—just for laughs—I’d look for, since the media this is a centre of is supposed to include books, I BOUGHT a book in the SHOP. How frelled is that.
But we did have a very nice slice of lemon cake with our tea. And Peter read his New Scientist and I knitted.^^^ Just like an old married couple. ::Hilarity::
^ British: first. American: second.
^^ Postscript: neither my, which is not surprising, nor Peter’s, which is shameful, books appear anywhere on said shelves.+ Sure. We can pretend they were all checked out.
+ And the children’s room is a grim little afterthought. ARRRRGH.
^^^ Stupid square knitting is fabulous when the ME is winning. Why did it take me so long to discover knitting??
‡‡‡ All of them, I think, out of this single splendid book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knitted-Cakes-Twenty-Susan-Penny/dp/1844483614
Which I just happen—er—to have. It’s near the front of the queue on my Knitting Shelf.
§ I believe you have been known to grumble briefly when you have to get up at 5