A Few Pages After the First
No. Not quite. Nearly. Tomorrow. I know I said that yesterday. Well, I’m more caught up than I was yesterday. It still seems to me going well. I can risk saying that (I hope) because I know there will be days between now and the rmmph of March when it is not going well, when I am not a writer, I never was a writer, and I’m starting my retraining as a mechanic* in the next uptake.** Which is to say I know I’m going to be paying for good days whether or not I admit to having them so why not admit it? See: wrestling alligators, below.
Stardancer
I learned how hard it is to make a story. . . . I did learn to take something in the range of horrible/okay and shove it around into okay/pretty okay, even if I didn’t think it was anything I’d want to read. It’s HARD. I’d never realized before how much work it was, even for those gifted people in my classes who did “hear” their stories right off. Drafts and voice and tweaking and word choice and why is that character there again?
Thank you. Yes. It’s HARD. This is why The Urge to Kill people who offer to split the money with you if they give you their Great Idea and you do the dull stupid labour of writing it up because the idea is the hard part and besides you already have the name and the publishing contacts, is pretty overwhelming. Fortunately most of these offers come by post/email. Back in the days when I went to more live things and people used occasionally to offer this blithering asininity to my face civilised restraint was more difficult.
But. Yes. It’s like wrestling alligators. WHY IS THAT CHARACTER FOLLOWING ME AROUND? GO AWAY. YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS STORY. Er. Do you? What have I missed this time? Writing is also brilliant and fascinating and enormous fun . . . but those alligators bite hard. And the regeneration of major body parts is tiring and demoralising and takes time, which you probably haven’t got.
EMoon
It’s downright scary sometimes how much your process is like my process…the whole thing about each character’s voice, each book’s voice, each book’s vocabulary, so sometimes I can’t hear the word I need–none of the first/second/third choice words works in that sentence and I can spend hours digging through dictionaries hoping to find the one right one. The stuff I have to write down (revolving door, uniform, etc.) that has to come out later because who cares, it doesn’t matter only some of the details DO matter and I don’t know which ones until the book’s done or nearly done.
Scary? Hmm. I find it exactly the opposite—this seems to me so obviously the way stories must break into storytellers’ brains, get heard/figured out, get written, that I find it far more unsettling when I hear about some other writer’s entirely different process. Those people who write out complete outlines—story arcs, what happens in each chapter, characters’ names, descriptions and relationships—people who create files on different aspects of story and characters before they ever settle down to write the story part of the story—that’s scary. I went through a period when I was a teenager of (mostly) secretly reading everything I could get my hands on on how to write—secretly as one pursues any vice, or any unadmitted longing—and some of the advice clings round me still in cold, sticky, cobwebby sorts of shreds. I absolutely believe in ‘whatever works’ but . . . brrrr for the file-keepers.
I mostly don’t write down stuff that will come out later. I tend to have faith that if I’ve left something out it’ll clamour to get into the next draft. Certainly stuff does come out, but not usually the revolving door and the doorperson’s uniform. But I do keep some notes as I go, and sometimes the marginal notes to the notes to the notes (to the notes) get a little cramped.
* * *
* jaccairn
Also, MOT – I think I remember that yours is due sometime this month, It’s the sort of thing that might slip your mind when you’re so busy.
Snork. The things some people’s blog forum members remember. Thank you. Yes, Wolfgang is due this month and I’ve already booked him in.^ I hope you’re impressed. I’m so impressed I can hardly bear myself. (I think this is the first year I’ve ever remembered before the last minute.) Now I just have to implore the weather gods to be kind since the remains of the bus system between here and Warm Upford is not worth discussing. Hellhounds and I can perfectly well walk home one day and walk back the next, but not if we’re having gales and hail and winged monkeys and so on. Which we’re apparently going to have overnight. This is all because Peter had planned to go to Oxford tomorrow and have lunch with one of his cousins. No, no! said the weather gods, shaking themselves out of their long winter slumber, we can’t have promiscuous peregrinations! Where is that blizzard, we know we put it somewhere! —It hasn’t got up to freezing the last three days^^ and now we’re supposed to have SNOW. Ah . . . frell. Well, my yaktrax have been lonesome so far this winter . . . and snow will certainly keep me at home where I have nothing better to do than work. . . . ^^^
^ And he has to pass. Has to. In the first place I can’t afford a new car this year. In the second place . . . I still don’t want a new car. I want a new car less and less as I hear friends with shiny new cars talking about the way the computers in new cars run their lives. And go wrong, of course. You can learn to ignore that little flashing red light on the dashboard after the third time you’ve taken it in and paid £100 to be told there’s nothing wrong. Not so much the robot voice continuously telling you to fasten your seatbelt/add grinchflobby fluid to the ziggury system/placate the trolls with ham sandwiches.
^^ And my chocolate cosmos hate being indoors, so they’ll probably frelling croak this year too. Arrrgh. Furthermore, my gladiola bulbs arrived today. Gladiola bulbs are tender. Mail warehouses are rarely heated. At least mail warehouses where tender plants are held are rarely heated. Arrrgh. Don’t these mail-order bozos ever, you know, listen to the weather forecast? Hey, guys, we’re supposed to get three foot of snow tomorrow! Let’s ship all the banana trees!
^^^ Ajlr
I also wondered what the reaction of the hellhounds had been to the new Amazingly Loud Voice?
Chaos has always found my singing . . . disturbing. Darkness has always assumed that it’s just another daft human activity. It is perhaps hard on hellhounds that both at the mews and the cottage their bed is next to the piano/cheap electric keyboard. Chaos gets up and moves toward me cautiously, staring at my distorted face for clues. GO LIE DOWN YOU WRETCHED DOG.
I’m more worried about the neighbours. Do you remember—probably nearly a year ago now—I was fretting about singing at the cottage, where my office, with the keyboard in it, has the common wall with my semi-detached neighbour? (The keyboard itself, plugged into headphones, is silent.) The wall is floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, but I can still hear my neighbour climbing the stairs on the other side. Don’t worry, said Nadia, you don’t make nearly enough noise.
I think I probably do make enough noise now. Ah, the disadvantages of success. I can still sing while I do the washing-up—it’s on the far side from the common wall. I also sing out hurtling, while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me, and my impression is that people are starting to move to the opposite pavement (I used to think this was just a reaction to rampant hellhounds). Hey, this probably happens to Deborah Voigt too. I wish it had any effect on aggressive off lead dogs.
** The GUARDIAN is running a publicity draw to win a full degree Open University course. Details tomorrow. The OU is highly thought of so I, who don’t have nearly enough to do, had an idle look through their course list. Their language department is terrible. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Welsh (Welsh?^) and Latin and (classical) Greek. That’s it?
^ Yes, I know, good for them, Celtic languages are struggling for survival, but in the context of only six modern languages offered it seems to me a bit startling.
Another Great Day
Not.
I got back to the cottage last night later than I meant to, as I had gone on with SHADOWS rather too long after Bronwen left and was late tackling the blog . . . and there were archangels coming in the morning, I mean, you know, morning, before-noon-type MORNING, and while hellhounds (when all is well) have amazing sphincter control, I did want to take them out before archangels arrived, in case I became absorbed in biting the carpet and screaming.
And there was a car parked in my space.
I have sufficiently impressed upon you that the cul de sac my cottage is on is not merely narrow and land-mined but a seven-dimensional jigsaw and you’re required to take six months’ advanced driver training at Silverstone before you’re allowed to buy a property there? Every micron of pavement is privately owned and you encroach on someone else’s territory at extreme risk to life and limb. And have I mentioned that it was 3 o’clock in the morning? If I’d known where the miscreant was hiding I would have been happy to bang on the correct door till they or their severed body parts emerged, but I wasn’t going to go looking at that hour. I managed, by good fortune and fury, to wedge Wolfgang in next to Phineas’ car, left a CRISP note on the windscreen of the brigand, went indoors and . . . called the cops.* They are not allowed to draw blood, more’s the pity, but they could at least locate the little rat turd and tell him to move his gorblimey vehicle. Yes, of course I thought of letting the air out of his tyres, but with modern tyres that’s more of a faff than it used to be in the rough days of my youth, and the car was middle-aged and in even worse shape than Wolfgang, so he probably wouldn’t notice if I did key the thing.
But adrenaline is not your friend when you want to go to bed and sleep. I turned my computer on which (frighteningly) is pretty much my default response to any and everything any more**, which gave me the opportunity to discover that my email was NOT WORKING. I did all the unplugging and replugging and closing and restarting and dancing and shouting things you’re supposed to do in these situations and . . . no. Okay, at least Computer Archangels are coming . . . in about six hours. I sent Raphael a text saying, please don’t come before eleven. . . . volleyed through the whole teeth-bath-and-hellhound-snack pre-going-to-bed business, turned the light out and . . . lay there thinking about . . . well, about Maggie’s mom and her sisters, and about some of Mongo’s friends, and about . . . um . . . never mind. Thinking.***
The alarm went off way too early, except I was already awake. Moan. The gorblimey vehicle was gone, and there was a note through my door from Phineas’ son apologising for his contemptible low-life of a friend. You may gather I am not appeased. I found moth holes in one of my favourite sweaters.† Computer Men were there for over two hours and . . . the new laptop is still eating its battery like a lion tucking into a wildebeest and they never figured out what was wrong with the email, it just started working again. And then stopped again. And then started again. . . . ††
While this was going on there was an exciting Christmas delivery! No. Wrong delivery.††† Boring boring delivery. I have about thirty-six Christmas things coming and one boring one. So the one that arrives. . . .
After we finally had our proper morning/afternoon hurtle‡ and loaded up Wolfgang to traipse down to the mews . . . there was a large delivery truck parked in the archway into the mews courtyard. I think the driver was eating his lunch. Parked in the archway, so that no one could get past. The courtyard behind him was empty. He could have parked in the courtyard to begin with, or he could have backed up six feet and parked in it now. But he didn’t. He saw me, got out of the truck, opened the side door in a leisurely fashion, examined his hand-held electronic gizmo for instructions, unhurriedly selected a parcel, ambled over to one of Peter’s neighbours, knocked on the door, had a nice chat . . . and frelling FINALLY drove out of the *&^%$£”!!!!!!! archway.
And now I am going to try to go to bed early. Beginning with driving calmly back to the cottage and parking in my space.‡‡
* * *
* Who were gratuitously polite. I have insurmountable philosophical problems with the fact that High Tories in positions of modest social authority in small towns in Hampshire are pretty well universally well-mannered and considerate. It’s true that for all my bellowing I’m (mostly) extremely law-abiding^, so when we have contact the fuzz and I tend to be on the same side. It’s still disconcerting.
^ I would be capable of letting someone’s tyres down—ideologically if not practically—probably not keying. I’d feel sorry for the car.
** . . . and chocolate. Between turning your computer on and chocolate, most of the exigencies of life are covered.
***Maggie As far as I’m concerned, learning that Shadows has Mongo and maths and physics AND origami is an excellent Christmas present…
Oh glory. Are you one of these scientific people? Brace yourself. Your namesake is not. She has certain scientific principles thrust upon her, but she bends the physwiz^ out of them whenever possible.
^ sic
EMoon
You said: I haven’t got time for unexpected plot developments! It’s due in six weeks! It’s really simple! Mongo saves the universe! The End!
Yes. That. My idiot book has been changing its plot in the last few weeks and even today, dadblast its fiendish excuse for a mind. Idiot person riding from A to B to tell X that Y is coming for a visit changed his mind on when (actually Y changed his mind on when to send idiot person) leaving fossil bits of conversation relating to the earlier decision scattered across several chapters.
Riding. That’s your problem. Riding. There are no horses in SHADOWS.^ But I wholly concur about the ‘dadblast its fiendish excuse for a mind’.
^ Okay, two or three ponies in the background. But they’re little ones, petting-zoo burn-outs. And if you tried to ride them they would bite you.
† They’ll mend. But I’ll need to take my wounded garment in to the craft shop to look for the right colours of embroidery floss. No I am not going to spring for an entire two skeins of yarn. Probably.
†† After they left I rang Penelope and cancelled going to see HUGO with her tonight. I knew I shouldn’t be sloping off to the cinema but this was not how I wanted to get out of it. Should I tell Niall you aren’t going to stop round for handbells then either? she said. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
††† Had another of those extremely enjoyable experiences on line today. Got to the check out. It wouldn’t (a) accept my email address (b) accept my password (c) let me re-register (because my email address is already on their database. I knew that) (d) accept the new password they sent me after I hit ‘forgotten password’, even though I hadn’t forgotten it. I wrote to customer service and was rewarded almost immediately with a robo letter thanking me for contacting them and promising to respond some time in the next twenty-three years.
. . . Meanwhile as I write this I have received confirmation of an order put through the end of last week within their stated Christmas deadline. This is one of those delivered-live-plants things, and I’ve fired off plants to half my address book. When you buy more than eight hundred and forty three they let you choose a few free ones for your home address. The confirmation is telling me that the free ones coming to me have been dispatched . . . and none of the others is now guaranteed to arrive before Christmas. Thanks. Thanks loads.
‡ In the rain. All forecasts for today said ‘sunny’. It’s been raining off and on all day. Oh, and there wasn’t supposed to be any frost last night? There was. I now have several fewer pots that will need bringing indoors the next time we have an official frost.
‡‡ It’s now raining hard.
Eight days till Christmas
I’ve just been ordering Christmas presents for me on Peter’s credit card. Mwa hahahahahahaha.
Well, he asked. He says, I don’t have enough Christmas presents for you. Gee that’s really too bad, I say, trying not to slaver too openly. I’m sure (I add hastily) what you have is fine. [Crosses fingers behind back.] * Do you have any suggestions? he says, politely averting his eyes from both the drool and the crossed fingers. Um . . . well, I say, trying to sound bashful, there’s that fabulous new book on ROSES that you found the review for, that I keep not quite committing to buying for myself**, and you know maybe an extreme book of scary origami?***
Do it, he says. My wallet is in my leather jacket.† And then he ambles gently over to the sofa and lies down for a nap.
The power. The power.††
Christmas. Great big feh.††† I’ve spent most of the day‡ hacking my way through excruciatingly slow web sites overburdened with other frantic people doing last-minute Christmas shopping. My memory, not one of my strong points at the best of times, managed to let me down disastrously in a couple of instances—most of the last-minute sites let you order up till Monday but I’d managed to forget that one or two in my mind’s eye aren’t last-minute sites. ‘Five to seven working days’ does not ravish me with joy, ‘five to ten working days’ makes me whimper and ‘out of stock, we will contact you when available’ makes me fling myself on the floor in a transport of I don’t know what, but it looks interesting to the hellhounds.
Meanwhile all these gorblimey physicists going on about the impossibility of everything. How about if they whiffle some of those infinitely complex non-boundaries of the Mandelbrot set into/out of time? I’m sure the answer to the thirty-six hour day is tucked away in there somewhere, if they’d settle down and apply themselves. There’s a Nobel Prize in it for sure. Come on, guys! Function!
* * *
* I’ve tried the ‘if you have an overwhelming desire to help me pay for the new laptop please don’t restrain yourself’^ but he says, no, no, you need something to open. Aw gee. He’s always been like this—for someone who has to overcome deep-rooted repugnance at the very idea of receiving a gift^^, he has a very romantic notion about giving them. And furthermore, he says, with a gleam in his eye, you need something that will look good on the blog.
Hmm. Okay, he has a point.
^ And he did help with the iPad. Although that was before I realised PEG II was an evil fiend from hell/second book in a tr*l*gy and that I wasn’t going to turn it in last August and was therefore about to run out of money instead.+
+ This means that the old laptop will lurch on almost failing for at least another year. If I hadn’t bought the new laptop it would have blown up in a toxic cloud of sticky purple smoke last week, melting the William Morris oilcloth, leaving a very nasty mark on the table, and causing me to run away to sea.~ Yes, this is still the old laptop. I don’t have time to learn a new frelling operating system.
~ I don’t think they take fifty-nine-year-old women as able-bodied sailors, do they? Well that’s out then.
^^ He was unusually well-mannered yesterday.+ I don’t think he ran out of the room even once. And he seems quite pleased with his phone.
+ The big problem with visitors is the absence of leftovers. Like, a glass of soothing champagne tonight.
** I’ve now spent easily its list price in maths and physics books. But then I didn’t already have umpty-gazillion books on maths and physics.
*** No, I have at least twelve thumbs. I also have a slight problem about empty flat surfaces to practise folding on.^ But maths and physics are not enough! Origami is also important in SHADOWS and I need to know something about it too, before I Schrodinger’s-cat^^ it all up for the story! Why couldn’t I write about something easy, like vampires or dragons?
^ Now even worse than usual. I spent most of an hour I didn’t have this evening bringing the jungle indoors. But we’re apparently supposed to have several degrees of frost tonight and . . . I, er, folded. I have lost remarkably little so far and I see all those gallant geraniums pressing themselves against the warm house-wall and shivering and I feel like a murderer. One of the curious aspects of going back to the cottage at, oh, 3 a.m. or so is that you probably know by then if you’re having a frost or not. Ahem. The mews courtyard freezes at least two degrees sooner than I do at the cottage so if I have to claw Wolfgang free of the clutches of the Ice Giants it doesn’t necessarily mean that those faint popping noises you hear are geraniums giving up the ghost back at the cottage. We’ve had two or three frosty nights thus far when I’ve gritted my teeth and gone to bed anyway^^^ but last night caught me out. I didn’t think it was going to freeze and then it did, and pretty smartly too. The geraniums are definitely looking a little crumbly around the edges. ARRRRRGH. So when I went back to the cottage on the second hurtle with crisp-weather-enlivened hellhounds and it was already only about two degrees off freezing I . . . brought everything I could find in the dark . . . indoors. And the best thing about this? The BEST? That my kitchen—and I hope it will only be my kitchen—will be full of revitalised slugs tomorrow morning which were hibernating and believe that spring has come early. . . .
^^ http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+tote_bag,137590655 Hee hee hee hee.
^^^ I don’t have TIIIIIIIIME. Listen, all of you, at approximately 9:30 GMT tomorrow morning, I want any of you who happen to be awake to face in a Hampshire-ward direction and shout, YOU DON’T HAVE TIIIIIIIIME, because that’s when Niall, as we pull our coats on and prepare to descend the ladder after service ring, will tackle me (again) on the subject of handbells with Titus tomorrow evening.
† Last year’s Christmas present, you know.^
^ Last year? Two years ago? I’m too old to be bothered to make fine distinctions between mere years.
†† Sigh. Yes, he does read the blog.
††† I don’t have time for Christmas. And I have to get the frelling Christmas stuff down from my attic at Third House this year. It’s been at the mews before this, so I’ve been able to flounce and sulk at Peter for not hotfooting to accomplish this. Not only do I not get to flounce and sulk at someone else, I have to frelling do something.
‡ Barring bringing the jungle indoors
Wet and Shrill
It’s absolutely tipping it down out there. Again.* Yesterday Peter had warned me that the weather was going to turn torrential by evening, so hellhounds and I had had an extra-specially hurtley hurtle in the morning, looking over our shoulders at the vast sneering grey bulk of the coming storm.** I then had my head down over SHADOWS all afternoon and ignored the warning signs of tempest.*** By the time we got out it was sheeting and hellhounds were not amused. I have raincoats for them and they were still not amused. Look, guys, I said, pee and crap fast and we can go indoors again. I think internal systems tend to shut down under meteorological abuse, however, and we didn’t have a long walk but we didn’t have a short one either—with me hauling them along at the farthest extents of their long leads while they gave me the full treatment: tucked tails, humpy backs, flattened ears, and laser-eyed reproachful looks. Mind you I’d much rather have lap-of-luxury-prone hellhounds than these hearty bounding things that think weather trying to beat you to the ground the better to drown you is an adventure—I’ve dogsat too many working hunting dogs who can’t wait to rush outside and look for grouse or tapirs or whatever the hell and can’t understand why you’re being such a poor sport about a little rain/hail/hurricane-force wind/alligators. But yesterday was extreme. Today would have been even more extreme except that the dog-minder tells time better than I do and she took them out on their afternoon hurtle before it started getting dangerous out there. It was starting to rain ominously when I came out after my voice lesson, and the wipers were on high-extra-plus by the time I got home.
What with everything else going on I think I haven’t mentioned that I’ve had rotten week for singing. I think there’s been some rudeness from a minor virus involved, but the result has been that I haven’t wanted to risk aggravating the scratchy-almost-sore croaky situation. ARRRRRGH. This is the sort of thing that if I weren’t trying to sing I wouldn’t even notice. † This is why singers are so neurotic, Nadia said cheerfully. I’ve told you that before.
Yes, but . . . Okay, it’s much worse— much worse—for a professional singer. But if you sound like Jonas Kaufmann or Deborah Voigt it’s understandable that you get a little stressed if your shining, high-mettled thoroughbred comes lame out of its loose box one day. As a singer I’m one of those Thelwell ponies where you can’t tell how many legs it has, let alone whether it’s sound on all of them or not. When I get discouraged because I’m sounding even more rubbish than usual it’s like don’t be frelling ridiculous.
So it hasn’t been a good week.†† Also when you can’t practise enough you can’t derive the benefit of practise either, so I went in there today for my third hour-long lesson thinking, she’s going to tell me the hour was a mistake and we should go back to forty-five minutes. And she’ll do it kindly.
She didn’t. She told me that everyone has to learn how their own voice works, but that I’m extremely unlikely to be doing mine any damage, so to go ahead and keep experimenting with the limitations imposed by rude viruses. The hour shot by. The teacher-magic worked and I sounded better than I have since . . . at least last Monday.
I’m even noticeably learning Dove Sei.
* * *
* My poor garden. I swear, when I hand SHADOWS in and doodle my last paid-for-already doodle, whichever comes second, I am going to spend a fortnight DOING NOTHING BUT GARDENING. I may come indoors for meals.^ The blog will devolve to photos of mud and large green bags of future compost.^^ But at the moment I am grateful not to be watering pots.
We had our first hard frost three nights ago and I just threw up my hands—I haven’t got two hours to bring everything in and take everything out again—I don’t even have two hours to finish getting the summer/greenhouse set up, stocked up, and then regularly watered—speaking of watering. Meanwhile I got off much more lightly than I deserved three nights ago. I know it was a hard frost because we came home in it—I had to chip Wolfgang’s windscreen clear^^^ and we then came home sideways. Geraniums and snapdragons often come through a degree or two of frost, although you can’t count on it, but the begonias and fuchsias usually don’t, and they did the other night. I think the only thing I lost were the chocolate cosmos, and they are a ratbag to drag through the winter indoors so while I’m sorry I’m also relieved. Maybe I can find two hours somewhere before the next frost. . . .
^ Especially if this is happening in February.+
+ I wish.
^^ Especially if this is happening in February.+
+ I wish.
^^^ This is the third year in a row I’ve told myself I need to get a serious scraper instead of the shy little doodad I do have, clearly made for ornamental use in the Maldives. It’s still better than fingernails.
** Sunday morning hurtles are always at least a little aggrieved because of this bell ringing shtick, and the prospect of an extra-long Sunday morning hurtle is not always welcome. By Sunday afternoon/evening hurtle I’m significantly brain dead, but I’m also full of caffeine. I’m beginning to think that Monday evening practises are also always at least a little aggrieved because of this voice lesson shtick, although at least I can mainline a little more molasses-coloured tea between getting home from the one and going out again to the other. Once-a-month Old Eden tonight, and a better turn-out than usual^, but this included one beginner and two people only just learning to ring inside, so the rest of us were mostly filling in for learners to bounce off of. Minimal brain necessary. Yaay.^^
^ Thanks to McKinley’s phone wiles, but they’re pretty much the same phone wiles every month, it’s just this month they worked.
^^ Brute strength, however, is required for the frelling bells. I wonder what chaos theory says about possessed-by-demons change-ringing bells? What’s the physics of a 360-degree-turning bell, first 360° degrees in one direction and then 360° degrees in the opposite direction, securely riveted on a rigid frame, and you’ve just about got it figured out how hard you have to yank the wretched thing to make it complete its circle and suddenly between one yank and the next it comes down on you like a stooping falcon?, which is to say it doesn’t rise from straight down 0° to 180° straight up, it rises perhaps twelve degrees and sticks like it’s just hit a wall, and there you are turning purple and hauling on the bellrope till you can feel the blisters coming, trying to hoick it back into place again, and meanwhile you’ve probably totally fallen off your line through the pattern and you may have two or three people yelling at you, but then again maybe not, because they’re out of breath hauling on their own anvil-like bells.
*** Long whippy rose stems beating against the windows like chains and the occasional thud of a raindrop the size of a latke.
† I’ve been trying to remember how much of this nonsense I put up with when I was singing for Blondel. It doesn’t seem to me it was this bad, but I’m hoping that’s because all of my singing at the beginning was basically a kind of undifferentiated wizened squeal, and by now I’d be noticing the somewhat better days from the very much worse ones whoever I was singing for . . . and not that I’ve angered the Upper Respiratory deity and it’s going to be a ratbag from here on. I also don’t yet have a clue, besides finding out the hard way, when I can sing through an incursion of throat crud and when I’d better not.
†† Turns out there’s a serious drawback to gaining a slightly better grasp of, um, music. I don’t sing favourite arias out hurtling because they’re too hard. I keep going wildly adrift and can’t find the tune. But this is changing. I was, for example, singing Marguerite’s final music—the angels-save-me bit^—pretty accurately this morning. Except it’s my voice.
^ ‘Anges pur, anges radieux, Portez mon ame au sein des cieux’ is what my libretto says.
Frelling knitting
Mostly it’s been raining today. Especially when I’m trying to get hounds hurtled. I was sitting in Wolfgang this afternoon with the windows curled down just a bit so hellhound steam* wouldn’t fog up the glass, hoping that it would stop raining long enough to let me do at least an abbreviated hurtle before Tabitha was finished with Peter and ready for me, and knitting. Arrrrrrrgh. Remember I said the other night that I’d started a new knitting project while I was waiting for doodle photos to load? In the first place, I have enough squares at this point for several secret projects, not only the two that . . . are still not finished because the ‘sewing up’ thing is in the way.** In the second place . . . there is more to knitting than squares. So they tell me.
I decided I wanted to do something else, not only for the sake of my education. Something that did not involve forty-six gajillion squares that would turn out to be far less square-like in aggregate than they seemed to be individually.*** Something that would be new and amusing. I also decided I should do something that involved purling. I have two auction squares† to produce some day when the doodle level has dropped a little farther (for all of which I have already accepted money††) and I need to be able to (a) count††† and (b) purl on command to succeed in this task.
So I decided to resurrect the leg-warmers. Remember the leg-warmers? This whole knitting thing began with leg-warmers . . . almost a YEAR ago.‡ But they’re ribbed. And ribbing looked a bit like . . . hurtling hellhounds in monsoon mud on crutches. I prefer challenges that involve at least a 1% chance of success. It was Fiona’s brilliant idea that I begin with a hellhound blanket, which would be pretty much hideous-beginner-error-proof because the hellhounds won’t mind, and hideous errors in a little 20 x 14 stitch square are, meh, it’s just a square, there’s always the next square. And then I got deflected onto several wheelbarrow-loads of squares for my Secret Projects . . .
And now it’s nearly a year later. So I got the leg-warmer recipe, I mean pattern, out, and discovered that the Blessed Fiona had written it out for me so I didn’t have to translate either Knitting Language or recognise which number series are for grown-up-human-woman size as opposed to dwarf Pekinese. And I began to knit. And purl.
*&^%$^*()__+@~?>J)*££”!!!!!!!@;/#~+=}}][^*_?!
. . . Okay. Dissecting my humiliating failure, first, I am a moron, and I can’t tell left from right (or clockwise from anti/counterclockwise). I’m reading it from one of my helpfully illustrated knitting books and it says, wrap wool anticlockwise . . . and I’m cheerfully wrapping it the other way. ARRRRRRGH. But the second thing is that the yarn I’d bought, despite the fact that it’s exactly what the pattern calls for and is described as ‘easy knit’ is not easy knit enough. It’s chunky, and made up of a variety of threads, some heavier and some finer, and some gauzy little gossamer ratbags whose ultimate thrill is to get caught invisibly somewhere, tighten, and pull. I’d forgotten, for example, that when I started out I tended to knit so fixed-and-strainingly I could barely shove the resulting stitches along the needle—I am sorry to have remembered this fact so graphically. There was language. There was knotted yarn. There were rows of lumpy stitches that looked like something out of the Wreck of the Hesperus. Slightly after I had come to this conclusion myself Fiona suggested by email that I revert to hellhound squares again for basic practise. . . .
So that’s what I was doing, this afternoon in the car, as the rain sluiced down, and hellhounds breathed damply from the back seat. I’d learnt to purl months ago, via Fiona and Bronwen, but, rather unforesightfully, all I’d done was purl a few entire squares just to get the motions fixed in my mind. (Which you then flip over, and they look just like your knitted squares.) I’d never tried swapping, knit and purl and knit and purl, let alone swapping every few stitches, as one must do for ribbing. After the fourth time I had ripped out the first half-dozen rows of the leg-warmers (and this was not the toughest top-quality yarn to begin with, and it’s beginning to look a little haggard), I got out the hellhound yarn. I’m working down to ribbing. At the moment I’m knitting two rows and then purling two rows, and back again. The first row I spend trying to revert to the other stitch. By the end of the second row I’ve forgotten the other stitch.
Sigh.‡‡
But SHADOWS is still going and going. ‡‡‡
* * *
* I swear there’s about 110% more water vapour in dog breath than human breath. Or maybe more alveoli per square inch in hellhound lungs.
** Sewing-up takes space. You have to keep laying the freller out and sort of dry-blocking it to see if it at all resembles what it is/was supposed to be. Anguish. And then trying to decide what to do about the fact that it doesn’t. The individual-square-knitting phase is much to be preferred. Squares are or at least seem to be much more immediately recognisable as . . . squares. Not to mention the not-needing-space part. And the discovery that the squares are not square enough.
*** And the lack of square-like-ness increases geometrically with every non-square added to the interesting object spread-eagled on the table.
† Speaking of squares
†† Yes, this preys on the mind. Especially in the middle of the night. The real reason for going to bed at dawn is so I can be awake and glaring back at the demons during the scary hours.
Have I told you we’re supposed to be able to keep our bells through Christmas, although ringing in a restrained and tactful manner might be a good idea, and then they go off to be gilded and diamond-studded in January?
††† I am hoping that recent breakthroughs on the subject of higher maths and hard sciences may have a knock-backwards effect on my capacity to do arithmetic. I can float lightly past my limited comprehension of Professor Stewart’s clever tricks while falling asleep in the bath, but it would be very useful to be able to add and subtract reliably. I’m not even asking for long division.
‡ How embarrassing. Well, I’ve been busy. Not writing PEG II and now—gasp—writing SHADOWS.
‡‡‡ Maggie wrote:
Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.
Shadows will be about a seventeen-year-old named Maggie… and will most likely come out when *I* am a seventeen-year-old named Maggie. YAAAY!
Oh . . . golly! Er . . . how is your relationship with algebra–?