Blog housekeeping
Item one: I mention this in the comments occasionally but the message is failing to percolate and furthermore people forget. Hey! Forgetting is my job! I don’t read or answer comments from the front end, at the bottoms of their entries, but in one long combined list at the back end of site admin. This is faster for me to deal with and I’m afraid it’s all about faster. I don’t have time to answer comments as it is, I just enjoy it.* But from there I can’t easily track back to previous comments on a thread; you’re supposed to be able to click through to ‘view all’ but it doesn’t work–and I don’t have time to hunt around. Therefore would you please copy and paste some hint what we’re talking about if you’re continuing a conversation? (Even if it’s a conversation with someone else . . . It’s a public blog, and I like to eavesdrop.)
Item two: please remember that I haven’t a clue about site running, maintenance, adjustment, blah. I can barely copy and paste entries, load photos** and answer comments. All such remarks and queries should go to Blogmom. Something like the counter clock it makes sense to ask me because I might not want one for some reason . . . but generally speaking please feel free to leave me out of the tech loop. I occasionally get emails from people who want to make helpful suggestions and I sit there staring at this stuff thinking ‘you have mistaken me for someone who runs her own blog. Permit me to disillusion you’.
Item three: It really bothers me that Anonymous is still putting in so regular an appearance in the comments. I’m aware that there’s some wrinkle in WordPress that means this happens more easily than it should, and again, people forget or are away from home or on a new computer.*** There are still far too many anonymice. This may be a bit deranged, but anonymous to me is anti-community, and this is, for better or sillier, a community.† Please feel free to create an alternative personality with a name borrowed from your favourite novel–as long as you read books and are nice to the rest of us you’re welcome here. While the Robin McKinley you see here is certainly familiar to anyone who knows me in three dimensions, I would be the first to declare she’s had a certain amount of spin put on her.†† And I don’t care if you belong officially or not: but if WordPress isn’t providing you with a name automagically please think of a unique identifying glob of symbols that suits/amuses you and sign it at the bottom.
Item four: And, speaking of the iniquities of WordPress, it eats comments occasionally. I’ve written maybe half a dozen that simply never appeared. Sometimes I get that confounded ‘slow down, you’re posting too fast’ message. Sometimes a comment . . . just doesn’t appear. What happens a good deal oftener is that something I’ve unscreened rescreens itself again. I do take a quick troll through and look for these, but inevitably I’m not catching all of them. If you’ve posted something, ahem, innocuous, and it’s never materialised . . . send it again. The only ones I delete are . . . um . . . rude. Or hilariously over-personal.††† But remember also that I usually only burn through here and do the unscreening once a day. If you posted just as I was checking out the night/morning before, you’ll have twenty-four hours till it emerges blinking into the computer ether.
PS: I was reading the summer issue of BRITISH HORSE over supper. There was a review of a book on riding that ended like this: Would I advise you to buy it? Yes and no. Yes, because . . . it would be a useful book for the newcomer to riding . . . and a worthwhile read for the student instructor. No because it’s an e-book–I do like a book I can pull off the shelf and refer to at a moment’s notice. Perhaps the author can be persuaded to publish the book in a more traditional form?
Hmmm.
And has anyone been to Baen’s Bar recently? Several of you–including Ithilien in her magisterial post on e-books–have mentioned it as an example of what on line bookishness can do, so I tried to go investigate. The opening page says they’ve moved the furniture and everyone has to re-login. I’m new anyway, so I created an account, dutifully responded to the official email . . . and it wouldn’t let me in. It denied the password I had been told I could choose, and reenter to confirm . . . and when I gave up and asked them to send it to me‡, it was one of those automated-gibberish collections of letters and numbers. . . and it wouldn’t accept that one either. Whereupon the noise level around here increased abruptly.
Right. I’m going back to a nice paper book right now.
* * *
* Mostly. Occasionally, at 2 am . . .
** And this rarely does not involve screaming
*** I hadn’t realised that I hadn’t checked in here from my newest littlest cutest knapsackiest computer and I was using it at the mews while the usual mews laptop was at the Computer Spa having mudpacks and saunas, and I signed on and it wouldn’t let me in. Paaaaanic.
† I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll probably say it again. I was so not expecting this when I took this blog schtick on. Community? On line? With a bunch of people you’ve never met? Come on. I am not a character in funny font in a Douglas Coupland novel.
†† Sometimes I can hear fairy laughter echoing through the ether when I post.
††† Do you really think I’m going to list everyone I’ve been to bed with, ages, genders, and success levels? I was laughing for days after that one. –It might be worth noting that obtrusiveness about my private life will mostly make me laugh. Obtrusiveness about my books . . . it’s a rare reader who truly gets alongside the author of a book. This is the source of my answer to the question ‘What single thing would improve the quality of your life most?’ which is ‘That readers would learn the difference between ‘this book didn’t work for me’ and ‘this book sucks dead bears’. ’ This is in the Imaginary Interview on the old web site, and will no doubt reappear on the new one.
‡ I know I’m middle-aged, crumbly, and forgetful, but even I would find it challenging to forget the password I had only just chosen ten seconds ago
Voyeur
It’s a good thing I looked at my diary this morning because tonight was Penelope’s* writing group night. She’d asked me weeks ago if I’d come talk to her group about being a professional writer and I said certainly, wrote it down, fortunately, and then forgot. So I scrambled around this afternoon finding props–Editions through the Ages kind of thing, and sample page proofs, copyedited ms, galleys, etc, much hampered by the fact that most of this is in taped-up, erratically labelled boxes in the attic at Third House. My Editions through the Ages of BEAUTY is not the same without the (French) edition of the naked girl covered in blue feathers or the (American) mass market edition of the simpering little git with the pink horns growing out of her head–most of which I left in the car, but it’s reassuring to know you have a back up plan if no one wants to talk to you.
Turns out they start their evenings with a Writing Exercise. Gods. What an unnatural concept. However, I am always up for a new adventure.** This is what you might call the extrapolated version of what I wrote:
So I’m supposed to be doing a writing EXERCISE. For the first time in forty years or so. I can probably think of other things I’d rather be doing for the first time in forty years.*** I drop out of creative writing groups. The group part is fine† but the creative writing part is . . . unh. I’ve never taken direction well. And I’ve elsewhere compared my writing process to trying to stay on a runaway horse while taking notes on the scenery.
They gave me the Writer’s Block–which I’d given Penelope a year or so ago when she had hit a creative rough patch–which is a tiny square block of a book with an illustration and a bit of text on every two-page spread. Thus we will choose our exercise topic. Open at random and . . . I opened to a man with binoculars and the word ‘voyeur’. So, who is voyeuring whom? I can do the public thing when required, but it’s easier when I don’t know anybody–and can feel relatively secure in not ever meeting any of them in the street tomorrow or next week, since I live several hundred to several thousand miles away††–when the veneer of someone else, someone not me, some public author figure, can be allowed to be complete. So they are voyeuring me, although I’m here voluntarily.
But I’m voyeuring them too, because I’m going to go home and get a blog entry out of it.††† I’m a good girl, however, so the only person I’ll be rude about is me‡. But I had it half thought out before I came: Outside View of Famous Writer (as I was rather unnervingly greeted at the door) Robin McKinley: Needs a haircut. Has eczema on her chin‡‡ and tea stains on her teeth and she should clean her fingernails after she’s been gardening.‡‡‡ And what’s that funny smell?
Oh. Well, the sterilised chickensh*t purveyors were supposed to ring me before they delivered ten bags of variously smelly plant nutritional substances, and they didn’t. I can’t leave the stuff in the driveway–they may be sterilised but golly do they pong–because I prefer to stay on good terms with my neighbours. But as a result I can’t wear my Chapter Seventeen t shirt till it has been divested of its chicken connection, and I put it on for the writing group. Thus reality impinges on literature, as it so often does.
I think it went okay. The everyday ‘I’ tends to hide under the bed while the extrovert personality construct does her schtick. Most of the questions were pretty normal§ but there were a few nonplussers. A few people admitted to having looked me up on the web before this meeting, but the only one of my books I was asked about was BLACK BEAUTY. Yes, I did a hatchet job on Anna Sewall§§ many years ago so it could be beautifully illustrated by Susan Jeffers, and as a picture book intro for the littlest pony clubbers I think it works just fine, and I hope they all grew up to read the original. But it’s been out of print for yonks and it’s not exactly a seminal work. Someone else said he’d been reading my blog and I was so angry about everything. Uh? I am? I certainly do anger and I’m aware I do it rather liberally but as the thing to single out of this blog . . . well, that was a nonplusser.
And one poor woman asked me what was the best book I’d read in the last six months and of course my mind went blank instantly. And then I said, no, I know! Neil Gaiman’s THE GRAVEYARD BOOK and it’s not available till the end of October! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!
* * *
* And to anyone who was there, and is only reading this to see what I’m going to say about all of you^, yes, Penelope. Everyone on this blog but Peter and me has an alias. Which is also why I’m not going to say anything about you. The only person’s privacy I’m allowed to invade is my own. Peter also allows certain incursions.
^ Hint: nothing.
** No I’m not! What am I saying!
*** Reading LORD OF THE RINGS for the first time. Although that’s forty-five years.
† Sometimes. Which is another tale for another day. With the names changed to protect the ugly evil ratbags.
†† I do try not to take advantage of this
††† Yes I did have to read mine out, like everyone else, and at this point everyone laughed
‡ In the original I add: especially if I have to read my writing exercise to the group–then I’ll really be polite
‡‡ Which is worse from having eaten cheese last night, idiot woman, what was she thinking? She was thinking, that’s a very nice piece of Brie that my idiot husband bought for my friend’s visit last weekend and then forgot to make her take away with her and it’s a pity to waste it. What were cheese-eating neighbours invented for? Good grief.
‡‡‡ I spend my life cleaning my fingernails. I think I have little tiny Dirt Magnets embedded on the tips of my fingers.
§ Including one that I’d better start getting used to: Why do you write a blog?
§§ Except for a few connective ‘buts’ and ‘ands’ they’re all her words. There are just a lot fewer of them.
Chalice begins . . .
Because she was Chalice she stood at the front door with the Grand Seneschal, the Overlord’s agent and the Prelate, all of whom were carefully ignoring her. But she was Chalice, and it was from her hand the Master would take the welcome cup.
From the front door of the House, at the top of the magnificent curling sweep of stair, she could see over the heads of the crowd. The rest of the Circle stood stiffly and formally at the foot of the stair with the first Houseman and the head gardener, but nearly the entire citizenry of the demesne seemed to have found an excuse to be somewhere in or near the House or lining the long drive from the gates today.
Their new Master was coming home: the Master thought lost or irrecoverable. The Master who, as younger brother of the previous Master, had been sent off to the priests of Fire, to get rid of him. Third and fourth brothers of Masters were often similarly disposed of, but the solitary brother of an unmarried Master without other Heir should not have been dealt with so summarily. So the Master had been told. But the two brothers hated each other, and the younger one was given to the priests of Fire. That had been seven years ago.
A little over six years later the Master died, still without other Heir. The Grand Seneschal had sent immediately to the priests of Fire to say that there was urgent need of the younger brother of the Master of Willowlands, for the Master had died without having produced a son. Such a request—a plea—had never been made before. Once someone has gone to the Elemental priests, they do not return.
But a demesne must have its Master. And a change of family, of bloodline, in any demesne, upsets all, often for generations, till the new family has settled into its charge. The nearest other living relative of the old Master of Willowlands was a fourth cousin who had already married someone unsuitable and had three children by her. The priests of Fire said they would see what they could do, but they promised nothing. The younger brother of the old Master had just crossed into the third level, and by the third level Elemental priests can no longer live among ordinary humans.
But six weeks ago the Grand Seneschal had received another message from the priests of Fire: that the Master of Willowlands was coming home. It would not be an easy Mastership, and the priests were not sure it was even possible, but the Master himself felt the responsibility to his demesne, and he was determined to try.
Mirasol—straining her eyes toward the gate, partly as a way to ignore the three men who were ignoring her—remembered the younger brother: his strength of purpose, his feeling of obligation to the demesne, his feeling for the demesne. It was what the brothers had quarrelled about. The elder brother had loved the power of the Mastership, not its duties, and he was not the least willing to bear lectures on his behaviour from his younger brother. She wasn’t surprised the younger brother was coming home, even from the third level of the priesthood of Fire.
She had dreamed of the message to the Grand Seneschal the night before it arrived: she had felt the fire and smelt the burning. She knew the Master would come. She knew too that the smell of burning was a warning, but she did not know of what. Might the demesne itself burn, or its new Master?
She could see only a little way down the drive as it curved toward the gates half a league distant. But she could see when people better placed than she for first sight of the arrival stiffened and stared. The three men standing with her drew themselves to attention.
She could hear carriage wheels now.
It will be all right, she told herself. It must be all right. She settled her shoulders with a tiny, invisible shake, and fractionally raised her chin.
Six horses drew the coach: four of them coal-black, clinker-black, two of them ashy grey. The coach itself was also black, but black was always fashionable among the great and grand and would draw no comment. But the curtains at these windows were drawn closed, and they too were black. A light flickered behind them, red and wavering, like firelight.
Again she smelt burning, but she did not know if she imagined it.
The welcoming of a new Master was a time of rejoicing. The ceremony of investiture was the official occasion, and after the rites were done there was an enormous banquet with musicians and dancing for everyone who belonged to the demesne—and for anyone else from any other demesne who wished to join in the festivities at the price of some enthusiastic contribution to toasts and cheers and acclamations. But the informal arrival of a Master should still be a happy moment. And she knew she was not the only person present who felt that the brothers had been born in the wrong order: it was the younger who would have made the better Master from the beginning.
But no one clapped or called. No one smiled. It was as if everyone was holding their breath.
The coach stopped in front of the House, where the gravel had been raked in a perfect circle, a symbol of good luck. Any coach wheels and any horses’ hooves would have broken the circle, splintered the careful spiral; that it should be so broken was a part of the welcome, like opening and pouring out the contents of a bottle of wine. There was no reason for her to feel uneasy, watching the horses dance as they halted, kicking pebbles every way, to feel that something fragile and vital was being destroyed.
The body of the coach rocked on its wheels, and little spurts of gravel pattered out from under them.
Then the door opened.
Perhaps she imagined the cloud of darkness like smoke that billowed out; no one else reacted, and she bit down on her own gulp of astonishment. And of sudden fear. She remembered the younger brother. She had not known him—it was not for such a one as she had been to know the Master’s family—but she had known a good deal of him. She had known more of him than of the Master, before the Master sent him away, because he was the one who rode or walked round the demesne, seeing that the fields and woods grew and throve, and the temples and places of power were serene and well tended. He was not tall and handsome and flashing-eyed like his older brother, but there was kindness and grace in him, and intelligence in his unremarkable brown eyes.
She knew little of the Elemental priests, nothing of their initiations, and only folk-tales of what the priesthoods did and were capable of. She knew that Fire frightened her worst, more than Earth or Air. And the Fire priests themselves had said that Willowlands’ new Master could no longer live among ordinary humans.
As the coach door swung back, one of the House servants jumped forward as if suddenly recalling himself, and lowered the steps. Two figures climbed carefully down. They both wore black capes with hoods that hid their faces, but they carried themselves and moved and looked around as anyone might. As any ordinary human might.
There was a collective letting-out of breath. Talisman, the tallest of the minor Circle, seemed suddenly shorter; Sunbrightener, who was the fattest, seemed fatter.
That was until the third figure climbed down from the coach.
He too wore a black cape with a hood, but the cape bulged and seethed weirdly around him, and he let himself carefully down the steps as if he did not know or could not remember how to use his feet for such an activity. The two figures who had climbed down first reached their hands to help him, holding him at the elbows and under the arms, but she felt, looking on, that their hands did not grasp quite where elbows and armpits should be.
He half limped, half rolled up the steps toward the House’s front door with his helpers still on his either side. She seemed to hear a distant roar, like a fire caught in a sudden updraft. She wanted to glance at the faces of the other people, the people who had come here this morning to catch a first glimpse of their new Master, wanted to see if they looked frightened or appalled. But she couldn’t drag her own gaze away from the great roiling black loom of the third figure coming toward her.
She felt the three men standing beside her struggling not to step back and away as she stepped forward. She had been clutching the welcome cup against her body so tightly that her stomach ached where the extravagantly ornamented brim had bitten into her. The roughness of the intricate overlay on the cup’s bowl gave her suddenly cold stiff fingers better purchase as she moved her hands to their proper places on its stem.
She was Chalice, and hers the first greeting.
The top step was a wide smooth half-moon of white stone before the door. There was plenty of space for her and him and his two aides, as well as the three men behind her, and the doorkeepers back farther yet, flanking the doorposts. She raised her cup, grateful that the weight of it prevented her hands from shaking, and looked down. Three faces turned up toward her, two of them brown and ordinary and worried-looking.
The third face was black, as black as the coal-coloured horses that drew the black coach, and its—his—eyes were red, flickering like fire around the black pupils. She recognised nothing in that face from her memories of the younger brother of the dead Master. She looked at him steadily, willing herself to see something—anything—that she could welcome as Master, and in the final seconds it took him to climb the last step, she saw what she needed to see: comprehension. He knew her for Chalice and knew she was there to welcome him, because he came as Master.
When he stood with her on the top step he gave a little shudder, or ripple, and his two aides dropped their hands and stepped back. As they let go of him she saw that they wore gloves. Her mouth was dry, as dry as if she had been eating ash, and she was slow to say the two important words: “Welcome, Master.”
She was slow, but he was slower. He should reach immediately to take the cup from her, hold it briefly over his head for everyone to see that he accepted it, taste its contents and hand it back to her. It was possible that he would thank her, but it was not necessary.
But he only stood, looking at her. The hood shadowed his shadow-dark face; she thought she was glad of it. He twitched, a tiny spasm, once, twice. Perhaps he was trying to raise his hands. The third time he succeeded, the sleeves of the cape juddering back as if blown by a wind, and she saw that he too wore gloves, long heavy ones, laced snugly to the elbows.
She could not give any Chalice cup to gloved hands. She looked back into his face—into the shadows where his face was. She did not know what to do. She thought she must have imagined the comprehension she had seen there a moment earlier; she could read no expression on that black face now.
Clumsily he raised his left hand and drew the fingers through the laces of the glove on his right. The cords fell away in uneven shards, as if charred. Slowly he peeled the glove away from his arm—and the heat of his flesh raged out at her. The air between them was almost too hot to breathe. Even more clumsily he raised his naked right hand, the fingertips glowing like embers, to touch the cup. She held her ground while the fingers of that fiery hand curled round the bowl of the cup inches from her face. The enamelled metal of the goblet grew uncomfortably warm against her skin and steam rose from the liquid within it.
The weight of the cup did not change and she supported it as he stood with his hand around it. He looked at it and back at her.
“What . . . do you give . . . me to drink?” His voice was as eerie as his appearance, but perfectly intelligible.
Her answer to this question had been in no record she had consulted about the rite of welcome; but then no one had ever welcomed a third-level Elemental priest as Master either. She had held her own against the preferences of the Prelate and the Grand Seneschal only because she was, in the end, Chalice, and they could not order her to give him the earthed wine customary for a welcome cup. But she had not expected to have to announce publicly her departure from tradition: only the Master himself would taste the contents of his welcome cup. She felt as if she were being wayward, unreasonable and oblivious all over again when she had to reply, “Water—plain water from the Ladywell—and a spoonful of honey, Master.”
She was sure—she was almost sure—she did not imagine it that he smiled. And it was only after her answer that she felt him begin to draw the cup toward himself. Still he did not—or could not—bear its weight, and so she carried it for him. Together they made only a faint gesture of holding it above his head, for the audience to see; and then she tipped it gently against his mouth, and saw him drink; and also saw a tiny rivulet run down by the side of his mouth and hiss off his chin, briefly leaving a fire-red tracing thread behind it.
He let her draw the cup back toward her again with his hand still around it. She looked again into his face and saw, though she could not have explained how she saw, that he was tired, tired almost to death; and so she knew that it was only weariness that made him clumsier still, that when he lifted his hand away from the cup, he was not able to do it cleanly, and his hand dropped a little, and glanced—only barely, fleetingly glanced—off the back of her hand, where it seared the thin flesh to the bone.
At the time it almost didn’t matter. She found that she had been half expecting something like it to happen, and did not flinch when it did. She lowered the goblet only a little bit hastily, and tucked the weight of it against her body again so that she could drop her wounded hand to her side and let the long sleeve of her robe cover the burn. This made it throb worse than if she could have held it up, but that couldn’t be helped. No one farther away than the three men behind her awaiting their turn—and possibly the Master’s two aides—would have seen anything, and she wished to keep it that way.
But the three men waiting just behind her would have seen. The Grand Seneschal might have kept his mouth shut for his own good—it was he who had negotiated with the priests of Fire in the first place, and he who had received the news that the priests did not believe what he was asking could be done. She didn’t know the Prelate well enough to guess after his motives, beyond a growing suspicion he had few of his own and preferred to borrow them from some stronger character. But the Overlord’s agent would have every reason to tell the tale—and doubtless had. While it would upset the balance of the entire country if one of the demesnes were realloted, the process of the reallotment would hugely increase this Overlord’s power, and bind the new Master to the Overlord with a political gratitude it would take generations of Masters and Overlords to bring into equilibrium again. And their current Overlord was a little too fond of political power—she among others believed—without such temptations as a Master who might burn his subjects by the touch of his hand.
By the end of the first day of the new Master’s return, the people she met were looking first at her right hand. Gossip travels as fast as fire. By then she had dressed and bandaged it, so there was nothing to see but the bandage; but that was enough. And there was no way to shrug off what had happened as an accident. Of course it had been an accident: no Master could remain Master who deliberately harmed any of his people. What had happened to her should be viewed as no worse or more significant than if one of his coach horses had shied and trodden on one of the onlookers: an unfortunate mishap. That’s all. But of course it was not, for it was not an accident that should have been able to happen. If the new Master were not a priest of Fire. If the new Master were still human.
“It is nothing,” she said to the people she caught looking at her hand. “It is nothing.” Sometimes she tried to smile. She’d smiled at Sama, when she’d asked for lint and salve; Sama was a Housewoman with a round, happy face and three children, and she and her children were excellent customers for Mirasol’s honey. “I was clumsy. It is no more than if I brushed my hand against a dish just out of the oven.”
“It don’t look like nothing,” said Sama, whose round face was not happy today. “And oven burns hurt.”
“Of course they hurt,” Mirasol said briskly, trying to be competent with one hand and failing. “But we bear them because we are clumsy—and because we still like our food cooked.”
Sama’s face closed a little more, but she did reach out to help Mirasol with her bandage.
“It is not as though we had had a chance to practise our roles,” Mirasol said, trying to make a joke, but she realised as soon as the words were out of her mouth they were a mistake. Usually a new Master was well known to the demesne; usually the Chalice’s welcome cup to the Master entering his House as Master for the first time was a formality only.
Usually a new Master was human.
“But—” Sama began.
“He is our Master,” said Mirasol firmly.
There was an uncomfortable pause while Sama finished tying up the bandage. When she was done she raised her eyes to Mirasol’s and said, “As Chalice wills.”
Mirasol almost blurted out, It’s not what I will! It is what has happened!
A few months ago she would have spoken so, spoken before she thought, a few months ago when her Chalicehood was still so new that every reminder of it was like a burn. But she was Chalice now, and all things had changed, herself most of all. Before the Chalice had chosen her, Sama would have argued with her; would have held her own opinion against Mirasol’s. She would not argue with her Chalice; it was her duty to accept the Chalice’s ruling.
Mirasol hoped she was right.
She told herself it would have been worse if it had been an ordinary accident like a coach horse blundering into the audience, because that would so clearly have been a bad omen. The new Master was a priest of Fire, and adjustments had to be made. That’s all. That’s all. She could not help the bandage on her hand, but once she realised there was no point in trying to hide it, she used that hand freely, as if it did not hurt her. She had to hope that the fixed expression on her face that this usage provoked—because it did hurt a great deal—only looked like the Chalice’s professional mask.
But if their new Master believed he could be Master, then she wanted him to have his chance. In the first place this was only her duty: the Master was the Master, but no Master could maintain his land without his Chalice. But in the second place she wanted this Master to grasp and hold because these first six months of her abrupt and lonely Chalicehood had been almost beyond her strength. She did not think she would be able to bear—to contain—the tumult if Willowlands were given a new, outblood Master; and she did not think this or any demesne could survive an outblood Master and a second disastrously new, inexperienced and untrained Chalice together.
CHALICE review
Any readers of this blog who haven’t looked it up for themselves by now, muttering about the total hopelessness of some writers of books that receive starred reviews in Publishers’ Weekly, the (ahem) starred review in PW of CHALICE is here:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6579438.html#Fiction
This should take you to the top of the ‘Fiction’ section of children’s books* where CHALICE is the lead title, but as I mistrustfully try it on more than one computer** I am finding that it seems to open fine on a big screen but tends to open halfway through the review on a small screen, so the title that catches your eye is the one following, SOVAY. (Which looks good too, just by the way, and also got a star. I’ve always loved the song.) So you want to scroll up a little. Unless it’s doing something else entirely on your screen, in which case you’re on your own.
If you want something nice and uncontroversial, this takes you to the top of the ‘Children’s’ section, and you have to scroll down through the little kids’ books to ‘fiction’.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6579438.html
I guess I didn’t make a mess of turning it into a novel after all. Or not in one reviewer’s eyes anyway. One thing that interests me, they choose BEAUTY and HERO to compare it favourably to.*** They must like short: those are my two shortest novels. And this interests me because I thought everybody is supposed to like long† this era. HARRY POTTER AND THE ENDLESS STORY MACHINE. JONATHAN STRANGE, MR NORRELL AND NINETY MILLION PAGES. I am comforted that at least you aren’t automatically penalised for short.†† There is a place for short, like in your knapsack, so it doesn’t make a hole in your sore shoulder.
And thanks to all of you who sent me these links. It is extremely ridiculous that (apparently) neither my agent nor either of my editors knew that you can just look PW reviews up on the web . . . or, as one of the friends who sent me the links by email said, Google is your friend. Um. I thought I even knew that Google was my friend. But in moments of stress I still revert. Very, very slightly in my defense, PW didn’t always hang its reviews on the web.†††. And I merely haven’t checked in . . . um . . . years. Oops. But I guess a lot of other professional publishing people haven’t either.
Furthermore . . . I did sleep last night, despite some really remarkable nettle burns. And the hellhounds ate their dinner tonight . . . not only ate it but ate it without needing to be driven out of their bed and then chased around with it first. And I rang Grandsire, if not exactly to the tower born, still, I rang the sucker as opposed to pulling frantically on my rope and waiting to be yelled at instructively. Last week I found myself on the five for Grandsire, and I’m used to ringing the three or the four or maybe the two. Not the five. But if you really know a method you can ring it on any bell. So I don’t really know Grandsire, so what else is new. It was still pretty discouraging that I could not seem to see what I was doing. This week when Wild Robert called for Grandsire again I made a dash for the five, and this week the five and I were friends.‡ I was even one of the people holding the line while others went astray, which is always great for morale. Next week–or this Friday at my home tower–it’ll be open season again with me and Grandsire however. Some day I’ll just ring it. It’ll be one of the methods that when I go to a strange tower and the ringing master asks me what I ring, I can say nonchalantly, oh, plain bob, Stedman, Grandsire. Hold that thought.
* * *
* Sigh. It’s not a children’s book. Never mind.
** And Computer Man was here for several hours today and all my computers are having competitive nervous breakdowns as a result. There’s a lot of admonishing ding!-ing going on while they querulously insist that they don’ wanna do what he has instructed them to do. I may be on the phone to Computer Man Central really early tomorrow.
*** A brief pause here while I do a little head-clutching about being shackled to early successes for the rest of one’s life. What your or anyone’s favourite book is is strictly up to you and that’s absolutely fine. Different things appeal to different people and different things appeal to different people at different times. Telling an author that thus and such is their best book, however, is a value judgement, and problematic. Telling an author that her first book is her best book is . . . at best unkind. Getting old is sucky enough.^ Being told repeatedly that it’s all been downhill since you were 25 is grisly. I don’t think BEAUTY is my best book, fortunately, but I wasted a lot of time over a lot of years worrying that it might be.
^ Mind you I wouldn’t be young again even if the devil showed up with a great offer plus a letter of recommendation from Faust. Getting old is sucky, but it beats being young. The thing about young, however, is that you have more time left to figure stuff out, and you still believe you’re going to figure it out faster than, forty years later, you have.
† I was once fretting over some novel looking like it was going to turn out short.^ Merrilee said, short is good. Same money, less work. Very good point. Unfortunately PEGASUS looks like running long.
^I think this was DRAGONHAVEN, which, as many of you know, did not end up short.
†† Hey! This is just a dumb short story! Where’s my other eight hundred pages! I want my money back!
††† Since there was a web, I mean.
‡ In a doubles method like Grandsire, with five working bells and the sixth bell always ringing last, the five should be a good bell to ring, because every bell you have to worry about is to your right and you don’t have to keep looking frantically back and forth. When you’re on the four, say, you tend to forget about the five, which is dangerous, since you’re going to be ringing over it just as often as over the others, and on the three you could get dizzy whipping your eyes back and forth.
Proofs
I finished reading the new page proofs of SUNSHINE in one great almost-hundred-page wallop today. I am brain dead.* It’s a good thing Part Four moves as fast as it does and drags–and dragged–me along or the book would never have got written. Even now, even this umpty-umpth read-through, I get to the end of Part Three, with Sunshine sitting on her balcony watching the sun set and waiting for Con to turn up so they can seek out Bo for their final confrontation, and . . . I want to stop and go do something else. Even preventing myself from getting up and finding some dishes to wash or some dog crate to divest of its accumulation of crumbs**, I find myself reaching for the nail file*** or positively needing another cup of tea.
All my books have no-no-I-don’t-want-to-go-there scenes† in them, some worse than others. DEERSKIN is the worst. SUNSHINE is probably second. I have said many times that I wrote SUNSHINE for wimps like me, wimps who love Dracula†† but can’t stick horror. Who love the sex/blood, the monster/lover, power/death thing but like it, you know, a little restrained. Seven years ago when I was writing it–even five years ago when it came out–the New Vampire hadn’t really been invented yet, and it was still mostly about mayhem.††† When the first edition of SUNSHINE was racked in horror I got all twittery and frantic, because its audience wasn’t going to find it there.
Five years later there’s been such a burst of softcore–of the stuff I wanted to read in the first place–SUNSHINE looks almost hard. O tempora, o mores, I guess. Whatever, the last battle with Bo is a rough one and I’m right there with Sunshine peering into the bottomless pit and wondering if her hands are going to go rogue, as she’s spent most of the book wondering if all of her is. It’s funny, I write these love-loyalty-friendship-and-honour books but my underlying world view is still pretty bleak.‡ Maybe we will all be under the dark in a hundred years. And then again maybe we won’t, because if there are Bos out there, there are Sunshines too. And Cons.
And Mels. If I ever manage to write a sequel, one of reasons why will be to do something with Mel, who is about the most criminally underutilised character I’ve ever been responsible for. I couldn’t help it–it’s the way the story went–but I can not like it. And I do. I don’t like it a lot. I also want to find out more about what the Blaises are up to. I know they’re up to something. Trust me, I’m even more aware of all the loose ends than you are: but I can still only write what I’m given to write, and what I know about SUNSHINE II, while there’s quite a lot of it, remains obstinately fragmentary.
* * *
* I am also a moron, which is not the same thing, although some of the effects may be similar. I’ve been so hysterical about having two sets of proofs to read in the same fortnight–although after I screamed and started trying to climb out of my office window (which is one of those that opens sideways on a sliding bar and is therefore hell to get through) which might be a more graphic symbol of despair if the well, which is excellently placed beneath it, didn’t have an enormous grill across it covered in potted camellias, they gave me an extension–that when I reached the end of DRAGONHAVEN I merely set it down and picked up SUNSHINE. Which is to say I did not send my corrections in. And now what with inappropriately long hacks on a lovely grey mare of my acquaintance and Sunday service ring followed by an unusually long hellhound walk^ I didn’t get round to checking my emails till tonight. And there’s a bright, friendly little note from my editor from last Friday, saying, you have an extension on SUNSHINE but we really need anything for DRAGONHAVEN. The gods wept. The gods finished weeping and all rounded on my fairy godmother who^^ put up her hands and squeaked, Yes, she’s a moron, I know! But she writes books that people take to bed with them and drop in the bath and read on glaciers in the fog! Give her a break! –So I haven’t been struck by lightning after all. And tomorrow morning I get to spend writing up notes for DRAGONHAVEN.^^^
And, to all of you who have over the last year written to point out helpfully that bats are missing from DRAGON’s, or Jake’s, list of genuine wing-flapping flyers, they will be reinstated in the paperback, and the great mystery is how they fell out of the final manuscript and no one caught this. I’m crossest at myself, of course, but this is the sort of thing that someone should have noticed, some nice professional eye who hadn’t seen it all fourteen hundred and twelve times before and couldn’t focus any more on what’s there and what isn’t. DRAGONHAVEN more than usual for me had stuff put in and stuff taken out and stuff put in and stuff taken out, and bats are only one of the things I lost track of. I still read the page proofs this time–and how many times have I seen the book in its final form?–wondering where this or that scene or paragraph or joke had gone.
And I probably do know what happened to the bats: at one point there was a whole little riff about weird wildlife, including bats, and including that Australia did the best weird wildlife on the planet, and that really duck-billed platypuses should also fly: sort of the James Bond car of the animal world.+ And when I was going through for the fourteen hundred and eleventh time I decided this was a digression we could do without. But how all bats (except one or two references to them living in Smokehill caves) disappeared from all digressions about the life of dragons, I don’t know, and it’s impossible to do anything now but thrust in a ‘and bats’ somewhere. Novel writing is not an exact science. You may have noticed.
^ Of which more anon. Tomorrow, maybe.
^^ Word wants my fairy godmother to be a that, not a who! Stale doughnuts and bad coffee to all Microsoft grammarians!
^^^ Humming a little tune here and looking innocently at the sky. Well, New York is five hours later than we are, and I’m going to go watch Jenny ride the New Project and Connie again tomorrow morning.
+ I had a brief . . . and I do mean brief . . . glance at a couple of earlier drafts, thinking that if I could find that outtake I’d post it. Obviously I didn’t find it.
** One explanation for the unfaltering ribbiness of hellhounds is that not only don’t they eat, anything they take back to their bed with them and appear to eat, they merely render into crumbs and leave all over the floor of the crate.
*** You would think, the amount of time I spend trying to escape my authorial destiny, that I would always have short clean tidily filed fingernails. You would be wrong. It is one of the mysteries of life why my fingernails are always dirty, even if I haven’t done anything but sit at my desk. It’s also a natural law that in the hour before your piano lesson your fingernails will grow a quarter inch.
† Peter says he’s written scenes he’d never be able to read in someone else’s book.
†† And BUFFY
††† Except Angel, and when he got his own series I stopped watching because he was too much about mayhem.
‡ OUTLAWS is still my bleakest book in terms of world view–despite everything Sunshine says about her world. And the final face off with Guy of Gisbourne is right up there with the confrontation with Bo.