Gods and slang
Another day when by the time I am facing The Horror That Is The Blog again* I have no brain with which to harry and feint. I haven’t even done anything today.** Except SHADOWS of course.***
PamAdams
No, no! That’s not it at all! I’ve been meaning to respond to this . . . since last autumn when someone at Forbidden Planet asked me something similar, and I’m glad of a forum comment to prod me. But this is a good example of how dangerously different the writer’s eye view may be from the reader’s. I had two purposes in having people swear by odin and thor and kali and carthage and by gods instead of God and so on in SUNSHINE—first because I did want to spread the net a little wider: this is a world where there are more active religions jostling for place in an alternate America than there are in the world we live in. But I didn’t leave Christianity out deliberately—I didn’t mean to leave it out at all. But I didn’t realise the extent to which I’d, um, obscured its presence. Because the subsidiary reason for the other gods is that ‘thor’ and ‘kali’ aren’t swear words—in this world. It should have been ‘thor’ and ‘kali’ and ‘christ’ but ‘christ’, in this world, is rude. And, believe it or not—says the woman who used the c-word in SUNSHINE and no one is ever going to let her forget it†—I prefer only to cause fury and outrage either when I mean to or when I haven’t got a choice. Thor and odin and kali look like swear words and perform the function of swear words without causing the swear-word reaction in this-world readers.
This is also on my mind because while the slang differs in detail, the exact same thing is happening in SHADOWS. They swear by gods and hells just as Sunshine does. (But not by thor or kali.) If I ever did write that sequel to SUNSHINE I’d put jesus and christ back in—yes, no init cap, because none of the other gods are—and brace myself.†† I used the c-word last time. How much worse could it be?†††
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* Another really excellent reason for 36-hour days is that the frequency with which the blog presents itself to me to be written^ would be cut back by 50%.^^
^ With a demeanour rather awfully like a hellhound feeling that a hurtle is overdue.
^^ At least I think that’s what I mean. The fact that I read Prof Stewart’s mathematical prodigies in the bath, and laugh, doesn’t mean I can do any of the stuff.
** Well I did take redelivery of the Laptop Monster. Remember the new laptop I bought . . . something like two months ago? And that Raphael and Gabriel have been hosting hot and cold running engineers for about the last six weeks because Large Nameless Stupid Computer Company is too anal retentive simply to give me a new one and get it over with? I remember ranting about this here not long ago.
So it came home (again) today. It’s still shiny and silver and large and weighs too much. It also, allegedly, no longer discharges its battery by 50% overnight. So, should I join Lovefilm for my 3-month free trial^ and test the freller out? I asked the angels to strip some of the stuff off this old laptop so it’s not straining at the limits of its hard drive any more—can’t say I’ve noticed any improvement in speed however—since I am, on mature^^ reflection, just not going to change ungleblarging operating systems mid-final-draft. Life is harrowing enough. But that still leaves me with a large shiny silver object to do something with.
^ I’ve got some kind of extreme voucher here somewhere.
^^ Gabriel was wearing a kidney belt and—bending himself over the back of a chair because sitting down was Not Good for his sciatica—said well, you know, when forty is rushing up on you. Tell me about it, I said, I turn sixty in November. Both of them successfully managed to look surprised, but then Raphael blew it by saying ‘I wouldn’t put you a day over forty-one.’. Snork. Have I mentioned that our service contract is due for renewal?
*** I also ordered a ‘like new’ copy of Japanese Cooking, A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji as recommended by Jacky on the forum. I went and looked it up on amazon and it gets like twelve stars from everyone. Only it’s not available. Well, frell this for a lark. So I hit the ‘abebooks’ button and found a nice clean cheap copy on the east coast of America since there don’t seem to be any on this side of the pond. Feh. This is the second time I’ve done the abebooks button-pressing thing in three days. I am bad.^
The first time was about looking at kanji. I’ve been reading this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Japanese-Today-Practical-Languge/dp/4805309814/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329871721&sr=8-1
which makes those diabolical little squiggly things—and kanji are the seriously squiggly, borrowed from Chinese ones, as opposed to the comparatively straightforward katakana and hiragana syllabaries^^—actually look friendly and comprehensible. No mean frelling feat. And before anyone climbs all over me again about Going Too Far, kanji are one of the stronger memory-flicks from my five years as a child in Japan. Kanji tell stories. The problem with Read Japanese Today is there’s no INDEX and also no stroke order—one of the fifty-year-old books I’ve hung onto about the Japanese language is an extremely intimidating list of the 2000 or so basic kanji you need to know if you’re going to read Japanese, and while it scares the living daylights out of me, I find that to decipher the squiggles I seem to need to know how you build the suckers, line by line. And the First Two Thousand has changed in the last fifty years. So I’m reading my Japanese Today and trying to find the squiggles in my old book and going wait, that’s not the same.
Also, I want fewer than 2000 to grapple with, even in my slithery dilettante way. So I looked up kanji again on amazon, and the book that includes how to write the first few hundred kanji that got twelve stars was not available. (Which is probably why I didn’t order it in the first place.) So I hit abebooks and . . .
^ I also have trouble remembering that books cost money. I mean, I do know they cost money, I just feel that book money shouldn’t count when you’re figuring out how not to run out of money before you finish something that someone will pay you for.
^^ Clearly one of the additional purposes of kanji is to make you think you can learn katakana and hiragana at least.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_katakana.htm
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/japanese_hiragana.htm
† And the reason why, as I’ve said as many times as it has come up, is because there are no casual slang words for female genitalia. There is no ‘dick’ equivalent. Dick isn’t a word you use with your gran, I know, but it doesn’t make averagely crass people come out in hives the way the c-word does. In Sunshine’s world, that word is the dick equivalent.
†† Which is to say there will probably be ‘jesus’ and ‘christ’ in ALBION. I won’t know till I get there.
††† Don’t answer that.
If I say it’s been a pretty good day, will something awful happen?
WOLFGANG IS HOME AGAIN.
AND I’VE HAD A BRILLIANT DAY WITH SHADOWS.*
I’ve also been pursuing this learning Japanese thing. Oh dear. Enthusiasm is dangerous. This particular manifestation of my lifelong tendency for rushing in all directions simultaneously started several weeks ago. Takahiro was already in the second draft of SHADOWS—he has been there from the beginning—so it’s not like he was a surprise. And I’ve still got a few of my very (very very) old books about Japan and the Japanese language and culture, and I’d had a somewhat nervous cursory look at these. I do research to throw it away, you know? It’s just that I like to have some idea what I’m throwing away. There will be about six words of Japanese in SHADOWS. But it needs to feel like there could be more—rather like the bees in CHALICE. I crammed like mad on real, this-world bees and bee-keeping. There’s precious little of it left or visible in CHALICE, but I know it’s there. **
So I had been looking at my fifty-year-old Japanese grammar and wondering how much the language had changed.*** When, lo, with a whap up longside the head like fate dropping in for tea, CLANG, frelling www.audible.co.uk sent me a come-on for discounted language-learning downloads. And, further lo, and further whap, Japanese was one of the options. Which is how I started listening to beginner-Japanese lessons.
Fast-forward to a few days ago when I confessed to my latest madness, and several kind people sent me links and recommendations. OH DEAR. I seem to have bought both a grammar and a dictionary for the Kindle ap on Astarte† and a grammar and dictionary from the frelling Apple ap store.††
So I should go study something. Gakusei da. Ha. †††
* * *
* Well, I hope I have. I think I have. Maybe I have. Um..
I almost never reread immediately; when I’ve just written—or rewritten—something I’m still in trees-not-forest mode and chances are if I did reread it I wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s doing its job or not. And furthermore I would know that I can’t tell, and then I’d start to worry and I’d waste time pushing commas and ‘and’s around. So I have to Live with Doubt till the next day at least—and probably longer. Today I stopped in the middle of a scene—I was hoping to reach the end of it before my brain went STOPPING NOW, but then I did reach the end of the previous scene and went a little farther. Tomorrow I will not reread except the last paragraph to make sure I know where I am, and then I will keep going. I know. It seems at least as likely that it would be a better idea to read at least the entire scene that I’m starting in the middle of before I set off again, in order to match momentum/energy with what has gone before. But I find in practise that rereading always throws me sideways and undoes impetus^—and I write at all by motion, by the vigorous flow of the story. I can fix bad connections later. While I’m still writing drafts, even if it’s the last draft, forest—flow—is more important than trees. I don’t always even reread entire scenes mid-draft—if I think I can keep going, I probably will. If I have to go back and stick something in or take something out I’ll do it with as narrow a focus as possible: six trees, not a quarter of the forest.
^ Unhurtles hurtling.
** I was talking to Alastair about this as we were walking out to Warm Upford.^ I know there are writers who write wonderful fabulous deeply felt and exquisitely expressed books, and who do nothing but write wonderful fabulous etc and stuff like read other people’s books and watch films and TV and cruise the internet and basically never get out and it works fine for them. Now granted I wish I had more time to read other people’s books or watch films and TV at all, and that most people probably wouldn’t count bell ringing as something to get out for, but I totally don’t know how you stand all those hours in front of a flat media screen of one sort or another (paper counts here) without having a garden or hellhounds or a piano or a ’64 Mustang in the garage that you’re rebuilding, or something.^^
^ He thinks I walk too fast. BIG HMMMPH. He’s six foot four.+
+ He’s also the skinniest 6’4” you have ever seen and eats like a starving man. ARRRRRRRGH. Okay, how skinny is he? He can fit into my jeans. Have I told you this story before? I’m sorry, I have to tell it again. Many years ago, he and his wife were the prince and the principal boy in their local Christmas pantomime. She wore my thigh-high purple suede boots with the smooth-leather purple turndowns#. He wore my old Harley Davidson black leather jeans. It’s true he had a little trouble kneeling, but that’s leather for you. The zipper went up fine. The legs were a little short, but he wore (ordinary) boots. I believe the pantomime was a great success.
#You need the turndowns to hide the elastic bands you’re wearing to keep the frellers up.
^^ Or possibly a frivolous stab at learning another language that requires a whole frelling new alphabet+ which certainly changes the parameters of your flat media screen.
+ Japanese has three alphabets, except they’re not alphabets, they’re syllabaries.
*** Think of a fifty-year-old English grammar. –Quite a lot, in practise. Konpyuta^ wa doko da?
^ Say this out loud. And then there’s konpyuta-gemu.+
OKAY WORDPRESS YOU RATBAG. GIVE ME MY LONG VOWELS BACK. U, A AND E IN THE ABOVE SHOULD HAVE LITTLE LINES–MACRONS–ABOVE THEM. ONLY WORDPRESS WON’T LET ME.
+ Hint: ‘e’ in Japanese is pronounced rather like a long ‘a’ in English.#
# I’m fond of Fingerzilla and Montezuma myself.
† Also the complete works of H P Lovecraft and the Collected Ghost Stories of M R James. That’s the hell of Kindle.^ Old stuff is so CHEAP. And there’s nothing cosier and more luxurious than reaching for your slender, takes-up-very-little-space-on-the-bed ereader in the middle of the night/morning when sleep has decamped to Pago Pago and being able to scare yourself silly so you really won’t get any sleep now.
^ Note that because I have an iPad I can suffer all the more extensively with a Kindle ap as well as the entire stock of the frelling Apple ap store.
†† The grammar told you to download when you had plenty of time so I got out my knitting.^ And I was in the middle of a row when it finished, so I finished my row, and then I made myself another cup of tea, and then I sang two choruses of Leonard Cohen’s HALLELUJAH, and then, assuming it had had enough time to settle down and put its toothbrush in the mug and its socks in the bureau drawer . . . I opened my new grammar. AND ASTARTE PROMPTLY CRASHED AND FROZE. THE BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH WITH THE APPLE LOGO.^^ I’M SO HAPPY.
This time, fortunately, the holding-two-buttons down simultaneously^^^ trick worked. It was, of course, after computer angel hours, although Raphael has a silly habit of checking texts on his business account at home in the evenings. And the grammar has opened obediently several times since then. Lambasting me with jolly descriptions of the next 1,000,000,000,000,000 hours of dedicated studying, but hey, there’s an off button.
^ I HAD TO RIP OUT EIGHT ROWS TWO NIGHTS AGO. AAAAAAAUGH. But I seem to have got all the little loopy horrors back on the needles again and have caught up and I think it’s okay. Frogging is like falling off your horse, right? You’re not a real rider/knitter unless you’ve eaten dirt and had to rip stuff out? Right? Right?
^^ Why the Apple logo, you know? This seems to me to be teaching the dog to bite the lab technician when it hears the bell.
^^^ With possibly extraneous shouting
††† Or possibly hai.
In which Robin Gets It Wrong (or Has It Gotten Wrong) in a Variety of Ways
I had a conversation with Hannah today. After we discussed the health and well-being of husbands, (human) teenagers and hellhounds, and what we are going to do for each other’s sixtieth birthdays (I’m first, but I’m not going to tell you by how much), she said, So, what was your deal last night? Why are you so negative about this? You even like del Toro’s work. I remember you raving about HELLBOY.* I thought you were flattered when Merrilee told you he was behind Warner’s offer for BEAUTY.
Negative? I said. I didn’t mean to be negative. It’s just I was getting this stream of daft emails from people saying they were so excited that BEAUTY was going to be a movie at last.
Hmm, said Hannah. Well, all those capital letters come across as negative.
I was trying to make a point, I said. That’s all. I was surprised so many people were reading the news items and still thinking it meant they were making BEAUTY into a movie. They’re making BEAUTY into their own thing and then making the movie out of that. Um. Merrilee hasn’t said anything about what I wrote last night.
Merrilee is probably lying down in a darkened room with a damp towel over her forehead, said Hannah. You keep forgetting that while you live your life all in capital letters, most of the rest of the world does not.
I’m sorry, I said.
Don’t tell me, said Hannah. Tell the blog.
* * *
I’m sorry.
* * *
And then I wanted to say thanks to forum members and a few emailers who’ve made suggestions about where I might go for some beginner colloquial Japanese. I haven’t had time to do any tracking-down today but I will.** THANK YOU.
It is possibly worth mentioning however that by the time I’ve asked blog readers if they have any input I’ve already looked into whatever it is I’m asking about enough to know I’m interested—and possibly to have some very vague idea what I’m getting myself into.*** Also remember that I lived in Japan for five years and even as an American military brat you can’t help but pick up some sense of the real life of the country you’re living in—even at nine years old the very very different takes on what constituted politeness, for example, were pretty astonishing. And I’ve retained an interest in Japan and Japanese culture although I haven’t done much about it except hang out in the Far Eastern wings of museums a lot. But last year, rather than getting all my news from English newspapers and English radio, I was listening to local reports on the tsunami and the Fukushima meltdown on the net—reading subtitles but listening to Japanese newsreaders reading—and I was surprised and even shaken by how familiar the sounds and rhythms of the language are even if I remember about three actual words of it. So while I wasn’t planning on a Takahiro in SHADOWS it’s maybe not shocking that he’s appeared. And while I’m only planning on using about six words of Japanese in SHADOWS . . . well, I’d like to enjoy the process of putting them there, you know?
* * *
So at 3:55 this afternoon I rang the garage, having carefully given hellhounds and myself a slightly curtailed morning hurtle in the hope that we would be yomping out to Warm Upford this afternoon to fetch the sound and healthy Wolfgang home for another year of bouncing over potholes and snagging shrubbery and doing sixty-seven-point turns in jigsaw courtyards. I got some random woman on the phone—I know all the regulars but I didn’t recognise her—who put me on hold to check Wolfgang’s status. She picked up the phone again and said, It failed. You can ring again tomorrow afternoon.
WHAT? I said, visions of the engine dropping out in someone’s hands or the glebbershiggleblatz exploding or something. £££££££££££££££££ = new car which I can’t afford. WHAT?
Er—what’s wrong with it? I said meekly.
Would you like to speak to the mechanic? said the random woman.
OH NO, OF COURSE NOT, I’LL JUST GO AWAY QUIETLY AND TERRIFY MYSELF WITH LURID IMAGININGS TILL YOU ALLOW ME TO RING BACK IN 24 HOURS, THANK YOU. VERY MUCH. OF COURSE I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK TO THE RFFFLLZZZZGGMGGGGNG MECHANIC, YOU . . . RANDOM WOMAN.†
Yes please, I said meekly.
So Blaze came on and said . . . that I needed a new windscreen wiper and the plastic housing of the right rear taillight was cracked and had to be replaced because it had sharp edges and they had some trouble finding a new one because they don’t make new taillights for these cars any more†† but it should be in tomorrow and I should be able to pick the car up tomorrow afternoon.
YAAAAAAY WOLFGANG. Not so yaaay McKinley, of course, for whatever piece of hedgerow took the taillight out. But . . . yaaaaay.
Although I want the random woman’s head on a plate. ††† So, well, I didn’t go to Forza bell practise, because I didn’t have a car, but I also didn’t go because Peter and I had done another of our now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t fumbles with the diary and it turned out we had not one but two of Peter’s offspring here tonight. Whom Peter, bless him, firmly took off to a local pub for dinner‡, and left me to work. I was all set to fly through what I thought was a relatively straightforward scene and get a little ahead again and GAAAAAAAAAAAAH—WHAM as I ran into an unexpected discontinuity. That is, I knew about the discontinuity, but I didn’t expect it there. ARRRRRGH. Person Who Did Not Get A Little Ahead Tonight.
However I have now finished off last night’s bottle of champagne with a little help from Alastair (who was designated driver and therefore couldn’t drink at the pub), whom I am furthermore going to take on a hurtle tomorrow morning which means I’d better go home and go to bed so I can get up again before the morning is over. . . .
* * *
* Hannah is not a big comic-book-superhero person. I don’t think she’s seen any of the X-MEN films. She nearly gave herself a hernia laughing when I tried to tell her how great BLADE and BLADE II are.
** Of course I may also have one or two books. Plus the CDs. And downloads. Or three or four. Maybe of each.
*** Dilettante? Me? —Okay, it’s true, innovative learning JapanesePod101.com has bumped chaos, quantum physics and Why Does E=MC2^ and Why Should We Care. But they’ll be back. And I’m still reading maths in the bath.
^ Okay, how do you get superscript numbers out of Word? They’re not in my ‘insert symbol’ table.
† Hmm. I’m having another capital letters moment.
†† Seventeen years old and PROUD. Oh that German technology. For which they clearly should keep making new parts.
††† Uh oh, I’m being CRANKY again.
‡ I’m not sure whether the mixed report on the food was meant to cheer me up about missing it and the food was divine and they just didn’t want to tell me.
Weather. Etc.
OH HOW I HATE THIS WEATHER. I keep trying to remind myself that it’s only the middle 20s*—mild November weather when I lived in Maine—also quite common in February, as I think about it, as we rolled finally toward March and the great STINK of the spring melt. But . . . the 20s in Maine in the winter is nice weather. You aren’t allowed to get cranky till it hits the teens. And there will be a stretch when it gets down to zero. Fahrenheit. Eww.
I loved Maine. I’m glad I don’t live there any more.
I hate this weather. We did not, after all, get more than a scant half inch of snow last night—just enough to make the long twisty drive to the main road from the far end of the mews terrace interesting, which then prompted me to square up before turning up my cul de sac at the other end, since chances were I wasn’t going to be able to straighten out afterward. We did kind of sail up the slope like a yacht or a dowager, but we arrived at the top which is all that matters.** And I haven’t fallen on any hellhounds today. Nor am I wearing yaktrax. So clearly it’s not that bad.
And it isn’t. Except that I’m not used to it any more. And it’s going on and on. Like, you know, weather, instead of the odd freak day. I was thinking about this today. As my old Maine gear has worn out I’ve been replacing it with, you know, local garb. Which is to say that my new winter jacket or raincoat isn’t baggy enough to get two heavy sweaters and a goosedown vest under. And picking up after the hellhounds is so much easier in fingerless gloves that I am reluctant to be driven back into proper full-length gloves.*** If the cold only lasts a day or two, eh, you get a little chilly and wait for it to go away. I got rid of my furry hat with the ear flaps years ago†. And I can’t frelling find my heated gloves—the ones with the little square battery strapped to the back of each hand, which I used for driving the MGB in cold weather. I have reminded myself that if I’m going to wear All Stars instead of hiking boots, to use the wool-lined leather insoles, and that the scarf I wrap around my ears has not only to be wool†† but it has to be large enough to protect my chin and throat as well. Winter. It’s a skill. Ugh.
Catlady
“…suddenly it was snowing. Only in the parking lot. Not on the road. Not in the next parking lot over. Just this one.”
EMoon
Precisely delivered snow sounds like some of our rain in Texas. I’ve been in hard rain, walked a few yards and been in the dry. Rains one side of a street and not the other. Rains in the neighbor’s yard and not in ours (the reverse never happens.) . . .
CathyR [who lives in the UK]
How bizarre … !
But this is exactly my experience of English weather. I used to think it was hilarious the way people in British films would stand under a tree when it rained. So it’ll take another two minutes before you get wet? And your point would be? —Your point would be that it may very well stop raining within two minutes. I am now totally someone who looks for a tree to stand under when it rains—from which vantage I stare at the cloud(s) and try and decide which way it’s going and which way we††† might want to sprint to escape its dominion. And at the old house it was regularly raining in the front/back garden when it was not raining on the other side of the house in the front/back garden. Regularly. Rainbows are so common around here that unless it’s a really good one I don’t even bother to stop—although I will look around to see where the local one is at the moment.
KatydidNL
…the history teacher who turns into a manticore and eats the students that piss her off?
Oh glory. Please say this is really in the book.
I so want to read this.
Oh. Um. Well, maybe we could have an outtake—? I admit I found the prospect rather appealing myself . . .
Mrs Redboots
is it a good thing to be able to write a persuasive modern, if alternative-world, seventeen-year-old—who goes to high school and lives with her parent(s)—when you’re sixty?^
But you aren’t 60 yet! Like me, you’re not sixty until NEXT YEAR, and that is still a VERY LONG WAY AWAY. Isn’t it? Yes it is…. it has to be! (I still have one more birthday to go, but alas, I can’t deny that I will be 60 next year. This is not good. . . . )
Er. No. Wrong. You may have a whole additional year left in which to gather ye rosebuds. I am sixty this year. I’m already 59. I’ll be SIXTY next November. SIXTY.§ But I was climbing out of Maggie’s skin again tonight and reacquainting myself with the embarrassments of increasing age and . . . I know I keep saying this, and there are probably those of you out there muttering ‘the [old] lady doth protest too much’ but . . . it sure beats being young.§§
* * *
* Fahrenheit. So about minus 4 C.
** We arrived and got into our parking space, which is all that matters.
*** And I had forgotten that a pair of (even lined) leather gloves that fit are nimble enough to deal with hellhound effluvia and plastic bags under most conditions. Yaaay. I may not have terminal chilblains^ by the end of the week.
^ Note that before I moved to England I thought chilblains were a myth out of Dickens and Victorian gothic. Then I started getting them.+
+ http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chilblains/Pages/Introduction.aspx Yes. I have terrible circulation. And yes, Maine cold is much drier than southern England cold.
† I got rid of my goosedown vest too, but then I bought a new one. On sale. Because no one wants them in southern England.
†† Which provides an additional reason to hurtle briskly because I need to get home before I come out in hives. If wool-weather goes on too many days I insinuate a fleece hood between the scarf and me. But that’s another of these taking it seriously things, which I keep resisting.
††† If I’m out in the rain near a tree, I have hellhounds with me.
Mrs Redboots
And male dogs do pee every yard or so, not to relieve their bladders but for scent-marking purposes. A great nuisance….
Tell me about it.^ All dogs mark to a greater or lesser extent, in my experience, but my experience has been mostly neutered girls, and the last entire male^^ I had much to do with lived on a farm, and long, mostly on-lead walks were not necessary. The thing that I find both very funny and VERY FRUSTRATING, ESPECIALLY WHEN WE’RE TRYING TO GO TO BED, is how long it takes them—Darkness in particular—to empty his bladder. He stands there with a vague, far-off look on his face, going squirt. Squirt. Squirt. Squirt. Squirt. I actually thought there might be something wrong, but the vet said blandly, oh no, some of them are just like this.
^ Ooh! Grass! Ooh! Tree! Ooh! Dustbin! Ooh! Wall! Ooh! Another tree! Ooh! More grass! Ooh! Rock! Ooh! Corner of something! Ooh! Bollard! Ooh! Corner of something else! Ooh! Fence! Ooh! Particular bit of hedgerow! Ooh! Another particular bit of hedgerow! Ooh! Signpost! Ooh! Gate! Ooh! Stile! Ooh! Bank of stream! Ooh! Hillside! Ooh! Shrubbery! Ooh! Large ancient rusty piece of something that has been sitting there for years and is a message board for miles of local dogs!
^^ DOG
§ But they’ve been playing silly buggers with the concept of pensionable age, and I’m not eligible for my free bus pass till I’m 62 years, seven months and twenty days old. Feh.
§§ After all, you might end up in that class where if you piss the teacher off she might morph into a manticore and eat you.
Late
It is unduly late.* Well, I slept nearly ten hours last night. That Grandsire Triples will really take it out of you.** And so everything has been late today, including slamming on with SHADOWS till about six minutes ago.*** ARRRRRGH.†
And there were handbells. Hellhounds and I had only barely got down to the mews when we had to slap ourselves back into our coats again†† and crunch back to the cottage.††† We’re still beating bob major to death but . . . we’re beating it to death more briskly. Gemma missed ringing at the abbey last night but she was full of back-patting encouragement and positive remarks today‡ as I went blither-blither-blither rounds-on-ninety-three‡‡ leopards-in-the-shadows.
CathyR
Oh gosh, I know that feeling exactly (Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, huge industrial ringing chamber, 12 bells, heavy – and having to stand on a doughnut-like 3ft raised platform to ring!!!). Total nervous breakdown, looking into the abyss.
I would not have done it. I would have taken one look into the abyss, and turned around and fled. I think I’ve told you about ringing at Chichester Cathedral? It has a separate tower . . . which is the size of Arundel Castle ‡‡‡ I swear. The ringing chamber is nearly the size of Forza’s and it’s long draft§ and . . . the whole experience still makes me wake up in a cold sweat swearing that I’m going to forget bells and take up knitting.§§
. . . It’s the heaviest and highest peal of bells hung for change ringing in the world. . . .
Mind you, it’s skill not brute strength (although it does usually take two people to ring the tenor up). I’ve seen a fairly slight teenage girl ring that tenor.
I watched them ringing up the tenor at the abbey last night—they started off with three. Once they got it going the third person dropped out (panting). They do have one madman who likes to ring it up by himself when he’s there and in the mood, but I don’t think I’ve met him yet.§§§ And yes . . . these little wisps of people who ring colossal bells are a little daunting to those of us . . . who would be happy to be able to ring a touch of Grandsire Triples on ordinary bells reliably.
We’ve probably a second visit there in a couple of months. Hopefully I’ll do better. I’ll think of Robin to give me strength!
THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO THINK ABOUT TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH IS ME.
We will, however expect a full report. . . .
* * *
It’s still snowing.
* * *
* It’s also SNOWING. And I left my yaktrax at the cottage.^
Julia
I had [to walk to school in the snow] this week. . . . I’m currently in France (working as an English teacher in a primary school), and it snowed over the weekend. The French aren’t used to dealing with snow… and so the buses weren’t running. In order to get to work on Monday, I had to walk. Through the snow. Uphill.^^ It took an hour. I only fell down once, so I felt quite successful when I finally arrived!
I would like to eschew the standard falling-down part. I did manage to fall down on Chaos yesterday or the day before, but that was one of those everybody-in-slow-motion-AM-I-REALLY-FALLING-DOWN-RATS-YES moments and I was lifting Darkness off his feet with my death-grip on his (short) lead with the other hand as counterweight, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. I’m not entirely sure Chaos noticed. He may have just thought it was a sort of upside-down lying-on-the-sofa-but-outdoors thing.
But the ‘not used to dealing with snow’. Yes. I leave Wolfgang wherever he’s parked after the third snowflake falls not because he’s hopeless in the snow, which he isn’t, but because most of the locals are hopeless in snow. One of my least-favourite fantasies is a side-on SUV coming at you at frictionless speed.
^ You don’t want to know. Living in two (or three) houses has serious drawbacks especially if you’re perhaps a trifle disorganised in the first place. See, my yaktrax mostly live in my canvas briefcase equivalent when the weather gets hinky, but occasionally they are transferred to some other mobile living unit. I took them with me to the abbey last night because while the main roads are all clear, the footpath from the abbey car park to the enchanted portal is a mixture of 14th-century cobblestones and 16th-century paving, a trifle unevenly worn, and mostly in shade all day. I thought it might be yaktrax or hands and knees last night, and I preferred yaktrax. As it happened, extreme measures were not required, and then when I got home again my knitting came back out of the small evening knapsack and went back into the large day knapsack+ but the yaktrax, somehow, did not.
There. You didn’t want to know, did you?
+ Which frankly wouldn’t fit up the last flight of flower-fairy stairs at the abbey anyway.
^^ Both ways!
** Grandsire Triples, hell, it was the rounds on eighty-four. Or was it eighty-seven?
*** I talked to Hannah today, who is approximately the only person besides agent, editor and husband who gets a look at a book before it’s done, and she said that she thought I got the emotional reality of a teenage girl (ie in the particular opening set-up of this story) down really well. I was pleased, of course, but after we rang off I was thinking . . . is it a good thing to be able to write a persuasive modern, if alternative-world, seventeen-year-old—who goes to high school and lives with her parent(s)—when you’re sixty?^ Don’t answer that. Besides, I need to earn a living, and I’d be really bad at robbing banks.
^ Okay, I know I’m not the only elderly kiddie/YA writer around. But it hits me harder when it’s FIRST PERSON AND SHE’S GOING TO HIGH SCHOOL. Good grief. High fantasy seventeen-year-olds are different.
† I also talked to Merrilee today who said, you, that is, I, do need to remember that I may not make the deadline and SHADOWS may not come out in the spring of ’13. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Yes. True. I know. One of these years my hurtle toward the last possible scheduling moment is going to fail. Merrilee was giving me the standard agent lecture about not hurrying but taking the time the story needs and I said, MERRILEE. HOW LONG HAVE WE BEEN WORKING TOGETHER? I can only write as fast as the story will let me. If the third draft takes longer than I’m hoping^ then . . . it does.
So this is your warning too.
^ The good sign is that her list of notes matches mine. There were no, What do you mean, you were not convinced by the history teacher who turns into a manticore and eats the students that piss her off? Have you forgotten what high school is like?+
+ Merrilee is nearly as old as I am.
†† OOOOOWWWWWWOOOOOOO, say the hellhounds.
††† It was afterward, Colin, leaving, who said, in sepulchral tones, It’s snowing.
‡ She’s a GP and has three kids. She absolutely knows how to be supportive and encouraging.
‡‡ Yes. They breed.
‡‡‡ http://www.arundelcastle.org/_pages/03_visitor_info.htm
§ Which means the ceiling is very, very, very far away, and the rope is a million feet long. In the first place that much rope tends to flap around unless you have FLAWLESS handling skills—do I need to tell you I do not have flawless handling skills?—and in the second place . . . the weight of the rope has an effect on how a bell rings, depending on how heavy the bell is and how much rope there is. This can be DISCONCERTING—and on long draft, probably is.
§§ I’ve been having this nightmare for years. When you wake up out of an old familiar nightmare you may not remember acquisition of recent skills that may have a bearing on your equally old and familiar escape mantra.
§§§ I want to know how he gets ringing-up-the-tenor-by-himself shoulders up that last flight of stairs.