Bibliographic Searcher

winter, we has it

2012-01-17T18:45:00.000-08:00

Sad! Here is our Christmas tree, stripped of its ornaments and fallen in the back yard, decorated only with fresh-fallen snow.
The cat is afraid to go past it, because she would be outmatched and outwitted by a small dead tree.

Early morning snow yesterday. I took this photo, then went out to sweep the walk and sidewalk. Today more snow, alternating flurries so thick it was difficult to see, with bright clear skies reflecting dazzlingly from the fresh falls of snow.

Arthritis, possibly... In the mornings, if I stand for a while, to do dishes, or fold clothes or mix up scones, my hips / lower back hurt quite a bit. Sitting down for a while sometimes helps, or a cold-pack. Exercise doesn't seem to prevent it.
So I'm going back to 10 methotrexate on Happy Methotrexate Day, and see whether that makes a difference, though it will probably take about a month to tell.

Writing... Argh. Stupid history, all happening at the wrong time to fit my story. Why can you not be coordinated?
At the WFC 2011 autograph session I spoke briefly with Marie Brennan, who has had her own struggles with the ECW timeline and trying to work Cromwell into her plot when he's nowhere near the area for the first part, and dead for the second part.
On the one hand, there's the argument that one is writing fiction, not history, and should be able to change things to fit plot. On the other hand, if one is going to change anything major (a sliding scale, of course) why bother writing historical fiction at all? Why not go the Guy Gavriel Kay route and just write fantasy closely based on history?
Or, like a certain popular writer whom I shall not name, just mess around the facts in perfect confidence that my readers either don't know or don't care.

But I would care. Even though I'm working vampires and witches into the mix, I want to stick to the recipe for the rest of it.

Other stuff: on the weekend we drove out to Sea Cider for Wassailing, and saw Morris dancers and a Mummers Play. Pics next post, promise!

under the year-end tree

2012-01-11T21:34:00.000-08:00

The tree came down after Twelfth Night, as it should. I fiddled around with my camera, but couldn't quite catch how silvery and otherworldly it looked in the dark morning.

For happy things to find under the tree, a round-up of photos from World Fantasy, starring Viable Paradise alumnae/i. First up is Nikki, author and fibre artist, with great hair.

Terri, author, editor, and kick-butt earth-mother.

Dave, author, cool dad, and Voice of Podcastle.

Zak, the best-dressed dark fantasist I know, and Sharon in conversation with Sherwood Smith. More great hair.

What do you think of this for my new author-photo? I think Cory really makes the composition stand out.

readers' rights AGAIN!

2012-01-10T17:47:00.000-08:00

What with the Week of Writerly Whingeing just past, it seems time to repost this, so's y'all can hold me to it should I ever be widely published.

My Pledge of Readers' Rights
If my books are sold and published, and people I've never met read them, I hereby admit the following rights to any and all such readers:

1) The right to not like my book, and to think it is crap.
2) The right to stop reading and to judge my whole book on howeverlittle you read.
3) The right to completely miss my point.
4) The right to dislike any of my characters, even based on a partial or inaccurate reading.
5) The right to dislike my prose style and to quibble with my word choices.
6) The right to find fault with my plotting, worldbuilding, or other big-picture aspects.
7) The right to share these opinions in person, twitter, blog post or other social media as they appear.
8) Other rights that seem good and reasonable and occur to me later.

I do not grant to the reader the right to make me change something already published.

I have the responsibility to act like an adult.
That is, the responsibility to listen to criticism with attention, using my own critical faculties to find what's useful and what's not (just as I would with a workshop critique).
That is, the responsibility to not hold grudges or look for ways to do down someone who doesn't like my writing however they express it.
I was tempted to weasel here, to say something about tone, about even-handedness, but given that writers generically want nothing but praise, in bucketloads, even-handedness is way too difficult to quantify. As a reader, you have a perfect right to think that anything I've written is a load of crap and to say so, in those words or similar.

I retain the right to bitch in private to my friends about how you completely missed my point, dear god do these people have no reading skills at all?

sometimes I'm clever 2

2012-01-05T17:38:00.000-08:00

Another lazy post, reposting something I was musing about on a message board a few years ago. I thought it might have some relevancy, given the re-examination of Mary Sue on the Zoe-Trope and other good blogs (a decent round-up of links on this post).

Some helpful background on Mary Sue is found on this Making Light post.

And then there's me, below.

I was reading a book by James N. Frey (the writer, not the fraud) - The Key: How to Write Damn Good Fiction Using the Power of Myth. It uses the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey as a framework, and I found it entertaining even though I'm somewhat dubious about Campbell, the same as I am about Robert Graves.
Anyway, Frey provides a handy-dandy checklist of the possible characteristics of the Hero (he neatly end-runs the sexism thing by making his own exemplary Hero a woman):
The Hero is a protagonist, is an 'outlaw', has courage or finds it, is good at his/her trade, has one or more special talents, is motivated by idealism, has been 'wounded', is clever and resourceful, is sexually potent/attractive, is stoic, is loyal, is physically superior, may have a special birth and special destiny.

You'll note I've bolded a few of those. Now, I direct your attention to The Original Fiction Mary Sue Litmus Test, and to the following questions:
Is the character highly attractive? (3 points)
Are one or more other characters attracted to her/him? (1 point)
Is the character related to royalty or nobility? (4 points)
Is the character the last surviving member of a family/clan/race/species/etc.? (2 points)
Was the character ever forcibly banished from her/his family/tribe/country/etc.? (3 points)
Does the character have an angsty childhood, or an angsty past? (1 point)
Was the character abandoned by her/his caregivers? (2 points)
Is the character unusually accomplished for her/his age/species/etc.? (2 points)
Does the character ever easily learn a difficult skill (e.g. learn to play guitar in a matter of weeks)? (3 points)
Does the character have a special birthmark or other marking? (4 points)
Does the character have any particular skill at which she/he the best or among the best? (2 points)

Which made me wonder. Is Mary Sue a mythic hero? An attempt at a mythic hero? Is the Hero a Mary Sue? What's the difference? I'm hesitant to say skill, because the myths have been through so many hands and languages the skill of the telling is kind of hard to be sure of.

At the time, I didn't go with the answer that's becoming the clearest in recent discussion--that the great difference between a Mythic Hero and a Mary Sue is that the Mary Sue is a female character, especially one written by a female author.
How dare a mere gurl act like a mythic hero? What would Joseph Campbell say?

Tangentially, this is one of the reasons why I prefer fairy tales to myths--that the protagonist in the majority of fairy tales is interchangeably male or female. But that's probably another and longer post, for some later time.

wherein I am artsy

2012-01-01T21:10:00.000-08:00

Thought I'd be lazy and just post some of the photos I took in the summer, a couple of which aren't bad, or might be mildly interesting.

This below is a view of the shower (women's) at Coopers Lake Campground, the site of the Pennsic war. The building is over 100 years old - if you zoom, you can see adze marks on the roof joist. For several years, these three stalls (and three on the other side for men) were it for showers, unless you rigged something at your campsite. Now that Pennsic gets over 10k attending, there are a couple of shower trucks and other buildings, plus most group encampments have shower tents. It's still a rare occurence to find the whole room empty, so I commemorated the moment. About 2 or 3 am, I think it was, and the greenish light gives it a nicely underwater eerie look.

At Mark's urging, I took my camera on a couple of early morning walk-runs around the camps. I may have mentioned that many groups do elaborate painted fabric walls or trompe l'oeil gates. This group went for the macabre. If someone had been awake I would have asked if it was a portrait or a generic head.

I took so many photos on the way back, of changing landscapes, rock formations, cool clouds and lotsa vistas. This one comes under cool clouds--I like the way the sky mirrors the perspective of the lane lines, though I probably should have trimmed off some of the top third to emphasise it.

Rock formations, did I say? Nature--not that subtle, really.

We pulled over into this tiny town below for the sake of photographing the, um, mesa, that overlooks it. Although we found a good vantage point and got shots of it alone, I prefer this view interlined with houses.

I'm a bit of a sucker for neon. We came out of the last hotel early early-oh, and I saw this sign against the hill. Just in time--a couple of minutes later the lights went out for morning.

Happy Year-End!

2011-12-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

Oof. Half a bottle of wine, a glass of cider, and a slice of rum-soaked Christmas pudding with rum butter, and I am not firmly anchored to the turning world, I must say.
So I will post some pics, which will not risk spelling or syntactical errors.

An artistic shot of one of our saffron-producing croci, beside the front gate in November, taken by Mark.

Me icing my birthday cake, with the icing left over from doing Christmas cookies. Also taken by Mark. He took about a dozen, but I kept moving at the crucial moment and coming out blurred.
The overall icing is butterscotch, melted butter, cream and brown sugar. The coloured icing is basic butter icing. The red behaved much better then than it had for adding holly berries and suchlike to the cookies, but I don't know why.

Baking tally, hmmm...
Two batches of cake gingerbread
1 batch of gingerbread men
4 pans of 'petticoat tail' shortbread
1 batch of rolled shortbread
2 pans of oatmeal shortbread
2 pans of chocolate shortbread
1 pan of domino cookies (choc shortbread with white choc chips)
1 batch of cardomon sugar cookies
1 batch of honey cookies
2 batches of rolled & cut Christmas cookies, iced
1 batch of caramel sandwich cookies
2 batches of cheese shortbread (1 spicy, 1 plain)
2 batches of butter pecan shortbread
3 pounds of sugared walnuts
3 pounds of candied grapefruit peel

Tomorrow I may do butter tarts.

For Christmas dinner I made a spinach and feta pie for the boy, who has gone vegetarian, the pastry done with a veg shortening called Fluffo (which makes me laugh). Mark very very kindly dealt with the stalks and washing and stir-frying of the spinach, to spare me from the cooking side of things. I get somewhat nervous when I have to jigger a recipe the first time I use it, so his prodding was more than a little helpful.

The duck was dinner for the carnivores. Mmm. And made into curry, it fed another ten diners (two to four at a time).
I got to try out my Christmas present of an ergonomic potato masher, and very effective it was too.
Other cool presents - a long-handled pruning hook, with saw, so that I can Deal With that tree that's overshadowing the roses in the front.
And a Kobo e-reader. Which I am still learning my way around, after helpful lessons and work-arounds from Chris.

A definitive sign of Christmas being over, I reckon. A flat Santa. (photo by Mark)
By the way, while I understand several of the Christmas totems (nutcracker soldier, reindeer, Santa in a prop airplane), I am stumped by the cartoon owl with Santa hat. Is it from some animated Christmas special I've missed? From the back it looks like a monstrous baked potato with a Santa hat, which is less Christmassy than one might think.
I prefer plywood to inflatables, but that's probably just my failure to move with the times.

A cute cat picture to see you to year's end. At present, Priss is squished between my breastbone and the back of the Capisco chair, relaxed and purring. Here she is at the kitchen table, preventing me from doing anything useful.
Though in cat terms I'm probably doing the most useful thing of all, providing aid and comfort to the cat.

all photos by Mark, it seems!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T18:06:00.000-08:00

And other winter festivals as appropriate to your particular circumstances. Also my birthday. Yay!
The beating of Cost of Silver into another shape has been set aside for a while in favour of Christmassy things like writing and mailing cards, visiting friends, wrapping presents, decorating, and baking cookies (in a leisurely way, since I only just finished icing the rolled cookies).

A little early this year (that is, before Christmas Eve) we brought in the greenery.
The tree was decorated with the assistance of Tess and Rowan, so there's rather more ornaments on the lower 2/3ds than on the top, and some of them are a bit crowded.
It still looks good with the lights on - and none of them blinking, after Tess's careful examination of every bulb to make sure.
If you're wondering, yes, we are standing on the big table, which Mark's mother used to polish by walking a floor polisher up and down it.

(The box of stuff in the front is my collection of antiquities, waiting on the new position of the display case, which is waiting on us figuring out where it will go.)

And here's my cubicle at work, where Christmas gets serious. It takes a couple of days to get everything out and on the shelves, once I've cleared off the books and orders that usually occupy that space.

Each year the Times-Colonist paper (yes, Victoria's newspaper really is called the Colonist) prints a map with routes to see the best light displays, and I always resolve to go and see them, but there isn't always time.
This year Mark got me out of the house, abandoning baking and wrapping for an evening, so here are some pics to share the Christmas wattage.

Here is but one small corner of the house that really goes all out. You need to get out and walk around the yard for the full experience.
I managed to enjoy it in an entirely non-ironic fashion, and without wondering about their electric bill until later.

I admit it, this pic is for the sake of the madly excited pine tree in the front.
Whe I was a young child, our family would drive into Vancouver for Christmas shopping, and to visit my godmother. Near her house was a family who each year put up plywood figures of a snowman family. This was a high point of Christmas shopping, to drive by the snowman family.

On the other hand, the big department stores, like Hudson's Bay and Eatons, would fill their display windows not with fashion mannequins and goods for sale, but with Christmas scenes of trains, skating rinks, Dickens-era carollers, inhabited by animatronic children and elves. I don't know if anyone still does that, devote retail display space to a non-retail purpose. Perhaps no one can afford to anymore. So it's fallen to individuals to make up the balance of animatronic skating rinks?

I have to mash potatoes in a minute, so I'll leave you with the more spiritual side of Christmas, as expressed (like the snowman family) in plywood.
Merry Christmas!

metaphorical cat

2011-12-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Here, the cat takes on the role of symbolising Christmas tasks such as addressing and mailing cards, wrapping presents, and decorating the house, as she rises over my head.

Picture taken with Mark's IPad.

long tail?

2011-12-05T23:53:00.000-08:00

Two weeks knee-deep in the 1600s, and last week hip-deep in other people's books.

I was helping with the United Way booksale at the university Student Union Building, and a right object lesson in humility for fiction writers it was.
See, it turns out that the hardest category to sell, even for $2 a pop is ...

Hardcover fiction.

Doesn't matter which genre. We had stacks of mysteries, thrillers, romance, Canlit, bildungsroman, small-town angst, wry slackers, picaresque, in shiny clean dustjackets and shabby library brodarts, sitting there yearningly like unattractive Babylonian women in that Herodotus story.
In the meantime, nonfiction, maps, and mass-market paperbacks were trundling steadily out the door.
Sarah the amazing co-op student and I made up gift baskets of thrillers, mysteries and romances with props like martini glasses, teacups, teabags and candles, in hopes of moving a few more, but even this did little to thin the ranks.

I took pity and took a few home at sale's end. For Christmas presents, of course.
Really. I'm not adding more books to my library when I should be weeding. Of course I'm not.

ergonomic cat

2011-11-23T07:41:00.000-08:00

As you may recall, my 'writing room' has a HAG Capisco chair, which is super-ergonomic and ... has no provision for a lap. Especially if I'm sitting in it backwards, which I do a lot.
Since the cat loves my writing sessions because I remain sitting for a couple of hours at a time, furnishing her with a lap, I wondered how she would cope.
She found a way.

In other non-writing news, I have successfully made apple peeling jelly, from this recipe here! I reduced the sugar and added a grated quince (from my brother's trees) for more pectin, and some ginger slices, not being a cinnamon fan.

I don't know that I'll do this a lot, but I feel fairly virtuous about it, despite the extra electricity use. And I can still compost the peels & cores afterwards.

You may have noticed, faithful reader(s), that I haven't said much about nature's goddamn bounty this fall. This is because something like 80% of the Spartan and Golden Delicious apples have Gone Away to be made into cider. So you may hear some groaning when bottling time arrives.

In actual writing news, I have received 6 pages of editorial comments on the Dread Synopsis, which will require substantial revision (naturally). It seems I went too far on the expansion of historical scope / events / characters. Plus need to clarify motivations, provide closure to plot threads, etc. My agent includes this observation, which I found very interesting, so I share it with you:

As I read over this synopsis and thought about what kind of book succeeds I realized that what editors really want is a novel that feels like it has scope, but which isn't actually too complicated in plot because too much complexity undercuts the suspense and pacing.

There you are, actual writing advice. Now I need to take it into the revision.

WFC 2011 panels

2011-11-21T22:33:00.000-08:00

While I'm stuck in the kitchen waiting for the apple peeling jelly to cook down to jelly consistency, why don't I give you a few pictures from the sf-con side of WFC?
This is the last panel I attended, and a good one, too. Time Goggles: Modern perspectives and period literature. Emma Bull moderated, with panelists Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Bradford Lyau, and Marie Brennan.
Some very good discussion of how to honestly portray period attitudes without losing reader sympathy--and that tightrope between giving a character modern-day sensibilities and appearing to condone repellent practices like slavery.

Another good one - The Not-So-Fair Folk, a discussion of the bad fae, fairies as fearsome rather than charming or benign.
Delia Sherman has something to say about this, as Mercedes Yardley listens.

Woo! Thanks to Mercedes linking it, I discover that there's a podcast of this panel on the Filipino Bibliophile.

Jenny Blackford and Patrick Rothfuss were the other panelists. I realise that now I'll have to find my copy of Dreaming Again and re-read Jenny's story.

(Excuse me here, as the jelly seems to have reached the required temperature. Back soon.)

With Holly Black as moderator. She had some great facial expressions as she guided the discussion or prodded the panelists, and I wish I'd caught one of the sly ones, but this will have to do as a hint.

I might have skipped I Believe That Children Are the Future, because I've been to a few panels on juvenile and YA fantasy recently, but I couldn't resist the lineup. In any case, the discussion veered rapidly to trends in YA fantasy, particularly paranormal romance and The Book That Must Not Be Named.

Here, Tamora Pierce speculates on the mechanics of sex with the undead/dead.

And here, Cindy Pon and Karen Healey react to those speculations.

It was a pretty amusing panel, and Tamora Pierce was gracious enough to stop in the hallway and sign books (she hadn't been at the Friday night autograph session).

Because I am, apparently, not at all on the ball, I took no photos at The Coral Sword: material culture of undersea civilizations, with panelist Sharon Mock (fellow VPer), or at But Can You Take Him Home to Mother: paranormal romance, with panelist Sandra Wickham (fellow SF-Canada).
But! Here is a pic of From Elfland to Poughkeepsie: should fantasy sound like fantasy? with Terri-Lynne Defino, Susan Forest, Ellen Klages, Shawna McCarthy and Ellen Kushner as moderator. How's that for star power?

Obviously, only to be outdone by Neil Gaiman, taking the podium during Opening Ceremonies.
This is as close as I got to the Neil. The lineup for signings for him was immensely long, and so was the second signing added to make up for those who missed out the first time. The man must have signing muscles of iron by now.

This last pic here is why I missed about half the panels I'd put arrows next to--all the hanging out with VPers & associates.
I've forgotten the name of this restaurant, which I guess is a chain in the States? Any road, it's the chain where you can have Asian-fusion food next to the butt-end of a giant concrete horse. I hope sincerely that's an identifying feature.

I got back to the site in time to catch part of Out From Under the Bed: Monster as Protagonist, and managed to stay awake for How to Survive the Coming Zombie War (conclusion: I am pathetically unprepared and am doomed).

Panels I missed because of hanging out with people and eating food or scheduling difficulties (ie need for sleep):
The Role of Class in Fantasy and Horror
The Successful Misfit as a Theme in Fantasy
Founders of Steampunk
William Hope Hodgson's Nautical Horrors
Who Wants to Live Forever? Immortals
Don't Open That Door! The role of stupidity in genre fiction

On the whole, I think this was the best lineup of panels of the World Fantasy Conventions I've attended. Plus, that really annoying moderator whose name I've forgotten wasn't there.

because it is Nanowrimo

2011-11-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

An excerpt from Maenads at Band Camp, which, if I finish it and have the nerve to attempt the YA Paranormal market, will probably go out with one of those portentous one-word titles instead. I'm favouring Muse.

This is about midway, from the pov of the Sensible Girl, Cassia:

I slid down the grassy overhang, and landed with a sandy thump on the narrow beach. Good thing they'd picked the sand beach, instead of the pebbled boat lauch. And there they were, all seven of the Parthenoi, some standing with arms crossed, some cross-legged or kneeling on the sand. I couldn't tell which was which in the moonlight, with all their hair turned black and silver.
"Okay," I said. "I came. And I didn't tell anyone I was coming. But I'm telling you now, I'm going to use my own judgement about what I tell Kay. I'm not keeping secrets from her."
"That is well." Oleia's voice. "She may believe what she hears from you."
"You're going to tell me something that's hard to believe, right?" I wasn't too sure what was still hard to believe, if the last few days were believable. They happened, I told myself. That means you believe them. Otherwise you can't trust anything.
"Hard for some. Your friend will not wish to believe."
I'd read about 'her heart sank'. Now I knew what it felt like. More in my stomach than heart, but I guess that doesn't sound as dramatic. "This is about Adrian."
"What have you guessed?"
"Uh-uh." I shook my head. "No. I know how a cold reading works. You have to tell me what's going on, you don't get to let me fill it in while you pretend you knew all along. That's what con artists and fake mediums do, and I'm not going to fall for it."
A sigh rippled across them, starting with Oleia and ending with the two who were kneeling.
Oleia seemed to hesitate, which was not what I was used to from her. "You have seen what happens when we sing. When Adrian plays."
"No kidding. And I've seen that Dubois and Sawchuk don't see what happens. Cute trick."
"Do you know what Parthenoi means?"
Jazz had told me, after he'd googled it in town. "Virgins. So?"
"It is a name of--courtesy for the dancers of Dionysus. The Maenads."
I bit my tongue and managed not to say 'the what?' Maenads was the spelling my brain came up with after a second. The first thing I remembered was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with Bacchus and the wild girls making vines spring up in freed Narnia. But C. S. Lewis hadn't written the real maenads and bacchanalia, not in a kid's book, not by a long way. Hadn't Lucy said she'd have been afraid of them if Aslan hadn't been there? What about the real (mythical) maenads? Come on, brain, you read a book of Greek myths when you were thirteen...
Dionysus, the god of wine and madness. The bacchanalia, a mad dance and orgy, which sounded like fun (a ceilidh?) until you read about mad women chasing animals and tearing them apart with their bare hands. Mad women who demanded that Orpheus play his lyre for them. But Orpheus was mourning for what's-her-name and refused. So the Maenads tore him apart, and his head floated down the river, singing...
I shivered, and it wasn't just the cold wind off the water. "The Maenads who murdered Orpheus."
One of the sitting girls spoke. "Not murdered. The son of a god is not so easily dealt with."
There were seven of them, and one of me. I knew the ground better, and my night sight was pretty good, but--better to stand and face them. "You got me to break bounds so you could test my trivia knowledge of Myths and Legends of the Ancient World?"
"Not ancient," said Oreia, without a smile or sneer. "Now. We are the Maenads, we pursue Orpheus down the millennia, but the story is not as you have learnt it."
I crossed my arms, partly for warmth and partly to look bigger and more businesslike. "No kidding. What's your version?"
The sitting girl spoke again. "She is not ready to hear. Let us go." They swivelled their heads all together as if they had practiced for hours, and the seated ones flowed smoothly to standing, so they were all poised to leap up the bank and run into the night.
"Wait," I said. "Is this about Kayley? Is she in some kind of danger?"
They turned their faces toward me, all together, and the moon lit their eyes to white. "She s always in danger. In every life."
"Wait, every life? You mean, reincarnation?" I tried to remember. Did the ancient Greeks even believe in reincarnation? Didn't all their dead end up as ghosts in Hades, the most boring afterlife ever? "No, forget that. Is Kayley in danger now? Here and now, at Forbidden Lake, this summer? No double-talk, just tell me yes or no."
The moonlight cut Oleia's face into cold stone, a statue that didn't understand pity or fear. "Yes. She is in danger."
That book of myths had taught me one thing: gods and other immortals were double-talking, double-dealing bastards, worse than lawyers about hidden clauses, fine print, and reading between the lines. "Be specific."
"If she continues on her present path, she will be dead before the week is out."

my WFC tribe

2011-11-14T21:52:00.000-08:00

Not much wordage here, just some pictures, valued for their associations rather than their composition or artistry.

Perhaps the coolest thing about WFC2011 was the number of VPXers who were there. It made me realise how much I missed everyone. Following LJs really isn't the same, though maybe if I used twitter? Nah.

Let's see if I can remember who all was there from VPX. Zak and Sharon, Terri and her stalwart husband, Dave, Bart, Nikki, Elise, Erin and Mur--who have I forgotten? Myself? And a bunch of pre- and post-Xers, whom I will not attempt to name without reference materials handy.

Thanks to everyone else being on twitter or texting, and to Zak and Sharon's hospitality, we managed a VPXetc. room party and a VP afternoon lawn party.
Yay us!

Room party pics:
Bart, about to unveil some amazing chocolate, and Nikki, relaxing.
They are as far as possible from the creepy girl-with-birdcage print, which is why they are relaxed.

Dave Thompson, the voice of podcastle.org, did not on this occasion fall through the mirror to another world.
But it was a near thing.

PNH was lively, providing an audio-tour through Great Moments of Making Light and filks of British fandom.
He and Elise make great tour guides of fannish history. I hear there was an impromptu concert another night, but I had puppied out and fallen asleep hours before.

However I did not miss the music the next day, during the VPetc. afternoon lawn party, at the tables outside the con suite. Someone had provided a ukulele, which lured PNH over.

There was also, nearby, a very scenic and photogenic gazebo, causing a series of wedding-type photos. But I'll leave that for next time, and finish up with another group shot.

hotelery

2011-11-09T07:26:00.000-08:00

Until recent years, I haven't often stayed in hotels, certainly not in upscale ones. I still harbour a fearful conviction that staying in hotels and taking taxis is the Road to Financial Ruin, while sleeping on the couches of friends and standing in the rain for city busses is the Path of Financial Virtue. Perhaps as a result, the decor in hotels tends to make me uneasy. The hotel where VCon was held featured carpets with a raised vinework that seemed likely to creep up and entangle one in one's sleep.

World Fantasy was in San Diego this year, in a hotel complex that was very pretty, much too big and spread out, and both bewildering and frustrating to navigate. I'm fortunate in not having mobility issues yet, but for those who did, I can see that getting past the random steps and gates and steep narrow ramps would range from exasperating to outright dangerous.
The hotel was originally three or four hotels, I gather, which accounted for the disparity in height, accessibility, decor and theme. I was on the 9th floor of um, Park Tower? something like that.
A pleasant room with two big comfy beds and an unnerving colour print of a little girl with ancient eyes, wearing 19th c. clothing and holding a birdcage in which she doubtless trapped the souls of unwary guests.
The view was impressive. Here is my arty shot of the balcony in the early morning, through the gauze curtains.
This fake mist was the only mist to be found. The weather was clear and warm and dry, only a bit chilly at night. I washed a couple of shirts and hung them on the balcony chairs, where they dried nicely.

I mentioned a diversity of decor? I didn't get any pics of the rose gardens (rose pictures I have too many of already) but here's a tropical bit of garden that went with the palm trees. Unlike the scrubby little palm trees that cling to life in Victoria, those in San Diego are great big hairy things.
And here is a tiki - just for you!

Lots of green space and lawns and pathways, but interrupted by many white iron fences and gates. Some attendees were reminded of The Village, and expected Rover to come wallowing and bouncing along in pursuit of some poor escapee.

It's a good thing that along with relative able-bodiedness I have no fear of heights. This is the view out the front door of the hotel room. All the rooms in this building were reached by an exterior walkway. You could take the elevator or walk up the exterior stairs (I did the latter, to make up for not bicycling--discovered that after the 7th floor I do start to feel a touch vertiginous and have to watch my step), but either way you then walked along the outside of the building to reach your room.
Nice view though.

I admit, this post is mostly an excuse to put up some photos. Next post will be about people and panels. Probably. Unless I'm distracted by something.

Oh, yes, and I'm doing Nanowrimo again, with the usual degree of application and success. So I'll go and shove a couple hundred words into its gaping maw now.

chronological conventions

2011-11-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

Before I babble on about World Fantasy, I must not forget that I owe you a VCon post, which is this one here.
On your left, a mandatory pic of someone in costume kindly posing for me. In the hallway outside the dealers' room were Ghostbusters with an inflatable Sta-Puft marshmallow man, with which one could be photographed, and Imperial Stormtroopers with a big painted backdrop, ditto.
A number of anime-cosplay freelancers, but a surprising lack of vampires, sparkly or trad.
Larry Niven was the Guest of Honour, but the autograph session was Friday afternoon, and most people missed it. I didn't even find it on the schedule.

I spent most of my time in the dealers' room, next to Mark, hanging out at the SF-Canada table, which I was overseeing. This year we had no wall behind us, so the banner didn't get used--the table behind us had a nice pennon arrangement that I think I may swipe the idea of, and paint up something that will fit in smaller spaces. Also I want to paint or print up an SFC logo to fit that blank space between the red tablecloths.
Other SFC members took shifts at the table, so I got in some panels and some wandering of my own. Thanks to Casey Wolf, Donna Farley, Eileen and Patrick Kernaghan (I've forgotten someone--must find my notes).
All three copies of my self-published 3-Day Novel collection, Threefold, were sold, so woohoo! All to people who know me, but it's a small world.
I even ended up on a panel! I hauled a half-dozen people from the SFC party to an 11 pm panel (really, yes, pm) on 'Are You Prepared to Be Published', about what publishers wish writers knew, as an act of mercy to the panelists, Brian Hades of Edge, and Ian Alexander Martin of Atomic Fez, so that they wouldn't be alone with the hypothetical desperate unpublished insomniac writers (the sort who use more than one adjective in a row). And they called me up to represent writers (or be moderator?) on the strength of my four e-stories and having an agent.
Mark too was unexpectedly on a panel, filling in as swordsmanship historian for Devon Boorman, who couldn't attend.

One of the perks of a trip to Vancouver is a chance to visit with the boy and the girl. Chris and Shannon were about to leave for a camping trip, but hung on long enough to go out for dinner at a rather good Asian vegetarian place within walking distance.
I forced baked goods onto them before they escaped.

Next, WFC 2011!

sometimes I'm clever

2011-10-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

Fellow Furtive Scribbler Holly reminded me of something I'd posted on the book forum some months back, and re-reading it I thought, hm, that's not bad advice. So I thought maybe I'd start an irregular feature on this blog, posting cleverish things I've said elsewhere that might bear repeating.

This was part of a discusssion about following the dictum 'make things worse for your characters', specifically having them get caught while searching someone's room.

Just my take - no, it's not always a good idea to make things harder. If it stops the plot dead in its tracks, if it leads to a pointless roundabout subquest that changes nothing, if it makes the story duller rather than more exciting, then it's a mistake.
Twists should make things harder for your characters but in ways they can overcome while advancing the plot and their own characterisation. (whew!)
You know those legends and fairytales where someone's given a quest but on the way finds he can't accomplish it unless he first goes and gets the sword of Ladidah, but he can't get that until he gets the horse of Wateva, and for that he needs the bridle of Blaah? And you lose all interest in whether he ever gets back to rescuing the princess of Hawtt?
Maybe have them almost caught, to up the tension, but not actually. Protagonists need to win sometimes, or they look like losers.

airports must be liminal space

2011-10-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

I'm at the San Francisco airport, on my way back from the World Fantasy Convention. It was good.
Do not speak to me of synopses. The dead Duke of Buckingham is my King Charles's head. (bonus Dickens reference).
Will post photos and coherent sentences later.

fall harvest

2011-10-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

Last year I cut the grapes back severely in the back yard. But in the summer I got distracted and let them grow madly again, so the grape harvest was not so magnificent a thing as it might have been.
Blueberries would snicker at our grapes, and kick sand in their faces.

On the other hand, with my Snackmaster! I'm collecting a fair bagful of raisins. Not seedless, but tasty. The grapes are tasty too. They may be Pinot Noir--it's been so long since the vines were begun that neither of us remembers. Maybe Cabernet. Then there's the green grapes on the arbour; no idea at all about those.

Behold! A study of my own. Chris's loft bed and shelves have been moved out (thank you, usedvictoria.com) and I have bought a desk ($150) and an ergonomic chair (HAG Capisco) ($80) and dug out my old camping carpet ($25). Then bamboo blinds ($10) against the afternoon sun.
The small bookcases are temporary, because the plan is to fill both long walls with bookshelves, as per ch. 8 of The New Yankee Workshop by Norm Abram, Little Brown 1989. Then I can clear my stacks of books out of the window seat and the computer room. And the latter becomes Mark's office properly, so that he can sort, photograph, and enter antiquities in one place.

The cat approves the carpet as a good place to disembowel her catnip budgie. Next she would like me to get a comfy chair (free) for research, reading, and cat-petting.

pictures from the past

2011-10-11T21:59:00.000-07:00

Well, from about a month past. Photos from our Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill. I've chosen a few pictures that I like or think are nicely composed, but I'll provide a commentary pretending that there's an educational aspect to this post.

Remember the clay and cob oven Joan and the kids and I were making? Here it is in action, with Joan in charge. Bread and pastry and buns every day! You build a fire inside the oven, until the interior is hot enough (there are a few different tests for this, disagreeing with each other). Then sweep the fire and fuel out, and insert the thing to be baked, either on the floor of the oven, or on a piece of stone covering the floor of the oven. Cover the mouth of the oven with that square of wood (which does scorch through eventually, yes) and let the contents bake until done.
One of those simple-sounding things that takes much experience and many mistakes to get handy with.

The labyrinth returned after two days of picking and laying out stones. Here the younger kids make sure that it works properly. The littlest one was a babe in arms last year.

Because we're portraying everyday life and working-class artisans, it's important that everyone have work to do, whether their craft or daily tasks around the camp. Here, weaving narrow-ware. That's a stool turned upside-down serving as the loom.

Gathering for a meal in the dining tent, at a trestle table spread with a linen cloth and loaded with bread, apples, dried fruit, eggs, cheese, sausage, butter and honey. It's a hard life, but we keep our spirits up.

The origin of vampires

2011-10-03T22:10:00.000-07:00

As requested!

First, background on magic, in my system. Every living human being has magic in them, just by being alive. Some have much magic, increased by study and practice or by being in proximity to magic (think of it as second-hand smoke), some have only a little.
Back in the mists of time (Bronze Age?) magicians developed a way to join their powers and channel them towards some great task they couldn't accomplish singly. The joining was accomplished by a blood-sharing ceremony and had a tendency to kill or drive insane one of the participants--the weak link in the chain, it was assumed.
The magicians came up with what seemed like a good idea. They would include in the joining someone (a slave or prisoner) who was dying, in hopes that the magic would be directed to that 'weak link' and spare the magicians.
Sometimes it worked as expected. Sometimes it charged the dying person with enough magic that he didn't quite die. Instead he became a sort of zombie, a mindless slave blood-bound to the magicians, and could be maintained semi-alive by small feedings of blood, the same way animal familiars were bound to a magician. And who doesn't want a mindless slave, particularly one who could be used as a sort of magical storage-jar? While it might be filled with magic, it couldn't direct or control that magic, because of not being properly alive.
But if the zombie-slave was overfed, or re-used too many times in the joining ceremony without being burnt out by it, it might become sentient. If the magician who was feeding it died or lost control of it, it might become autonomous. And would still need blood to maintain itself, but would have to go out and get that blood. Thus, vampires.
It's the magic in the blood that maintains them--although they can't control magic, they are magical creatures, and have some powers (glamoury, strength, etc.) that are associated with magic. If one takes a magician's blood to the death, it is charged with enough magic to create another vampire, blood-bound to it. (There is not a strict one-to-one exchange, by the way). For this reason, second or third generation vampires are forbidden to take magician's blood, lest they become powerful and autonomous. Or, if they take magician's blood in small quantities, they might be blood-bound to the magician instead of to the vampire master who made them.

Somewhere between the Bronze Age and the Early Modern / Late Medieval period, there was enough disruption of the magical tradition that this (fairly closely guarded) knowledge was lost to the magicians. The oldest vampires knew it, but guarded it even more closely.

Now I believe I'll go to bed, so I can be up early and work on the Dread Synopsis.

October? What?

2011-10-01T09:29:00.000-07:00

I'm at the Sheraton in Richmond, at the Vancouver Science Fiction Convention. I've been trying and trying to post some pics from our Living History Week in August, but apparently I can't upload from here. Argh.
This will be a more visually interesting blog in a couple of days.

So, you may recall that I was going to produce a revised synopsis of the new! bigger! expanded! Cost of Silver 'after Labour Day. Which I had thought of as being about a week after Labour Day weekend.

This has not occurred. Instead I have been dashing about for 3 weeks, researching byways of 17th c. life and beliefs and customs and folklore and court intrigue and... And writing bits of synopsis with lots of square brackets [ insert motive here ] and [ why? ]. And writing snippets of conversations and scenes to try to figure out who these characters were and what they wanted.
I've researched
- bog bodies
- Prince Rupert of the Rhine
- fen ecology
- the Duke of Buckingham
- Catholic plots and anti-Catholic plots
- rescue archaeology
- King John's treasure lost in the Wash
- Doctor John Lamb
- alchemy
- etc.
And after consulting with (ie throwing myself on the mercy of) my fellow Furtive Scribblers, I think I have it worked out, including the Origin of Vampires.
Now I must go away for a while and write it.

But I will post some nice pictures soonish.

did not break 20k

2011-09-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

Final wordcount, once title page, address and End were added: 18k exactly. Annoyingly, I signed off at midnight feeling that I could have kept writing, although the two nights before I'd been propping my eyelids open and ready to fall face-forward.

Last line: "At least in the meantime you and Persie can earn money babysitting the gods."

Thanks to the advent of (hurrah!) online submission, I don't have to muck about reformatting, dragging the file through bloody Word, and traipsing over to Zap to have it printed out. Yay! all done!
Next year I am a)going to have an outline, however minimal
b)going to have more than one pov character so I can swap around. Nothing gooses a story better (for me) than bringing in a new person with their own backstory and angle.

And this is the rose that was blooming Tuesday morning, in the gallica bush behind my window seat.

Sunday wordcount

2011-09-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Finished near midnight with 11011.
Not my lowest, but not the 12-14k I aimed for. Today will be a hard slog if I want to break the 20k ceiling for the first time. Saturday is easier usually because I'm following the characters around and exploring the world. Sunday the characters need to do something, and I start to second-guess myself about what they should do and how it will lead to a resolution. However, in the last couple of hours I decided to write from the child-goddess's pov, and that perked things up. (I should remember this! Alternating storylines are a Good and Helpful Thing.)

Last lines written last night:
Only I wondered sometimes, as I was washed and painted for the day, why only the Little Girl aspect took a mortal vessel, and the Fierce One went unbodied?

Saturday wordcount

2011-09-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's progress:
Sitting at the laptop by 7 AM with a cup of tea.
8 AM broke for breakfast with a wordcount of 1002.
1:20 PM stopped for lunch, wordcount 3045
6:30 PM stopped for dinner, needing food, although my wordcount was only 4682, not the 5k I'd aimed for.
Closed at 11 PM with a wordcount of 6763, shy of the 7-8k I'd wanted, but still my highest Day 1 count ever. Previous highest was 6555 in 2009.

Title is Vessels.
First line: The day began with portents. That's never a good sign.
Last bit written last night:
Virgie thought it over, tearing her muffin into blue-stained crumbs. "There are only two groups? Not more?"
"Lots more," I said, taking my turn at the cookpot. "But only two that want a public fight for dominance."

on my way to bed

2011-09-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

Because this weekend is the 3-Day Novel Contest, and I must be well rested. And sparkling with brilliant ideas and thick with fully-rounded characters and chattering with witty dialogue! Or at least rested.

In other exciting news, Mark suggested that I take over Chris's old room for a writing room. He's been using it to sort & store antiquities and take photos for the website, but if I got my desk and the futon-couch out of the 'computer room' he'd probably have room to do that in there.
I could move my stacks of research books into one place and put them on shelves - of course we'd need to build floor-to-ceiling shelves on two walls. Maybe move my children's books in there as well.
A room of my own, just for writing.

I had been longingly browsing shed designs (Summerwood lets you customise your designs online, plus has immense design galleries to play around in) and occasionally looking at cabins at realtor.ca. (I classify this as house-pr0n, lusting after things impossible to perform) But having my own room would be pretty much as good as having my own building, with access to electricity, refrigeration, and tea.
So now I'm browsing Where I Write and the Guardian's series on Writers' Rooms.

Bed time! I'll try to post my 3-Day progress.

more Pennsic photos

2011-09-01T21:33:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to pick what's representative of the 'Pennsic experience' when I just photographed whatever took my fancy. I'll try to provide some context.
About 12000 people attended the Pennsic War, most camping onsite. The Cooper's Lake campground was long ago filled, and I think they rent surrounding fields to cover the overflow and allow room for fighting fields etc.
There are two large marketplaces with about 300 merchants, a dozen tracks of classes (hands-on, seminars, etc.) running every day, performances of music, dance and drama, processions, craft demonstrations, ...
oh, and a war, with battles and stuff. Somewhere. But it was really hot.

Various groups, from kingdoms to households, prefer to camp together, and there's a complicated system for allotting space. Having won their land, most groups mark it with fabric walls and gates made of anything from fabric to plywood to stone. I liked the paint job on this one, a pretty decent trompe l'oeil.

Midweek there's a late-night shopping spree called Midnight Madness. Merchants drop their prices, offer odd bargains, and sometimes do silly things like shave their heads. The markets are full of people, it's a great night for buskers (three very young ladies outside our booth performed 'What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor' and Leonard Cohen's Alleluia, an odd juxtaposition), very carnival atmosphere. This photo is of some 'dead' being carried out, complete with Monty Python quotes.
"I'm feeling better!"

One of the many streets at Pennsic, photographed towards the end of the event. This area is residential, so not many people are about. They're either napping in the heat of the day, or off taking classes, or fighting, or wandering the market.
Hoping this gives at least a hint of how big the event is.

Artisan invasion! A number of artisans arrive in the market street with their tools and materials, and work through part of the day, then vanish, reappearing elsewhere another day.
Mark points out that almost everything they do is 18th century, but it's still fun to watch.

writing? oh yeah, writing.

2011-08-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

No pics yet, because they're on a camera card and I'll have to do it through my EEE which has a card slot. Instead, a return to the ostensible topic of this blog: my fabulous writing career.
Ahem.

Okay, my writing. There.

You'll recall that before leaving for Pennsic I was in a mad rush to cut free and mail off the first 'half' of The Cost of Silver for my agent's opinion on how I should proceed. In that narrow window between my return from Pennsylvania and my departure for Fort Rodd Hill, she emailed her assessment (yes, she is speedy like a speeding thing), having read the mss while on holiday with her family.
While containing phrases like 'spooky and compelling', 'carries absolute historical authenticity', 'raced through it', the gist was that the narrative was headed in the wrong direction and that my research was showing. (what a surprise, right?)
I imagine her reading and reading, with a sinking feeling getting stronger and stronger, and her wondering how to break it to me gently.

Well, I emailed back, and we had a bit of discussion, and I'll be working up a revised--severely revised--synopsis for her after Labour Day. I think I can keep the storyline I care about, of the commoners and fenfolk and their fight for their land and livelihood, by tying it more securely into the revenant story. Which means building up characters and plot for the courtiers, royalty, and fen-drainers, so that they appear on-stage, not just referred to by the commoners. With the revenants being in various ways supporters of the enclosures, because enclosing land for the gentry means driving commoners off, creating a dispossessed, powerless population that's easy prey, in place of tight little villages where everyone knows everyone else.
Maybe the revenants have fond memories of the abolition of the monasteries, too? Some number of them must have been around at the time.
This also means more scenes with revenants, because there's bound to be conflict among them, with some liking the idea of influencing the powerful mortals, and others thinking it dangerously rash and risking discovery.

She's suggested working in a modern-day plotline, with perhaps a Cambridge researcher discovering papers that lead back to the 1600s story. I talked this over with the others at Fort Rodd Hill, and what sparked from it I quite like, involving Wicken Fen (the last untouched fenland in East Anglia) and the discovery of a 'bog body' which perhaps ain't as dead as all that.

So, I am quite excited, not least by her suggestion that 'you have it in you to write a big commercial historical fantasy novel' that could be sold to a mainstream editor. After I had curled up in a corner and twitched for a while, then wandered around the house muttering 'but, but,' that is!
I'd pretty much pinned my future as 'quirky midlist author with small cult following', but the point of having an agent is for advice and guidance, right? So I shall work on reassessing. Then on massive revising.

But first! The 3-Day Novel Contest this weekend. I even have an idea for it, at last. An artists' colony on Saltspring Island, populated by retired gods and heroes, stirred up by the arrival of a young girl who was recently the incarnation of a goddess and has issues therefrom.

here presently

2011-08-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

Back home from our Living History week at Fort Rodd Hill. After a slow start because of being so recently returned from Pennsic, followed by two days work panic, I got myself sorted out and immersed in daily life of the fourteenth century. I didn't go online, turn on my EEE, or read, except for one brief trip to 'the fried bread shop' on the day it rained a lot, when I read a couple of chapters of The Book of Air and Shadow, by Michael Gruber.
Now I am back home, a home strewn with un-unpacked baskets and bags, clothesline heavy with freshly-washed linens and lawn covered with tarps and carpets. My brain appears to be in a remarkably similar state.
So. More later, and pics. I will never catch up with the pics!

random Pennsic pics

2011-08-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

A small selection of the cool stuff at the war. First, labyrinths of various designs appeared by the barn, in the food market, and along the paved pathways. Every morning they were drawn fresh. You can imagine how happy I was to discover them on my early morning walks, and to take the time to walk or run them on my way.

Another new thing: parchment makers in the market. The Meyer family has been making parchment since the 1500s, reportedly, but this is the first time they've come to Pennsic. Next year they hope to have a proper tent, but I suspect no one really noticed anything past the OMG PARCHMENT!!!eleventy.

Another thing that might almost have been chosen to make me personally happy: Alexander, apprentice to Arab Boy, is making Aldrovani-style enamelled beakers. These are the very objects that caused me to fall in love with enamelled glassware in the first place, and to work on faking them up with thriftshop glassware and low-fire enamels. Alexander is doing them for real. When I found out there would be a demo of the process on Saturday, I was all bouncy.

By the food market we met the labyrinth maker, who had just finished a gnomen sundial nearby, and was adding another classic labyrinth to the path.

I wanted to add a video of Dru and Osprey playing cigar-box and cookie-tin banjo, but there isn't room on this post, so it will have to wait.

random trip pics

2011-08-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

These are still from the drive to Pennsylvania. Pics from the war itself next post.

More Montana geology. On the return trip we went through Wyoming and Nebraska and Utah, where I took more photos of landscape than of geology.

The rest area at Moorhead. Elisa and I recognised it as one we'd slept at two years ago, and very nice it was, too. Grass, trees, recycling, all good things. Do feel free to make your own Bewitched joke at this point.

In the restaurant (Brigid's Pub) at the hotel in South Bend that was our last night's stop before the war. I'm not sure why there's a callbox in the corner, but there it is.

briefly present

2011-08-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

Am home.
Am tired.
Am driving out to pick Mark up from airport about midnight.
Am working tomorrow.

for you the war is over

2011-08-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

Was ritually said to prisoners of war in WWII, to discourage them from escape attempts. In this case, it's simple fact, as I'm on my way home from the Pennsic war. South Bend last night, rolling in about 3 am, Cheyenne tonight just before midnight. Tomorrow is Baker City. Then home.
Typing from Springhill Suites, Marriott hotel in Cheyenne. This little suite is so nice that I harbour thoughts of just staying here for a few days instead of going home. It has not just the usual desk, but a mini sitting room with couch, chair, and coffee tables. Two closets, the microwave & coffee set in a sort of mini kitchenette so they're separate - the layout makes very effective use of space.
And as you know, I don't stay in hotels that often, so it's always a bit special.

Pics of Pennsic when I'm not asleep on my feet (well, on my bum, since I'm sitting down, but you know what I mean).

promised pics

2011-08-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

Just some from the Montana leg of the trip, a rest stop under a hill, with a terrific view from the top. I climbed it because I needed a stretch after a few hours driving. Forgot to photograph or note the informative sign naming which rest stop it was, sigh.
Took a fair number of photos, but I don't want to strain my available upload time.

One side of the rock formation at the top. I do love the geology in Montana. We did North Dakota in the dark, so I don't have any clever observations to make about it.

I took a few more photos of the plants as I walked back down. I don't know the names of any, so I should try to bring a wild plants book and a bird book the next time I make this trip.

And while I forgot to photograph the actual place sign, I couldn't resist this one. If you're wondering, no, I didn't see any snakes of any sort as I walked up the narrow asphalt trail to the top of the hill. Would I have stood about like a nitwit and attempted to photograph a rattlesnake if I saw one? Hm. Hope not.

If I can make this all work again (or rather, if my wonderful husband can make it work, since this is done on his laptop) I'll post some Pennsic War photos next time.

promissory post

2011-08-05T18:49:00.000-07:00

I'm in Pennsylvania, at the Pennsic War, very temporarily online with borrowed equipment. I have some cool photos from Montana that I can't post yet because the thumb-drive won't show up on this machine, and I have a pre-written post about the trip that is stuck on my EEE, so much will have to wait for free wifi.
Things have been purchased (books, linen, ink-making supplies, parchment). Classes have been circled in the schedule. Sweat has been sweated. Wine and cider have been drunk. People have been hugged. And so on. I have even gone for a brisk walk in the early cool and done some writing on Not a Fairy Princess (working title). Haven't worked on Maenads at Band Camp yet.
More later.

amoeba book reproduces by fission

2011-08-01T00:59:00.000-07:00

A strange and sudden freedom has fallen on me. As you may recall, I've been
struggling along with the ever-expanding expansion of Cost of Silver,
occasionally despairing of it ever being completely filled in, and repeatedly
extending my self-imposed deadlines. Well!
Over the last few weeks, I'd been comparing the almost-completely-filled-in
first 'half' with the much-left-to-go second 'half' and realising that if I did the
English Civil War justice, I was going to have a novel of at least 180k,
probably more.
Also that, although I had tightened the timeline considerably, there was
still a natural break between part one: fen-draining and vampires, and
part two: war and witchfinders.

As part one crept up past 90k, I began to believe that either I had two books
on my hands or I needed to stop expanding and start trimming. Yikes! But this
is what's great about having an agent who started as an editor. I emailed her
and asked 'how about I send you part one and
you can give me an opinion as to which way I should handle this?'
She said 'great, send it to me.'

After some Adventures in Formatting, followed by Adventures in Printing,
The Cost of Silver part one: The Astrologer's Death, 94k,* is on its way to
my agent for her considered advice.

And its author is on her way to Pennsylvania for two weeks of mostly-offline life.
I've brought actual paper notebooks and pens, so I'll still be writing. I'm planning
to mess around with a YA story idea riffing on the YA paranormal romance genre,
most easily summarised as 'Maenads at Band Camp". I think it will be fun.

Posting from Missoula Montana - goodnight!

*part two stands at 55k, which is a little under where the sketched-out first draft
stood when I started expanding it in January. So I must have written about 90k in
7 months. Maybe I really am a 'book a year' writer!

making our own fun

2011-07-19T20:41:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I helped build a clay oven, in hopes of using it during our upcoming Living History Week. We've had ovens from time to time, the first being built of broken bricks on site, covered over with clay and straw then disassembled with a hammer at event's end, the later one being built of clay over a tall basket and fired by burning the basket inside it. That one lasted a couple of years but was a bit delicate for moving back and forth to the site. Eventually its makers smashed it up cathartically.
After that we did without. But an oven is such a handy thing to have, and opens so many possibilities, that the idea was never quite given up. At last Joan bought clay and offered her patio as an assembly site, and Ina, fresh from a course on cob-building, offered her expertise.
I brought the basket.

Here Ina directs her two lovely assistants in preparing the sand-and-clay cob mix.

After the base has been covered in clay, the inner frame of the oven is established. Rowan is eagerly squishing clay into a sheet to begin covering it.

Halfway up with the first layer. Ina works up more clay and sand. We covered the frame with an inch-and-a-bit of cob mixture, then left it overnight. The next day we painted it with slip, then added a thinner layer of cob mixed with short-cut straw.

Some decoration to the top, as with some of the English examples, in a rope-twist pattern, and the youngsters could not be deterred from painting it over with slip once more.
It has to dry for a couple of weeks before we even think about firing it. We'd like to be able to put on a hand-cart and wheel it around, but we might have to settle for standing it on a couple of trestles.

mapping the coastline

2011-07-13T21:57:00.001-07:00

I am learning that I am utter pants at estimating the wordage it will take to cover some chunk of plot. Pathetic is what. In April, when I was coming up on 105k, I thought I might be finished with another 10-15k. Now I'm nudging 140k, and losing hope that I'll be done at 150k. 160?

Griffin joining King Charles's ill-thought-out excursion of the second war against the Scots? I figured that would take up maybe 10k, a chapter and a half, maybe another 5k, tops, to get him back home.
What did it take? 30k, not counting the getting home part.

Lately I've been filling in Alice's storyline, and needed to set up the fellow she eventually marries, a thatcher. So I went back to the fenland riots and gave him the task of getting the sedge-loaded barge up to the sluice gates and burning them down. A couple of paragraphs should have done that, right?
But when I'm there with him, hearing the sedge burn, smelling the smoke and the wet wood of the gates, I realise that it couldn't have been that easy, and that the barge has to (magically) move to block his escape. He has to make it out of course, to marry Alice, but it couldn't have been that simple.
Ah, it's the coastline paradox in action. Beforehand, the distance to be traversed looks fairly smooth and simple. But when I'm on the ground, looking around, that wiggly-but-mostly-straight line turns out to be deep-cut zig-zags of little coves and beaches and ravines and inlets. How far inland should I follow an inlet before I decide that I've lost the coast? How far out should I follow a promontory before I risk getting cut off by the tide?
How closely should I follow the coast?

I imagine it as the coast one gets here in the Pacific Northwest, trees to the land's edge, crumbling rocks, crunching barnacles and slippery kelp, skimpy little beaches reachable only from the water. And somehow I have to traverse it before the end of the month, because in August I'm off to Pennsylvania for 3 weeks.
I wonder if there's a Search & Rescue operation for writers?

happy thoughts

2011-07-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

Because I am grumpy and achey and the deer ate the new little branch my cherry tree had grown, here are some pictures of cheerful things.

The first fresh pie of this year: rhubarb from our garden, and strawberries from a winery / berry farm up-island. There weren't quite enough strawberries for a second (frozen) pie, so I filled it in with brandy-soaked raisins that happened to be in the pantry. I have no idea how a rhubarb-strawberry-brandied-raisin pie will turn out, but I will report whenever we get around to it.
Is it just my frame of mind, or is there a goofily distressed face in this pie?

Dining al fresco in the back yard: a light salad, a jug of wine, and thou beside me. Not singing, though.

From the Vancouver trip a few weekends back. This is in one of the little ferries that go back and forth from Granville Island, Vanier Park, Science World, etc. Nostalgia time, as I used to take very-small-Chris on them when we attended the Children's Festival, usually with a firm handhold on the back of his shirt as he looked out the entry.
Now he is grown-up-Chris, and that's Shannon on the other side, and Mark taking the picture. We entertained ourself by seeing who could spot the silliest boat name as we rode by.

garden cat

2011-07-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

photo credit: Mark Shier

The leafy things are tomatoes. Lucky this wasn't a soaker hose.

Happy Canada Day weekend to all to whom that is appropriate! I will be writing, so enjoy the fireworks for me.

maze of mazey words

2011-06-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

Since today I am kind of achey and grumpy, I will think happy thoughts.
First being that I had a lovely weekend, with a Saturday trip to Oldfield Road farms and nurseries, though I restrained myself and did not buy another fruit tree. This time. Or another old rose. The greengage plum tree I bought last visit is planted in the front lawn, and doing all right so far.
Sunday Anna and I visited Damali Lavender farm for a fundraiser for the Cowichan Valley hospice. A low-key, relaxed event, with tables of rummage-sale goodies and baskets, musicians and storytellers.
The site is gorgeous, an older house with pillared veranda at the top of a rolling slope planted with lavender (more kinds than you could guess, all neatly labelled) and rows of trellised grape vines, as they've moved into winemaking. The slope runs off into a meadow (or hayfield, depending on time of year I suppose) where visitors' cars are parked. We arrived a bit early, and were the first car directed into the field. One of those moments where you're not quite sure you're in the right place, or whether you're being set up for some sitcom moment of mistaken identity ("Ah, you must be here to apply for the position of governess!")
We visited the lavender shop, where I bought a copy of Labyrinths of British Columbia and a little gauze bag of lavender. As a child I bought my mother a lavender sachet each summer, so the smell is a sentimental one for me. Though I have to say, after a few minutes in the shop I couldn't smell the lavender at all, it was so pervasive.
At the bottom of the hill is a simple Cretan labyrinth, as shown in the pic above. I trotted down the hill to walk it, while Anna listened to the harpist up above. The pattern is one I've seen before, and I will have to get my mazes books out and identify it before it drives me mad. A pleasant meditative walk, though I never get any particular insights or enlightenment walking a maze. (I can't meditate worth a damn either.)
Back up the hill to hear local author Carol Matthews speak about mazes and memoirs, using Ariadne and her thread as a metaphor for choosing a path through all the memories and possible beginnings.
Then a drive to Cowichan Bay for lunch and some shopping. Bread, and cheese, and crafts at Spinning Ninny boutique, where we both loved the needle felt dolls by Anne Fulton - I wish I had pictures to show you how cheerful and comic they are. Plump roguish angels, chubby ballerinas who embody 'dance like nobody's watching', all so happy in themselves.

Writey stuff, also happy. Well sort of. I mean, it made me happy to have it work out. As you know Bob, I've been expanding The Cost of Silver, and that means I've been tossing plot threads out like fishing lines, unsure which ones would catch. (possibly more like grappling hooks, the sort that will pull free when you haul on them, and fall onto your foot in a slapstick fashion.)
A scene added in the fenland draining sequence brought in crook-backed Nell, who taught Griffin how to cast his spirit into a bird's body and 'ride' it, which they did together to fly over the dykes and discover something creepy and plot-relevant.
That meant Nell would be one of the witches hanged in the witch-hunt sequence, hitherto unnamed. But, I thought, what if...
What if Griffin called a bird, and 'rode' it to the gallows, and snatched Nell's spirit from her body?

Over roofs of tile and thatch, over the fallen stone of the Abbey lying like a mason's sketch beneath, the swallow's wings resolute, swift as its heart.
May be thou shalt die when thy mortal frame hangs, Griffin said, and she knew him beset more by curiosity than grief.
May be I shall turn bird and forget woman, she answered. But my end shall come winged and not choking.
She forgot her companion a while in the joy of air, riding the buffet of gust and pull of wind. A hawk cried somewhere behind and the swallow's unthinking craft dropped her low among alder, darting and fleeting between branches.
Griffin's body lay in bracken, sprawled long-legged and awkward. She fell from the air onto the broad hat that lay across his face, feet scratching and sliding before she found their workings.
I am sorry, she said within herself. I grieve for Nan and would have given myself for her an I could.
Aye. He withdrew, pulling himself from the bird as a man thrusts off a rain-soaked coat. Dost forgive me, Nell, that I leave thee bird-shaped? 'Tis a poor rescue.
Have done with regret, she said. What shall I do with wings but fly?
He loosed her and fell away into his body. The swallow-woman sprang onto an alder twig and waited for the man to stir and roll over.
#
Griffin lay on bracken, wearied to the marrow. He tipped his hat back to watch a swallow dip and swing in the air, higher and smaller until his eyes watered and he lost the black speck into the blue.
#
In Bury's market place, one of the condemned witches had fallen into so deep a swoon that she could not be made to climb the ladder and stand for the noose to be tightened about her neck.
At last the hangman lowered the rope, two men held the woman upright between them, and he fixed the noose there upon the ground. With a haul and a grunt, he dragged her up. She did not kick nor thrash, only swung neat as a bell-rope to and fro.

red rose and the white

2011-06-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

One of the backyard gallicas, with bonus ladybug.

One of the backyard albas, half open.

Bonus book link: if you are interested in diversity in YA general fiction (as well as fantasy), have a look at Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Books recent post on the Nerds Heart YA contest. Both books discussed look like ones I'd pick for my occasional forays into non-genre reading.

just a little reader rant

2011-06-23T21:53:00.000-07:00

As you, my hypothetical reader, probably know, I'm into history, or at least, I'm interested in several historical periods, and I'm a material-culture geek in a small way.
I also read fantasy.

One heck of a lot of fantasy is set in medievaloid or at least pre-industrial world.
WARNING: Gross oversimplification to follow!
Much of the subgenre of epic fantasy (aka Big Fat Fantasy, aka Extruded Fantasy Product) is set in what looks like Saxon-to-Tudor Northern Europe, with a sprinkling of apostrophes across the naming system. There is usually magic, because magic is what makes things go. Sometimes magic and technology are outright enemies and one rules out the other. But for certain sure, there is no industrialisation. Imports and exports may be handled by perilous caravans, less often by ships.

In the historical real world, people in pre-industrial societies did not have cheap consumer goods. Every thing that anyone owned was made by hand, usually by hundreds of hours of labour of several people.
There were no factories turning out cheap shoes and watches and tableware. If you were wealthy, you have some remarkably fine tableware of precious metals, and lovely expensive tapestries and paintings. If you were middle-class you have cheaper imitations, still hand-made (of course) and painted or gilded or whatever you can afford to look like your rich neighbour's goods.

You have a shirt? It was made by growing, cutting, retting, beating, hackling of flax or nettles or hemp into fibre, that was spun thread by thread with a spindle, later with a wheel. That's months before it could be woven into cloth. You have a woolen gown? First someone grows a sheep, then shearing, washing, carding, combing, before the spinning. After weaving, woolen cloth is fulled, combed, and sheared to make it soft and water-resistant. Oh, yeah, then it's cut and sewn into a garment.
When your shirt gets worn, it may be 'turned' (taken apart and rearranged so the worn bits are less visible), then patched, then cut down for another garment, and so on. If you're reasonably well-off and charitable, you may give that shirt to a beggar, or you may sell it to a fripperer (dealer in used clothing) One of the frustrating aspects of studying medieval everyday life is that everyday things didn't get preserved in waste-heaps or attics. They were in use until they were destroyed.

Cloth is valuable. When soldiers looted a city, they didn't just grab gold and jewels (that's for officers...) they carried away clothing and bolts of cloth. Servants and apprentices were paid in cloth, 'enough for a suit of clothes', once or twice a year. Well into the 1800s, the stealing of clothing drying on hedges was a specific criminal trade, and small children were sometimes abducted, stripped, and released--their clothing was worth more than them.
Cloth, ironware, leatherwork, even pottery was repaired and re-used. The upper and middle classes might discard something that was unfashionable or unwanted, but the lower and criminal classes were waiting to snap it up, sell it, use it themselves, take it apart. Kind of like the ocean, with food descending from one level of fish to the next, less and less each time.

Sure, even a generic fantasy world is not actually pre-industrial northern Europe. But if your fantasy world is pre-industrial anywhere, you need to bear in mind that it will not have cheap consumer goods. Not until the Industrial Revolution does home decor achieve the clutter of a Victorian interior. Look at Dutch interior paintings.
See a lot of stuff? No.
See many things that are purely decorative and have no useful purpose? No.
Do you want your fantasy setting to be different from the modern world, to have its own texture and existence? Maybe not. And maybe the majority of readers don't worry about it. I can only speak for what I like to read. But would you lose anything by imagining your world just that much more consistently and plausibly?

This rant triggered by two stories read recently. One was by an unpublished writer on a display site, the other by an established writer in a fantasy magazine.
One story began with two young knights riding into a city. The path to the city was strewn with discarded belongings: knives, goblets, bits of clothing. No beggars had come to carry these things away and sell them. No rag-and-bone man. No mudlarks. (I'm getting 19th c. here, but my point is that even into the 1800s broken cutlery and rags had resale value). For the opening of the story I thought the city had been emptied by plague and the fleeing populace had dropped their belongings as they fled, but no.
The other story began with a corrupt city watch hassling a poor householder, demanding protection money. He refused, saying they'd taken everything. The watch roughed him up and threw him against a small table, knocking down the vase that stood on it. So, what was this everything they had taken? How well off was this poor man, to have a vase? Did he buy cut flowers to put in it, or have an extensive garden?

One of these stories I continued reading (but it was a near thing) and it turned out to be good. I just couldn't believe in the setting.
Would either story have suffered if the author had thought a little harder and made the setting work?

roses in bloom

2011-06-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

The inevitable rose pictures, since it was sunny today.
Here's the Dortmund, blooming like mad despite its chewed-up leaves. It will keep on with this into the fall. But this year I really will prune it before winter. Really.

Below is Bourbon Queen, and despite the horrid wet cold spring she is blooming. Hurrah! I was worried for her. You can see Dortmund intertwined with the Queen - mesalliance?

Sorry the focus is a bit off. I was so excited to see a bloom on the Rosearie de la Haye that I wasn't careful. I wish I could capture its scent for you. mmm.

Sir Clough, not as huge as last year but still impressive to me. This one needs pruning badly, it's getting top-heavy canes.

Just for a change, the front-steps peony, climbing towards the house instead of out to the garden. My other photo is head-on and makes it look vaguely threatening - maybe I should have posted that one?

it's a rosebud in june

2011-06-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

It's June, and that means ... it's time for flower pictures!
Here's one of the first blooms on the garage-whelming alba, just opening from fist to spread palm. I'll put up a more recent pic soonish, showing it spotted all over with white. The arched trellis we shoved in between the two bushes is completely hidden now.
The cold damp spring that we've had means not all the roses are going to bloom, but the Dortmund and the albas are showing off, and the Blanche Double that I planted last year has taken full advantage of its nice sunny location and bloomed like heck.

After three months or so of trying to dedicate every weekend to wordcount, and ending up burning myself out after a few hours and going online to look at lolcats or whatever, I decided to accept that Cost of Silver was going to take longer than I hoped, and let myself do other things on weekends.
Last weekend I drove the Malahat twice, once to visit my brother and his family, and once to visit my friend Anna.
The weekend before, Mark and I took the ferry to Vancouver and visited Chris and Shannon (which would be, for those who haven't made notes, our son and his girlfriend).
This weekend a much shorter drive into Saanich to the farmers' markets, with a last visit to Babe's Honey Farm for its last sale. Very sad about this. Babe's was founded in 1945, and went strong until Babe died a few years back. Then it was bought up, and kept going, but the accountant(?) stole about a million dollars, so now it's going under for good, and I don't know what's happening to the bees and so on. Hang on, I'll find some news stories for more accurate information.

While I was at my brother's, I dug up a row of the raspberry plants he's giving away (to replace with blueberries, a decision my husband strongly approves) and got to see his pictures of their bees swarming in the summer. Pretty amazing - a cloud of bees leaving the hive, settling on a tree branch nearby, then Pete and Laura cutting the branch off, and shaking the bees into a cardboard box, then tipping them back into the hive, where they settled again happily.
Sometimes I wonder about setting up a hive in our yard. We've had bees crawling in and out of the front porch roof, last year, and this year into the roof by the back door. I see them bumbling about the sweet rocket and the comfrey in the back yard. But I'm not sure how much attention they need, and I'm worried about pests and disease.
My plum tree, which I've mentioned before, is suffering from caterpillars (I hate caterpillars. Lots. I don't care how fluffy they are, they're evil.) and from what I fear is bacterial canker. I've been up on the stepladder trying to reach the diseased branches and cut them off, which is breaking my heart because some have plums on them. Last year the plum harvest tanked, after a few bounty summers, so every plum lost hurts. Worse, there's only a poor chance that this pruning will save the tree.

In cheerier news, I scored a free rocking chair from UsedVictoria, and passed my 20 yr old jade plant on to someone who'd just lost her 30 yr old jade plant, so that karma should be nicely balanced. I have now a rocking chair on the front porch, and have sat and read there on a few mornings already, and in the back yard I have my hanging chair, ditto. The hanging chair is becoming a lovely Secret Hiding Place as the sweet rocket grows up around it and the grape vines begin to spread over the posts.
This pic was taken at dusk, because I liked the effect, so you will just have to imagine it in full daylight.

Cost of Silver is nudging 130k at present, and I'm not at all sure I'll be able to wrap it up under 150k. I've had some plotty stuff that made me happy, so I'll post about that next time, maybe.

Photo credits this time are mine. The previous cat pic was by Mark Shier, and I should go back and add that info.

Asafia's bargain

2011-06-08T15:54:00.000-07:00

There's a discussion over on the Clarion Foundation blog about teasers, which in this case means choosing excerpts for brief readings.
The following may be too long, but I think it stands reasonably well on its own. I may be too close to the story to judge.
A scene added in the last revisions of The Willow Knot to flesh out the Wicked Aunt:

Asafia stepped into the marshwater, and black mud rose about her bare feet, dabbled at the hem of her white shift. The fat moon bleached hair and skin to like pallor with her linen. In her arms she bore bundled cloth.

"I have woven," she said to the darkness. "I have woven strong within and without, for the love I bear you and for the gifts you give."

"Weaver woman," said the darkness. "What do you bring me?"

Asafia shook her burden out, in meshes that caught moonlight with shadow. "A net to snare birds. To snare frogs. And those who pass between shapes shall not pass through this."

The darkness reached out with hawk's talons to hook the net, with stumpy fingers to worry at the knots, with a blunt muzzle to snuffle at the cords. "The strands sting. What virtue have they?"

"Strands of courtesan's hair for the snare of lust, plied with threads of shrouds for the grave that none escape. Washed in the tears of an infant, the monthly blood of a virgin, and the spittle of a crone."

Could she have learned the craft of House Sallew, those knots that sealed the king's secrets, how much more power would her net have? But that was an old grievance, and Asafia put her niece's sullen obstinacy out of her thoughts. This prince of the marshes was cunning, and she must not be careless.

Its tongue rolled out, touched the net and shrank back snail-like. "What ask you for this?"

"A flask of nix-water." She added, "And safe departure from your lands."

The muzzle flattened to a child's pouting mouth, sharp teeth showing as the upper lip drew back. "The night'll come that you forget, and I'll have your blood and bones."

"Then who should make you a net to snare the silver birds?" Asafia threaded scorn into her voice. "You'd sooner have one dish than a hundred meals?"

It squatted at her feet, shapeless as a trick of weary eyes. "Such a dainty dish that one would be, white as swan's flesh." A stinking sigh fluttered her damp skirts. "Well then, clap hands on a bargain." It held out fingers like rotted twigs, and Asafia took them in her clean hand, felt them yield in her grip like a cluster of frog's eggs. It giggled. "Be one with me, you'll need no nix-water to change your shape."

Asafia said, "To be consumed comes to all mortal flesh without your aid. Give me my flask."

bike to work week

2011-06-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

So I have been biking to work. So far (cross fingers, knock on wood) the weather has cooperated by not actually raining, and not being too hot for comfortable bicycling.

Registrations have opened up for the 3-Day Novel Contest, so I will be getting mine in. I wish I had any sort of idea for this year, whether plotline, conceit, opening scene or character. The last few mornings I haven't even been able to remember my dreams.

The weekend before last I cut about 4 inches off my hair, by the expedient of braiding it tight to the end, and cutting across the braid. Now my brushed-out hair is only to my waist, and braided hangs to the middle of my back. It is even across the bottom, which it has never been, creating the illusion that my hair is unexpectedly thicker.
I find myself fiddling with the tail of it, and having odd tactile memories of my mother's hair. She had the most gorgeous thick auburn hair, shoulder-length and wavy. The very tail-end of my hair verges on her colour, but mostly mine is duller and browner.
My mother was the last person to cut my hair, in September of 1974, shortly before she died. I wondered if I would have a massive spasm of regret after hacking off the bottom part, but so far I haven't.

In other news, I still haven't finished The Cost of Silver. It is the book that never ends.

no cat here

2011-05-27T21:35:00.000-07:00

Because she is expertly camouflaged.

And now I must go offline and write 500 words of fenland riots before I can go to bed. But in good news, Oliver Cromwell has made a personal appearance and a brief speech, at a time and place where there is some documentary evidence he actually was, though I had to make up the speech and am now guilt-wracked in case I got his style wrong.

photo credit: Mark Shier

still here

2011-05-22T19:48:00.000-07:00

The twenty-fourth of May
Is the Queen's birthday.
If you don't give us a holiday
We'll all run away.

As you may have noticed, the world didn't end, and the Rapture didn't occur this weekend. Which I'm quite pleased about, as here in Canada we have a long weekend, and I'd hate for it to be interrupted by the Tribulations. (The caterpillars are a problem, but not--thankfully--a plague).

It may be that prophecies are in the air, but I was moved to rant over on Evil Editor when the umpty-umpteenth query involving a prophecy and a chosen one who was the only one who could deliver the land from the evil. The chosen one, by the way, was an adolescent girl.
Which is not to assume that the book (or any of the other books fitting those criteria) is necessarily a bad book. Just a book with a plot that made me bang my head on the nearest available flat surface.

In the invaluable Tough Guide to Fantasyland by the wonderful and much-missed Diana Wynne Jones, the entry on Prophecy begins :

is used by the Management to make sure that no Tourist is unduly surprised by events, and by GODDESSES AND GODS to make sure that people do as the deity wants. All Prophecies come true. This is a Rule.

Less succinctly, if you are a writer (the Management), you include a prophecy in your book (the Tour) so that your reader (the Tourist) will know ahead of time how the story will end.
You include a prophecy so that your characters (the Tour Companions) will have no freedom of choice and thus no character development, because no matter what they do, how they squirm, they will fulfill that prophecy line by line, no skipping ahead.
Why would anyone do that?

It can't be just lazy plotting (though that's probably a factor), because usually the reluctant heroes are coerced into action not only by the Prophecy but by some personal incentives as well (known in movie trailers as This time it's personal) such as loved ones being taken prisoner or killed, whole villages being slaughtered, the world is going to end and that means him and his little dog too, .... So if your plot is already poking your character with pointy sticks in the direction you want, what's the prophecy for?
I suppose there's some fun in reading on to find out what twisty language and hidden meanings the prophecy will turn out to be using, but that's kind of a thin, distant pleasure, isn't it? Like doing a really old crossword puzzle.

Where does this expectation of prophecy come from? Tolkien didn't make a big deal of prophecies in Lord of the Rings, as best I recall. There was the business of the sword that is broken, but that was more of a sad song than a directive. David Eddings used a prophecy extensively, but in a rather more unusual way, by making the prophecy a character of sorts.
Maybe if I had read lots of Big Fat Fantasy aka Extruded Fantasy Product I'd have a better idea of the origins and requirements of prophecy in fantasy. Maybe I'd even see the point of it.
But the next time I see a query that uses the word 'prophecy', I'd be thrilled beyond words if it turned out that the prophecy was false or mistaken, or referred to something else entirely. Or was a trap set up by the Evil Overlord.
Or, heck, was just misinterpreted several times, so that everyone thought it had already been fulfilled. How many different historic events have Nostradamus's prophecies been refitted to?
After all, if Mr. Camping can get his doomsday prophecy wrong, why should Seers, Dreams, Runes and Omens always get it right?

writerly fussing

2011-05-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Thing I learned recently.
Battles are like forests, in the struggle to establish and describe the same bloody things all the time (trees and explosions) without either continually repeating oneself or, alternatively, looking as if one has shaken the thesaurus out over the scenery.
The historical Battle of Newburn was fought and lost between dawn and afternoon. It took me three bloody days to finish writing one character's experiences in it. Gaaah. Anyway, done! Then the retreat after it, which dropped said character into a nest of Northumbrian witches, to improve his education. (Wherein the writer is beset by doubts that this expansion is unbalancing the novel...)

I swear, action scenes are the hardest for me, like wading through molasses. Dialogue? Dead easy. Description, I'm not crazy about, but it can be knocked off in under three sentences usually. Openings of stories, no big deal. Action? A constant struggle.

In other news, I've hit the stage in this work where I become convinced that I've lost the voice, and that everything I'm adding is written in an utterly flat and modern style that will jar the hypothetical reader entirely out of the story.
Fortunately, because I know I'll think this (it happens with every 3-day novel), I can pretty much disregard my misgivings and struggle on.

In still other news, my left shoulder decided to act up for a couple of days, twinging and whingeing in just the same way it did before I was diagnosed with arthritis. So I gave in and took a couple of Naproxen, the NSAIDs my doctor told me to stop taking, and hey, they worked.
The flare-up may have been because I'd been taking the lower dose of methotrexate for some months (8 pills instead of 10 on Happy Methotrexate Day). Hopefully it doesn't mean I need to change or adjust the meds, because I've been pretty happy with the lack of side-effects so far.

You receive this post because it has been so long since I posted, and now you see that it is because I have nothing to offer but angst.

Right. Back to the saltmines.

Skychair west

2011-05-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

is up! So it must be spring in Victoria. The rocket is sprouting, the fruit trees are flowering, and it only rains a couple of times each day.
Below is our bluebell woods in miniature.

The downside is that chilly weather has meant we are only now seeing the bees bumbling about, and the wind and rain have stripped the plum blossoms, so pollination may not have happened.
And the caterpillars are back. I've clipped three nests off the Spartan tree, and have been up on a ladder searching the plum tree for the little buggers. I have come to understand why 'caterpillar' was an insult in Shakespeare's time--they chew the blossoms off their stems and leave them hanging, and they take leaves down to the base so the twig dies, and they're nearly invisible until the damage is done and sometimes after.

Well. Anyways.
Beans and peas planted in front and back gardens. Strings holding back the raspberries.
We have rhubarb. So far I'm keeping it in check with a bowlful in the morning, but since I hacked off 4 crowns and replanted them around the yard, next year may be overabundant. Note to self: look for rhubarb recipes.

And I am about to stuff William Lilly, Astrologer, into The Cost of Silver. I may not be able to get Nicholas Culpeper in (what a stand-up guy he was!) without bending space and time, but I'll give it a try. Then I just need to make sure I haven't sprained continuity beyond mending.

If you were wondering

2011-04-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

The answer is no. Many words, many well-researched words were added to The Cost of Silver, but no, this draft is not finished.
It's looking like 10-15k still to go. And I am still having qualms about the ending. Do endings need some vaguely redemptive aspect? Or is bloody unrepentant revenge enough of a closure?

I feel as if I should insert one of those cheesy 'Under Construction' gifs here.

glass has class

2011-04-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter! Or other seasonal celebration as appropriate to your tradition!

A brief post because this long weekend is the last push for the expansion of The Cost of Silver. I have the Battle of Newburn to write, the arrival of the Undertakers at the fen, and the death under witchfinder questioning of the only really sympathetic character in the book.
Why yes, I do expect this all to be a bit emotionally draining.

As a relief to that, some non-writing news. For Christmas, Mark got me via Groupon two sessions of a glass sampler class at DeBrady Studios. It was popular--I got into the classes this month, Wednesday evenings.
You can see the work layout above. The first half of each session was lecture with samples. Mr. Brady is an enthusiast: his most used phrase was "Wait, I'll show you one." And that in addition to the many samples of different glass crafts he already had out on the table. Then the class divided into two groups to try one of the aspects of glass craft, afterwards swapping table-ends to try the other setup.
I think only one person cut themselves each night. Not sure whether it was the same person.
First night was practice cutting glass with a modern wheel cutter, then swap around to cut a stencil out of 'ceramic paper', a quick and easy way to make a form for slumpwork. A sheet of glass is laid over the thick stencil, and heated in the kiln until it softens and melts into the spaces cut from the stencil. This is called 'embossed glass', and the technique may have been developed by DeBrady Glass.
You can see my piece here (that's a post-it note underneath):

The second night was lampwork beads, and I made about 5 small ones, though I fear that I heated the metal rod too much and burnt the kilnwash off it (which is what I did the last time I tried lampwork), which will make the beads break rather than be pulled nicely off.
As was mentioned in class, lampwork is quick to do but slow to do well.

The other end of the table was fusing, another in-kiln craft like embossing or slumpwork. Take a square of clear glass as base, and cut and shape coloured glass and frit (powdered glass) to make a design on it. One square to be heated until the coloured glass adheres, making a raised design, the smaller square to be heated until the coloured glass fuses into the the clear glass, making a smooth inset design.
The challenging thing about kiln work is the same as with pottery. You don't know what worked or what exploded or turned into something else entirely until the kiln has cooled and you open it up the next day. That rather attracts me--it's like baking. The question is more whether I can find anything I want to make with it.
I do want (post-novel) to go further with stained glass, the leaded kind, not the copper-foil kind which leaves me rather cold, especially when applied to building dustcatchers like model planes and houses. (I know many people find these awesome and impressive, I'm just not one of them.)
Then there's enamelling glassware, like those gorgeous Middle Eastern and Venetian drinking vessels. I've made some using low-fire enamels, but the real thing would be cooler.

I may have to write something with glass as a plot element, to justify this as research.

hungry ever again?

2011-04-12T21:38:00.000-07:00

Because I promised you this some time ago. Above is the Novelty Meat Square, and I really do apologise for it not being in full 1950s saturated colour.
Wait, let me add an equivalent picture, so you can colourise Novelty Meat Square in your imagination. This is the pic of Onion Squares.

Mouthwatering, no?
These two appear in the 'Savory Foods' section of Bake it yourself with MAGIC BAKING POWDER, published by Standard Brands Ltd in 1951. The Savory Foods section also includes Beef Crescents, Tenderloin in a Blanket, and Frankfurter Loaf.
Does Tenderloin in a Blanket sound like erotica to anyone else?
As a library tech and occasional archivist, I feel deeply that Novelty Meat Square should not be lost to the ages. This is what the recipe says:

This good supper dish is made as an upside-down cake, with a meat layer in the pan under a rich biscuit dough. We picture it turned out and topped with an interesting chili sauce meringue, as given in recipe--but a good brown sauce may be used instead.

1 1/2 pounds minced lean beef
1/4 cup chopped onion
2 tablespoons fine-flavored dripping, heated
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
2 cups coarse soft bread crumbs
2 cups once-sifted pastry flour
or 1 3/4 cups once-sifted all-purpose flour
4 1/2 teaspoons Magic Baking Powder
5 tablespoons chilled shortening
1 cup milk
3 egg whites
2 teaspoons corn starch
2/3 cup thick chili sauce

Grease an 8-inch square cake pan.
Preheat oven to 425 (hot).
Combine beef and onion and fry in heated dripping until browned; sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of the salt, pepper, mustard and bread crumbs and combine lightly. Turn into prepared pan and pack lightly.
Mix and sift once, then sift into a bowl, the flour, 4 teaspoons of the Magic Baking Powder and remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt.
Cut in shortening finely.
Make a well in flour mixture; add milk and mix lightly with a fork.
Pour into pan over meat and spread evenly.
Bake in preheated oven about 30 minutes.
Turn out onto a cookie sheet and top meat with the following topping.
Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry; combine corn starch and remaining 1/2 teaspoon Magic Baking Powder and beat into egg whites; gradually beat in thick chili sauce. Pile lightly on meat; return to oven and bake until topping is set--about 8 minutes.
Serve hot, with tomato gravy.
Yield: 6 servings.

And for dessert: Blossom Cake! (very springlike)

soul of a writer?

2011-04-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Thing that I'm rather tired of seeing, in whatever permutation: the insistence of yet-another-someone that you cannot call yourself a writer unless you {fill in the blank}.
The blank-fillers range from the quite concrete, like 'sell a story to a print market paying .05 a word or higher' to the maddeningly vague, like 'have the soul of a writer' (which demands the answer: 'but I do, in a green glass vial in my cabinet of curiosities.'). Pretty much the only thing they have in common is that they tend to be something the speaker believes him/herself to have and the addressees not to have. (Ha ha, I'm a writer and you're not!)

Pause to prevaricate: there are many ways to become a better writer, such as practice, critique, reading the work of good writers, reading books on writing technique, and so on. There are a few inborn or learned traits that will help you become a better writer, like having an ear for how people speak (this can be acquired by paying attention and making notes), having an eye for detail (same), having a good memory or an ability to visualise plot threads. But that's a modified writer, not 'a writer'. (VP injoke FTW)

If it were up to me, which praise-be it is not, I'd rule that to call yourself a writer, all you need to do is write and keep writing. I'm not even sure you'd need to finish anything, though finishing and revising and submitting are important if you want to call yourself a published or professional writer.
But in the real world which goes on without my having any say in it, nobody can stop you calling yourself a writer even if you never finish anything; even if you never write a full page (250 words in Standard Manuscript Format) but spend all your time drawing up character profiles and writing opening sentences and deciding on titles for your imagined bestseller instead.

And I'm fine with that, because whatever you want to call yourself, it doesn't make me less or more of a writer. It's not as if there are only so many stick-on badges to go around, and if you grab the last one then Patricia McKillip or Tanith Lee suddenly isn't a writer anymore.
Nor will I become more of a writer if I can somehow stop five other people from using that designation. I'm pretty sure I'd have to eat their hearts or brains to manage that.

The ABM is fired

2011-04-04T21:04:00.000-07:00

I've been writing. That is, I have been in the depths of my own brain, with occasional excursions to the Bishops' Wars and to the Fenland Riots, and to the Witch Panic. This is not actually a comfortable or relaxing tour, but it is full of incident.
I can sort of see the end of this book, if I stand on my tiptoes and squint. I'm hoping to have all the holes filled in within a couple of weeks.

So every now and then I stick my head out to see what's up with teh intarwebz, which almost always results in my staying up too late reading FandomWank or something similar. Is it my imagination, or has there been a marked increase in Authors (and Publishers) Behaving Badly over the past few months?
I mean, just on OTF (Other than Fandom) Wank, there's been (the ironically named) Chivalry Bookshelf ripping off its authors; Decadent Publishing getting over-excited over some nasty sockpuppet reviews; First One Publishing wanting $150 to take all your rights; and most recently the J Howett meltdown over a mixed review.
More fun threads on Absolute Write, in the forums, but if I look for them I'll be up all night.

Responding to a negative review is such a poor idea that it's called the Author's Big Mistake, or ABM. (Paul Fussell is credited with inventing the term) Back in the day when print was all, authors and reviewers would carry on feuds slowly, over weeks, through the book review sections and letter columns of newspapers. It was made even more fun by the likelihood that reviewers and authors were likely colleagues, published by the same presses and reviewing in the same newspapers and journals. So an angry author might have the chance for sweet revenge by reviewing his enemy's book (and being paid for the review, too).
Yeah, the fact that everyone knew it was a bad idea didn't stop highly-educated, literate and eloquent people from doing it. Some very classy invective was produced this way--but again, if I look for it I'll be up all night.
Wait, Jane Smith's brill blog How Publishing Really Works has a terrif rundown on the classics here.

The internet has made it possible not only to carry on such a feud without any timelag (and without, alas, most of the eloquence, as eloquence takes time) but for everyone and his dog-that-no-one-knows-you-are-on-the-internet to weigh in and mock and share.
I like snark (I sometime explain that we are an ESL family: the first language is sarcasm) and I'm willing to watch a trainwreck happen in realtime. But the scope of the possible wreckage is more than a little scary.
On the one hand, it's possible to have an ongoing intelligent and thoughtful conversation between writer and reviewer, online.
On the other hand, it's possible for things to explode before one party even realises the fuse has been lit.

I wonder what I'll do when/if I get my first negative review? Hopefully I'll have as much class as the author of Pregnesia does here. Or at least the good sense to bitch privately and offline.
Now, back to the fens!

Japan benefit reading

2011-03-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Most of interest to those on the BC Lower Mainland, so I can't myself attend, but just in case anyone reading this blog has the chance, here's the info:

*Japan Earthquake Benefit *

***Friends Across the Pacific: An Evening of Readings & Performances**

Join us in supporting relief efforts in Japan. The BC Japan Earthquake Fund and the Asian Canadian Studies Society invites you to an evening of poetry, fiction, and performance, with some of Vancouver's finest writers:

Daphne Marlatt, Joanne Arnott, Proma Tagore, Roy Miki, Lydia Kwa, Hiromi Goto, Fred Wah, and more!

Thursday, March 31, 2011, 8pm. Doors open at 7:30pm

VIVO Media Arts Centre, 1965 Main Street, Vancouver

By donation. All donations will go to the Canadian Red Cross through the BC-Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.

** All welcome. Must be 19 years of age or older to purchase alcohol. ID required.**

The BC Japan Earthquake Relief Fund (BC-JERF) is a coalition of volunteers; we are individuals, community groups and businesses concerned for the well-being of the people in Japan in the wake of the recent earthquake, tsunami, and unfolding nuclear threats. Our purpose is to vet and act as an organizational hub for BC communities' fundraising efforts and to facilitate the delivery of this financial aid to the affected people in Japan. Funds raised through BC-JERF-endorsed campaigns and events will be donated in full to reputable charities operating on the ground in Japan, such as the Japanese Red Cross.

Community Partners: VIVO Media Arts Centre, Powell Street Festival Society and Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.

For more information contact: Julia Aoki, Communications Coordinator at julia@bc-jerf.ca

books, book-talk, and race

2011-03-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Terri, I'm sorry, this will probably give you another book to read--but it's a very fast read!

So, I recently finished Half World, by Hiromi Goto, a sorta-local author (lives on the mainland), book trailer for which can be seen here. The back-cover copy reads:

MELANIE TAMAKI IS AN OUTSIDER
As the unpopular and impoverished only child of a loving but neglectful mother, she is just barely coping with school and life. But everything changes on the day she returns home to find her mother is missing, lured back to Half World by a vile creature calling himself Mr. Glueskin. Soon Melanie embarks on an epic and darkly fantastical journey to Half World to save her mother. What she does not yet realize is that the state of the universe itself is at stake....
Award winning author Hiromi Goto's novel is an adventurous, genre-bending fantasy of shape-shifting characters, tortured half-lives, and redemption.

Wow. This book moves at a dead run. There are two prologues, one distant past and one recent past. The first is a pared-down legend-backstory, but the second is grab-reader-by-throat.
Then the story proper begins, as Melanie's mother goes missing, and she gets a phone call (on a disconnected phone) from the deeply-creepy Mr. Glueskin telling her what she has to do if she ever wants to see her mother again. Because the reader has already encountered Mr. Glueskin in the second prologue, this is even creepier than Melanie knows.
Melanie makes a believable young heroine, sometimes frustrated and overwhelmed, sometimes hasty and resentful, but always picking herself up and 'doing what's nearest'. She has no special powers, only determination and a loving heart--a refreshing change from the YA heroines who are billed as kickass tough girls but are passive and helpless when the crunch comes. (And hoorah, she is a chubby kid and does not become magically thin-and-pretty by the end of the story.)
The horrors she faces in Half World aren't cheap blood-splatter special effects, but subtler and weirder. I thought there was an influence both of the Japanese ghost scrolls and of the Buddhist hells, and maybe also Stephen King's Overlook Hotel, which is to say, pretty damn creepy.
So yeah, if you haven't read this book already, you should go and read it.

You can guess, thus, that when I heard Hiromi Goto was delivering the keynote talk at a conference at the university where I work, I knew I'd have to be there. Even if not for myself, for the others on the book-chat forum who'd read her work.
The conference info is here. Curious, If True: The Fantastic in Literature.
I would have liked to attend the whole thing, but I was booked already to leave Friday for a medieval event in Bremerton where I'd be taking a new apprentice--not something one can reschedule easily. And Hiromi's talk was the highlight.

After some to-ing and fro-ing to find out about registration, which turned out to be on the other side of campus, but which I didn't really need to deal with anyways because I wasn't speaking, just listening, but let me be useful in walking one of the real attendees over to find the secret hidden building he needed, I was in place with coffee and snacks and a copy of Half World in good time. Here's my notes, filled in and cleaned up. Anything incoherent or wonky is due to my errors of transcription and memory.

The title of her talk was: "Escape Procedures May Not Have Been Designed To Your Specifications: Some Thoughts on Race and Representation in the Literature of the Fantastic"

Hiromi Goto is a small compact woman with fairly short grey hair and a face either smiling or seeming about to smile. She is very present, almost concentrated, in the space she occupies (I'm not sure if that's a clear explanation). She spoke from written notes, at first with her eyes on them, gradually more confidently and with less referring. She began by acknowledging that this was the territory of the Coast Salish peoples, and thanking them in Japanese for allowing her there.
The spark for her talk was the not-too-long-ago kerfuffle over the filming and whitewashing of the Earthsea books. Having read the books in her youth, Hiromi's first reaction to the fuss was 'wait, Ged's not white?' Then she was embarrassed: at a time when she was reading avidly and hungrily for characters like her, (enough that she was thrilled and touched by the Chinese character in A Cricket in Times Square, only later recognising him as stereotypical), how could she have missed that Ged was not another white character?
In part because she applied the author's race to the characters. In part because of the author's conscious decision to provide the physical clues gradually, to get the (possibly-resistant white) reader into Ged's skin before noticing that said skin was brown. And in part because the clues about the culture of the islands of Gont (bronze-smithing, goat-herding, witch-women, women's magic being 'rubbish and humbug', dragons) were not sufficient to mark it as a non-European culture for her.
A distinct race (like the Karg?) will be set against a 'normative' race. Readers within a culture that has a dominant race will assume that the unspecified is the dominant. The attempt to envision and write for a 'universal reader' erases difference and homogenizes, which ends up being exclusive rather than inclusive.

Pause to describe the concept of umwelt (German, the surrounding world), the perception of the world related to oneself, through constructions of one's body, education, desires, past. The understanding of the world can be very different even by organisms that are quite similar. A meadow will be understood differently by a fieldmouse, a hawk, and a farmer, and different again by a second farmer. No one umwelt is correct or dominant, each is true for the one within it. Neither is that understanding fixed. One's self alters within different contexts, one isn't a neutral subject. She compared this shifting and altering to the altering of perceptions in optical illusions where foreground becomes background.
Goto's family came to Canada when she was three. She remembers English being incomprehensible babble to her ear, and remembers text moving from incomprehensible to meaningful as she learned to read. As she read, she didn't at first notice the absence of 'people like her', only as she encountered the few that existed in fiction did she become aware of the lack.

Representing diverse races and cultures requires complexities, and the necessities of narrative prune away complexity. Thought must be put into the complexities of race: what effect does it have? The markers of race include colour, hair, language, cultural practices and religion. Not all of these will have space in the narrative, but there is more to representing diversity than providing different skin colours.
LeGuin diversified sf/f, but race is more than skin colour. Goto considers Always Coming Home to be the more effective treatment of race. She uses the term Terra Racialliblendedis to refer to the setting where everyone is mixed or non-white but there are no differences in culture or custom, even in food, and cites The Hunger Games as an example. Given the near-future setting, it's implausible that racial and regional differences could have been subsumed so completely into class differences.
Race is inextricable from political discourse: multiculturalism, immigration, economics etc. Racial narratives can be deadly; she gives the example of the black man seen as criminal. Brown bodies in literature have been locked in the attic or the kitchen, or banished to jungles and forests for exotic background.
Sf/f provides room to imagine different worlds and futures, but setting the brown body in a supposedly post-racial world and flattening the differences inherent in race and culture presents its own problems. Fantastic literature can push at the boundaries of comfort, but is read by the reader within her own social context / umwelt. The reading of the fantastical other is the reading of one's imagined self.

We cannot escape our context, even reading for escape, but we can dismantle, small step by small step, and move toward a place where escape is no longer desired.

After her talk, there was some time for questions. A couple of questions asked on how to represent other cultures respectfully, and what would affect your decision on whether to use one culture rather than another. She suggested (to a question that came perilous close to whining about touchiness) that peoples need space / chance of their own representation, that it may be appropriative to make use of a culture that hasn't had experience of its own (representational) space yet.
The concept that struck with me was 'narrative prunes away complexity' and since I'd recently read a Quill & Quire review of Half World, where the reviewer regretted that the story spent so little time on Melanie's life before the crisis, and wanted more time spent on the world and how it worked, I asked whether much had been pruned from Half World.
Answer being yes - that an earlier draft had been probably 400 pages, and the last was less than 200 (not sure if that's mss or printed - the pbk is 233 p.). The present opening scene of ch.1 was originally ch. 15 or 16. Much was pruned out by the pressures not only of narrative but of market considerations and the intended audience.

Then I had to run away back to work, and was unable to stay for the readings and panel discussions. But I did get a copy of Half World signed, and found out where I can buy her other books (the university bookstore - have not found them at the local indies.).

readers' rights: my pledge

2011-03-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

I've been stewing over this for about a week, trying not to get all ranty. Then I read Janni Lee Simner's call to action, and had (yay!) permission to rant.
(A good link roundup on YA Highway here , including a link to Zoe Marriott's fine post on the insecurity that makes writers vulnerable)

As I've said, repeatedly and recently, I was a reader before I was a writer. I'm still a reader. If some wicked fate forced me to choose, I'd weep and wail and hammer the walls... then choose reading.
Something you learn, hanging out with readers, whether in person or online, is that tastes differ. The book one person thrusts into your hands promising that it will Change Your Life is the book someone else gets three pages into and gives up on. The protagonist who is one reader's ideal lover is another's pretentious git who needs smacking hard.
The internet has made it a lot easier to have entertaining, spirited (yet usually civil) discussions about books with people whose perspectives are quite different from mine, and to read reviews of books I might never have known about, reviewed by people who are insightful, funny, and sometimes snarky.
Which means I am not thrilled by the chilling effect of recent tweets and posts suggesting that Negative Reviews Will Be Held Against You (Caps of Portentiousness, found in all the best fantasy novels). At present I find it doubtful that I'll be asked to blurb someone else's books, but I sincerely hope that any blurbing I do would be based on what I thought of the actual book, not whether the author reviewed mine.

Anyway, presently I have no influence, to raise or to crush. I hope I would never want to crush someone for being passionately engaged with books, or for bringing the snark. So here's the little that I can do against the chill:

My Pledge of Readers' Rights
If my books are sold and published, and people I've never met read them, I hereby admit the following rights to any and all such readers:

1) The right to not like my book, and to think it is crap.
2) The right to stop reading and to judge my whole book on howeverlittle you read.
3) The right to completely miss my point.
4) The right to dislike any of my characters, even based on a partial or inaccurate reading.
5) The right to dislike my prose style and to quibble with my word choices.
6) The right to find fault with my plotting, worldbuilding, or other big-picture aspects.
7) The right to share these opinions in person, twitter, blog post or other social media as they appear.
8) Other rights that seem good and reasonable and occur to me later.

I do not grant to the reader the right to make me change something already published.

I have the responsibility to act like an adult.
That is, the responsibility to listen to criticism with attention, using my own critical faculties to find what's useful and what's not (just as I would with a workshop critique).
That is, the responsibility to not hold grudges or look for ways to do down someone who doesn't like my writing however they express it.
I was tempted to weasel here, to say something about tone, about even-handedness, but given that writers generically want nothing but praise, in bucketloads, even-handedness is way too difficult to quantify. As a reader, you have a perfect right to think that anything I've written is a load of crap and to say so, in those words or similar.

I retain the right to bitch in private to my friends about how you completely missed my point, dear god do these people have no reading skills at all?

To which I set my hand and seal, this fourth day of March 2011, when I should be finishing my revisions and not blathering online.

snow and sociability

2011-02-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

A lost work by Jane Austen? No, the last week-and-a-bit here.
Mark has been away in Arizona, at the semi-disastrous Estrella War, and I've been here, cleaning and tidying the house (to my specs, which may not be universally accepted) followed by spreading my stuff around on the excavated horizontal surfaces. Sometimes I danced around the house singing 'Mine, mine, mine.'
I watched--while rowing--How to Train Your Dragon, which I enjoyed greatly. Mostly I've been watching videocassettes with subtitles, because the rowing machine is kind of noisy, and I'm usually rowing early in the morning, when I don't want to turn the sound up to bellowing level. Previously I've watched Comet, Butterfly and Sword; Lady Hermit; Legend of Zu; Zu Warriors; The Crimson Charm; Magnificent Swordsman (gave up on that one). How to Train Your Dragon made for a change of pace and genre.
That was not the sociable part though. The sociable part was last weekend, when I had visitors, yes. Thursday, our friends Paul and Shona came for dinner, even with the warning that I was only making tuna casserole (comfort food). Friday, Stephen was in town to attend a concert and spent the night here. Saturday and Sunday, my friends Lynne and Tony came over from Seattle, and we had dinner at the Won Ton Noodle House (yes, that's its real name) and lunch the next day at the Penny Farthing, and talked a lot, about writing and reading and work and collecting and stuff. I got to talk about my writing! and believe that the other people were interested and not just being polite! The food was terrific too--I'm astonished I've gone so long not knowing how good the Won Ton Noodle House was. I must make up for lost time.
I know I'm very lucky in having online friends to whom I can go on about writing & about my books. But there's still something special about being able to talk to someone face to face--and it is lovely for the ego to talk about my own characters and stories more than about the craft of writing. Though I suppose doing it regularly would result in unsightly bloating of the ego.

Yes, it has SNOWED in Victoria and the Island generally, between 5 and 20 cm on Wednesday. When I got up, 6ish, there was only a little, but it came down hard, and by the time I set out to work I'd had to shovel the front walk and sidewalk twice. I did the neighbours on each side as well, because it's always a toss-up whether someone in Victoria even owns a snowshovel.
So gorgeous, though. Until later in the day there was no wind, so the tree branches were all laid in with white, the grey and black underlying it like shadows. Except for ruts in the road and the shoveled walks, the snow was smooth as if it had been sanded down. Every now and then a powdering would fall from the trees or roof-edges, and spread itself out, vanishing. Only later did clumps fall and leave their ghost-tracks.
I made a half-hearted attempt to bicycle, but that didn't work at all. The slush built up between tire and fender, and the ruts in the road sent me slithering sideways. So I walked to the bus stop and waited nearly half an hour, during which time about 5 buses should have gone by, but didn't (2 went by in the opposite direction) and all the people who were waiting when I arrived gave up and went home. I might have been able to walk most of the way to work in that time, but given how many sidewalks weren't shoveled, it might have been difficult.
Wednesday was the day Mark got back, so on his return from the desert he was greeted by snow.
The cat is confused by the whole business. Last night she was so whiny about wanting to go outside, then refusing it when the door opened onto a world of white, that I tossed her out into the snow, where she remained, bleating and unmoving, until making a sudden astounding leap back through the door, without touching the snow in between.
Cat-butt-print shown below:

in the continuing series

2011-02-21T14:56:00.000-08:00

Of things I said I'd blog about later: Notes from Mary Robinette Kowal's talk on Readings, given at the World Fantasy Convention 2010.

Usually, it seems, this talk has a much longer time-slot, so she was rushing and hitting the high points, with an invitation to join her in the bar afterwards for a more detailed discussion. Unfortunately I wasn't able to follow the mass that went on to do that, so this is only what was said in the time allotted. Also, only what would fit on the back of my namecard, since somehow I did not have a notebook with me (this is really unusual - I don't know how I wound up walking around without a notebook. Next I will not have a book to read, and then you can take me away raving.)

So, the high points, or what I wrote down of them.
Be loud: this means not yelling but projecting. You don't want to wreck your voice, so use what you learnt in choir or drama class, sit or stand up straight and give your lungs room to fill. Keep your head up and aim for the back row (My mum used to call this 'the deaf old lady in the back row.)
Slow down. You want to run at about 150 words per minute (this is the recommended rate for recording audiobooks). She pointed out she was being a poor example, because she was rattling along talking fast to cram as much of the content in as possible. Practice reading your selection aloud, and clock yourself to make sure you're not speeding up.
Tell the story. Practice, read it aloud beforehand and get familiar with it. As much as possible, tell it without reference to the page, and look at your audience. Make eye contact and watch their reactions.

Choosing which piece to read:
It should be self-contained, without requiring a lot of explanation beforehand or during, and have some sort of closure to tie it off.
It should have a small cast, so that you don't have many character voices or presentations to keep distinct.
It should suit your voice.
It should lend itself to being read aloud, with onomatopoeia and strong rhythm to the sentences. (think Just-so Stories).

The narrator is a character, whether named as one or not, and has to be distinct from the other characters. The narrator is the gateway, and the narrator's attitude determines the audience's interaction with the character. Decide how to play the narrator.
Note the key words in each sentence, give them weight.
If the selection is first person, narrator shouldn't be too different (gender, age) from you, or audience will be distracted & maybe confused.

To distinguish characters, use:
Pitch--learn your pitch by humming high to low
Placement--voice is different when it resonates in back or front of mouth, chest, sinus, movement of soft palate
Pacing--give characters different speeds of speaking (remember to keep own speed down)
Accent--if you are using one, make sure it's accurate, better to use rhythm, pacing & inflections
Attitude--if you speak with a smile, or as if you're angry, the same words sound different

She talked briefly about microphones, but I didn't make notes on that, only mentally resolved to avoid the damn things. If I can teach an Ithra class without a mike, I ought to be able to read aloud without one--I doubt the audience would be any bigger, and probably smaller.

Hmm, that's kind of skimpy compared to how it looked in rough notes. So, my review, then?
Well, it's always worth while watching Mary Robinette Kowal. I would probably attend a panel on, um, ichthyology if she was the speaker, because she's just that lively and engaging. Also she would give all the fish different voices and gestures.

Anyway, with that in recent memory, I paid close attention to Robert Lloyd Parry's performance of M. R. James's ghost stories in November (a run of three-name names - is it significant?) as mentioned here.
He was playing the narrator - Montague Rhodes James, a Cambridge don, and in the second story, the main character was also an academic, and the introductory part of the story was banter at a college dinner, so the characters had similar accents and to some extent similar delivery.
He dealt with this by using posture and body language - it was clear that one character was seated and looking up, and the other standing, looking down & interrupting the first one's meal. The seated character (our MC) he gave a slightly querulous, nasal tone, and when the bluff old soldier appeared, he got a lower in-the-chest voice and a slower speech.
The first story had a historical setting, with characters of different classes, and he kept with James's somewhat caricatured country bumpkin form for the servant, lengthening his vowels and speaking slowly. The squire had a more peremptory pace, and the vicar slower but higher and quieter.
What impressed me was how willing he was to employ movement--even though he mostly stayed seated--and to convey fear (by breathing and pitch mostly) which I think I would be very self-conscious about doing.
And of course I was massively impressed that he was doing it all by memory, with no reference to a text. Tell the story indeed.

I am a hamster

2011-02-13T12:54:00.000-08:00

Only less cute. Just the puffy-faced, snuffling, huddled-amidst-crumpled-paper features, the paper being kleenex rather than the crumpled paper balls that iconically signify the trials of literary creation. (tangent: what will be used to signify false starts now that paper is so rarely required for them?)
Yes, I still have the horrid cold. At least today is sunny and clear, unlike the streaming rain of yesterday. Also, last night, after I got up to clean up the cat puke, I dreamt I was on a double-decker bus with Neil Gaiman.
So things balance out, I suppose.

I meant to do a post about things I don't like reading in fantasy: monocultural worlds. But I will use the horrid cold as an excuse to postpone that, and instead refer you to Zoe's excellent post on building multicultural worlds here.
And to the works of the late (and much-missed) Jo Clayton, most especially her three Wild Magic books.
And to the works of Martha Wells, especially City of Bones and Wheel of the Infinite. There's also a moment in The Wizard Hunters where someone from a culture that has no representational art (only pattern making) encounters a trompe l'oeil painting and is fascinated by the idea of painting that looks like real things, which made me-the-reader bounce happily.
And obviously to N. K. Jemisin and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and its sequel The Broken Kingdoms.
And to Alaya Dawn Johnson's books Racing the Dark and The Burning City. Which I want to post a proper review of, when my head contains more braincells than mucus. Short form--Racing the Dark does have some first-novel markers (I don't hate adverbs, but I do notice them) but damn! the world building and the non-generic settings and the heart-wrenching turns of the story and the characters and ... oooh.
And, natch, a pointer to Terri-Lynne DeFino and her first novel Finder, set in a big sprawly fantasy world that (yay!) is not Northern Europe with jumbled place-names.
There are more, but they must wait until the proper thoughtful analytic post. Suggestions welcome....

mostly medieval, otherwise history

2011-02-10T20:41:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday was the University's Medieval Seminar, run by Continuing Studies. This year the topic was especially interesting (to me) Medieval Lives.
The talks were as follows:
Program:
9:00 am Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:10 am Introduction, Dr. Marcus Milwright
9:30 am Everyday Life in Scotland during the Viking Age, Dr. Erin McGuire
10:10 am break
10:45 am Abelard and Heloise: Lovers in a Dangerous Time, Dr. Iain Higgins
11:30 am lunch and film presentation
12:45 pm Medieval Map Project presentation
1:00 pm Byzantine Lives Under Siege, Dr. Evanthia Baboula
1:45 pm The Caliph al-Muqtadir (908-32) and the Fall of the Abbasid Empire, Dr.
Hugh Kennedy
2:45 pm break
3:15 pm Christine de Pizan, the first Man of Letters, Dr. Helene Cazes
3:45 pm Closing Remarks

So overall, pretty cool. Erin kept her audience on their toes by starting with questions to them, and asking them to come up with possible explanations for unexpected grave finds and so on. The Christine de Pizan talk ran out of time before it ran out of interest, which is better than the alternative, but frustrating still.

Above, in a pic not taken by me (I'll check and get the credit right later) you can see the site and the setup, during the talks, while things are quiet. Between lectures, we're 'on', and chatting with the attendees while they get their coffee and biscotti. But during the talks, we may attend them or do other things. In the photo I was losing at checkers to a 7 yr old, while his sister walked the labyrinth. (I evened the score later at 9 man's morris.) The lady on the right is warping a tablet-weaving loom, the lady in dark blue is embroidering, and the lady in light blue is playing a harp
Also, yes, I chose this picture to show off the labyrinth and painted floor and backdrops that I painted my own self. Because I think they are pretty cool, actually.

What I should have been doing was getting further ahead with calligraphing the contract indentures for my apprentice-to-be, Deirdre, whom I'll be taking at the end of the month. Writing out two copies of a longish contract, to be cut apart in a sawtooth pattern (the indenting that makes it indentures, in case you wondered) isn't done in one hour or even two. (I'm hoping to get it finished this weekend.)
But I flatter myself that I was still doing something useful, in keeping the kids amused. We also had a non-rules-based foot ball game with the leather-stuffed ball, down past the catering tables and through the empty part of the hallway.

On Wednesday Mark left for the Estrella event in Arizona, with the van, so I am non-vehicular for a couple of weeks, and forced to get my own dinners. I took today as vacation so I could get started on straightening up & tidying the house--after us getting everything medieval out for the display, and then everything needed for a week's medieval camping, the house was in some disarray. (Shall I admit it? I hadn't finished boxing up the Christmas decorations.)
Today was thus spent moving things around and establishing my laptop and immediate-research books on the kitchen table, next to the woodstove; clearing off surfaces; dusting; sweeping; stacking books; and coming down with a streaming headcold that I finally have to admit was not just a response to the dust kicked up by previous activities.
Bugger.

Writing-related, Cost of Silver: I'd reduced the 20-year span of happiness between major threats to 5 years, and am now reducing it by another year or so, by sending Griffin off to war. The Bishops' Wars, in Scotland, so as to include gritty uncomfortable historical detail and increase wordcount.
Originally, after being turned down by apprentice-girl Alice, Griffin was to find comfort and eventual love with Nan Moray (older than him OMG!!!). In revision, he's going to be a sullen overdramatic young idiot and respond to being turned down by going to 'list for a soldier. So a few thousand words of enduring hardships, seeing nasty things happen, engaging in some himself, staying alive, and coming back sadder & wiser and all, then finding comfort and love with Nan. Must figure out which historical figures he'll encounter.

Do I sound a titch cynical? this is because I've been reading Rebels and Traitors, by Lindsey Davis, a novel set in (shoehorned into?) an exhaustively detailed history of Civil War England and the fall of Charles I.
I should say first that it's well written and often engaging, and Davis knows the times and events surpassingly well. Too well, perhaps, and as someone who loves the details herself, I think I can identify when someone has given in to including something because it is just that cool, regardless of whether it assists the story or characterisation.
This would be a pretty good, fast-moving, eventful novel, if you stripped out the irrelevant detail. This would be a fascinating, detailed 'narrative non-fiction' history if you stripped out the invented characters and plot. But as it is, you have both, for 742 pages, and you may be constantly shifting mental gears between fiction and non-fiction--not to mention keeping track of rather a lot of invented characters and rather a lot of historical ones who have walk-ons to be name-checked but don't affect the plot.
On p.14, I encountered this sentence: 'To set the moment in context, that year of 1634 would see the notorious witchcraft trials at Loudon, the first meeting of the Academie francaise, the opening of the Covent Garden piazza in London, and the charter for the Oxford University Press.'
In case you're wondering, none of those have so far appeared in the actual narrative. Then the exposition continues for a page and 2/3ds, bringing us up to date with events in the Americas, continental Europe, and Wales.
I'm not sure I can pull this off, myself.

mixed bag

2011-02-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

Bluebeard Contented is up at Cabinet des Fees - yay! This one was workshopped at Worldcon and beta-read by a couple of writer-friends before I finally sent it in. CdF was the first and only market I thought of for the Perrault-with-a-twist version.

To balance that, the first rejections of the year, one from Weird Tales

Thanks so much for submitting your piece to the One-Minute Weird Tales. We have had an overwhelming positive response! Alas, we do not have the room for all the wonderful stories submitted so must pass on this one. Again, we thank you for thinking of Weird Tales.

And one from ASIM

Thank you for submitting to Andromeda Spaceways.

Sadly, we find that we can't use your submission at this stage.

Thank you again, and we hope to hear from you in the future.


See our Hints and Tips page: http://www.andromedaspaceways.com/slush.htm

both form. Which reminds me that I need to start a new Rejection Pledge!

Unearned Specialness

2011-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

As I've said (perhaps too often) before, I'm a reader before I'm a writer. So I tend to critique stories rather more from the stand of 'would I want to read this' than 'is this the way I would write this'. Not, I must note, from the stand of 'would a lot of people I don't know want to read this', because I can't claim that. For one thing, I find ungraceful or incorrect prose a serious stumbling block, and clearly many readers don't.
*insert obligatory Dan Brown / LKH jab here* But let's not get into the bestseller discussion this time. All I can contribute is that it seems to me the key to bestsellerdom is to appeal to people who don't usually read. The audience of people who read regularly is not large enough (and possibly too divided by genre) to create and sustain bestsellers.

Bear with me, because much of the thinking that follows is still shapeless. I'll try to clean it up as I go.

In a bookshop, I will put a book back if the back-cover copy says something like 'only s/he can save'. Or promises me that the character will discover his/her Destiny. Yes, this may be unfair, and I know as well as anyone that back-cover blurbs are as accurate as tabloid headlines.
But there's still a good chance that I'm being offered a story where the protagonist (or perhaps I should stay 'main character') is Special just because s/he is Special. The MC doesn't look Special, of course, and may be almost aggressively ordinary at first glance. But when danger and crisis hit the plot, and the MC is pushed to the brink, and all looks hopeless ....
*dramatic music*
the MC reaches inside him/herself and discovers an unguessed (but perhaps foreshadowed) power that s/he instinctively knows how to employ and that saves the day or at least the chapter.
If I have bought this book, it goes on the booksale pile right there.

Heck, I can understand the appeal of this trope. It's flat-out wish fulfilment, the dream that I, ordinary as I am, will when faced with crisis rise to the occasion and triumph. It's the 'mom lifts car off kid' myth. But the trope departs from the dream in two ways.
First, the character can keep on lifting cars for the rest of the book, with little or no training.
Second, only this character can lift cars, even if other characters have cars fall on their kids.
If everyone is special, no one is special (another reason why Specialness makes me twitch is that it's inherently non-egalitarian) so the best way to be Special is to prevent anyone else becoming Special. With the author on the MC's side, you get a few possible outcomes.
1) only the Designated Love Interest can also become Special
2) anyone else who becomes Special comes to a bad end or turns evil or both
3) no one else becomes Special, they just worship the MC.

Ah, but don't I have shelves full of books about exceptional characters? What about Simon Templar or Modesty Blaise? What about all those swordplay videos?
Hm. A constant of martial arts movies is the dreaded (okay, I love 'em) training sequence, usually involving pain and drudgery, even humiliation. Skill is paid for--earned. Modesty and Willy Garvin train daily, bruisingly, even after their 'retirement', and the debonair Saint puts time in to earn his marksmanship.
In other words, even those with natural talent have to work at it. The message is there if you want it: you could do this too, if you worked at it. Maybe not as well, but it can be done.

Jules Feiffer, in his 1965 essay "The Great Comic Book Heroes" notes that he 'couldn't stand' the boy sidekick characters attached to Batman, Green Arrow, etc. because he believed he had a chance of growing up to resemble the grownup heroes, but knew he couldn't ever be like Robin, Speedy, or Bucky, characters his own age and already astoundingly skilled. He knew the boy companions were intended for boy readers like him to identify with, but they didn't work as intended.
Likewise, while Unearned Specialness works for many readers, it doesn't work for me. Why? I admitted it was an appealing dream, so why do I resist it?

One reason is that it destroys suspense. (I'm working at not naming any specific books or authors, so I apologise for vagueness.) Once a character has reached inside himself and discovered his inner powers or had the plot whisper its secrets to him, my assumption is that he will deal with all subsequent challenges the same way. After all, who wouldn't? I don't need to read the rest of the book, unless I skip to the end to see what became of secondary characters I liked.
It makes me resent the MC on behalf of the other characters--this happens when I believe the narrative is engaged in special pleading for a particular character--who are being used to contrast with the MC's awesomeness instead of having their own aims in the story.
It prevents--for me--identification with the MC, because I can't suspend that disbelief. I can't believe in grabbing a special power out of thin air will happen for me, and if it did, it wouldn't make things easier. How can I share the rejoicing in a victory when I didn't share the struggle and uncertainty of earning it, because it wasn't earned?

It ties in to the Mary Sue dilemma, well-discussed by Marie Brennan here. How to write an active, effective female character without her being tagged as a Mary Sue?
The big first step, in my opinion, is to not make her naturally talented unless she does the work to back it up. Even people with perfect pitch have to learn to read music, have to learn breath control, have to practice.
Second is to allow her to fail, and to fail through her own lacks, not because of the machinations of an enemy. If she fails early in the story, I am put on alert that she may not succeed later, I become concerned for her success, I begin to root for her.
Third, but by no means least, is to allow good characters to dislike or be indifferent to her, to have their own aims that don't concern her. One character that I quite liked for herself lost my sympathy when I realised that all other characters alliances could be determined by what they thought of her: anyone who disparaged her was later revealed as EEEEEvilll. (An alternative is for anyone who disparages to be forced to admit how wrong they were.)

Naturally I had these points in mind while I was writing Mylla in The Willow Knot, but I'm not sure those cogitations would be of particular interest, what with it being unpublished and all. Also this post is fairly long already. And has no pictures to enliven it.

The daydream of becoming unexpectedly powerful or wealthy or beautiful or famous and coming back to show all those people who were mean before--it's an appealing daydream to the star of it, but other people's daydreams are like other people's dreams: from outside they're boring and incoherent narratives. So the appeal relies on whether the reader can put herself into that starring role. Most of the time, I can't.
Which leads into another half-thought-out topic, using a quote from one of my 3-Day Novels: "Who are you in the story you are told?"
I'll see if I can put that one together more elegantly next month.

three times a bridesmaid

2011-01-26T20:11:00.000-08:00

Never a bride? Or is it like a midway game, where if you win three small prizes you can trade up to a larger, and up to a big plushie?
Which is to say that the 3-Day Novel Contest results are out, and this is the email I received this morning:

Hi Barbara,

Congratulations on making our Honourable Mention list once again! As always, the judges very much enjoyed your novel. Like last year, because you made it so far in our judging process we'll be offering you complimentary entry to the upcoming contest... so I hope you are ready for yet another round! We'll be sending out your certificate and entry coupon in the next week or so.

Best,
Melissa for 3DN

I honestly didn't expect to make the shortlist this year, since Archipelago, basically 'Barbara does a Jo Clayton pastiche' was classed in my mind with Trading in Ghosts, something that might work up to a full-scale fantasy novel with a bunch more plot and characters stirred in, but wasn't necessarily a tiny perfect object like Fold (Fold is an egg: to change it would require breaking it). So that was an exciting way to begin the day.

Here's the full notice, swiped from the 3-Day website, and can I just say that I would love, love, love to read the 2d runner up? Also, Gayleen Froese, a shortlister, is the author of Touch, a book given to me by my awesome apprentice (and fellow writer) Alis, and published by NeWest Press in Edmonton . Oh, and another shortlister, Paul Colley has put his novel, co-written with his 12 year old daughter, on Lulu, to be found and ordered here. Worth mentioning that Paul used the Wondermark Genre Fiction Generator to outline their plot (which like most outlines, was abandoned early on in the process, or at least mutated beyond recognition).
And because I guess I should plug it, my previous 3-Day entries have been collected into Threefold: a nine-day novel, on Lulu, which can be purchased here (or downloaded for free).

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Jennifer K. Chung of Bellevue, Washington, for TERRORYAKI!

Jennifer K. Chung, photo by Gavin Jensen

About the Book
It’s three months until the wedding, and Samantha’s Taiwanese parents won’t warm up to her hopelessly white fiancé. Meanwhile, Sam’s food-obsessed sister, Daisy, is on the hunt for an otherworldly take-out truck whose dishes are to die for. Terroryaki! is a quirky tale of love, family, redemption and the best—if slightly cursed—dish of chicken teriyaki to be found in this realm of existence.

About the Author
Jennifer K. Chung is a Taiwanese-American writer, pianist and software engineer. She grew up in Southern California and studied computer science at MIT in Cambridge, MA. In her spare time, Jennifer plays keyboard in a goth metal band and studies the Japanese martial art of Naginata. She lives near Seattle.

SECOND PRIZE WINNER

Gwendolyn Bird of Kasilof, Alaska
For The Island of Broken Toys, the haunting tale of a community of mysterious children who seek out the truth behind their exile.

THIRD PRIZE WINNER

Tate Young of Toronto, Ontario
For The Ridgeback, a witty thriller about a bloody murder, a very large diamond and a dogwalker on the run.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Jon Billman of Stillwater, Oklahoma, for Bicycle Tramps
Alan James Blair of Stillwater, Oklahoma, for The Mermaid’s Brother
Jenni Bomford of Prince George, B.C., for Spiritual
Keith Chittleborough of Glen Waverley, Australia, for Near Dreg Experience
Paul Colley & Laura Colley of Pickering, Ontario, for Clockwork
Logan Evans of Pullman, Washington, for The Boundary Nebula
Gayleen Froese of Edmonton, Alberta, for What the Cat Dragged In
B. Gordon of Victoria, B.C., for Archipelago
Diana Holdsworth of Amherst, Massachusetts, for The Golden Tooth
Jimmm Kelly of Vancouver, B.C., for The Little Man
Ashok Mathur of Vancouver, B.C., for The First White Black Man
Iulia Park of Toronto, Ontario, for Canadian Experience
Rudy Thauberger of Vancouver, B.C., for Evil Beach Dance Party
Jake Wallis Simons of Winchester, United Kingdom, for 24/3
Jenny D. Williams of Brooklyn, New York, for The Widow and the Twin

We’d also like to give special mention to this year’s youngest entrants, three-time contest veterans Natasha Carr-Harris, Abby Adams and Sean Vipond, as well as our latest under-10 entrant, Albrightine Ngusurun Orsar.

reconstructing Dad

2011-01-16T14:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, I had a specific reason for traipsing off to Vancouver last weekend. To meet my other (half) sister, Lorene. We'd arranged online to meet at the Starbucks in the Chapters store in Metrotown--whenever possible I try to arrange meetings to take place somewhere indoors with food or books to divert whichever person has to wait. And since it seemed likelier that Lorene would have to wait, and since I knew she was another book-lover....
For a wonder, BC Ferries and BC Transit cooperated, and I made it from the 9 am sailing to the Metrotown mall just after 12:30. We'd exchanged descriptions of clothing the night before, and Lorene was already sitting down with her coffee when I reached the mock-iron railings of the Starbucks. We recognised each other easily.

The last time we'd met, I'd been in my early teens and she was a young mother, a couple of years before my (our) father died. I don't remember it very well, and she remembers it as rather a flying visit, because we weren't able to stay until her daughter got home. This was a more extensive meeting: we left Chapters about 3pm.
Some of the talk was 'catching up', though Darlene had filled us both in to some extent. Most, though, was sharing and comparing memories of our father. What term to use? Lorene began with 'our father', though as we became more comfortable, and talk became more fluent, she slid into 'my father'. I stayed with 'Dad', avoiding the pronoun issue.
Comparing notes: did our father have a webbed toe? Yes, two (I have also). Was he an atheist or agnostic (agnostic, but was confirmed Anglican the year after me, so he could serve as a warden for All Saints church).
Swapping stories he'd told: how he got the little scar on his forehead (hit with a lunchbucket in the schoolyard). The time he (very young indeed) and a friend sold tickets for a made-up show. I had more of these--although I'm bad at names and dates, my memory for narrative and dialogue is good, and Dad only had to tell me a story once for me to have it down.
Matching memories: what subjects he taught, what he'd filmed for commercials, family friends who had farms we'd visited as children. Lorene had more of these, having been older and more attentive when Dad was alive. She told me how she'd watched the changes at the film studio he'd done work for, as it went from studio to shop to restaurant, and we digressed to memories of Vancouver neon signs and when Vancouver, New Westminster, and Burnaby were separate places.

Our father was born in October of 1903. He liked to say that he was a year old when the Wright Brothers flew their airplane, and he'd lived to see the moon landing.
He also used to say that his family was the most important thing in the world to him, and that he didn't care what happened to the rest of the world as long as his family was all right. Argumentative child that I was, I would object that without the rest of the world, our family would be in a sad way. Now I wonder whether he included his other daughters when he said that? He continued to see them when he could, and Lorene remembered that when she'd hoped to attend SFU, he and my mum had offered to have her stay with us.
Lorene and I are both the older sisters. One doesn't often get to meet someone who was in the same birth order to the same parent. I think she may have been a 'daddy's girl', as I was. We both learnt to love books and value education, though she wasn't able to go for university until she retired.
Her memories of our dad, all that came up in our first meeting, are positive and fond. I've been braced, a little, to admit Dad's faults, to discover (as in fiction one does) imperfections and failings that might diminish him. That hasn't happened with either Darlene or Lorene. Maybe because my vision of him was realistic already, or maybe because he really was a good father, if not consistently a good husband.

It seems to be rare to not have unresolved issues with one's parents, and the common desire I read of is for 'closure' (a concept I don't quite believe in) and to hash out what went wrong in one's childhood. I didn't feel that either of us were looking for closure, only to fill in the spaces in our father's memory, to hear the stories he would have told us if there had been time, and if we had known to ask.

I'm on a boat!

2011-01-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

BC Ferries have wifi now. So I'm sitting in the upper lounge with my Eee and we're just about to Active Pass. A couple of minutes ago, the Captain announced that there was a pod of orcas on the port side, which is where I am. So I stood up and looked out to see a shining fin and back arch out of the water and down again.
We are curving between piney-backed islands crouching in the pale blue water. The rain of the last 3 days has gone, though I see gray cloud over Vancouver, my destination.
I meant to do a couple of ranty posts about things I dislike in fantasy novels: the hero(ine) of Unearned Specialness, and the CGI Ending. But I think I will stop and just stare out the window until we hit open ocean.

telling ghost stories for Christmas

2011-01-03T21:12:00.000-08:00

or, Our second visit to Hemingford Grey.

"Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about specters.” (Jerome K. Jerome, 1891 introduction to an anthology of Christmas ghost stories)
As traditions go, it's one I prefer to eggnog.

My favourite author of ghost stories is Montague Rhodes James, a Cambridge don, mediaevalist and antiquarian. His stories are marvels of restrained creepiness, and for all his indirection, some of his ghosts will stay with me forever. I know one or two people who won't sleep in a room with a spare bed, and I'm probably not the only one who for years could not sleep with any limb protruding from under the covers.
So when I learned that during our time in England there would be an evening of M. R. James ghost stories at Hemingford Grey, I knew I had to be there.
Here, have the whole blurb, since there will be performances going on into January and February:

Ghost Stories told by candlelight
Robert Lloyd Parry presents Ghost Stories by M R James told by candlelight in the 900 year old Music Room

Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook and The Mezzotint
Friday 14 January 2011
Saturday 12 February 2011
Thursday 24 March 2011

O Whistle and I’ll Come to You and The Ash Tree
Saturday 15 January 2011
Thursday 10 February 2011
Friday 25 March 2011

A Warning to the Curious and Lost Hearts
Thursday 13 January 2011
Friday 11 February 2011
Saturday 26 March 2011

Doors for all performances open at 7.30pm for 8.00pm
Tickets: £16.00, to include a glass of wine.
For tickets to any of our events please telephone The Manor on 01480 463134 or email diana_boston@hotmail.com

Here is the Music Room, and yes, the gramophone trumpet is just as huge as it looks. You could hide a medium-sized child inside it.
So. I will pass rapidly over the morning and afternoon, which were spent visiting my uncle in nearby Perry, then in missing the last bus to Hemingford Grey, then in taking the bus to St. Ives and walking from the Hemingford roundabout to the Cock, (rather than waiting for a cab) as advised and accompanied by a charming young man who was walking his very energetic spaniel in the hopes of exhausting it. Lastly in having a more-rushed-than-expected dinner with Mark, who had been waiting for hours. But I made it, we did have dinner together and it was very nice, and we walked to the Manor in good time. And I must say that even a high-ceilinged Norman stone chamber, once you've put a dozen or so people in it, does warm up enough for the removal of jackets and scarves.
We found our seats, the same improvised seating of cushions and mattresses that Lucy Boston had put together for music evenings with serviceman and aviators during WWII (Mark and I were seated on the seat cushion removed from her car), candles were lit, and we waited.
I was watching with particular interest not only because 'Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad' is one of my favourite James stories, but because I was hoping to pick up tips on effective reading aloud, to add to what I'd noted down from Mary Robinette Kowal's presentation on reading your work aloud, at WFC.

Robert Lloyd Parry, dressed and groomed for the part, does have a striking resemblance to photos of Monty James. He carried himself and spoke as I'd expect an Edwardian don to do, and he didn't break character. Mark asked me afterwards whether his tongue had even once touched the roof of his mouth, and I thought not.
Parry--James?--entered, and sat in the high-backed chair provided, a table beside him with a decanter of what looked like brandy but I'm betting was cold tea. He tells the stories, without notes but with occasional props of documents or boxes. He acts the parts, not only 'doing the voices' (as my son called it when I read him bedtime stories) but changing his posture and gestures to indicate different speakers. He does well with James's donnish humour, and gives it good value. He is quite willing (and this is where I would be afraid) to portray the extremes of fear or despair, and able to keep the story coherent while he does.

The first story was The Ash Tree, and I was teasing Mark about spiders beforehand, though I kept from linking my thumbs together to do spider-hands along his leg (I have some sense of self-preservation).
After a break for a glass of wine, we resumed with Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, which turns on the Halloween rule of 'never take anything from the dead', and has one of James's best ghosts ever. I'm torn between this one and 'Lost Hearts' for most memorable ghosts. More use of props, here, as the story begins in a university dining-hall, with the dons chatting. Parry had a bowl of soup on a tray on his lap, and made fine play with the spoon and bowl to establish the seated speaker and the standing interlocutors.
You'll notice I'm not saying much about the plots, because if you haven't read the stories already (and thus know the plots) you should go and read them now. You can do it online, here. Or you can order the dvds of Parry's performances--I bought the first one that night.

After the misadventures of my arriving, it was a relief to learn that Diana Boston had found someone attending who'd come from Cambridge, and we rode back with a young couple who lived only a few blocks from the house where we were staying. The alternative would have been hiking across a pitch-black sodden field to a bus stop outside a defunct hotel, in hopes that the 11 pm bus would stop for us.

A good evening's entertainment, and I didn't dream of spiders or strange hopping, fluttering figures following me, though they'd certainly have had every excuse.

another new year

2011-01-01T16:49:00.000-08:00

Which I can't say in sparkly shortbread, alas.

One of my Christmas presents from Mark was a membership in LibraryThing, which I fear will not enhance my writing productivity. Already I have discovered the joy of adding a book that no one else has, alternating with the joy of seeing who else has the same books. This with only 50 or 6o of my books added, and no adult fiction yet.

A shared Christmas present was a 2d-hand rowing machine, plonked now in front of the television. Mark is up to 40 minutes at a time, I'm at 20, and using it to catch up with the videos and dvds that I've bought over the last few years and haven't gotten around to watching. I'm favouring HK movies with subtitles, so I don't have to bump the volume up to hear them over the machine.

Much happy Christmas baking still remains, including rolled shortbread, pressed shortbread, iced cut-out cookies, chocolate shortbread, cheese shortbread, spicy cheese cookies, honey cookies, oatmeal shortbread, butter tarts, candied grapefruit peel, sugared walnuts, melting moments, bar shortbread, domino cookies, toffee candy (it was meant to be fudge), gingerbread snowflake cookies, one piece of birthday cake, gingerbread cake, butter pecan cookies and coconut macaroons. So if it were to snow for real and we were to be trapped at home, we wouldn't starve.

But now it is the New Year, and time to get seriously serious about finishing the revisions on Cost of Silver. This means writing more scenes relating to the draining of the fens, the English Civil War, and the witch hunts. There may have been cheerful things happening in the latter 1600s, but I'm not sure any of them will appear in the book. Angsty angstiness is the tone of the era, with occasional gallows humour.
Also: writing down actual comments for Anne's excellent slice-of-lowlife novel The Sleepy Teepee. And thoughts on possible markets.

food and family, that season

2010-12-30T16:20:00.000-08:00

Not too much to say here, just enough to keep the photos from being too puzzling.
Chris came for Christmas, is now off at a cabin in Sooke (not our old home, but one with power and running water) and will be back for New Year's. He just missed connecting with my brother, my sister-in-law Laura (pictured here with Mark and the back of Cedric's head) and their kids, who came by on the 28th and filled the kitchen nicely, as you can see by the second photo below.
The hare hanging from the rack is plush, we are not aging our meat in the historic fashion.

These are most of my nephews and nieces on one side of the family, with a significant other for leavening (he's the one in the striped shirt).
We had to bring in a few extra chairs. It was raucous and cheerful, and the cat hid upstairs until everyone had gone.
Can I remember names? Um. Cedric, who sings opera; Jason, Piper's significant other; Piper who's supposed to look like me; Graeme, Ivan the youngest, Josephine the shy one; Helen whom you can't quite see, Hannah who has been carving Christmas dinners all week - and I'm missing someone, I know it.

Happily baking still, and just the other day finished decorating the cookies with this batch of golden bells. I'm quite taken with the little holly leaf sprig, as you can tell.
I do need to do another dozen tarts, because the pastry won't keep forever. Mark has asked that I stop at 3 dozen butter tarts, so I may do the rest as pecan tarts (that is, the same filling, but over chopped pecans instead of raisins), or look at some other tart recipes. If I'm feeling adventurous. Maybe there's one that can use up an apple or two.
We had roast ducks with wine & bitter cherry (correction per husband: sour cherry) sauce for Christmas. Duck curry the next two days. I took the leftover cherry-wine sauce and used it in gingerbread cake, but I have to say the water-from-boiling-grapefruit-peel is more effective. I suppose the spices and molasses overpower any weaker flavours.

And since I promised, here is my super-garish birthday cake!
It's a butter cake with butterscotch icing, ornamented with butter icing left over from the roll cookies in a festive design of stars and holly (or possibly, green bats with red eyes). Around the outside is happy birthday Barbara in sloppy red icing, or Barbara happy birthday, or birthday Barbara happy, depending where you start.

New Year Merry Christmas and Happy to you!

walking into the books

2010-12-27T14:11:00.000-08:00

This is the post about Hemingford Grey Manor that I promised weeks ago.

First, background: the Manor was built in the 1100s, of stone, and is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited house in England. It has been adjusted in various ways over the centuries, most notably in the Tudor age and the Georgian, when it belonged to the Gunnings (of the 'beautiful Gunning sisters') who completely covered the Norman stone with a symmetrical (and much larger) Palladian exterior--which burnt down in the late 1790s.
In 1937, Lucy M. Boston bought the Manor, and spent the next two years restoring it. At the time it looked like a 'semi-derelict Georgian farmhouse', only one Norman window showed and only two rooms were livable. But she had fallen in love with it, and decided 'if this should prove to be all there was, I would yet live in a house that had a window into the twelfth century.'

The Manor became her muse. 'All my water is drawn from one well,' she said. 'I am obsessed by my house. It is in the highest degree a thing to be loved.'
At the age of sixty she began to write, and her first novels were published in 1954. The Children of Green Knowe was illustrated by her son, Peter Boston, and her publisher explained that they did not illustrate books for adults. So it was published as a children's book, and became the first of six Green Knowe books.
The Manor, under various names, features in all her novels except one (The Sea Egg), always as a haven, sometimes an ambiguous or embattled one. The countryside around the manor plays its part, from the winter flood that The Children of Green Knowe opens with, to the river Ouse (in the picture here) that is the setting for The River at Green Knowe.

The books: In the first book, young Tolly (Toseland) goes to stay with his great-grandmother, whom he has never met. He arrives during a flood, and is rowed to the doorstep. I want to quote swaths of this, because it is beautifully and sensually written, from the train crossing railway lines covered with flood water, to the entrance hall 'hung all over with mirrors and pictures and china'. But I'll try to restrain myself.
'Toseland waved the lantern about and saw trees and bushes standing in the water, and presently the boat was rocked by quite a strong current and the reflection of the lantern streamed away in elastic jigsaw shapes and made gold rings around the tree trunks.'
He meets his great-grandmother: 'She had short silver curls and her face had so many wrinkles it looked as if someone had been trying to draw her for a very long time and every line put in had made the face more like her.'
Tolly's father and stepmother are in Burma, and he feels alone and placeless. At Green Knowe he finds his family's past, in a place where past and present are not so easily distinguished, where he is welcomed to both.
While Tolly has an ancestral claim, his mother's family of Oldknow being descended from the Roger d'Aulneaux who built the Norman house, the other child who finds a place there is Ping, a refugee child who arrives in the third book The River at Green Knowe. By the fifth book, An Enemy at Green Knowe, Ping and Tolly stand together to defend their home against the conniving Dr. Melanie Powers.
'Green Knowe was full of mysteries. Certainly it was welcoming and comfortable and rejoicing and gay, but one had the feeling that behind the exciting colours and shapes of its ancient self there might be surprises from the unknown universe; that the house was on good terms with that too, and had no intention of shutting out the un-understandable. Of course, it was largely Time. Surely Now and Not-now is the most teasing of all mysteries, and if you let in a nine-hundred year dose of time, you let in almost everything.'
The house: With the aid of Peter Boston's line drawings and scraperboard illustrations, I knew Green Knowe as well as my own home. The nursery with its angled ceiling and rocking horse casting shadows across the wall, the Knight's Hall with its arched windows and high ceiling, the entrance with carved cherub and witch-ball. The thick stone walls that had withstood centuries, and the river that ran quietly alongside, sometimes waking and spreading across the fields.

Before taking up writing, Lucy Boston was a painter and musician, and along with her writing, she was a remarkable quilter and gardener. The fictional topiary garden of Green Knowe and the actual topiary garden of the Manor grew alongside each other.
Here is Mark taking the path through the gardens to the river walk. We came in November, when the gardens weren't at their best--they are famous for roses--but the topiary remained stalwart.
The weather had turned bitter cold and windy, and when we reached the house, Diana Boston told us to come in even though we were early. Mark said he'd be glad to come in out of the cold. She laughed and said 'Out of the wind, maybe. Not out of the cold.' Stone houses are not known for their insulating and heat-retention capacity.

No pics of the Manor, sorry, but you can see a little in their gallery here. Outside it was too bloody cold to stand about, and inside they ask that you don't take photos--though I expect there are plenty on flickr, taken with cell phones and all.
I had been to Hemingford Grey in '04, but without Mark, and since he was also a fan of the Green Knowe books, coming to them as an adult, I'd wanted to visit again with him.

Visiting the Manor is like walking into the books. Over the years, as Lucy Boston describes in her memoir Memories in a House, she collected things that had appeared in the books, and added them to the house. The most recent addition, Diana Boston told us, was the Saint Christopher statue that protects Tolly from demonic Green Noah. Lucy Boston based it on one in a nearby church, and when The Children of Green Knowe was filmed for British television, the company created a statue, which Diana managed to acquire rather than letting it go into the rubbish.
The first time I visited I was in a constant state of 'oh look, there's the Green Deer! there's the window Tolly and Ping look out of at the end of Enemy! there's the carved cherub!' and when Diana Boston put Tolly's carved mouse into my hands (close your eyes first) I was in something near book-ecstasy.
I managed a bit more restraint this time, but it still taps into that childhood imagining that if somehow I could manage to want to enough, I could get into that other world, step through the looking-glass, open the wardrobe door, climb into the painting, shrink to toy-size and catch the dolls moving.
I don't know of another place where the walls between real and imagined are so thin, as thin as the walls between past and present are in the fictional house of Green Knowe.
The nursery is the exemplar. In the photo linked, it is tidy, but depending when you visit, the toys may be put away in the chest or strewn about the house, being played with by visiting grandchildren, great-nephews and nieces, or recently rescued from dogs--the wooden doll has had its arms chewed off--because it is part of a living house, and at the same time it is the very room in Peter Boston's illustration.

Hemingford Grey village is madly picturesque. Here's just one of the thatched timber-frame cottages. Up the street is the post office, which came near being closed down for lack of funding, but was taken over by the parish church.
The colour of the plaster is Suffolk pink (though this is Cambridgeshire), it and yellow being favourite colours of plaster in East Anglia. (They were made with local ochres originally, and you can now buy housepaints in the same tints)
The village does manage to support a gastro-pub, the Cock, where I had the local cider, Cromwell, and the pigeon breast pictured in a previous blog entry.
Hm, I think I should leave the Ghost Story evening to another post, since this one is already longish.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

And Happy Boxing Day! Have some shortbread with sparkles.

afterlife of books

2010-12-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

I've been effectively offline for a week, so it hasn't been just my blog I've been neglecting, and I do still love you all. Truly. What has been occupying me was the United Way booksale, an annual pre-Christmas event at UVic. Donated books, cds, LPs, etc. are sold off in a 3-day binge that takes weeks of prep, a day to set up, and at least a day to clean up after. I came in peripherally, as a scout for more-valuable donated items that could be put into the silent auction, and ended up being on board for the whole week of the sale, aside from two meetings already booked.
When I went home each day I was too wiped out to go online--I'd just eat dinner and go to bed. So I have no idea what's been going on in the world all last week. Or even what's been going on in Fandom Wank.

On the other hand, I got to spend five days messing around with printed books, which is always a Happy Thing. I know some writers find the proximity of many many books to be dispiriting: Robert Benchley was said (by Dorothy Parker, I think) to find (used?) bookshops depressing, because he would look at all those volumes and think of every one of the writers behind every one of them, and how each writer had finished writing, put down his pen and thought 'there, that's it, the last word, all that needs to be said.' And the books sitting on the bookshelf, unwanted.
Some writers are agin' the resale of used books, given that the authors & publishers get nowt for them. Others are cheered by the possibility that readers of their used books will go on to buy copies of their new books--this option only open to writers with continuing careers. As a reader, I know I've gone on to buy books by authors whom I learned of from library or 2d-hand reading, so it does work. And, um, yes, I did bring something like 3 boxes of books back from the sale, myself.
I promise you a later post, with pics, from the 1960s-70s cookbooks I snagged during packing up. Though I admit to bitter, bitter disappointment that the photo for 'Novelty Meat Square' is only b/w and not full 1960s colour.

There's something rather marvelous (to me) about the way books go on, as physical artefacts, having a life in the marketplace long after the authors and even publishing houses have gone toes-up. Students and seniors arriving at the cash desk with armloads of biographies and travel books, mysteries and fantasies, art books, and here and there a bestseller from two years back. Books to be read and studied, still wanted.

In other news, a rejection for God's-Meat, though a nice one:

Thank you for your submission to Shimmer. I thought your story was
well-written and evocative, but ultimately didn't think it was exactly
what we look for here. I'm going to have to pass on this, but I wish
you the best of luck placing your story elsewhere.

I'm not hugely surprised, since they buy mostly contemporary stories, and God's-Meat is a take (a piss-take, possibly) on heroic fantasy, but it never hurts to try.

snow has fallen

2010-11-25T08:17:00.000-08:00

And Victoria grinds to a halt. That was the newspaper headline a day or two ago: Victoria grinds to a halt. I'm sitting in the kitchen sipping on my second cup of tea and watching the snow fall. It would be nice to get the woodstove going, but there's not really enough time before I leave for work. And yes, I'm being a wuss and getting a ride in and out, rather than biking. Which there really is no excuse for, because it's not icy at present, and it's ice that I refuse to bike on, not snow.

I'm working on a writing-related post--or reading-related post--on characters with Destinies and what I think of as 'unearned specialness', but since it's something that annoys me as a reader, I keep wandering off into sidetracks about specific books, and having to delete.
It's an odd thing to be a writer as well as a reader. Suddenly the opinions I have about books and stories become opinions about other people's work, and that dubious ground between creator and creation becomes even boggier. It's as if I've compromised myself.
And yet I've been a reader all my life (even before I could read for myself, my parents read to us and told us stories) and a writer only since, oh, 2004. And a critical reader, too, encouraged to analyse and to put my analysis into words.

Some writers give up reviewing or commenting on what they read, or review only books they loved, because of the discomfort of saying anything negative about the work of someone who is in a sense a colleague, or whom you might meet at a convention or workshop.
I wonder what I'll do?

island of eels cathedral

2010-11-20T17:41:00.000-08:00

From Cambridge, I made a day trip to Ely. It's only about 15 minutes by train, and I might have been able to bus there. I'd been briefly in Ely a few years ago, and wanted to spend more time looking around, instead of rushing through.

Like Lincoln, Ely is in the midst of fenlands, very flat fenlands. Like Lincoln, it's a town on a hill that used to be an island. The name (pronounced Eel-ee, not Ee-ly) means Eel Island, so you can guess what the waters were full of.
Fortunately, Ely isn't nearly as steep as Lincoln, with only a bit of a climb from the railway station. The day began gray and chilly, as you can see from this photo. What you can't see is the wind, which came pouring through the cathedral doors and made me stop and push them shut again.
What you might be able to see is that the wall leading up to the cathedral has little gargoyle heads along it, some knocked off over the years, many still in place.

I had somehow forgotten that Ely Cathedral has a maze. It's Victorian (1870), not medieval, and lies just inside the entrance. The guide pamphlet suggests you use the labyrinth to concentrate your mind and consider your path in life and your way to God as you enter the house of God.
Naturally I walked it, with due concentration. This pic was taken from the centre, just before I walked out again. (I'm so glad my new camera doesn't need a flash--flashes inside a church just feel rude). I was surprised by the number of people who didn't notice the maze, but just walked over it as if it were an ordinary bit of floor.

You can perhaps see from this that the maze isn't the overused Chartres design (she said sniffily) or the standard Cretan labyrinth, but an original design by Gilbert Scott, who restored much of the cathedral in the 1800s.
Like all labyrinths, it is a long journey in a compact space, and takes more time than you would think to complete. I stopped in the centre, wondering if there would be any resonance between the maze under my feet and the maze over my spine, but no. It was a cool moment, all the same.

From the maze I went on to the Stained Glass Museum, housed in an upper gallery of the cathederal. It's a well-done small museum, with a good sampling of glass from early medieval to modern, and decent explanations of the revival and the different schools and movements. Plus dioramas of glass workshops showing the cutting, painting, firing, assembly and so on.
The only problem was that no photography was allowed inside the museum--and the catalogue pictures were small and did not include measurements! So I put my hand alongside the pieces I was interested in, as a measure, then sketched my hand beside the catalogue photo.
The pic here is from outside the museum, of the Victorian glass which fills almost all the windows now, the original glass having not made it through the centuries. While Victorian glass is not hugely appealing to me, I have to admit that it makes a brave show in the sunlight--which had appeared by then, though the day was still not warm.
And again, reason to love my new camera, as it was able to capture the light through the stained glass windows falling on this pillar.
After the Stained Glass Museum, I wanted a cup of tea, and perhaps a scone with clotted cream. I was cold. But! That morning a water main had burst, and Ely had no water. Thus no tea. Also no lavatories.
Rumour had it that the Costas had water, but rather than chase rumour about, I walked over to the Oliver Cromwell House and took the tour there, where it was warmer, being a timber-frame plastered house that might even have been stuffy on another day. Oliver Cromwell's life was represented by mannequins rocking cradles or sitting at writing desks, some with unnerving head-tilting action. Then to the Ely Museum, a cooler (stone) building that was once the gaol, and had a suitably depressing (distressing) display of mannequins chained to the wall and floor for violent crimes, and a despondent family of debtor mannequins. None of them had convincing hair, but perhaps that can't be helped.

Finding no water nor tea, I returned to the cathedral, and visited the Lady Chapel, which has an unusual modern statue of Mary, but I admit I was more stirred by the discovery in an aisle window of fragments of medieval glass, patched together into roundels. Here's a closeup of one such. The diamond quarries around it are about the length of my stretched out thumb and index finger, if that helps. The fragments look to be late 14th to late 15th century.
I also photographed the 13th or 14th c. wall paintings of the martyrdom of S. Edmund, but those aren't visually exciting unless you're already a wall painting geek, so I'll skip those here. If you are a wall painting geek, you would probably have shared my fangirl moment in Lincoln when I discovered that Eastbridge Hospital had an E. W. Tristram copy of its much faded Majesty painting--I'm not sure which I was more excited by, the original or the Tristram.

This head is one of those decorating the Prior's Door, which dates from about 1150, elaborate Romanesque carving. Very flash. I'd expect it was painted originally.
It was after 3 by then, and I was wanting my tea, so I decided to walk down to the river and see if the water main had been fixed.
Outside, I saw that the slanting light had turned the cathedral stone golden, and stopped to take even more photos. I'll spare you most of them, and only observe that the stabilising feature is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Also the larger screen, which makes it much easier to tell if a photo is blurred or out of focus.

Here's the pic I think came out best. The zoom feature is so good, and the screen so large, that I was pretty much using the camera as a telescope, to show me details I couldn't make out by eye alone.
Ely has a great collection of gargoyles. I don't know how many are restorations, but there are so many! I could probably have populated this blog post entirely with gargoyles.
However, I finally tore myself away and headed downhill.

Reaching the bottom of the hill, I found the riverside walk, and strolled along it. A couple of fishermen stood on the paved bank, and one brought in a fish as I walked past him. Ducks with bright red beaks stomped over to him, perhaps wanting their cut, or protection money. They didn't really look like law-abiding ducks.
Here's a swan and a canal boat. If I ever end up with time to spare in the UK, I want to ride on a canal boat. One of my cousins lived in one for a year or so, but that was long ago.

Alas, the restaurants and pub along the river were also closed, though the pub hoped to be open for supper soonish. But I didn't want supper on my own, just tea.
So I explored the riverside walk a bit more, and found several massive willows, any of them big enough to be the one from Willow Knot, sheltering the little cottage under its leaves. The trouble is that the massiveness just didn't seem to come across in the photos. This one is the closest to showing itself properly.

home again

2010-11-17T07:26:00.000-08:00

We made it home Monday afternoon, despite yea, even more travel glitches--specifically, Delta deciding that there was insufficient connection time between my arrival in Seattle and my departure for Victoria, and cancelling that last flight for me. My husband's reservation, made from the same flight to the same flight, they did not cancel, though it (obviously) had precisely the same amount of time to make the connection.
Maybe they figure girls can't run as fast as boys?
The wonderful staff at Horizon/Alaska, though, got me on to the very same flight I was originally booked for, even though it was overbooked by one already.

But, you say, what about the rest of my trip? Didn't I promise a full post on Hemingford Grey? Have I said anything about London? Where have I been and what have I seen?
Though some of you, faithful readers, may more likely be griping that I've babbled enough about travel and how about something relevant to writing, like whether Willow Knot has had any nibbles yet.
And yes, I will be alternating travel and writing posts for the next little while. In brief, WK has had one very nice rejection in the 'don't think we can market this one but show us the next' vein, and two of the 'doesn't work for me' sort. Cost of Silver is slated for expansion with MOAR HISTRY & MOAR PPLS PLZ.
Yesterday morning my doctor told me that my kidney function is down a trifle and so I will get more tests and potentially a kidney biopsy. Ick ick ick. I'd look it up on Wikipedia, but I'm almost certain it involves Huge Needles and that I might be better off not knowing the details.

So! More later. I'm not jetlagged, but I am uncommon tired, so please excuse the brevity (or appreciate it, as your tastes dictate.)

not travel, just books

2010-11-11T00:10:00.000-08:00

While travelling, one does tend to read. Waiting at train stations, waiting at bus stops, waiting for something to open, before going to bed, and so on. Here are two quotes that struck me in recent reading.

From In a Dark Wood, by Amanda Craig, Fourth Estate 2000, a contemporary lit novel about a man struggling with the breakup of his marriage and the stalling of his acting career, on a quest to discover the truth about his dead mother, through the memories of her friends and the book of fairy tales she wrote and illustrated.

Ruth fixed me with her eyes. 'If you read fairy-tales carefully, you'll notice they are mostly about people who aren't heroes. They don't have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid. They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.'
'How? How?'
'By luck, or courage, or kindness.'
'Ruth, you must know that in real life, none of those things work.'
'How do you know?' she said. 'Have you tried them?'

And from The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, Time Warner 2005, enough of a bestseller I don't need to precis the plot.

The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had--apparently--actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the "large family" dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real.

pigeon post

2010-11-09T13:07:00.000-08:00

Back from Hemingford Grey Manor, the original of Green Knowe, and that deserves a long and thoughtful and amazed post. Which I'm not quite up to at the moment, after two half-pints of cider. So instead I provide a sampling of the pigeons of England. Honestly, pigeons everywhere, in flocks like starlings, inside train stations, all over churches as if they were auditioning for a John Woo film, pecking around the street markets, everywhere.
This is at Dane John tower, part of the walls of Canterbury. An arrow slit, the perfect size for a pigeon hole.

This is part of the overhang of the roof at the Peterborough train station. There's a whole series of spaces on the inside, with a walkway--pigeon size--along the interior. Thoughtful of British Rail, isn't it?

Cambridge, a statue on the outside of one of the colleges. When I first noticed the pigeon, it was roosting on the statue's wrist, pretending to be a hawk. By the time I had the camera out, it was wandering around the wig and had met a friend.

Just for a change--gulls! And can you guess why the first pic is on here?

really just more photos

2010-11-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

Because I found this one while looking back & deleting, and thought it was better than the daylight one of the same spot - Northgate in Lincoln, the Roman wall.

And this is Lincoln's Eastbridge, viewed from the water walk. If you walk up the High Street, you may not even realise that there's a bridge - that timber-frame building there is a cafe, and you can't see the water at all, on either side.

Just above Steep Hill, which is the road to the left. Just here is where, at night, with a light rain, I saw a young man, unhelmeted and with his legs swung out to the side for balance, careen down the cobbles on his bike. I just stared.

And here is the sight that you meet just after getting off the train in Cambridge. Bicycles are locked everywhere--every set of iron railings has at least one layer of bikes chained to it, sometimes stacked vertically, sometimes horizontally.

walled town to university town

2010-11-08T03:04:00.000-08:00

Writing now from Cambridge, but of Lincoln. Reunited with me EEE, hurrah!

Lincoln is another walled town, medieval walls on top of Roman walls. Here's a nice bit of Roman wall, the North Gate, on Northgate. The sign nearby has a fine b/w photo of a goods lorry stuck midway through the arch, with a stone block (on the upper right, you may be able to spot it) crunching its corner.
The b&b was pretty nice, recently redecorated I think, firm bed and pillows rather hard, and no smoking signs just everywhere you turned, including a dire warning about sensitive smoke detectors connected to the fire station and the penalty for false alarms.
A good full English breakfast, with slice of black pudding (research!). Visited the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, which has some thorough dioramas of stonemasons, basketweavers, tilers, and other things I had to take photos of (for research!). May put up pics later, but for now only brief postings.

Lincolnshire is flat fens. Lincoln is a hill. A steep hill (the name of one of the streets). It is remarkably like Nelson in that way, that one can't really get lost because there's always the slope to orient yourself with. Plus Lincoln has a large pointy cathedral at the top of the hill, so you can orient yourself by whether the cathedral is at your right hand or your left.
Walking in Lincoln is a good way to stay fit.

Here, in St. Mary le Wigfort's, oldest church in Lincoln, right next to the railway station, I had tea with fellow ABE forumites Rocambole, Ferret, and 2manybooks.
After that we climbed up nearly to the cathedral and had lunch at Brown's Pie Shop (details to be filled in later and photo added), then descended bookshop by bookshop. I had to be removed from the Lincoln Historical Society bookshop so that Roccie and Ferret could catch their train.
It was a pity Zolah couldn't be there, but in another two years there may be another chance...

Somehow, yet again, I did not make it into the castle, but here is a picture taken while leaving.
The night before, I walked about Lincoln in the dark, while belated Bonfire Night fireworks went off scattered about the town. I stood in the courtyard of the medieval Bishop's Palace, old stone walls all about me, and a skein of geese flew overheard, gabbling and barking. I looked up and saw them as a frayed bar across the deep blue sky, like a single ragged creature.
Then I walked to the Church of St. Mary Magdalene to hear a concert of early music. Do feel free to envy me.

the pilgrim way

2010-11-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

From Canterbury still, but leaving tomorrow morning. Mark for London, me for Lincoln. The EEE goes with Mark, so I won't be posting for a few days.

Canterbury is a walled city, though the wall is down for about 2/3ds of the way. A good part of it is still walkable, and that's how we came from the train station to our friends' place. Opposite here is the view from their front door.
It's a school, no public admission. Used to be St. Augustine's Abbey. That's the gatehouse in the photo.
Presently, nearly half the population of Canterbury is students (about 30,000), with the University of Canterbury and the University of Kent, and various schools.

Perhaps relatedly, there are a lot of pubs.
We've eaten twice at the Parrot, where I had pork-belly with mashed potatoes and candied black pudding and crackling and broccoli and green beans and carrots. So good. Transcendent. The second time I split mine, and was able to try out puddings (desserts)--the four of us split Eton Mess (meringue, whipped cream, strawberries, raspberries & sauce), Banoffee (digestive biscuit crust, sliced bananas, toffee & choc drizzle), and chocolate mousse.
I had my required English cream tea, so that's taken care of, at Tiny Tim's Tearoom, 'the quintessential English experience' they say. The name is because there's a haunted room, where a volume of Dickens is supposedly always pulled out and left open to the same passage with Tiny Tim. I was a bit disappointed to visit the Ghost Room and see that the book on the table was a book about hauntings and not Dickens at all. And I couldn't hear the mysterious laughter and whispers of children because they have a student film continually running, which has a soundtrack of children whispering. Harrumph.

Less corporally, yesterday I went to a service at Greyfriar s Chapel, a lovely Norman stone building straddling the river. About 20 people attended, at least 5 being Franciscans (wearing brown habits--the information board on the ground floor explains about Grey Friars wearing brown or black). I was one of the youngest there, except for a young woman with her 4 yr old daughter, who was remarkably patient during the service.
The homily was for Richard Hooker, whose anniversary it was, and prayers were made for President Obama and the newly-elected representatives, thence down to the local council in Canterbury, and names provided by the congregation members.
I didn't take pics of the interior - it seemed a bit rude right after the service (followed by tea and biscuits), but it's a fine small open space, whitewashed walls and wooden beams. It sheltered Huguenot refugees once, who used the beams for their weaving, which is pretty cool.

There is much else I could say, but Mark wants to check his email, and I need to get some sleep.

WFC 2010

2010-11-03T03:21:00.000-07:00

Posting from Canterbury.

Well, the whole enterprise very nearly ended before it began, when I arrived at the airport to check in and the woman at the counter pointed out that my passport had expired 2 weeks ago.
Yes, I am an idiot.
However, the Victoria passport office worked absolute miracles for me and had a new passport for me by 1 pm the next day (can you believe that? I brought them a tub of cookies and a bag of apples) so I flew out the next evening.

I have now met my agent, and a number of her other clients, all of whom think she is wonderful and are ready to sing her praises. (I had confirmation from another client that all the revision that goes on before submission makes a difference and that she had less revision required from her editor.) In case anyone is wondering about the high-flying life of those of us with hot New York agents, for our meeting we ended up in the hospitality / consuite after the cafe got too noisy, and had free tea and pop. And crackers.
We talked about The Cost of Silver, and what I see as the highly uncommercial aspects of it, and what could be done about those. I have the go-ahead to write bigger and broader this time, to really use the historical setting (England in the Stuart and ECW era), and to write several povs or storylines, tying them in rather than leaving those as secondary or tertiary characters.
I suspect this means that revising the first draft will not be finished by the beginning of February as previously estimated.
The question of 'what books is this book like' came up again. So far we have Iain Pears' Instance of the Fingerpost, Kostova's The Historian, and that Dan Simmons' book that starts in a Roumanian orphanage.

I got to visit with Terri-Lynn and Cal from VPX, and to fangirl Martha Wells, among others. I got a signed (and inscribed!) copy of Terri-Lynn's book, launched at the con--Finder, published by Hadley Rille. Memo to self: find sparkly gel pens for her to use for future signings. The queen of sparkles needs to have a sparkly signature.
Got to meet Cal's daughter, a bright and talented young lady, with an awesome Goth coat.

Here's a photo of us, taken by Terri's stalwart husband. I don't know how well Terri's tattoos show up, but they are works of art.

Good con stuff: excellent food in the consuite; a talk by Mary Robinette Kowal on how to improve readings, truncated to a half-hour and continued in the bar. I had to miss the latter part because I wanted to attend the panel on Fantasy as the Art of Leaving Things Out, which was also pretty good. And here's a picture of that panel, with Martha Wells in the centre, moderating. Somehow I missed catching her in the big autograph session--missing people there seems to be a gift I have. But I was able to meet Lane Robins and engage in some mutual squeeing over how good The Wizard Hunters is.
Also met Alaya Dawn Johnson and bought her last copy of Moonshine (ha ha!) and was able to tell her that I'd looked for and bought her previous two books, the Spirit Binders series/trilogy after reading the sampler at last year's WFC. So the sampler works.
I picked up my tent card after the signing session, but with only 4 e-stories to my name, I don't have anything to sign, myself.

I don't have the programme book with me, so I can't do a full con report, but overall it was a good con. I never got into the art show, which was a pity, because it looked good although out of my price range.
Not quite as many books in the bag as with previous years, and the swap table pickings were fairly lean--there were four books that were fairly constantly present, and others were only available briefly. I was happy to snatch up a copy of the new Holly Black, and to have a copy of Secret History of Moscow in my bag.
Then I posted all that back home, because when I'm travelling I try to carry only books I'm willing to leave behind when I've finished them. So I picked up a copy of Night of Knives from the table, and unfortunately while I'm quite willing to leave it behind, I'm not nearly as willing to finish reading it. The story is okay if you like gaming-based heroic fantasy where the story fills in cracks of a much bigger storyline, but I'm having trouble with the author's persistent misuse of words and clumsy sentences. ('rind of bread', 'cantered' for 'canted', 'malinger' for 'linger', etc.) The character with a crossbow strapped to her leg, lying on a rooftop, kind of boggled me too (and she's an adolescent girl: does the author know what upper body strength is required to draw a crossbow?).
Oh well, gripe gripe gripe. I've picked up a couple of books from the Oxfam shop to tide me over.

More later!

my tattoos

2010-10-27T21:24:00.000-07:00

Brand new and still healing.

This is the labyrinth pattern I build with stones each year at Fort Rodd Hill. I wanted a human figure in the centre, like the female figure in the Sibbo wall-painting, but it wouldn't have been legible without making the labyrinth huge. So a dot, standing for me being midway (a labyrinth is a two-way journey, there and back)
Also, if I forget the pattern next year at Fort Rodd Hill, I can just ask someone to look at the back of my neck.

A jellyfish, on my right shoulder, for the phosphorescent ctenophora at Martha's Vineyard during Viable Paradise (yes I know this isn't a ctenophore, it's a moon jelly) and for my first pro-rate sale, which features flying jellyfish.
And VPX, for Viable Paradise Ten, my year and my tribe.

Garden in autumn

2010-10-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

These are all photos that Mark took, and since I've been slack about posting this month, I'm taking the chance to show off his work.

Here are rosehips, from the rugosa in the front yard, I think. The gallica in the back still has a few blooms, or did until the winds last weekend, but the rosehips are making a fine display.
You can eat rosehips, just don't eat the hairy bit in the middle. Ptah!

Crocus! The kind that produces saffron--see the lovely yellow stamens? The bulbs were planted years ago, and only now do we have more than three showing up in a year.
Mark harvested the saffron and made saffron rice.

A white slug. I've never seen one all white before. I'm much more used to the small brown ones and the big banana slugs (childhood memories of stepping on a banana slug, and the slime making everything stick to one's bare foot afterwards).

It's rather beautiful in a slimy translucent way.

clawing my way

2010-10-17T16:14:00.000-07:00

from under a heap of apples, rather like James T. Kirk in the tribbles episode, only apples are hard and some of them have mushy bits or bug-bites.

Last weekend I was in the Interior, attending the Golden Swan event and spending time with Alis/Rajpal and Lucy, my most distant apprentices. Riding with me was Deirdre Greenwood, with whom I am in apprentice negotiations. This was the road-trip test, to see whether either of us had such annoying habits that the other would want to leave them behind at a rest area.
I am pleased to report that we both made it back to our respective homes. Though the last part of my trip makes for a long and convoluted story that can only be properly shared in person, and all I will say at present is that I am really surprised BC Ferries has apparently no provision at all for dealing with someone who falls ill during the trip. I mean, not even a place to lie down.
But I am back now, and mostly recovered. It has been a social month so far, with the spare bed not having a chance to be folded back up between Deirdre, Alis and Sitavati, and Stephen visiting, and that just at our place, not counting travels & socialising.

Me with three apprentices, in front of my little tent, Cawston BC.

The apple trees have taken advantage of my absence to start dropping fruit in earnest. We gave two buckets away, and I still have a sinkful to process into dehydrator loads and frozen crumbles. I'm missing the boy and his appetite for apple pies, since the freezer will only hold so many. I may have to start pushing frozen pies onto stray visitors: 'What do you mean you'll be on the road for 3 days? Look, I'll bake it for you, then you can just eat it on the way!'

Then there's deciding on an itinerary for the UK visit, booking b&bs, and figuring out how to pack for the very professional & businesslike World Fantasy Convention and also for hiking around the UK in the cold. Which I admit is a damn fine problem to have, and I'm not actually complaining, just noting what has my brainpower booked lately.

Do I have any writing-related thoughts? Yes, I think I do. As with other times that I've attended Golden Swan, which is a persona-development challenge (sometimes called competition, but since there can be several winners or none, it's not really competing), I notice that what makes a presentation of one's persona work is not so much the big-picture info-dumps, but the small details of the texture of one's life. Lucy did well with her entry, in part because she knew the layout of her home, the way down the stairs with the low beam, drawing water in the courtyard to wash. Another entrant did less well because she knew how 'male children' were taught, but could say nothing about her own son's education, whether he liked his tutor, what he learned quickly and what he was slow at.
The other thing I notice is that while those small, telling details are effective, they need to be researched, or you risk breaking the illusion with a mistake. Anne Rice broke the illusion in Cry To Heaven (for me) by having a character burn a parchment letter in a candle flame--I've worked with parchment, which is essentially fine, thin, smooth rawhide. Imagine burning a dog-chew and you see the problem. Similarly, an entrant this year presented an 11th or 12th century noblewoman and told us about her psalter, made by 'students' at the nearby priory. Um, no. Personal ownership of books is a watershed moment, and it comes at the earliest in the late 14th c. by which time books are being produced in secular workshops. She had, essentially, told me that she'd researched everyday life in the wrong century, and skimpily at that.
Ah well, pedantry: hobby, sport, or vocation?
Or just a relief from the burden of apples?

GoH gofer go!

2010-10-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

Apparently I am both awesome and organised. How about that?
Back from VCon, where I set up the SF-Canada table, which was fiddly but not difficult, and followed Cherie Priest about, which was fun. I was unsure how officious and flunky-like to be, but she is among the least diva-like people imaginable, and by Sunday I was just waving as she went by and asking 'Need anything?'.
So, y'know, it was mostly a matter of not screwing up majorly, which I can often manage, though I did splash dumpling-filling over myself at the Shanghai River (which is a restaurant). Mark and Cherie ate a good deal of a rock cod, unfazed by its head and outspread fins.
Should I be chronological? Can I do that and still skip the boring bits?

Let's see.
Thursday: I packed like mad. Took 1pm sailing to Tswawassen, then bus and skytrain to Richmond. Walked to the Marriott. Found VCon people, found that Cherie had been safely picked up and was sleeping in her room. Helped carry stuff to art room. Helped carry stuff to hospitality. Went off with Michael Walsh (the man with the Daffy Duck tie) to haul stuff from their place to hospitality. Hung about in lobby waiting for people to show up. Introduced Dave Duncan & Cherie Priest to each other. Went for dinner at the Mad Greek with guests of honour and concom (this for being liaison/gofer for a GoH). Cherie Priest and Heather Dale are good raconteurs (raconteuses?) and Cherie told ghost stories plus amusing stories of personal injuries.
Returned to hotel, found husband setting up his tables, in midst of considerable confusion over how all the dealers tables would fit in the room and question of whether hotel was really going to supply the tables originally requested (request having been lost and hotel disclaiming knowledge). Situation not aided by dealer coordinator walking off with one and only layout map several times. I am encouraged to take one of the tables and set up, so as to be harder to dislodge. Do so. This works, although table is several times moved, finally squashed into corner which does have advantage of providing vertical visibility for SF-Canada banner. Books are brought, accumulating to a lively display. Every single one of the plate-stand book-stand thingies that I bought and that Mark lent me is eventually used, as is every one of the DISPLAY COPY slips that I printed out. About 1/3 of the table is dedicated to display copies, with notes about where they can be purchased at the con.
Friday: more setup of table, and rearrangement as it is moved. Registration is having trouble connecting and setting up. I make roughly calligraphed signs saying PRE-REG and REGISTRATION but wickedly do not bother to pick up my registration packet until much later when the computer setup is mostly working and the nasty big pre-reg line has died down.
Registration is supposed to have Cherie's schedule, but cannot find it in the database. I borrow Johanna-the-lovely-Media-lady's programme book and mark all of Cherie's panels in the pocket program, then deliver a marked copy to Cherie. Later I meet Pauline who has a thumb-drive with the schedule in it. She gives me printouts and a tent-card to deliver. Do so. Run into Dave Duncan who is off to dentist to have tooth glued back in.
Attend opening ceremonies possibly first time in years. Go for dinner at Shanghai River with GoH and own husband. Terrifying tales of book launches and book fairs. Attend Heather Dale concert.
Saturday: breakfast at hotel's buffet, mostly okay. Knock on Cherie's door to find her working on article for Subterranean. She comes for breakfast and chat. Terrifying tales of deadlines. In between table duty and rearranging books as more arrive, and hearing rumours that Chris and Shannon are on site, I attend You Suck! No, You Suck! panel on workshops; GoH interview; How Did That Get on My Cover?; Draw Me This!; and am invited onto the Vampire panel by Sandra Wickham, which is very flattering. Finally find Chris and Shannon at that panel. Mark, Chris, Shannon and I go for a family dinner at No. 9 restaurant. SF Canada party and bed, in that order.
Sunday: breakfast at hotel buffet. Check schedule with Cherie, who now knows her way around the hotel better than I do. Final bids on art show (trying for another of Danielle's cool little shadow boxes). Make it to panel I really want to attend - History is my Playground. Pretty good. Book takedown and packing, pick up art show wins, sneak some time at Turkey Readings, yay!

Clever things I did: asked my niece Piper to cat-and-house-sit.
Found two small red tablecloths, so I could put one at each end of the SFC table, with the white cloth in between suggesting the Canadian flag, PLUS the two contrasting colours meant a book could always be put on a surface that let it stand out (yes, I totally planned this, and it had nothing to do with the first two tablecloths I pulled out of my someday-I'll-paint-this box. Nothing.)
Married a man who would lend me almost a dozen stands for books so they could be visible from a distance.
Asked my BNF friend Betty about the duties of a gofer.
Made up flyers with text swiped from the SFC website.
Went to bed by midnight each night.
Got almost all the money and leftover books back to someone responsible by the end of the con--except for those needing to be mailed, which remain with me.

There was a multi-author book launch Friday, in a room with rather definite acoustics. And just for Terri, here's a little film of one table, with Dave Duncan and other members of SF-Canada:

Lately, as my regular readers will expect, I have been beset by apples (which as a phrase is very nearly a googlewhack), to add to which I inexplicably brought home two large buckets of apples from my brother's trees. So, I've been processing apples to make apple crumbles, and when I have sixteen or so in the freezer I'll move on to pies. I'm feeling somewhat paranoid about getting done with the apples, since I'll be away for very nearly 3 weeks from the end of October, when they'll be dropping like mad.
Which is to say that I've been processing apples most nights, interspersed with packing up stuff for a sales-and-display table at VCon, trying for 600 words minimum each morning (which seems to be my comfortable rate for an hour's work). And trying not to worry about prep for the trip to Golden Swan, or about how to pack for both World Fantasy and hiking about in the UK in the rain.
Which is to say that I probably could have been more organised, but things went reasonably well nonetheless.

time and motion

2010-09-25T09:13:00.000-07:00

Last weekend Mark and I were in Powell River (the SCA name is False Isle, because although it's part of the mainland, it can only be reached by ferry, however you come to it) teaching at a small event. I taught four two-hour classes, which is taking it easy, since I usually try to teach the whole time so they'll have their money's worth for the travel costs of bringing me over (or if I'm paying my own way, so it'll be worth it for me - no point paying $100+ to sit around drinking tea, when I can do that at home for free).
In my free hours, though, I was able to take Stephen's class on understanding medieval music, for which I didn't need to be able to read music, yay!
The event was low-key and fun, with a potluck feast, like events from 20 or so years ago in Seagirt (Victoria) or Lions Gate (Vancouver). So I don't quite understand why I've been so slow and sluggish all last week. Either travel is tiring me much more than it used to, or the change of seasons is affecting me.
Anyway, that's my excuse for not posting much just lately. Although! Exciting things are happening.
Today I'm driving up-island to Honeymoon Bay to visit my brother and his family, and my (half) sister Darlene.
The first weekend in October, I'll be at VCon, organising the SF-Canada book table and being a gofer for one of the Guests of Honour, which I hope I do okay at, because I haven't done that specific job before.
The second weekend I'm driving into the interior of BC to the Golden Swan event, where I'll visit with my amazing and talented apprentices, Alis (aka Rajpal) and Lucy. The scenery will be gorgeous, as usual, and the nights will be freezing-bloody-cold so I'm taking lots of bedding and wool. Also bringing Deirdre, with whom I'm discussing apprenticeship--it will be the long drive part of the testing, whether either of us will want to leave the other at a rest stop and drive away.

Then--head down and write, because I need to have this draft of Cost of Silver all filled in and smoothed before the World Fantasy Convention at the end of October. I'll be flying out to Columbus Ohio, and there I will be meeting my agent face to face for the first time. She doesn't usually do WFC because it's over Halloween and she has young children, so this is a rare chance. I'm not twitchy about it yet, but I may be by the time I get there.
She expects to be hearing back from publishers after WFC, and cautioned me not to get impatient because publishing is a slow business. Fortunately I have something to distract me from worrying (besides doing revisions on Cost of Silver) which is ....

I'll be in England for the first two weeks of November. Researching, yes, this is TOTALLY WRITING-RELATED, yes. Mark will be at the London Coin Fair for part of it, and going behind the scenes at museums, so it's very work-related for him. I'm hoping to meet up with the UK Scribblers and other writer friends, so it's time I started planning where to go and what to do--if only there wasn't so much else going on to distract me.

December and January are booked for revising Cost of Silver. We'll see how that works out. And probably for deciding which book to work on next. Dark, gritty fantasy is my market presently, so mysteries and modern-day fantasies will have to wait, or be my backup if my first couple of books fail utterly.

fish, fowl or red herring?

2010-09-15T11:37:00.000-07:00

Please remain seated during paradigm shift.

So, I was getting organised for VCon, looking for room-mates, checking out programming, and popping off emails because I seem to have volunteered to organise the SF-Canada book table (oh, yeah, I'm a year-old member of SF-Canada, did I mention that previously? by virtue of 2 short story sales to online markets). I went to the VCon website to see what had been updated.

Oh, look, I said to myself. There's a Writing Workshop this year, yay! Because last year there wasn't, and I was sad. VCon in 2006 was my first experience with a face-to-face writing workshop, and I really enjoyed it, plus got practice for the crit sessions at Viable Paradise right afterwards.
Do I have anything to submit, I wondered, running through my very short list of short stories, and shorter list of those never workshopped. And who'll be running the sessions?

I looked at the list and felt dizzy. There's Dave Duncan, writing since the 1980s, and Eileen Kernaghan, award-winning YA author, and a half-dozen others, but--I know all the names. They're names (not surprisingly, once I thought about it) from SF-Canada.
Of which I am a member.
I'm not up there with multi-published authors who've been writing for 20 years, but still related in kind (species? phylum?). Not ready to be on the pro side of a writing workshop, but--I think--at the point of it probably being awkward to be met on the receiving side.

Rather unsettling to be neither one nor the other, and leaves me deprived of face-to-face workshopping with people who understand sf/f. I suppose the only remedy is to keep at it until I earn my place on the pro side.

into the wide world

2010-09-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I went outside very early to see if more pears had fallen. The sun hadn't risen, and the sky was mottled grey. I heard a honk, and looked up to see a flight of geese, not so much an arrowhead shape as an inverted checkmark, or a hockeystick (yes, they must have been Canada geese). They were flying low, so low I heard the beat of their wings, an insistent repeated fwish fwish fwish, like a small child doggedly learning to whistle.

I've picked all the pears and plums that I could reach, leaving about 3 on each tree. This afternoon I had a last bowl of blackberries with cream. It's down to apples now, and I'll have to race the deer for the windfalls.

After a last flurry of finding an almost entirely different list of books my book is like, and writing a few paragraphs on What Fairy Tales Mean to Me, I smash a bottle of virtual champagne over the bow of The Willow Knot and my agent steers it out to sea. Or to the stony hearts of a half-dozen NY publishers.
Hopefully it will not imitate the Mary Rose.

done done done

2010-09-07T12:26:00.000-07:00

Wrapped Archipelago up at 11:35 last night, with 19,700 words approx. Didn't quite break the 20k barrier, but getting closer!
I'd call this one 'Barbara does Jo Clayton', and closer to Trading in Ghosts than it is to Culture Heroes, which was more like 'Barbara does Ursula K Le Guin'.

I can say with confidence that it will NOT make the shortlist, but it was fun, so I'm not bothered.

despatches from scouts

2010-09-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

I've just hit 13k and suddenly I know how it's going to end. Hurrah!

Now I just have to get there.

last written last night

2010-09-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

Malina's head hurt, pain rocking back and forth in it. Her mouth tasted dry and sour, and her stomach rolled in contrary rhythm to her head. She let the bodily misery hold her and fill all her thoughts, keep out some thing worse, some thing she dared not let herself remember. Instead she catalogued the present agonies, the strengthlessness of her arms, the stickiness on her chin and neck that might be vomit, the old-fish reek of her surroundings.
Jofroy is dead.
The convulsion of her guts bent her in half, then rolled her onto her face. She coughed and retched up nothing but spit.
They killed Jofroy. Who else?
Because of me.
I want to die. I want to disappear. Jofroy is dead. Jofroy who winked at me and called me his mermaid. I want to die.
But she did not want to die, not quite. She didn't want the pain, the blood draining out, or water filling the throat and lungs, bursting.
I wish I was never born. Then nothing could have hurt anyone because of me.
She cried for a time, great gulping sobs that hurt her chest, a sorrow that needed no words or names to spur it, a loss so great she could not name all she had lost.
The only comfort that came to her was that she would die soon, when the fishermen discovered she didn't bring luck--what luck had she brought to her parents, to the scientists? (to Jofroy?)--they would give her back to the sea--her father--and she would drown.
Would they feel stupid when she drowned, or think it was some kind of trick? She could not understand people who did not admit empirical knowledge to affect their beliefs.
She ran through her despair as her sickness and head-ache lessened to bearability, and began to take note of her surroundings. She lay on a pile of nets, smelling of salt and fish and damp. It must be the hold of the fishing boat, sometimes full of silver-scaled fish wiggling and heaving. Now only her, and the water that slopped beneath her nest. It was quite dark, but that was no clue how long she had been unconscious, because she guessed the hold of a ship must be quite water-tight, and thus impervious to light as well.
I mustn't be afraid. They want me to be afraid so I will cling to them and do what they want. But if I'm afraid, I won't know what to do except what they tell me. So I won't be afraid. I will be clever instead. And I will stay alive.
Some long time afterwards, light spilled over her from a square opening above. Malina fisted her hands tight and stiffened her arms. She was only a little girl, but she knew about thinking. The voice that followed the light broke all her resolve.
"How can you leave her there? Would you treat your own daughter so? If she is the sea's daughter, what will the sea think of her lying there like flotsam, frightened and alone?"
"Doctor Soonan!" Malina shouted. "I'm down here!"
"I insist. Either you bring her up, or you put me down in the hold with her. I will not leave her unattended."
Malina could not make out the words of those who spoke then, only an abashed and resentful rhythm of speech. A rope sling came down to her, then shouted instructions on how to fit it around herself safely. She wriggled it quickly about herself and snugged it. Then the swaying, swinging lift to the open air and Doctor Soonan's embrace.
"Jofroy," Malina sobbed into the doctor's raw-silk breastpocket. "All bloody--"
Doctor Soonan stroked her back, the long brown fingers skilful. "I did not see, my dear. I had walked down to the cove, feeling somewhat uneasy about the others who might be on that boat, or coming into land by some other route. Yona did so poor a work of encouraging us to give you up that I could not help suspecting he was mere distraction."

first 500 words (more or less)

2010-09-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

"There lay my love among the flowers," Agnesa sang as her oars dipped into the glassy water. "The fairest bloom if truth I tell--" A pause with her intake of breath as she bent over her braced legs. "I took her in my loving a-arms, and all to ash, to ash she fell--"
The skin-boat skipped over the little waves. Agnesa risked a glance over her shoulder to be sure that the island of statues was where it should be, a green-black turtle-back waiting for her, its only visitor.
We might live there, she thought, letting the song fall into the skin-boat's wake. There's houses and all, and I'd not need to row for fuel. She imagined broaching the plan to old Gresa, and laughed aloud at the picture her mind tossed up of her grandmother's face, wrinkles doubling and tripling with her furious frown. "She'd lose her eyes and nose in her own wrinkles."
"Where have you and I dwelt but here, child," she said, squeaking her voice to an old woman's cracked register. "And what have you and I been but safe, safe while all the world turned itself over and threw its legs in the air. And now you think yourself so wise, is it, that you'd plump yourself down and take your meals and spread your bedding in the midst of them as perished? Well, you'll not do that while I live." There. No need to have the real argument.
Agnesa supposed her grandmother wouldn't live forever, but who was to say? All things had changed mightily, and it might even be that Death, that old snake, was stuffed full-fat and sleeping for an age or two.
On her right side a slender pillar jutted from the water, copper-cladding stained to a soapy green. Agnesa grinned and lifted one oar so the skin-boat spun in place. She slowed it with a quick practiced twist of the oar-blade and brought it to stillness.
The boat rocked light as a bubble as Agnesa shifted cautiously to look over the side. Sunlight shot down through clear water, depths dying it to gold-yellow, then green-yellow, then dim green. Her own face, sketched in grey chalk, floated above all, round-cheeked, narrow-eyed, her short hair hanging down like a flower's ragged petals. Her gaze jumped past that too-familiar image, to down below. This was the treat she gave herself, reward for the labour of rowing and chopping fuel.
Bars of green-gold light fell across a pathway, red bricks showing where currents had brushed the silt away. The path wandered casually to a little humped bridge with latticed sides and carved pillars. Agnesa sighed happily as a school of red-and-black fish flitted over the bridge, threading through the latticework. One inspected a pillar carved with a little peaked roof, and jerked away startled.