Ladies and gentlemen: the Incredibow.
Apart from the irresistible name it looks very gamba-like, a shape I’ve been interested in for the past few years. If there was a trial option I might have added it to my ‘this is something to try at some point’ list.
My darling little sister, who is reading my next book in MS form, just sent me a lovely e-mail telling me she got tingles from reading the opening sentences, and voila, my day is better. Thanks, love.
Also, I have remembered that work =/= writing all the time, and am reading a second-hand well-used copy of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. A page in and boom, the highlighter is out, and the sticky bookmarks, my notebook is revving up, and my brain is moving.
I still have to leave in forty minutes, though.
An hour and a half round trip to drop the boy off this morning, thanks to piles of snow in the road and idiots driving on them who can’t wait their turn or remember how to drive in snow. The round trip usually takes thirty-five to forty minutes, including drop-off time. I came straight home rather than run the errands I need to run because otherwise I’d only have walked through the door around noon. I am having to reinitialize all my parking-in-snowbanks and pulling-out-of-snowbanks skills that have lain dormant for ten months.
After handling correspondence and news, lunch (important because I have missed breakfast and lunch the past two days), laundry, a call from the bank to discuss things, and so forth, it is now QUARTER TO THREE and I haven’t even gotten to Real Writing Work yet.
It’s that kind of day. I’ve lost so much momentum since last Wednesday, which is the last day I got to work at all. I wish I was motivated. This is one of those days where being a writer is more work than any other job I’ve held.
I’m going to have to leave forty-five minutes early to get through the idiocy and pick the boy up too, so if I hit a groove I’ll to have to jump out of it before I want to. It is so very tempting to say ‘to hell with it all’ and go play the DS instead. But I’ll still have to think of something to make for dinner.
That freelance cheque can arrive any time now, thanks. Money would make things marginally better.
Happy birthday, Ceri! Have 31.6 centimetres of snow!
(Yes, I am smacking myself for saying we hadn’t had a massive dump of snow only two days before your birthday.)
Not dead, just run-off-my-feet busy. I haven’t sat down at the computer in days.
Over the last twenty-four hours there has been lots of snow. Official reports vary, but according to our backyard we’re looking at around eighteen inches. It’s stopped, but we’re due to get about fourteen more centimetres tomorrow. (How very Canadian: Imperial and Metric describing accumulation in the same paragraph.)
The boy stayed home today and HRH took the car in to work after spending an hour and a half shovelling the driveway. For those who have inquired, no, HRH did not get the snow day that most elementary and high schools got. CEGEPs don’t close unless something traumatic has occurred on campus. He’s out there shovelling again now.
This morning I wrestled the boy into his snowpants (“No, no , no Mama, no snowpants”) and coat and hat and mitts and boots and scarf, and myself in tights under jeans and legwarmers over that (a lucky and unexpected find in the winter accessories box) and my old snow coat, and opened the back door for him. Liam was decidedly unimpressed with this deep snow thing. He kept falling over and flailing in a swim-like fashion, then rolling over on his back to look up at me and say, “Help, Mama, I am stuck” in that funny precise way he has of speaking. We fell over in the backyard for half an hour before coming in and shedding piles of snow-covered clothing on the kitchen floor and drinking hot chocolate. Like me, he thinks the hot chocolate is the best part. I am all about the apres-ski.
Friday night I went to a cello quartet concert with someone from orchestra, and it was absolutely phenomenal. It was one of those evenings where I was reminded of why I chose the instrument I did, and also mildly despair-inducing in that it made me feel that it was completely useless to even try because I can never play like they can. (Granted, they all had at least two music degrees each and played in pro symphonies. But still.) I really appreciated the evening, because not only was it the first time I’d attended a live music performance since May, but it was at my orchestral colleague’s invitation to share her double pass. It was great to have a night out with someone I don’t know very well but with whom I have things in common. I thoroughly enjoyed her company.
Late Saturday afternoon we went out to have dinner with Ceri and Scott, and this marked the first official Taking Liam Out To Dinner at a Friends’ House With No Other Kids. We all had a fabulous time. Liam was very well-behaved apart from the not-at-all-subtle exploring of rooms and the joyous chasing of cats, who mostly (meaning any cat who was not Tybalt) didn’t seem to mind and even let him pick them up and carry them around (I don’t know who was the most surprised when he walked in holding Miho). He ate surprisingly well, too, which I hadn’t expected, although it was hard not to enjoy the food as the meal was one of the best I’ve had in a while. (Liam seems to have decided peas in a pod are the current vegetable to be defined as Dalishious, replacing the chopped and frozen parsley he had dubbed Dalishious a few days previous.) I made a chocolate espresso pecan pie for dessert, which immediately made my Make This Again and Often list when we tasted it. We all had so much fun that we didn’t check the time until eight o’clock, at which point HRH and I scooped the child up and fled, expecting disastrous things to ensue with his schedule. Going to bed two hours later than usual didn’t seem to completely mess him up: there were no mid-night wakings, I got him back to sleep when he woke up at 5:15 the next morning with minimal fuss, we all got another two hours of sleep, and the only other effect seems to have been the boy being slightly whiny over the past two days. Not something we want to do on a regular basis, of course, but we’re very impressed at how he handled it. We wish we could have stayed longer, of course.
I spent a lot of the weekend baking, because Sunday was a cookie-exchange day. Bearing ten dozen oatmeal cookies, I spent a lovely afternoon with friends and acquaintances and snuggled with Tallis while chatting with some other mums. Liam cried a lot over the weekend when he’d try to scoop a cookie off the cooling rack and was told he wasn’t allowed because they weren’t ours, but the delight on his face when I unloaded all the new cookies once I’d come home from the party was proof that the cookie-denial was all forgiven. (Besides, he’d already stolen four of mine from the first batch out of the oven. It wasn’t like I didn’t let him have any at all.)
I like to wait as long as possible before breaking out the Christmas albums, but after watching the however many feet of snow fall today I put on Holly Cole’s Baby, It’s Cold Outside, Diana Krall’s Christmas Songs, and Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong while making supper.
I have piles of e-mail to handle, but that will get done tomorrow morning.
It was a very long day. I’m going to turn out the light now.
This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel J. Levitin
Empire of Ivory by Naomi Novik
Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
Magic & Malice by Patricia C Wrede (reread)
Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey
Mistral’s Kiss by Laurell K Hamilton
Broken Music by Sting
Children of England by Alison Weir
Have His Carcase by Dorothy Sayers
Mistress Anne by Carrolly Erickson
The Mozart Season by Virginia Euwer Wolff (reread)
Brief notes:
Reserved for the Cat: Better than The Wizard of London, that’s for sure. I almost swore off buying these in hardcover because I was so disappointed in that last one, but the subject matter of this one was more interesting to me. Glad I bought it; it provided me an afternoon and evening of comfortable reading. Actually, I don’t know why I buy Lackey in hardcover at all any more, other than for the instant gratification of this fairy tale-based historical fantasy series. It’s the only thing of her’s I’m following.
Mistral’s Kiss: Why do I buy these? They’re too short now, and they only cover a very brief period of time. I think they’d read better if I read a lot of them at once to get a better idea of how Merry was changing Faerie. Except I’d have to wade through a million sex scenes to do it, as the whole union of life force thing is what’s doing the changing.
Broken Music: A look at Sting’s childhood and very early music years, outlining a lot of the compromises he made musically. Pretty much ends with the launch of the Police’s first full album, unfortunately.
Undertow: A very enjoyable planetary romance (in the traditional sense of the word) that calls into question the native-colonist ethic. Really interesting native species, technology, and one of the best observations about humanity I’ve come across lately: human are climbers, not schoolers.
This Is Your Brain On Music: A well-written and accessible layman’s book that examines how our brains encompass, interpret, and respond to music, written by a musician/producer who reinvented his career and became a cognitive psychologist instead. One of those books I wish I could buy for lots of people because lending it out will take too long.
Marissa says something interesting about work-in-progress reviews by writers and non-writers, and I’m going to paste it here for immediate reference too.
I think it’s extremely valuable to have non-writers read and critique books. This is not in lieu of having skilled writers doing critiques but in addition to it. Ideally, the finished books will be read by non-writers, and just as only having people of one sex or only having people of one age critique a book can skew the type of critique one will get, only having people of one approach to the written word read it might skew the response.
I think some non-writers are a little shy about this because they don’t necessarily know what a good critique looks like. Trust me, writers sometimes have all the jargon down and brilliant ideas for exactly how, technically, to fix a scene — and other times we will look at each other and go, “I dunno, it’s just that this part kinda goes whoppita whoppita whoppita when it should go whirrrrrr, y’know?” Or else, “I think it needs to be more, kinda, um, um…manic…does that make sense?” If you socialize with writers you should know that we are not necessarily more coherent than other people until we’ve had several drafts to hammer out the whoppitas and the ums. And we probably ask each other, “Does that make sense?” more often than the international average, not less. And sometimes the whoppitas and the ums are the bits that make for a good and useful critique and the detailed, technical jargon ideas about how to fix something turn out not to be very useful.
“Does that make sense?” has to be one of my top five frequently-uttered sayings.
She’s right. Even though I’m a writer, I find it hard to put how a story works (or doesn’t work) for me into words. And so I often resort to the technical review instead. It’s a cop-out, but I feel inadequate giving someone a crit that essentially says, “That scene didn’t work for me but I don’t know why; it just felt like it fizzled”. I keep looking for a way to suggest a fix for it, instead of just saying “This needs something else here”. A non-writer wouldn’t necessarily be looking for the fix; I think they’d be more comfortable saying “This led me to expect X and I didn’t get the payoff, and what I got instead wasn’t enough”.
This is one of the reasons why I drag my feet about doing reviews of works in progress for friends. I get stuck over-analysing why I feel a certain way about a scene or a chapter or a turn of events, and I have no way to express it clearly. This is completely my problem and has nothing to do with the MS I’m critiquing. I hate handing something back with vague “this made me feel” kind of feedback; I feel as if I should be saying more, giving them more value, so to speak, because there’s nothing worse than getting a work back with no concrete crits whatsoever. (Hello, the A minus that has haunted me for decades! What made it an A- paper? What could I have done better to make it an A?) I always feel that I’m not necessarily the best person to give another writer with whom I’m personally acquainted feedback. I can do it for strangers, because I don’t know them and the way they write, think, and work: they are completely separate from their MS. Understanding how and why a writer does something because one knows them in person is in some ways a handicap. The general public does not know an author personally (and reading their on-line journals or web sites does not constitute ‘knowing them personally’), and reads a book or short story as a discrete entity, free of any authorial association.
To be fair to myself, I do need things to be as technically tight as possible before I can focus on reading and evaluating the story; that’s just one of my quirks. Floppy prose or distracting grammatical errors mean it’s hard to find the story in order to respond to it. So doing a tech critique before/while I respond to the story is just the way I have to do things. It means taking longer to do the crit, though, which is another reason I drag my feet.
That was all rather stream-of-consciousness, wasn’t it. And I have no pithy wrap-up for it, either.
*wanders off*