Category Archives: Words Words Words

Concert Announcement!

Yes, gentle readers, the time has come again to make plans to attend the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra spring concert! Every spring we present a lively and soul-uplifting concert to celebrate the arrival of the season (or advent, or the invocation of said season in this particular case, ahem).

This year’s concert to celebrate/invoke/present an impassioned petition to spring presents a selection of French dance-themed music, some well-known, others perhaps a delightful discovery for you. The programme includes:

Overture to The Caliph of Baghdad by Boieldieu
Pavane pour une infante défunte by Ravel
Aires de danse dans le style ancien from Le roi s’amuse by Delibes
Pavane, op. 50 by Fauré
Symphony no. 1 by Gounod

The concert takes place on Saturday April 5, 2008 at 19h30, and will be presented at Cedar Park United Church at 204 Lakeview Ave, Pointe-Claire, QC (corner St. John’s Blvd). Admission is $10, children under 18 attend free of charge.

Directions via public transport may be found here. If you’re driving, take St. John’s Blvd south from either autoroute 40 or 20. Lakeview is one street south of autoroute 20; the church is on the south-west corner of the intersection, with a parking lot on the west side. Here’s a map to help you find your way.

Did I mention that we have a guest mandolin player? We have a guest mandolin player. Intriguing, yes?

So mark your calendars, and make a date with friends and family to share a wonderful evening of music and camaraderie. And maybe, just maybe, it will feel a little more like spring when we’re through.

Truths

Over at SFNovelists.com, Catherynne Valente has written her future self some notes about how she works, having just completed a novel and so it is all painfully fresh in her mind. While they’re not universally applicable, I can almost guarantee you’ll find one or two that do apply to you and your own methods and/or habits, if you write anything. There are little gems such as “you can only type at the rate your brain can create” scattered throughout the whole piece, too.

For example, the ones that resonate for me are:

3. You need about 40,000 words under your belt before you feel like you have a handle on how to write this book (I fully agree with Gaiman that you never learn how to write a novel, only how to write this novel). You don’t have a handle on it, not really, but you’ll feel more confident that the shape of things is clear and solid. At this point, you will panic and think that you will overshoot your contracted wordcount by at least a million words. You won’t. It is a small superpower that your initial estimated wordcounts are always within 2 or 3k of actual final count. You are very good at guessing the size of your babies. You ought to work at the fair. So calm down. You do this because you think your ideas are too big for the book you’ve given them. They aren’t. It’ll be ok. You made these things up–trust that they are not bigger than you are.

and

6. You will, at more than one point, hate this novel above all others and want nothing more than to forget it ever existed. Specifically, you will be worried that it is fragmented and nonsensical and does not hang together as a novel qua novel. You always think this and it is never (rarely) true. Never fear, you have the ability to write truly crappy things, but they usually hurt you like a kidney stone until you go back and fix them. Listen to the kidney stone feeling and fix it if it isn’t metal and then move on. But have faith that the novel as a whole will come as it is meant to, at the rate it is meant to, and that you have a lot of time to fix everything in post-production.

and also

7. When writing a book, you will feel uglier and lower and more worthless than at any other time in your wee mad psychic cycle. You will be cranky and fragile and all kinds of friable. This is because you are a bad shamany thing, and everything is pouring through you into the book. All the good things in you, beauty and faith and patience and tenderness and love, are going onto the page and that means there isn’t much left to make you feel like anything but a slimy bug thing. This is ok. It is the price you pay for what you do and how you do it. Understand that it will pass, and that there are people who love you, and that you are not slimy or a bug. You will recover. You will feel as though you deserve to be seen in the daylight again. This usually takes about three weeks post-deadline. Do not rush it, do not beat yourself up for not feeling better than you do. If you had had a real baby, it would be called post-partum depression. Just be thankful yours does not involve uncomfortable stitches.

Random Links

Warner Bros. will be splitting the film adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows into two movies, both to be directed by David Yates with scripts by Steve Kloves. Projected release dates are November 2010 and the second in May 2011.

How needles were made in the nineteenth century, as published by PieceWork magazine, a neat periodical about historical needleworking technique. (They didn’t just appear on mercery shop shelves, you know.)

Yes, random. I warned you.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 51,541
New words today: 494
Carrot count: 6+

How’s that for misleading? I deleted five pages and ended up with two pages of new/refocused stuff.

I hate, hate, hate that my productive period begins just around two-forty-five, and then I have to pack everything in at four-fifteen. Hate it. But in those twoish hours I do get a stunning amount of focused work done. I only wish I could get into that headspace at, say, nine-thirty.

Guess What, It’s Snowing Again

An e-mail exchange during work this afternoon:

HRH: It’s snowing again. I’m starting to feel like a extra in the Narnia books.

Autumn: I said “Always winter and never Christmas” to Miranda just this morning!

HRH: How long was winter in the story?

Autumn: Over a hundred years.

HRH: Someone please kill the White Witch!

Autumn: Dude, you’re the one with the lion on his house crest. Do it already.

Experiments in Bowmaking

The frog of my main bow cracked last fall as a result of a small boy-related incident. I filled the crack with Krazy Glue and it’s been fine so far. I know, I know; purists are shuddering. I paid about $150 for this bow; it would likely cost me about that much to have the frog replaced. And I love this bow; the balance is perfect, the weight is perfect, and I don’t want to buy a new one.

Except with the spring concert coming up, I’m starting to worry about the crack, and have visions of the thing giving way during performance. My only usable back-up bow is a really heavy one that hurts my hand because the balance is off. Or rather, it was off.

Last night I took it to HRH and asked if he’d be able to shave some of the wood off the head and gradually extend the taper of the upper half of the stick further towards the middle. As it was, the taper went abruptly from a very thick stick to a much thinner section about three inches long at the tip. He said that while he could do it, he’d be uncomfortable because he’d be worried about breaking or ruining it. In return I pointed out that I’d only paid $80 for it, and to have the reshaping done professionally would cost more than that. Also, I still had my main bow, and so if this backup one was to be broken it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

So we took it downstairs and he set up the Dremel. In half an hour we had carefully reshaped the head and upper half of the stick beautifully. It’s lighter and better balanced, and the head is much more elegant than it was originally; it was very blocky before the remodelling. When I was happy with the weight, the balance, and the tapering along to the middle of the stick he buffed it, and I oiled it. Then came the final test: I sat down to try it out on the cello. To my satisfaction it travels well, and the balance is miles and away better than it had been. The fulcrum point is now a third of the way along from the frog end, where it’s supposed to be, instead of halfway along the stick. I no longer feel like my hand is going to fall off or cramp up from fighting gravity when I hold it. I’m going to use it as my primary bow at rehearsal tonight and see what happens.

Daring, but successful. I’d never have tried it with a more expensive or precious bow. It makes me wonder what we could do with a bow blank, a frog, the facings and screws, and a hank of bow hair. It would be interesting to make my own bow.