Category Archives: Words Words Words

My Day, By Me

The boy and I had a terrific day today. I think we both needed it. We drove HRH to work and did a couple of hours’ worth of errands on the way home (we now have a drying rack, huzzah, but we do not have cornmeal, which meant I couldn’t make the polenta I was craving). Then Sparky asked to watch a movie while I put away groceries and made him lunch. His nap lasted somewhere between two and two and a half hours, which gave me plenty of time to read a chunk of Sarah Monette’s The Virtu as well as play the cello for an hour. Just for kicks I’ve decided to start learning the second solo cello line of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Celli in G minor (RV 531 if you are a music geek, as I am), so I played through that and did remarkably well, although I discovered that I didn’t know the timing as well as I thought I did, nor the correct stresses and musical phrasing in certain places. Also, holy sixteenth notes that feel like thirty-seconds! Playing them at speed just isn’t going to happen just yet.

Then I played through a bunch of band stuff, proved to myself that I can actually play the solo from Enter Sandman (contrary to the evidence supplied by my performance on May 19), worked on my tone during Moon Over Bourbon Street, played Wheat Kings because I love the long tones, and really worked The Bonny Swans riffs. There just is no pretty technical way to play the first call and response phrase; I tried it in three different position combinations and there’s no way to win. It has to be the way I first worked it out because as awkward as the shift is, the alternate positions are even more awkward. Still, I worked that shift and the tone, and yeah, I can make it sound good. In fact, all of it sounded a lot better than I thought it would after not playing any of it since the gig, almost four months ago.

I am rather pleased: this marks the second time this week I’ve sat down and played. I’ve really ignored the cello this summer, partially because I am lazy, but also because the fretless bass is shiny and siren-like. Not that I’ve played Eva a heck of a lot either, but she’s easier to grab and mess about with than Adele is. However, I’ve played Adele at least an hour every couple of weeks, so she hasn’t been completely ignored. And really, I’ve been quite happy with my tone, too, and the quality of sound I’m pulling from her. I believe orchestra will be back in session next week, and I’m glad I won’t completely embarrass myself in whatever we end up playing. (Apart from whatever understandable embarrassment arises from sightreading things, naturally.)

Anywhats, yes, much with the cello playing while the boy napped. I heard him mumble an hour and a half into the nap while I played the Swans riffs and thought I’d woken him, but evidently he only surfaced for a moment and rolled over because I didn’t hear him again for another hour. And when I walked in to get him he was sitting in bed with a book, and said, “Oh, hi, Mama, I’m reading now.” “Oh, okay,” I said, “you just let me know when you’re ready to get up, then.” So I went back to chopping and frying the onions for the lasagna, and he didn’t call me back for another ten minutes. We made the lasagna together, the boy eating grated mozzarella and broken bits of uncooked lasagna noodles while standing on a kitchen chair supervising me. ( “Where go the noodles?” he said as I covered them with sauce, exactly the way he plays the Where’s Liam? game. “They’re under the sauce.” “Ah, otay, I see,” he said. Glad we’ve got all that straight, Sparky. Can we move on to the next layer now?)

Lasagna assembled, we hit the road to go pick HRH up, and treated ourselves to iced cappuccinos and doughnut holes on the way home. They were a comfort in the abysmal traffic and the August-like humidity that has returned to haunt us after a lovely cool week. Did I mention that everyone and their dog has returned to school? People are cluttering up my roads. That’s the one drawback to having the car while HRH is at work: we have to go pick him up at the end of the day and it’s lots of traffic both ways, being rush hour, and the boy gets very upset at being in the car for an hour and a half. Can’t blame him; I’m usually deeply unimpressed with the experience myself.

So, a good day all around. Tomorrow I will work on the Vivaldi novel again.

Il Maestro Update

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 45,794
New words today: 1,372
Carrots: a couple (emotionally, if not directly applicable to the work itself)

I didn’t remember the last time I’d actively worked on this book, but the date stamp on the file told me it was last December.

Let’s hear it for rummaging through notes to find suggestions for scenes, and going back to insert them between chapters! There is now part of a Chapter 6 1/2 covering what happens in December, which is a good thing because the existing narrative jumped from November to late January. This is also a good thing in that I get to warm up: it eases me back into the feel of this novel without forcing me to write the Big Thing That Comes Next.

When I opened the file this morning I panicked because it was so much smaller than I remembered it being. I’d forgotten that I cut about five thousand words out of this novel because they sent it in a direction I chose not to take after all. Now, of course, it’s four pages longer.

Some more research has been done, too. I’d like to see a couple of documentaries filmed in the past four years but I can’t find a listing for them anywhere. I don’t think they’re anywhere near crucial enough to write to the production companies to ask where I might obtain copies, though.

Back From The Dead

… or from the bed, anyway. I am better, thank you all.

On the other hand, it looks like the dryer is sicker than I was. It should not take three sessions to dry a small load of socks and underthings. We’re looking into getting the vent cleaned professionally; that ought to help. In the meantime, the clothesline is seeing lots of time and I’ll be buying a wooden drying rack this week, something I’ve been putting off for two years now. If the line can’t be used, I’m going to put my foot down and limit everyone to one session in the dryer per load, then it’s being relegated to the drying rack. The waste of electricity is shameful.

Also, one of the funniest LJ icons I have seen in a while: a crop of a Mary Wollstonecraft portrait, with the words “I can has rights?” along the bottom.

Back To Bed

I would post a review of our wonderful weekend if I wasn’t headed back to bed because I’m so sick. Suffice it to say that I had a lovely day as a guest of Fearsclave and his enchanting wife on Sunday, so lovely that within an hour of being with them at their peaceful Fearsranch I virtually forgot I was ill and felt better than I had in a couple of days. There was good company and good drinking and it was very nice to see HRH bond with someone who likes throwing sharp pointy things and drinking excellent Scotch too. Then yesterday I got to watch Liam eat the last half of a Wild Willy’s chocolate-peanut butter ice cream cone and laughed so much that I felt immeasurably better in spirit, if not in body.

It took us thirty minutes to get the boy to the caregiver today, instead of ten. School’s back in session for everyone and their dog, evidently.

Happiest of birthdays to Pdaughter and Sandman7!

More later, maybe.

What I Read This August

New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear
Nurtured by Love by Shinichi Suzuki
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Nodame Cantabile vol. 10 by Tomoko Ninomiya
The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland
Falling Angels by Tracey Chevalier
The Prioress’ Tale by Margaret Frazer
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
The Glamour by Christopher Priest
Kushiel’s Scion by Jaqueline Carey
The Players by Stephanie Cowell
Ability Development From Age Zero by Shinichi Suzuki
The Bass Book: A Complete Illustrated History of Bass Guitars by Tony Bacon & Barry Moorhouse
First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
Ex Libris by Ross King
Midnight Hour Encores by Bruce Brooks (reread)
Author, Author by David Lodge
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (reread)

Random notes:

Is there no genre Elizabeth Bear cannot write well? (I love you with much love, eBear.) New Amsterdam is a linked series of long short stories (oh, probably novelettes, I am tired, okay?) set in an alternate turn-of-the-20th century, featuring good old-fashioned mystery-solving, intrigue, politics, and sharp interpersonal shtuff as well as awesome characters.

Eat Pray Love: Lots of interesting stuff in this that reminded me of the spiritual upheaval and hard work to resettle everything I went through fiveish years ago. Elizabeth Gilbert’s first-person narration of her experience also reminded me that it’s easy to be spiritual when you’re in an environment focused on spirituality, not as easy to keep it up when you’re back in everyday life.

Ability Development From Age Zero by Shinichi Suzuki was pretty much a rehash of the original Nurtured By Love, It was essentially written to convince American mothers of the 1950s that yes, spending time with their children was actually the right way to raise them, and demonstrating that you love music is the plainest way instil a love of music in them. Some of it is dated, some of it sounds a bit condescending, but it’s a translation and also fifty years old. I can see what it’s meant to communicate, but I am not its target audience and didn’t need to be convinced, so other than a couple of interesting statements about how children learn it was useless to me. Nurtured by Love was more interesting to me from a philosophical standpoint, although I didn’t agree with all of it.

The Bass Book was essentially a waste of my time; it gave me a history of electric bass guitars, not the actual development of the instrument from its origins and how it was constructed. There was a lot of focus on Fender and Ampeg (some of the early Ampeg stuff is really interesting), but essentially it’s a highlight of the second half of the twentieth century and the electric bass business, along with the input of certain players that changed the development of the design and so forth. Not uninteresting, just not what I wanted. I won’t ever need to read it again. Pretty pictures, though, and gatefolds of some very lovely basses.

Christopher Priest’s The Glamour was good, but not as good as his The Extremes.

Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora was excellent, but took me a long time to settle into. The style of storytelling wasn’t exactly easy to go with as a reader, but the story itself and the characters were interesting enough that I stuck with it to accustom myself to the style. Once I had, it was enjoyable enough that I found myself chuckling now and again.

This was an insane month for reading, I see. Some of that had to do with periods of insomnia, some with the brevity of the books, some with the un-put-downable-ness of various titles.

Reviving Vivaldi

I am so very glad I delivered the file yesterday; I am terribly sick today with a dreadful head cold. It’s the kind of sick where you’re shivery (I’m bundled in socks and a sweater today), achy and stiff, have zero strength in your limbs, and are generally out of it as well as having all the common oh-so-enjoyable cold bonuses like the sore throat and runny nose and miserable sinuses and the headache. I’m thirsty all the time no matter how much I drink, and when I swallow my ears pop.

I spent the morning reading through the 110 pages I’ve got of Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro, and it’s not bad. As I read through it though, I could see again what had to happen next, and I still don’t think I’m ready to write it. Come to that, after what comes next the story can go one of two ways, and I still don’t know which way it should go. As I read I tidied some things up, corrected punctuation and phrasing, and made notes to myself in the margins to add information or go back and check things.

Evidently last fall when I wrote this Vivaldi was on the brain of the collective consciousness, because when I did a bit of online research I found two new resources that hadn’t existed in November: the Schola Pietatis Antonio Vivaldi, who together with the BBC filmed a programme called ‘Vivaldi’s Women’ on life in the Ospedale della Pieta that aired in March of 2007, and a novel by Barbara Quick called Vivaldi’s Virgins, published a couple of months ago, which at first alarmed me as possibly being like this YA book I’m almost finished writing but it thankfully it really isn’t. (What is it with this trend of referring to the girls of the Ospedale as belonging to Vivaldi?)

And now somehow it’s one o’clock.

We’re doing a birthday dinner with HRH’s dad tonight when we go to pick up the boy. I hope I’m well enough to enjoy myself.

Finis!

Finished, finished, finished! The file has been sent back. I invoice for the month’s work tomorrow.

I’m slightly dazed: the summer appears to be over. I saw children in uniform waiting on street corners for buses with new backpacks and lunchbags on our way out to drop the boy off the morning. It’s Labour Day this weekend. I missed the general energy of gearing up for school somehow, did not pick up on the subtle desire for new pens and binders and schoolbags that I usually develop ’round this time of year.

I have a cold. All three of us seemed to develop it roughly simultaneously. I seem to be the worst off, with what feels like a golf ball stuck in my soft palate, blocked ears, and a rapidly degenerating throat. HRH burned through it yesterday as per usual; the boy seems to have a bit of a runny nose and that’s it.

I have half an hour or so before it’s time to go pick up the boy. I think I’ll crack open New Amsterdam.