Category Archives: Links

Self-Confessed Music Addict

I just upgraded my eMusic account from basic to plus, and now I can download 50 tracks every month for fifteen dollars. That only five extra dollars for twenty more tracks, and at the rate I’ve been queueing albums for download I wasn’t going to get some of them until five months from now. And I’m still paying less than what I’d pay for a single physical CD for what essentially amounts to five albums’ worth of music.

Now I can have the Erik Friedlander I want for this trip. And I can download all three discs of the Matt Haimovitz Bach solo suites, too! (Well, the first three suites, anyway. I can download the last three after April 1.

I don’t remember the last physical CD I bought in a store. So much of what I want isn’t available through regular channels, or would take months to obtain, or would cost a ridiculous amount of money. (Oh wait, it was Danny Elfman’s Serenada Schizophrenia, and I don’t remember buying it in a store because t! ordered a copy for me via one of his music business contacts.) I really like the option of being able to download selected tracks from an album, too. The one frustrating thing is that some of the artists I hear and want to try out, or buy an album from, aren’t available via eMusic (yet, or whatever).

Random Stuff

So I am not at the salon, and my hair is not being cut. There was a death in the family and my stylist is understandably unavailable. We’ve rescheduled for next week.

I still wish my hair was going to be cut before we go down to see my parents.

In other news, my extended extension was no only accepted, my editor told me to take two extra weeks, which was lovely of her. It also confirms my suspicion that she may have been laughing at my original request for three extra days. So now I can go back and forth between the pregnancy page proofs and finishing up the hearthcraft book with no feelings of impending doom or crazed and obsessive calendar-checking. I can also sleep. Which is a good thing.

And in yet more unrelated news, cellists may have an edge when playing Guitar Hero:

On the whole, a musical background seems to help Guitar Hero players. Zach Whitsell’s mother, Betty Whitsell, said her son has played violin, cello and saxophone in the past.

Ming Cheng, a 17-year cello player, said he was able to play the game on the medium level in the store before purchasing the game. He placed fourth in the 16-and-up age bracket on Saturday.

Cello players might have an advantage in the game, Cheng said. He explained that the spacing between the buttons on the controller is almost identical to the spacing between fingers on the strings of a cello.

“It keeps my fingers in shape for cello,” Cheng said. “I don’t have to practice as much.”

Except:

[Guitar player] Bloomfield is able to strum the notes up and down, which helps boost speed, Cheng said.

“I normally only strum down,” he said. “It’s more accurate, but I get tired faster.”

Which is a problem I have encountered myself. So when I saw this really interesting video called ‘Taking Trips to America’ promoting the album Block Ice and Propane by cellist jazz alternative musician composer-type person Erik Friedlander yesterday, I was fascinated. Don’t miss the video of Erik performing ‘Yakima’ at the bottom of the page.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 53,044
New words today: 1,503
Carrot count: 2+

Rounding out chapters today. More on oil lamps, mostly kitchen stuff.

I was ‘helped’ by a five-month old ginger kitten who thinks stomping on my keyboard and chasing cursors and pointers is fun. He squished himself behind the monitor at one point and did the meerkat/sock puppet thing, peeking at me over the top. I nearly fell off my chair because I laughed so hard. And then he stuck his head into my glass of iced tea and slurped a good portion of it up before I caught him. The eternal purring began to get to me; at first it was cute, then I got tired of it, now it’s disturbing in its unceasingness. (Incessence?) I had to throw him out at one point and close the door to the office. When I let him back in after my next break he climbed all over the place again before literally falling over in my lap and passing out. I was wondering when that would happen; I knew I remembered kittens playing hard then falling over in a corpse-like slumber. What was amusing was when he woke up, he literally popped his head up, gave a little “Meer!”, then started purring again as he climbed back onto the desk to chase the pointer and appearing text. Cute, but exasperating.

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.

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.