Monthly Archives: January 2003

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I neglected to mention that my awesome-cool husband bought me a Ravenclaw house mug yesterday.

Mine! Mine! Muah-hah-hah-hah!

(The husband, and the mug. Neener, neener!)

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I know you were all on tenterhooks, so I�ll end your agony: the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has announced their new conductor. It�s Peter Oundjian, the retired first violinist of the Tokyo Quartet who was forced to give up playing a few years ago because of hand problems. (Okay, I don�t know about you, but that�s a nightmare for a musician. Kind of like me worrying about losing my sight, being that I love reading and writing so much. When Oundjian announced his retirement from the Tokyo Quartet I was devastated.) The TSO has been operating under guest conductors for a couple of years ever since Jukka-Pekka Saraste left, so this announcement means that they have an artistic director again who can guide the orchestra under a single vision.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it�s because our own Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal is in the same position. Charles Dutoit resigned last year and the OSM has sort of stumbled a bit without a leader. However, hope springs eternal, and rumours are flying that Kent Nagano is at the top of the search committee�s list. At the moment Nagano is the music director of Berlin’s Deutsches Symphony-Orchester Berlin as well as the principal conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. (Not that he�ll have to give those up; heck, Dutoit was the principal conductor of a handful of international orchestras. Racks up the air miles, but hey.)

Victory!

Well, we’re both still alive, we didn’t use copious amounts of Kleenex, and nothing valuable got smashed, so I’m calling yesterday’s NaNoWriEx session a success.

I really don’t know who Ceri has edited in the past; most of them must have been arrogant, insecure types, because she’s fantastic at offering creative, constructive advice, and helping you work things out. The point of handing a work like this off to someone else is so that you have a second pair of eyes seeing it for the first time to catch inconsistencies (which, bless her, she did) and take in the work as a whole and see how it balances.

We decided to hand them to each other with a minimal amount of editing, to see if the other reader would catch things we’d already pegged as problems, and sure enough, it was gratifying to hear her point out problems that I had already noted down to address — the resolution of a particular storyline, the use of minor characters in other places, and so forth. The good thing is she also pointed out other ways to resolve problems that I hadn’t seen. Likewise, the problems I talked to her about all seemed to be problems that she was already aware of or had anticipated in some way.

Moreover, Ceri put my mind to rest about things like my characters: she swore that every single one of them was different and an individual, and she loved them all. This made me squiggle with joy because I consider characters one of the most important elements of a story, something too many authors forget. (And for those NaNo participants from Montreal who are wondering: no, I have no clue when any of them were born, and what their favourite colours are. So there.) She also eased my paranoid fears regarding my portrayal of sensitive issues. What I wasn’t expecting was her comment that I had material for one or two more novels about these characters. I specifically did not plan a series, because so many YA novels end up as series — but it’s nice to know that I’ve created a sense of “life goes on”.

So! Back to the laptop! I have to add that penultimate chapter I had decided against in the orginal draft to tie up a couple of loose ends, incorporate her edits and word suggestions, and, well, the next step is shopping it around, isn’t it?

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I know that Future Shop is The Den of Evil, but damn, their CD prices are persuasive. When I stopped by on Sunday, I picked up the Chicago soundtrack for $14.99 (compare $18.99 at HMV) and the Treasure Planet CD for $9.99 (no matter what the HMV price might be, this is cheaper by a mile!). I checked the price of Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk and found it to be $17.99 as opposed to $23.99, so yes, I know where I’ll be picking it up. If I’m purchasing at a chain, I’d rather purchase at the chain which will take the least amount of my hard-won dollars, thanks.

As good as the Chicago soundtrack is, I’m slightly disappointed. The recording levels are a touch uneven, particularly in the Cell Block Tango. The entire introduction to the song is almost unintelligable, as are some of the monologues, which were loud and clear in the film. And of course, one runs into the problem of lacking visuals, so the songs don’t pack quite the same punch in certain places – We Both Reached for the Gun loses a certain something when you don’t see Richard Gere’s voice issuing from Renee Zellweger’s brightly painted lips in a ventriloquist act. My last regret is that for some reason the soundtrack doesn’t include the tap-dance sequence.

Apart from that, it’s good solid singing of good solid songs, and I’m glad my mother invited me along to see the film with her over the Christmas break.

Speaking of my mother, it’s her birthday! Happy Birthday, Mum!

Reading And Watching Movies

I took this weekend off: no weblogs, no e-mail. It was remarkably refreshing after a week of driving, goal-oriented work at the computer, writing articles and revising text and sending things off all over the place. I used my laptop instead of my desktop this weekend, and only sent one message out (a submission, naturally). I didn’t even sit down and read a book to relax, but you know, I don’t feel as if I spent my weekend racing about and not taking it easy.

I lie. I did read a book. Two, in fact. Both NaNo novels of other local authors. It’s not quite the same kind of relaxing reading that I meant, though; I read these two books with awareness and a critical eye. Drat the writer in me!

Saturday evening I went out with one of my oldest friends for dinner and a movie. We saw Chicago, which was just as good the second time around. I haven’t seen the original All That Jazz, but this version was spectacular. Richard Gere is one of my least favourite actors in Hollywood, but in this film he manages to not only entertain me, but surprise me. Anything that has current stars singing their own songs and dancing their own numbers has my admiration (assuming they’re more than passable at it). We now have a standing date to see any musical that’s released on the big screen; having worked on musicals on and off together for six years or so means we appreciate them in a very particular fashion together.

It was a terrific evening. I forget sometimes why certain friendships persist even if we don’t spend a lot of time with one another, and a night out like this one renews my faith in something. I just can’t put words to it.

(Speaking of stars singing makes me think of Once More With Feeling, a.k.a. the Buffy musical, which reminds me that Alyson Hannigan and Alexis Denisoff are getting married. If you have to ask who they are, then you won’t care. Really.)