Monthly Archives: April 2008

The Hat Drama: Resolution

It’s now been a day and a bit since the boy lost his hat. He has asked us dozens of times what happened to it, not because he doesn’t remember, but because he’s making it sure it all happened and learning the story by heart. After yesterday’s nap, we have decided that ducks are going to use it to make a nest.

Last night at the dinner table he said, “My hat fell in the water.”

“Yes, it did.”

“The ducks are going to make a nest in it.”

“That’s right.”

“And they will have sweet dreams in it.”

That part was new, and all his own. HRH and I exchanged startled but touched glances and agreed that yes, any duck who slept in a nest made from his hat would have very sweet dreams indeed. The boy is very satisfied with this, and we are, too. He’s a good-hearted kid.

Eleventh Hour

I just realised that the book is missing a chapter.

*facepalm*

No, no, it’s not that I miscounted and in fact have two non-existent chapters to assemble; only Chapter Ten needs the rits and such, which is what I’m working on today. I was scanning the four pages of random notes I’d been typing in at the end of the file when they suddenly clicked for me, and I realised that there really needs to be a separate chapter addressing how one works with a spiritual hearth.

This is not the staggering crisis it may seem. The fourish pages of notes tie together quite nicely, and there were threeish pages in Chapter Two that I’ve just moved into what I’m currently calling Chapter Two Point Five. The material really needs its own focus instead of being shoehorned into Chapter Two. Suddenly things are falling into place, and I’m somewhat relieved because I was always vaguely unhappy with the whole nebulosity of this particular element in the book.

It is, however, a minor crisis in that I now have to smooth out/link/expand another chapter when I thought I was all done but for the final chapter. Chapter Two Point Five has just been scheduled for Friday in place of obsessively scanning the MS.

This is a good thing. It’s not such a good thing in that I’ve just created more work for myself, but the book will be the better for it.

Sigh.

Tuesday So Far

An excellent morning! It’s sunny and there’s absolutely no wind, so it feels much warmer than the thermometer says it is. Sparky and I spent two hours at the Ecomuseum this morning, stomping in puddles and through mud. The original and earnest plan was to do it on foot, but right out of the car he asked to be carried. Uh-hunh; I don’t think so. So I pulled the handy-dandy Emergency Umbrella Stroller out of the trunk, which delighted him because he decided he wanted to push it. This would have been fine if the paths hadn’t been mud and water, and if he knew what a straight line was, and if he didn’t have that I-am-three-and-I-can-do-it-MYSELF streak flaring up that refused to allow me to help steer the thing.

Anyway.

There were a couple of class groups and a handful of families there at the same time, but the compound is big enough that we only ran into them once or twice. We saw an Arctic fox, and a pine marten doing intense laps in his enclosure, and deer, and crows, and the ravens flying around their enclosure (wow). Then we went to see the ducks in the waterfowl pond.

And there it was that disaster struck. See that faded green hat in the post icon? It is now at the bottom of the duck pond. Yes, Sparky leaned over the railing a little too far and suddenly wailed; his hat had fallen off. I grabbed for a shovel and threw myself down on my stomach and tried to hook it but it was just out of reach. Let me tell you, the wails and the tears and the running of the nose turned it into a Titanic-class tragedy. I tried to reach it from the next edge but there was no way. So I soothed him as best I could, but he didn’t want to leave it behind. I suggested going on to see the foxes and the wolves, and checking back later to see if the hat had drifted to shore. “Maybe the ducks will bring it to the edge of the pond,” I said, so he pressed his face against the railing and hollered, “PLEASE DUCKS, BRING MY HAT!” Finally he agreed to continue along, but he wanted to be carried so I managed the stairs up to the next level with him on one hip leaning his tear-stained cheek against my shoulder, and hauling the stroller up with the other hand. Then he wanted to sit in the stroller (aha, finally) and didn’t want to get out to see the animals, but complained that he couldn’t see. And the entire time he was saying, “Where is my hat? Is it in the water? It fell off? We will ask for help when we get back.”

The bears were out for the first time this spring, and we saw all three of them. And we spent about half an hour watching the river otters from both the top level and the window looking into their tank. There were more tears when I finally said that we had to keep going, and after a quarter-hour of resistance he climbed into the stroller on his own and waited for me to catch up and push him along. We took a side trip to check the duck pond but the hat was nowhere in sight; it had sunk, as I had expected when I saw it taking on water as it made its initial progress across the pond. There was no point in asking the staff to pick it up for us. So we agreed that he could wear his Thomas the Tank Engine hat from now on, and we’d keep our eye out for a new cap too. Then we saw the owls, and then we went inside and had our peanut butter sandwich while watching the birds in the solarium.

The car was nice and warm from the sun; I took off both our jackets. He almost fell asleep on the way home, but I kept him up with raucous Muppet songs. We finished lunch while watching the DVD disc of the new They Might Be Giants album Here Come the 123s, and now it is nap time. (This is a big improvement over last Tuesday, the day upon which there was no nap.)

Good day so far, with one bad bit. After the nap, I think we’ll bring out the home-made play dough again and make another army of Totoros. Or maybe the finger paint. [ED. NOTE: It ended up being making cupcakes and watching the TMBG DVD again instead, then playing in the backyard till we decided to take the wagon to the bus stop to meet HRH when he came home from work.]

A selection of photos from the Ecomuseum are up at Flickr. And now, bonus pictures: We have crocus-age!

Today’s Wiktory!

57,017 and only one more chapter to go! Well, to write, actually, because it currently consists of a page and a half of ideas for rituals and so forth.

Plus formatting and that [INSERT BRILLIANT RITUAL HERE], but that’s what Wednesday and Thursday are for. Friday is for obsessively scanning the MS before sending it off.

Off to get the boy!

Slogging

That’s Chapter Seven and Eight done. I wish I felt better about it but I don’t. I still have formatting to do, and I know I’m deliberately leaving some places rough or thin enough to be pointed out by the editors. If they do get pointed out I’ll handle them then because I can’t do anything about it now, and the fact that I’m okay with this decision upsets me deeply. I feel like I’m brushing it off, or assuming we can fix it in post-production, or putting the equivalent of a mental sticky-note on it and saying ‘I know this doesn’t work, do you have any suggestions?’… none of which constitute living up to my responsibility.

Everything hurts. My spine is just radiating pain, and that’s made me very short with people today. It’s hard to focus on work like this, because sitting hurts. Focusing is also a challenge because the farther along in the book I go the less structured it is. Part of that is the design of it — the later chapters are disjointed because they’re techniques and recipes and crafts and exercises — but it’s disheartening after having pulled off so much awesome work in the other six chapters. I feel like I’m hacking out rough, rude little approximations of writing and just kind of sticking them in.

Writing a new book sounded like a good idea at the time last July when I suggested redoing this proposal. Sigh.

I wrote my editor an e-mail today confirming that it would be submitted next Friday because I felt I hadn’t been clear when we’d discussed the new deadline (I had proposed the 15th, she suggested the 18th). I also told her about the FMS thing, because I felt I owed her an explanation for not being as on top of things as I have been for the past five years (yikes, has it been that long?). I hadn’t wanted to tell her until I’d handed the book in, because I didn’t want it to seem like an excuse, but I felt she deserved to know on the heels of the juggled deadlines and the proofs.

I’m going to knock off for the day. I’ll do some notebook work tonight. The hard copy has almost reached the point of uselessness because of the fragmented state of the final two chapters. I’ll see what I can do with it. I stopped using it in Chapter Seven because it was easier to do the edits directly in the file itself.

Things would be easier if there weren’t other issues going on behind the scenes here. It’s frustrating that they won’t clear up until the end of next week, which is when I hand in the MS.