Is this a blog post which I see before me, its handle toward my hand?
Yes, you’re right.* There is no reason to start a new blog & then stop posting to it. Apologies.**
I don’t have an excuse that will adequately cover all the last [mumble-umble-unggle] months, because writing a blog post only takes about 46 hours & what’s my problem? While a husband to make dinner is helpful it is not strictly required. Or maybe it is.*** I will have told you last autumn, I am not going to look back & check, that way madness, & the falling down rabbit holes†, lies,†† I was actually bearing down on FINISHING SOMETHING, ie a novel, which I had been working on a very long time.†††
And I did finish it. Huzzah, roses, 100% organic chocolate, champagne etc, also lying on the floor in a daze.‡ It is, however, not like anything I’ve done before-it’s not fantasy-nor anything anyone would be expecting from me-& it’s a tough book, so not any easy sell whatever my track record has been. It doesn’t have a home yet. It will some day.
Meanwhile I’ve done something I’ve never done before in my entire life, from the first time I seized a pencil with serious purpose‡‡ & started writing a story about a heroic horse.‡‡‡
I started a new book immediately.
TO BE CONTINUED. §
* All of you who have written me, mostly politely, for which thank you, & those of you who have written less than politely, well, go find something better to do, like deep-fry your dish towels & drink your laundry soap, & leave me alone.
** Except to those of you deep-frying dish towels^, but you aren’t reading this anyway, you’re busy.
^ Or tablecloths. Or Converse All Stars.+
+No, no! Not Converse All Stars! Converse All Stars are sacred!
*** Sigh. He made lunch too, & dealt with grim real world stuff like plumbers & invoices & getting all that scary tax paraphernalia together well enough that an accountant can do something with it. There are BIG DRAWBACKS to being self employed, & a widow with no real-world skills beyond attaching a lead to a large frantic dog^. I can just about wield a can of WD40 in an emergency.
^ He goes zero to Mach IV of frenzy the moment he sees me pick up the lead.
† I said that? No, wait, I’m sure/I didn’t/I was going to/I meant to state unequivocally/I meant to add . . . here follows feverish looking up of stuff on the internet & off random bookshelves.^
^ I’ve lived here going on six years & no, my books are still not on shelves in anything like order. The fact that there are too many of them to fit on the shelves is a secondary problem-or a third-ary+ problem-the much larger secondary problem is that I keep buying them, so the piles of only-slightly-sorted books keep getting LARGER & more CONFUSING. I have the SF&F more or less in one giant mountain range in one room(s) & the fiction & English lit in another large ragged mountain range in another room(s) . . . & the non-fiction AAAAAUGH in a terrifyingly anarchic sort of Fingal’s Cave only with books++. & Fingal’s Cave winds on quite a while, you know?
+ oh, tertiary, stop being so fussy
++I will have told blog readers this before, probably several times#. When I was an undergrad## majoring in English lit, all my (male###) professors said, with varying degrees of condescension, that I would read more & more nonfiction as I got older.#### I sneered=. I was going to read fiction EXCLUSIVELY== for the rest of my life. They were, however, right, drat the patronising little gits. I read astonishing amounts of nonfiction any more.=== & I have NO IDEA how to organise it. I don’t even know which already-full shelves I should be stacking up the new stuff in front of. Real life is so variable.
# Old People get stuck on their favourite stories. I haven’t got to the waggling my walking cane at you for emphasis stage yet. I could maybe waggle my German Wire-Haired Pointer at you. He’s always up for a silly game.
## Millions of years ago. I remember the Cretaceous well. I had a pet Protoceratops, which didn’t need nearly as much walking as a German Wire Haired Pointer. . . . HEY! WHAT!? DUCK!!! THAT’S THE BIGGEST FREAKING METEORITE I’VE EVER-uh oh.
### I told you I’m old. This was back in the days when a female college professor was about as common as . . . a Protoceratops in 2024. I did have one-one-woman professor & there was at least one other in the department. But the college was still reeling from the unwelcome shock of letting female students in a very few years ago. They had followed this horrific act by hiring a few women, but they . . . um, well let’s say they weren’t rushing to offer these radical additions to the teaching cartel tenure.
#### These were English lit professors, mind. Makes you wonder. Not in a good way.
= Standing up very straight in my beat-up motorcycle jacket & even more beat-up Frye stomping boots.
== Nearly exclusively. I have always been up for another memoir of life with horses or another dog-training manual.@
@ NOT THAT ANY OF THESE FLAMING DOG TRAINING MANUALS HAS EVER BEEN OF ANY$ USE. However, I’ve been blundering along in the company of dogs for so many years that we mostly just get on with it.
$ All right, limited use. I will give you limited use.
=== Dare I risk admitting that I probably read more non- than fiction any more. No, probably not. So I didn’t say that. Non-fiction has its uses however. When I’m working on my own stuff, ARRRRRRRRRGH, the fiction I can read sometimes closes down to nearly nothing@ because it’s too likely, ARRRRRRRRRGH, both to distract & to influence. & fantasy? Forget it. There are days when I long to pull Tolkien@@ off the shelves as a comfort read, but I don’t dare, or my next chapter will be all Gilthoniel O Elbereth, which would not be a good thing. Tolkien is very contagious especially when you’re eleven years old & at that time, back in the Cretaceous, there was nothing else like it. & once you’re infected, there is no recovery.@@@
So nonfiction means I can keep reading something. Also, you know, reading nonfiction . . . you sometimes learn something. Golly.
@ I read a lot of murder mysteries.
@@ Any one of about sixty editions
@@@ Tolkien has a lot to answer for. He’s also where I contracted my semicolon compulsion.
†† Um. What was I just saying about rabbit holes?
††† Not as long as it looks however. I did a lot of crashing & burning there for a few years. If you’re a storyteller & you’re not telling any stories you feel like half your head is missing, or maybe a few limbs. But if there are no stories demanding your attention-or maybe there’s one you don’t feel able to tackle-well, there you are. Doing jigsaw puzzles & reading other people’s stories. & limping.
‡ Possibly as a result of dancing on the ceiling a little too long.
‡‡ This was third grade, I think. I hadn’t been serious before. I’d just been fooling around.^
^ I HATE those stories, seemingly rife in the classical-music world, of musicians who picked up their first violin at the age of three, or shinned up the piano stool & started playing Liszt before their tiny fingers could stretch more than four keys+, & knew that THIS was what they were going to do for the rest of their lives, & if they needed to earn a living with it, they’d do that too, no prob, & then they just got on with practising till their fingers bled.++ Sure, I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. So do three-quarters of the kids out there who still like stories, & I suppose the other ones want to grow up to write computer games or start a new social media platform even bigger than [whatever the biggest one is today, I’ve stopped keeping track, & I hope Elon Musk falls in a large vat of prune juice soon].+++ But how many of us do? I’m still thrilled, almost half a century later, that I’m one of the few. But I sure didn’t know it in third grade. Or seventh grade. Or as an undergrad being patronised by my male professors. & I’m sure there are a lot of violinists who started at the age of three who grew up to be accountants & car mechanics & high school teachers & play in their local community orchestras. But they’re not the ones you hear about. & are there any writers who knew they were going to be writers when they were three? & never wavered from that ambition?
+ At least you can get quarter- or, I’m told, even eighth-sized violins. If you’re a pianist, you’re stuffed. Unless the keyboards-for-kiddies market has, you should forgive the term, grown up some.
++ or their vocal cords, if they are singers. It takes a little longer to discover the French horn, say, unless a family member has one sitting dustily in a corner, or possibly the kid’s in her push-chair trundling past a pawnbroker’s with one in the window &, being a tiresome precocious musical genius, she leaps out of the chair, points to it with a small trembling finger, & says, THAT!! Do they make quarter-sized French horns? If so, playing it probably makes all the local dogs howl.
+++ I’m omitting all the young musical geniuses, who only read scores anyway. Ha ha ha.
‡‡‡ No, really
§ I promise. Erm. I hope. But what with all the footnotes,^ this one seems to have got rather long.
^ Some things don’t change.
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