The house with two writers, chapter 119

J: i started dune. the pov stuff is interesting to track.
J: the book seems to lie at a certain point on a historio-literary axis, between the 'old days' of omniscient-pov, and the nouveau age of limited or close 3rd-person pov. he does it very very well, and it's quite appealing. Just a bit unusual to a "modern" ear
Marsh: i really enjoy it
Marsh: it's a fast adjustment
J: yeah
J: WAY more as-u-know-bob than heinlein. but than, which of us is not?
Marsh: i'm not
J: i know YOU'RE not
Marsh: i always err on the side of leaving out every important detail instead
J: my only question is: 'balance it out' doesn't quite connote causal
Marsh: "wtf, her main character is a staple gun??"
J: "is this a space opera-mystery-romance? or a COOKBOOK?"
Marsh: i'm cutting and pasting this into listeme, minus frivolous smooches
J: don't you dare excise my frivol

The most important thing is to remember that everyone -- everyone -- has a story. It's probably a long story. Life is terribly and wonderfully complicated, and if I can just remember that everyone is in the moments of their own life, I can have mercy and patience. Or at least I try to.

It also helps my fiction when I keep this in mind. People are not furniture. (Except mannequins, kind of, but that's a long story.)

Dangerous skins

Pulling on the skin of a new book, a new author -- I adore that feeling, but right now, with the pile of things I have on my desk and life, I am relying on the safety of familiar books instead. Sometimes it's better to know how the story ends, especially when you have a ton of dangling threads in real life. (Why do I sound defensive?? I reread books. Why else would one own them?)

So a few, in no particular order -- heh, speaking of no particular order, I picked up Harry Potter 5, in anticipation of the movie coming out, to lead up to 6. I got about a chapter in and grabbed the wrong volume when dashing out to do some chauffeuring and car waiting. So I read 7 instead. Of course, then I was at the "beginning" of reading the series backwards and decided to go ahead with that.

What a different look at a well-known (to me) series. For one thing, the flaws JUMP out at me. Especially the time-turner. Mainly the time-turner. Ugh, the time-turner. Little detail things like calling the dementors guards until partway through volume 3 and then not really again. For another, it doesn't matter. They are familiar to me because I have read them multiple times, and this is because I enjoy them. But I do recommend sometime reading a series backwards for a different take on the author's plotting. It's very instructive. I am going to do this with GRRM's next, in anticipation of the upcoming release, whenever the heck that will be.

The current top of the stack in the bathroom is Bisson's Bears Discover Fire. I can't remember which story I brought along to Odyssey as my "favorite", but this story (the title story) would be really high on my list, and there are several in this collection that are recommendable, as well. I feel, dimly, that old stirring of inspiration. Those bears can do that for me. So can Atwood and Oates. They make me want to add to the world, something, something new and different and dangerous, something that someone will want to call familiar.

What I'm working on

What's on my desktop

It's fun and creepy to research mannequins. I love the sites that have used ones for sale: "Just one crack on this toddler's skull," like that's a real plus. Considering that other descriptive phrases include "headless" and "hangable", perhaps it is.

I am using the word research to make it clear that I'm not just googling broken naked dolls. At least it is not puppets, although I dread the day that my brain will decide that puppets are in the next story. Marionettes = nightmarish. They collapse in a buglike way, a jerky centipede/spider way, and lie there with painted garish human faces and strings and sticks, like they have been smacked with a supersized magazine.

The so-called writing business

Got a slightly personal rejection for Putty Brother, which is both encouraging and a rejection.

I have now sent the enrollment form for TNEO, as well. I have no earthly idea how we will manage to coordinate things this summer, but I'm going ahead with it anyway.

Fewer daisies today

More Daleks.

Travel... in time!

To 1978, or thereabouts, when Marsh was starting to mix a few Daleks in with the daisies.

I know what I want

listeme (9:08:05 PM): ok, so here is a farfetched and ridiculous question
SISTER (9:08:11 PM): k
listeme (9:08:24 PM): is the meatball recipe by any chance handwritten?
SISTER (9:08:41 PM): party meatball recipe?
listeme (9:08:43 PM): yeah
SISTER (9:09:07 PM): frozen meatballs, jar of grape jelly, jar of heinz 57 chili sauce, jar of banana peppers
listeme (9:09:10 PM): no, no
SISTER (9:09:10 PM): heat
listeme (9:09:12 PM): HANDWRITTEN
SISTER (9:09:19 PM): that is handtyped!
SISTER (9:09:21 PM): :-D
listeme (9:09:22 PM): i need a handwritten version
listeme (9:09:27 PM): you are NO HELP
SISTER (9:09:30 PM): whut
SISTER (9:09:46 PM): you want me to email it to you...?
listeme (9:10:45 PM): gah

(I was looking for a specific physical/graphical thing. I'm really not a maniac.)

Upcoming titles

1. On being the mother of children who also have a stepmother: Turning small blobs of biology into good human grownups

2. My neighbor puts his trash out a day early: Sharing an ecological niche

3. Apocalypse Tomorrow!

4. What should we do with the newspapers? The ones stacked by the fire and the ones perching precariously on the edge of yesterday's technology

5. "Does this one have gentoo?" What bogglers could teach the NSA about dictionary compartmentalization


AND MORE!

You know, it's about the tangibility right now. If I were in the scarf business, for example, I would be feeling more valuable as a scarf maker than as a scarf designer. I would have proof in my hands, warm fuzzy proof.

This turns my normal priorities upside-down, but I don't think this is a bad thing. On Monday at some point I proclaimed that I just needed to "make something, anything. Clay pots!"

There are very good clay pots in this world, and I am not a pot maker. So it was just rhetoric.

Which is the whole POINT.

Maybe some pieces are fitting together

Synopsis progress: I have no idea.

What I will say is that I have been working on jigsaw puzzles in the evenings here and there because it has been actually cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace and a jigsaw puzzle is a nice thing to work on for a few minutes while my toes warm up. When I was little, my sister and I would do jigsaw puzzles on the floor of the sanctuary after services while our parents yakked with parishioners. When we finished, we would flip them over and do them again only looking at the gray sides. Peeking at the pictures was forbidden. We were very quick and good at them. So I am fond of puzzles, although I usually don't like the pictures on them.

Now, puzzles are really not a hobby that I will ever "pursue". They are great for fireside tables and for rainy stretches during vacations, but they are not a goal themselves. However, because I'm a competitive person, I do like to do whatever I do as well as I can, and hopefully better than the next guy. Over the years, my process has evolved into a very unlinear process that is more like clumping algae than anything else. Eventually I end up with large chunks of together pieces -- pieces themselves, you could argue -- that must be fit together. It is a much faster method (for me) than working from the outside in.

Besides puzzles, I think of myself as a linear person. I don't really have a map in my head, for instance; I have a lot of routes. I make the bed with a particular order of motions. Every time. I do things in routes, recipes of tasks.

So now, with this synopsis problem, I'm discovering that my novel is really more algae aggregation than a series of events, and figuring that out is a major big deal.