Off the Cliff

 Pepys is always writing 'Lay late abed' (except when he's getting up at 4 a.m. to be somewhere downriver at 8) and I fully sympathize with the feeling. Lay late abed today, reveling in the under covers warmth while the AC blew coolness into the bedroom, and dreamed a detailed bunch of things which the waking mind won't hold onto. But one was definitely incandescens coming to dinner at not!Bedford, bearing gifts, only my sibs had somehow eaten most of the food I was planning to serve and I had to order more. Sorry it turned into a frustration dream but it was nice while it lasted.

I've long known that quarantine would be easier if I were still writing fanfic and had that other world to escape into. So I read some of my old fics, from 15 or 20 years ago (!) to take me Elsewhere, as I read old LJ entries from ten years back, and that does me for a while.

Picked a Bernard Cornwell mystery off the curbside, possibly thinking he was some other author. But the blurb sounded good- 'The Countess of Avebury, once an opera dancer, was killed while having her portrait painted. The artist was convicted of her murder and is due to hang. But influences in high places brought Rider Sandman on the scene as an investigator for the government.' So far so good, and hot weather is mystery reading weather. The opening scenes, of a public hanging, are harrowing, even if the unsympathetic characters are all presented as grotesques. And then Sandman appears, walking back to London because he's pissed off at a thrown cricket match.

He walked because he refused to share a carriage with men who had accepted bribes to lose a match. He loved cricket, he was good at it, he had once, famously, scored a hundred and fourteen runs for an England eleven playing against the Marquis of Canfield's picked men and lovers of the game would travel many miles to see Captain Rider Sandman, late of His Majesty's 52nd Regiment of Foot, perform at the batting crease... He could not afford the stagecoach fare, nor even a common carrier's fare, because in his anger he had thrown his match fee back into Sir John Hart's face and that, Sandman conceded, had been a stupid thing to do for he had earned that money honestly, yet even so it had felt dirty.

Does no one hire editors any more? Are the colon and semicolon dead? I'm a subvocalizer, and I truly can't be having with writing like this. Back on the boulevard it goes.

I was ready to push off on my bike but had to wait for a pickup truck moseying up the street and taking its own sweet time. Passed me, I saw it was full of bits and pieces of stuff, guy jumps out several doors up and goes to inspect a barbecue left out for the garbage pickup. Light dawns. I peddle up. 'You take scrap? I have this window screen and an aluminum pole--' Yup. Two more bits the garbage collectors wouldn't take, happily removed from my front porch.

Chrome famously fails to give sound to Youtube. I thought I could hear the preview to JS&MN because it was embedded in someone's post. But when I went to the youtube site, mirabile dictu, Chrome had decided to give me sound again. Of course, this XP groans mightily when playing vids there, which drowns much of it out. But still am I content. Might even attach speakers to hear things better.
( Read more... )

amazon.jp knows all. They're still advertising a three volume compilation of Channel Five with a stand-alone story that will complete this 'uncompleted saga.' Volume three has yet to appear, after four years, and I'm sure never will. Given how many unfinished sagas I have of my own, I'm in no position to complain; but Shibata does do this. Well, and so do many mangaka: the system seems designed to wear them out and throw them away.

So I'm (re)reading her ancient Shounen Jump series Freeman Hero instead, with a view to emptying some of my manga shelves. S-i-l says 'in ten years I'll be 78, and if I haven't read all those books by then, out they go.' This is probably a good policy to follow.

Given that I'm working on a cold-- or working on not having a cold, which involves sleep, dope, water, and bowel-tolerance levels of vitamin C-- imagine how happy I was to show up at work and discover three guys away, including the Logistics Baby, and two of the remaining seven acclimatising with their mothers. No need for a fourth body, so the fourth body took herself down Huron for more dumplings and afternoon reading.

(The Logistics Baby is the happy shrieker whose logistics mess up our ratios, since he needs to feed and sleep when he needs to feed and sleep and not a moment later. Otherwise he shrieks unhappily, which actually sounds the same, and sets all the other children off. I love him, but if this were repeated tomorrow, I should not be sorry.)
( About those Lovecraft Holmes stories )

1. Am very taken with this distinction (in a discussion about Literary Fiction vs Genre.)

For me, kinetic writing is the sort that is libidinously exciting, and leaves you feeling almost physically bereft of the characters at the end of the book. The non-kinetic may be very intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, but it doesn't do that. Kinetic writing issues in the fan impulse, and the non-kinetic doesn't. This doesn't map onto literary / genre distinctions very well, but I think that "genre" writers more often aim to excite their readers in a kinetic sense, and "literary" types often self-consciously avoid it. But I don't think it's anything to do with quality as such. Scott is nearly always kinetic, and Nabokov hardly ever is; Joyce rarely is, Dickens quite often is.

( Read more... )

Reading Aaronovitch's past entries, I come across this filk. "I was once again contemplating the problem of pushy minor characters and how they can encrust the bottom of your narrative like barnacles"
( And here is the solution )

Hm. For October, 31_days has themes from the Hyakunin Isshu. I wish I was still writing, or you know, had something I was dying to write about.

Well I do, sort of. I want to do a Points ficlet, but teasing out How Things Work from the text is beyond me right now. I mean, what's the deal with the Ghost-tide? The timely dead come back, OK (supposing we can agree on a definition of timely dead) so why are there these people who keep showing up to insist that their sister or whatever has been murdered? If she's there, she hasn't been murdered; or if she has been, then she somehow felt she ought to have been murdered-- like Philip's former comrades killed in the wars. But the untimely dead? When do they show up? Any old time at all?

I'd like a bit more meta and no one's giving me it grump.
( Cut for links )

So rushthatspeaks discovers HP Lovecraft being, in essence, HP Lovecraft even while talking about some rather uninspired caverns in Virginia.

Glimpses of far black vistas beyond the radius of the lights-- sheer drops of incalculable depth to unknown chasms, or arcades beckoning laterally to mysteries yet untasted by human eye-- bring one's soul close to the frightful and obscure frontiers of the material world, and conjure up suspicions of vague and unhallowed dimensions whose formless beings lurk ever close to the visible world of man's five senses.

Am I the only person who thinks Lovecraft writes like a fog machine? Formless, inchoate, and dimly menacing, like the gibbering of Those who dwell Down There.

Ben Aaronovitch is talking about the previous incarnation of ideas that made it into Rivers of London, one of which was a Hogwarts hommage. "You can tell this is a basic TV idea because it's made out of clichés bolted together."
( I too can take someone else's ball and run with it )

1. If you are solitary, be not idle; if idle, be not solitary. If you *must* be both, have good muscle relaxants and all should be well.

2. Have never noticed so many abandoned, discarded, or simply lost winter gloves on the streets as I have this year. One expects it in very snowy years, when the glacier's retreat reveals where the glove fell as you were wrestling groceries out of the car in a white whirling haze. But this year's mild winter? Perhaps so mild people didn't notice they weren't wearing gloves.
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I will say this for Donald Thomas-- unlike other American authors of Holmes pastiche, he doesn't make his main characters American, or half-American as the case may be; he doesn't make his English characters naturally think in terms of Edgar Allen Poe and naturally reference American slang; and he doesn't make an English character say 'He hung himself' when any English person, then or now, would say 'hanged.' A pity he's not as entertaining as the other writers, but still. He doesn't commit that beginner's fanfic error, writing what one knows: so that Dorian Red Gloria and Heero Yui alike must visit Oklahoma City, and Holmes must visit San Francisco, because the author wants to see the beloved character in the streets of her home town.

Oh such sadness. The lovely little 15" monitor I got second hand from my SIL took me back seven years to the lovely 15" monitor I wrote my best stuff on. Square, you know? Fonts to the edge of the screen and quite happy with 800x600; none of the pale pixillated crap the 17-inchers pull, flat-screen or not. I was chugging away at the current story in a haze of nostalgic creativity and hurray go me.

But it has a quirk. The first three times I tried to use it it wouldn't quite turn on. The on-off button on the front blinked and heat lightning flashed on the side, but no picture. My brother looked at it sternly and it then behaved beautifully.

The secret seems to be not to turn it off. Leave that little button alone and all is well. Alas, last night I turned it off. This morning is heat lightning and no picture. So am back on the trojanned computer's 17" flat screen that wants to be 1440x900 and sulks at 800x600 and pixillates everything to death.

What I don't get is that even the geeks who produce this stuff are getting older. Why are screen resolutions getting higher and higher? Does everyone really hunch six inches from the screen? And how do they move afterwards if they do?

Ah yes. Writer's block. The two basics: nothing to say and I don't wanna.

Some forgotten summer in the last decade I'd regularly sit at my computer and smell hamburgers barbecuing in the back yards beyond the window, and then feel compelled to bicycle over to the one restaurant that had reasonably priced hamburgers-- and glacier-slow service-- and have one myself. (Somehow I never realized that Pauper's across the street had them too; I assumed my choice was between Incredibly Slow Restaurant and By the Way's organic burgers with a schmeer of hummous on them, quote-unquote.) Not that any restaurant gives me the pickle relish I really want, which is why I want barbecued hamburgers, not restaurant ones.

Am smelling hamburgers now. But the whirligigs of time allow me no more than a bulgogi's serving of beef, which might come to a third of a burger, and no fries at all. Sic transit etc. Am a little sad about that. The By the Way burger was what I ate the evening of Sept 11, as a means of asserting to myself that fundamental things in my universe were still the same. However. What we left them, trains inherit/ Trains go on and we grow old.
( And speaking of trains )

( Who do I write like? )
I'm suspicious of these results. I bet they only have five writers' styles analyzed, most of them popular. Except that I c&ped a passage of A Christmas Carol, and they concluded that Dickens wrote like Jane Austen.

rasetsunyo draws a classical Chinese beauty of the dragon persuasion. Who is this? Is it Pipang?

My first thought was 'Oh! That's the young man Kaiei starts getting interested in at the Southern Ocean' (that no one here has met.) However, on second thought I'm not sure said young man (son of Goushou's chief steward IIRC) is quite so peerless a beauty as that. But then I'd never thought Pipang was a peerless beauty either. joasakura drew me a picture of him long ago, which has to be here on one of these HDs somewhere, and she made him, mhh, I think 'lovesome' is the word I'd use. It's a gestalt, not just a physical attractiveness. I'd vaguely conceived Pipang as being good-looking enough, but of course no one looks at his *features* ever. It's that rare colour of his that focusses attention and inspires passion.
( But what if... )

Evidently I didn't realize, when I was reading Kohri no Mamono two years back, that vol 5 left me on a cliff-hanger. I went happily into vol 10, and all the problems had been solved, to the point that I didn't remember afterwards that a problem had existed. However I got vol 6 in NY, and did a fast reread of 5 last night, and now am ready to discover how we get out of our hole.

I am doing this to avoid writing Mushishi fic because surely, *surely*, everyone who writes Mushishi-- or does djs, more like-- works off the same trope: for Adashino, that aficionado of mushi-related artifacts, the most precious mushi artifact has to be Ginko himself. Whereupon we cut at once to the sex scene.

I don't do well with resolutions like 'Spend an hour a day writing' or 'Spend an hour a day on kanji.' Of course I keep making them and then they don't work and then I get discouraged, yadda yadda. In fact the 'hour a day on kanji' (plus-minus) has worked fairly well since October, with occasional backsliding, because it takes the place of doing crosswords. I want to be holding a pen and writing something but crostics depress the hell out of me now. (Oddly, when they were an addiction a mere twelve months ago.) Writing kanji is a reasonable substitute, with the plus of that on crack kanji origins book, and the further plus of doing it in the side bedroom with a pile of pillows and a heating pad. I fancy that what I really want is to be drawing, but it's a mite late for that.

Writing... oh well. But I seem to be managing 'squeeze out two hundred words a day'. Ten days of that will result in 2000 words of fic. And I only do it so that my fic-writing muscles don't atrophy completely, along with the word-finding ones. It's probably not age alone that withers the vocabulary; in my heyday I'd spend an easy two hours daily writing, and that keeps it limber. But then so does reading English, or reading the right kind of English, like O'Brian, and I have to make room for that too.

There'd be much more room without online solitaire. Just sayin'

And, once again, vanished reviews. I remember rereading Bellairs' The Face in the Frost and talking about it here. Can't remember when it was, but I read it because it was showing up in Yuletide requests, so vaguely 2005 or 2006. I'm sure I'm conflating it with reading Greene Knowe for the same reason in early '07, so probably I didn't read it in grey winter, even if that's how I remember it. But no matter. I've been through all my 'reading' tags, and it's not there. I've been through several months' worth of entries at a time in case it was pre-tag. And I can't find it.

Vanished reviews. My specialty.

Was looking at unfilled Yuletide requests yesterday. Before the whole archive became inaccessible, right? And not one but two people have requested Mara, Daughter of the Nile, the book I lived in in my early teens. One requester is utter anonymous, and the other, the one with the very detailed ideas, is someone next to whose name I have a vague Bartleby mark, for reasons lost in the mists of time. But still. Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Good lord that takes me back.
( Silent snow, invisible snow )

The Night Revels of Minister Han Xizai was painted in the 10th century by Gu Hongzhong (another representation with linked closeups is here.) 'Painted in five panels' doesn't mean 'reproduced in five panels.' Good, that's cleared up.

Wandering about NY on Monday, trying to locate Kinokuniya while passing Saks 5th Avenue here or observing the mouth-watering sales on denki seihin there, I realized that many people come to NY to shop for, well, other things than I come to shop for, certainly. But these days, with cheap bk1 shipping and increasing numbers of- feh- translated manga not only at Kino but at Bookoff itself, I don't really come to buy manga anymore. (Though I'm sorry to have missed Kino while I had US money during loonie-daka-- Saiyuki Reload and Onmyouji and Ravages of Time would have been mine without waiting for shipping. OTOH I'd probably have bought a new Wordtank for heart-stopping prices, just for the ability to see what it looks like and does, and there goes my VISA. Sai Weng's horse and all.)

( No, what I really go to NY for is... )

There is right brain writing and there is left. Left is when I sit at the computer and try to impart some life to the words on the screen, an undertaking made difficult by the screen size, the font size, the font face, and you name it. 'Twas ever thus, BTW, even when I was using Word Perfect. Writing rationally has never been fun.

Right brain writing is when I lie in bed with the walkman and see stories happening on the near side of the music, if you follow; or become the characters and walk around in their flesh and know what they're feeling. And then if the picture is strong enough or internalized enough, I write it out at the computer. I used to do that like breathing, but as with everything else it's apparently a function of hormones and in the last few years I've stopped doing it. I fancy this is why writers drink. It's to get that detached but intimate look into another world, that sureness of feel. (I also believe, without foundation, that people who touch type do this more easily than people who don't. It's hard to Zone when you have to be watching your fingers all the time, but time was I could Zone easily, even two-finger typing. True, I used to do that when I began writing about the time I now go to bed, and finished up a few hours before I now awake. Maybe the sedentary habits of age/ tendency for people to call me at 7 am to come into work have something to do with it as well?)

Or maybe I need an ipod and infinite downloads of 60s Golden Oldies.

(Is lj being trimmensely slow lately or is it just my connection?)

It is, as someone else said, 'Talk like a Jewish Pirate Day.' Err... lessee. 'Aaarhh me hearties, L'Shanah Tovah t'ye all! Aarrh, and a happy birthday to nojojojo as well!'

Yes, well, moving right along here.

My FFL is a source of inspiration. There's an Eid fic community for fanfic about Muslim characters. In my current light-headed state (involuntary fasting puts you in a strange place, truly) I think, maybe I could write a drabble about Zhang He, maybe?
( Equally... )

Cannot brain again. An old problem that I've never been able to think of a solution for.

You have two people sitting at a table. A is sitting on one side and B is on the side to A's right. So you say 'B is sitting to the right of A' or 'on A's right hand' if you want to be archaic. However. You have two people sitting on the same side of a table. B is next to A. You can say 'B is next to A', fine, but you can also say 'B is sitting to the right of A' or 'on the right hand of A.'

Is there any wording that specifically suggests that A and B are sitting on different sides of the same table, and not on the same side?