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Cross and tired and want to go to bed with a cosy book. Yesterday was (mostly) quite good; today was, predominately, not nearly so much.

We spent quite a lot of yesterday out shopping, because I have been desperately in need of some respectable-looking jeans for a very long time and pay-day had just happened for people who are not me and are still in charge of my pants. There was some Goodwillage, at which, exactly as I predicted, I found nothing -- trousers are the only things I have never had any really good luck with at thrift shops. Ever. I have never found that serendipitiously perfect pair, and certainly not the ones which fit me like a (pleasantly corduroy) dream. All of their jeans are what I would call "grunge jeans" -- very blue lighter washes, and the only ones that ever look as though one could dress them up with a nice blouse and a pair of heels are, inevitably, about a size .5. I did find a very nice warm nightgown, however, which was another thing I am in some need of.

I haven't mentioned my old jeans, have I? They've gotten to be quite the disaster. Finding trousers that fit me attractively is so accursedly difficult that we only undergo the process about once a year, especially as we are nearly always forced to buy them new. These are, of course, last year's pair -- and they have somehow grown since December -- grown quite a lot. I am sure I can't have lost nearly that much weight. They are always in danger of falling off, they are scuffed and drab and limp-looking, the bottoms are terribly frayed, a hole's started on the side of one leg, and, strangest of all, they smell peculiar. It isn't exactly a bad smell -- not a body-sweat smell, nor a these-pants-haven't-been-washed-for-months smell, but -- strange. Sort of like detergent, like trousers you wash in the machine and then leave them to dry on their own. Except musty. I would keep washing them and washing them, trying to get the scent out, but it wouldn't come out. And anyway they had stopped looking respectable long ago, traitorous things.

Anyway, we went to Ross Dress For Less, which has lots of very nice new quality clothing for less mind-boggling prices. I bypassed the regular trouser section and went straight for the clearance rack and managed to pull off about six pair of trousers to try on. Heh. Look, I haven't had a good pair in a while.

So, the first thing I discovered: skinny jeans? Kind of look fabulous on me. Who knew? Certainly not me. I sort of liked the idea of them -- I have a lot of very -- fluffy is the wrong word -- blouses, babydoll tops and peasant tops and the like, which would certainly benefit from a narrower jean, but I am naturally quite pear shaped, and I thought a narrower jean would only make me look ridiculously more so. But hey, contrary to popular belief I do look out for trends if they are pleasing to my aesthetics. I can't help it. I'm very silly. So I tried on a pair and discovered that they are bizarrely slimming and besides which compliment flats very nicely. So I have a lovely new pair of skinny jeans -- I think the official colour term is charcoal, but they have the tiniest hint of purple to them, which pleases me -- and another pair of regular dark wash jeans (which came to about twenty dollars, total). It is the first time in several years that I have had two pairs of presentable trousers to alternate between.

Also, Claire's was having a sale with quite a lot of fabulous items, including button earrings, apple jewellery, and turquoise lace not-gloves, for a dollar apiece. My new paycheck was very happy to accomodate.

Then we ran into a friend of Mum's and ended up talking for a very long time. And then I ran to the library, absurdly admiring my jean-clad reflection in the shop windows along the way, and returned and collected books in the seven minutes before it closed.

Today, around two-thirty, I called my job to find out my hours: I had realised that I didn't have any on record for this week and didn't really know who to ask. It was the beginning of the week, you know? So it ought to be a good time. I ended up being on hold (I don't even know; I think the manager was out and they had to go find her?) for -- ten minutes, at least? -- and finally a woman came onto the other end and said, "Um, actually, you're working today, and you were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago."

Says I: "ULP."

(Truly, Reader, I was mortified.) 

Mum rushed me over, and I was very cross and unhappy, because I wanted a ruddy nap so very badly, after having got to bed very late previously, and I want to impress my new employers, not make stupid embarrassing mistakes that force a lot of people to shuffle things around and accomodate me. (Mum and Jonathan tried to console me a bit -- I was, thankfully, not in the hysterics I likely would have had a year ago -- and it did make me feel a bit calmer, but still. I am still quite ashamed. Certainly, no-one told me anything about how I was to find out my hours, although I should have asked, and certainly should have asked Saturday, or even Friday night, leaving.) So my shift was only about two hours this time, and I made exactly two sales (drat you people! come on, let me use the cash register with its wonderful clicks and dings and whooshes!), and then I got to learn how to close up again -- I do enjoy putting up the curtains, with their hooks and zippers and padlocks on the zippers, and counting out the money is horrible in a mathematical way, but nice in a texture way, although when one realises exactly how much cash one is casually flipping through it can sometimes be faintly overwhelming.

However: Person In Charge who was showing me yet again how to close up was exactly the sort of person who puts me most on edge -- one of those perpetually negative, abrasive people who makes you feel that no matter what it is that you are doing, you are most certainly doing it wrong. And I know that's just how her personality displays itself, and she doesn't really think I am the scum of the earth -- she even admitted some of her own mistakes on things like counting out the cash and such, presumably to make me feel more confident -- but I still felt -- squashed, and insignificant, and very very young, and after such a ridiculously collossal mistake, too. And of course when I am nervous I make still more mistakes. At least I didn't knock anything over, but by the time I was picked up I just wanted to curl up and go to sleep. Only we went to BiLo instead, so Jonathan (who never ended up getting dropped off -- he rides with us to church and usually stays the afternoon -- and instead went with my mother to Wal-Mart?) could fetch milk, and Mum tortillas and parmesan and (at my begging) chocolate mint ice cream; and then there was a Goodwill sale, and then we came home and I holed up and read a book and it was marvellous. (I am, by the way, madly in love with Eva Ibbotson. Why has no-one ever forced me to read her before? A Countess Below Stairs was one of those marvellous, good-hearted books, with such fantastic writing and characterisation and Britishness -- the sort of warm, bright book you wrap around yourself as a shawl. I started reading it over again right away -- it was exactly the sort of book I needed after feeling so desperately out of sorts.) 

And then I wrote a thousand words. And now I want very much to go to bed.
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My mother called Verizon and apparently chewed them out until they relented and promised to send out an internet installation force this evening, instead of on Monday. I am well pleased (and also amused). I now have a way to watch Pushing Daisies tonight, as we do not get television until tomorrow. I am also considering making pumpkin cup-pies. If not this week, then next? (If only I had someone else to watch it with. :p)

My bed is on its frame at last, but I am still feeling somewhat overwhelmed where my bedroom is concerned -- so many books! (I know, I know.) And the ones which actually belong to me rather than being Family-Owned Books are rapidly increasing in number, and besides those are quite a lot I don't want to let out of my sight. I have two shelves in the shelfiest closet full of my most important books -- one shelf with my poetry, and the books I am closest to, and another shelf with my books-about-the-English-language and my Tolkien (of which there is a lot), and one more shelf with Harry Potter and Anne Shirley and some L'Engle. There is a box of books I don't need to have in my room, and two more boxes of books which I haven't found places for just yet. The closet most full of shelves I am turning into a reading nook -- it's quite large, and tall, and has a sort of -- bottom shelf? which is exactly right for sitting in, once I take out the air mattress the Presbyterians left in there, and put in some cushions. Other shelves currently house attractive vintage boxes of papers (one is a hat box), a pile of notebooks, and an amusing little collection of items: a blue glass inkwell shaped like George Washington's head (look, I don't know, I didn't buy it) filled with two feather pens, the fountain pen [livejournal.com profile] barefoottomboy sent me for my birthday, and a black cloth rose, nestled with left-over magenta Manic Panic and cheap black nail polish, and the notebooks.

By the way, my black and pink notebook, which I will have to take pictures of as the pattern never ceases to make me very happy, has been officially designated the Evangeline Notebook (I may start calling it Evy -- the black-with-felt-overlays spiral notebook Kyra got me for Christmas wrapped in sparkly paper named itself Edward, and now all the notebooks are clamouring for titles and starting unions and things). I am hoping things start being written in there soon. I have attempted to write a list of characters, but nobody except for the three sisters even has got names, and the youngest sister is on her third name now. (She started out as Priscilla, which suited her, but the middle sister is Camilla, and that would be silly. She was Phoebe for a while, then, but that didn't suit her much, and now she is telling me that she wants to be called Briony, even though I told her I wanted to use that name some other time, but Briony Nox does have a ring to it, and it does have a sense of feistyness, and the youngest Miss Nox is a bit of a spitfire. Which I can already tell. Though none of the Nox sisters is exactly docile and conformist to begin with. I haven't written Briony into the notebook yet.) The mother is vague, the father isn't showing up at all, despite my trying so very hard to have a complete happy family in one story at least, the primary vampire is nameless, and I am trying to do what Orson Scott Card said in Characters & Viewpoint and think about who else is in the story? -- who works at the library with Evy, who is part of the vampire-hunting organisation, who are the Noxes neighbours, their friends, who owns the shops where they buy food and household supplies, who are the vampires? (But then the vampires are the absolute most difficult bit of the entire novel. Oh dear.) But not a lot is coming clear. HALP.

Digressions aside. The bedroom desperately needs sorting, the living room is not currently very liveable, but the kitchen is coming along nicely. The stove, we have discovered, was manufactured in the sixties -- it's full of vintage quirk and whimsy. The shelves are metal and painted white. The kitchen itself is largely yellow. Most things have been put in their cupboards and drawers and the refridgerator, and Mum & I are planning a fifties and sixties diner theme of decor, already established by the stove & cupboards. There will probably be ruffled curtains, and already she has bought a pair of vintage metal signs. (Excuse me, a bloke came into the library just now and said something and his vocal inflections sounded disturbingly like Connor. I'm not sure which of the crowd he was, which is good, for both of our sakes.) 

Last night I registered to vote. It was very exciting. Well, no, it wasn't, really; I walked into the office and collected an application and filled it out and had to remember the new address (I am currently terrified that I mixed a number), and then I walked down to the post office -- this was after dark!! -- and slipped it through the mail slot. But yes, I will be voting, hurrah. And that is likely the last discussion of American politics that you will see on this journal for some time, wot wot.

I had lunch in the back yard. There's a bench on the border of it, but that clearly belongs to the preschool next door, which was in session, and I didn't want to get myself into unnecessary trouble, so I sat down on the edge of the hill instead. The house is on a hill, which is sort of more like a very soft short cliff -- the road is straight down from the edge of the yard. (Well, no, the two yards of grass are straight down, and then there is the road.) It's been raining -- very cosily, making lots of pattering on my window! -- so everything was a bit damp, but there's long bit of wood at the edge of the yard, and then bracken all the way down from there, so I sat on the wood and dangled my legs over the road and watched people go by (or anyway when I wasn't reading Ender's Game). I foresee much interesting people-watching in my future.

And now I am desperately craving sweets, so off I go home...on the route that passes by places which sell such things. La la la la la...

(Shall be catching up at last over the next several weeks, and yes, of course there will be many many many pictures!!)

escapadery!

Aug. 6th, 2008 11:18 pm
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I should be writing about the general hobnobbing and adventures that have been going on lately, but I tried and they're so muddled together in my head (quite comfortably, sort of like my bookshelves) that I can't quite figure out which pieces go where and it's too late at night to bother, so I shall just set down some pertinent facts.

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So, I just want to put it on record that I have the best f-list ever. Not only did you lot buy me an iPod, but you're always around when I need someone to blabber (or blubber) to, and you're tremendously encouraging and loving and giving and amazing, and wow. Not to mention I owe all of my fandoms to you, nearly, and loads of musical and literary discoveries besides. And you send me letters and parcels and emails and leave me silly messages and pray for me and pray with me and make me laugh and open the windows of your lives to me. As I said: amazing. I love you all.

I don't mean to give the impression that I've been miserable all week, because I really haven't been. Maybe a bit more restless than usual (but I'm always restless). Unhappiness sort of forces the writing out, you know? Anyway, I had a lovely Saturday -- I think that's been the only day really worth writing about, and that comes out sort of silly when it's all in words -- I walked to the library (very courageously through snowdrifts that came to my chin -- well, nearly my knees, anyway) -- note that I walked, not rode, because gorblimey the snow -- and my L'Engle had come in, and then I walked to Hockman's for my chocolate fix, and the proprietor and I had a good chat about Buffy (I love the Hockman's people; not only do they often slip extra chocolates into my bag, or downright give things away -- last-holiday-surplus, usually, but still, wow -- but they're gigantic geeks, and it's darling), and then I walked home, with Moony, who was a great comfort in my snowy trials, and then my jeans had to spend some quality time in the dryer, and I really like Saturdays that end up with me cosied up with a book and some foodstuffs on the bed. (I, um, have also been having some more-than-usually spectacular luck at the Goodwill lately. But that's really girly and shallow to babble on about. Heh.)

It's been raining all day, which is extremely pleasing, because the rain is very nicely washing the last of the snow away, and I am crossing my fingers in the hope that we won't get another storm. It's probably a lost cause, but I need spring. Oh, the birds are coming back -- how I love hearing birdsong again! -- but I want to open the windows and lie out in the sun. I've been feeling sort of residually tired and sad all day, which owes a lot to a really nasty bout of insomnia last night (I took Melatonin twice and it still must have been three or four before I finally nodded off; I didn't look at the clock because a) it's at the foot of my bed, and b) it would only discourage me), so I had a book and a cupcake or two and the radio, and Moony and I cosied up with a bit of television (which is especially cheering because both Moony and the television is all connected and due to you lot), and -- I'd completely forgotten how nice rain sounds. It barely rains in the winter. I love rain; it's so cosy and comforting and homey, somehow. Snow-clouds just loom; rain-clouds always seem a bit friendly and gentle, except when they're threatening thunder, in which case they're so magnificent you can forgive them that. (We've had clouds all winter, too, I'm only just realising. I can barely remember seeing sky since November. No wonder I've been in such a dismal state.)

I've been using a great deal of italics of late. Perhaps this ought to be looked into.

And I have suddenly discovered that I am fiercely hungry, so I am off to forage.
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So, Christmas.

Christmas Eve my senses all woke up. I'd been feeling as though I'd been walking through gauze, and suddenly it wasn't there anymore. I baked cookies and spun round and round the dining room singing.



And I really ought to talk about music -- [profile] windandtherain sent me the Decemberists' The Crane Wife which I have been playing nearly non-stop, except when I have been playing Children Running Through and Billy Bragg & Wilco's album of Woody Guthrie songs Mermaid Avenue, and also Loreena McKennitt's newest An Ancient Muse which only arrived yesterday (it was late; Dad stuck a bow on it and gave it to me over breakfast). I should also talk about several books I have read recently that were awesome, and what happened today, which involved me getting the best haircut of my life, and shopping a great deal and it was all quite marvellous. But this post is far too long already and I should like to go to bed with a book and a bit of peppermint bark.
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I really am going to do that Deathly Hallows response post, because there is actually a lot to talk about besides How It Broke My Heart And Why I Am Not Resigned, but I keep worrying I'm going to forget something ("I've only read the book twice!), and then the less silly bit of myself says very sternly, "Banui, it's a response, not a ruddy thesis paper" and so the two sides of me sort of bicker amicably for a while which makes it really difficult to actually, you know, concentrate on anything useful.

Anyway, 'tis the season for Great Thinky Meta Posts, now that the early frenzy is mostly over, and here is my first contribution, because I have been mulling this over for some time, and it's got a lot to do with my fic-verse, and I think if I start writing out my thoughts maybe some of it will come out clearly enough that I can start to write about it. I keep trying to write fic about Deathly Hallows, but I run up against this great block that says, "are you sure that this is how you want to portray this?" Like, guys, I haven't even really explored how and when Remus and Tonks actually fell in love, other than that it was sometime during OotP, and I'd like there to be something interesting involved, some sort of -- at least mild -- adventure, something other than mucking about in Grimmauld Place and keeping Sirius from going mad.


...I have apparently lost the ability to post about anything not related to Harry Potter now. This is a sign of dire things I am sure.
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So, yeah, this is me, back from holiday. REALLY EXCELLENT HOLIDAY. Will discuss this later, but there are much more pressing matters at hand.



Like I said, proper post about more of the things I liked and didn't like later, but I have very very very late dinner to find.
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So, I looked at my schedule, and have realised to my horror that I am going to be out of town on 21 July. This is all wrong. Fate has conspired against me. I mean, this is a holiday I'm excited about and all -- Dad and I are going to the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival in upstate New York, and I'm going to see Nickel Creek! and the Duhks and Bela Fleck and loads of other fantastic musicians and I've been looking forward to it for months -- so it isn't as bad as it would have been if I were stuck someplace at which I had little desire to be on 21 July. I plan to bicycle frenziedly to Waldenbooks first thing Monday morning. If I could read while bicycling, I would. I may try. This will result in disaster, of course, but I am not sure I can resist. I will also be dressed in a Tonks-like manner. (This is amusingly easy, because a) I suspect my wardrobe bears a frightening similarity to Tonks', minus the Weird Sisters t-shirts, and b) I look exactly like Tonks! Er, like she could, anyway. Ah, metamorphmagi!) There will be photographs.

So, since it's my first, last, and only chance to do so, I am going to theorise. Prepare to be lorded over for months if anything I predict comes true, even a bit. (TRAP/CARISSA AHAHAHA. Sorry, tiny fandom. Still, I WAS RIGHT.)



Furthermore, because it is awesome:

My Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom is:
Sirius Black accidentally destroys all of Scotland with the help of a small zombie bat.
Get your Harry Potter Spoiler of Doom


AHAHA, I'VE RUINED IT FOR YOU ALL NOW!

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I'm a bit overdue on this one, but -- comment and I will name you 3 interests from your list, and 3 userpics, and you explain them in your own post, asking the same of your f-listers.


And today was a good day. I bicycled to my guitar lesson in spectacular weather, thereby getting some much-needed exercise (and sun!), and then I stopped by Rosie's Bookshop on my way home and was redeemed for That One Time when they had two copies of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and I didn't purchase either of them because there was a new copy on the shelf and it is now mine (!!!). (I will have to post about the book when I am finished re-reading because it is amazing and possibly the only book that comes close to being comparable to Tolkien in any substantial way.) I also found The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (!!!) and a new copy of Anne of the Island (mine has pages missing, and the book itself might actually have finally got itself lost, as it is not in my bedroom nor the box with M-authored books in the basement), and got a little sack of chocolates, and made cupcakes when I got home (cupcakes that were not sour).
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I had something witty and brilliant and intelligent that I wanted to say, but I can't remember what it was. (I did make biscuits today--American ones with buttermilk that turned out a bit less fluffy than I think they ought to have but which will taste very good with a bit of sausage and cheese later--but that doesn't make for much of an anecdote as nothing went interestingly wrong. Things often go interestingly wrong when I am baking. I managed to burn a batch of brownies so magnificently once that even the little chocolate chips on top were scorched through, which was really tragic.)

Bartholomew-the-kitten, who is not actually a kitten anymore but an adolescent cat who has apparently discovered girls for the first time, ran off two days ago, not even coming back for dinner, which was a bit worrying as he is not the sort of cat to miss a good dinner, but he finally turned up at the door this morning, noisy and hungry. We think he was chasing the female felines of the neighbourhood. He has been very repentant and purry and cuddly today, but also very noisy. And he keeps crawling into laps when the laps are sitting at tables and the people the laps belong to are having a plate of turkey.

I totally didn't squee publically enough about "The Shakespeare Code", which may or may not have been the best Doctor Who episode ever, and also may or may not have been the best bit of television I've seen in a long time. (I think I might have even liked it better than "Girl in the Fireplace", which means a lot. NEIL GAIMAN LIKED THAT EPISODE.) I mean, it had Shakespearian London. Which was very pretty. The historical episodes are usually magnificently pretty. And it had Harry Potter references and the Doctor quoted Dylan Thomas, which had me wibbling like the fangirl I am. (By the by, that couplet--'do not go gentle into that good night / rage, rage agains the dying of the light'--is tremendously Doctorish, innit?) And Martha, who kept on being pretty awesome. Also, briefly, Ten in an Elizabethan collar, which was nothing short of wonderful. (Wonder if people ever got those caught on doors and things? I mean, I'm always catching my cape on doorknobs and railings because they are in direct alignment with the arm-holes, and often I am innocently going up the stairs when I am yanked back by my renegade cape which has got itself curled round the end of the railing.) I ran around in circles in my bedroom for a while after I finished watching and jumped over stuff for a while.

One of these days I am going to stun all of you with my brilliance and structure and presence of mind. Today is not that day.
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I haven't even got time for the checking of the f-list today on account of putting off the internet in order to read all afternoon, visiting Leandra, and staying up late watching a Woody Guthrie documentary with my father. Oh, dear; eventually I am going to make up for all of this neglect, really. But I need to write this: you'll see.

When Mum and the siblings and I were at Goodwill on Saturday, we found a book by Madeleine L'Engle about her marriage, which neither Mum or I had read, but we love Madeleine L'Engle--I have for years, since I read A Wrinkle in Time at nine and went on to read other things; she's one of the only writers I know who can write about faith organically in a novel, organically and beautifully and eloquently, without it feeling like a bit of lace frill sewn on at the end. I don't think that people intend to write faith so badly, or intend to write it in the awkward way they often do; it's just that it's so difficult: I haven't managed to do it, and most people who do come across as telling a lesson and it's what people remember about their books, that they had Christianity in them. L'Engle isn't like that--she has metaphysical bits on Christianity in novels the way people often have metaphysics in novels, and it's so natural and true and poignant. And yet her books aren't unaccessable to non-Christians. 

Which is all quite beside the point, actually. We bought the book. It's called Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, and it documents Madeleine L'Engle's relationship with her husband Hugh, but the centre, the core of the story is Hugh's struggle with cancer much later in life--it's woven into the reflections on the early days of the relationship until it has become the absolute story. And it's so--beautiful and tragic and tender and wise. The book is. The thoughts, the ideas, the stories and pains and joys and how L'Engle writes about them and what she writes about them--it's the sort of book that one has to recover from afterwards; you come out of it slowly, blinking at the brightness of the light, and you are very, very quiet for a few minutes afterwards, because you don't want to leave it, and because you have so much to ponder and to understand. (This is why I like Madeleine L'Engle, by the way.) I sat very still, wanting to know that kind of love, and that kind of trust, and faith, and strength, and wanting to be able to make others feel them as if the sorrows and joys belonged to them--if I can't do that, then I can't be a writer. I took a walk. It's Spring, as you have no doubt heard, and I love early evening, all pale and sharp-smelling and quiet and still, so I walked around the neighbourhood in the chilly March air and thought, not just about what I'd read, but everything, everything that there was to think of, because this is what walks do. (I like that kind of solitude--it's very rich and full and intuitive and I hardly feel alone in it. It feels like being near to something, and I love my long bicycle rides--when they're not in abysmal weather!--when I can think and exist as much as I please so long as I watch for traffic. I can't quite express it. There is a sort of communion, perhaps with thought, perhaps with God; perhaps I am more open to everything.) 

I don't know what it is that I am aiming to get to, in all of this verbosity, but this was one of those books, you know? It carves out a little space inside you and fits itself in. [personal profile] wanderlightasked, a while back, about books that have changed your life. I meant to answer but didn't get round to it because I didn't know how to say it. I think that most books burrow inside of me and put down roots, but I can't always see the repercussions. Some are more important than others, sometimes because of what they mean--Patricia MacLachlan's Baby was already a very personal book to me, and then I found myself re-reading it when Baby Jabez died, and the thoughts in it made more sense than they had even before. And some books climb inside you and make themselves at home, carve yourself into a slightly different shape so that you fit into the world differently. You can't explain the difference, but you feel it (or smell it, or taste it--you could talk just as easily of those, because it's a sense, but it's not one of the ones we are used to). Sometimes you want to be more, greater, fuller, and you want God and people and love and joy and pain more closely than you thought you did before. 

How does one do that, with only words? I want to know how. I want to reach into people and pull out words and set them in front of them: I want to reach into myself and pull out words and set them in front of people who have never seen me, but they recognise the words. I suppose I have to live first, gather up some experiences and knowledge along the way, because I can't write if I don't know about things. Perhaps, then, love itself is the key to art?
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I'd never heard of steampunk before today (or, rather, I'd heard the term bandied about and didn't pay a great deal of attention), but reading some of the discussion over the really nifty thing that Neil Gaiman linked to in his Journal of Awesome piqued my interest, and off to trusty Wikipedia went I. Now, I am rather deleriously enthralled, and I must find some to read, or watch. Alternate history--I include in this alternate explanations of historical events--is also something that fascinates me endlessly (one of the reasons that Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was so enchanting--did I never talk about that book? I didn't, and I ought to), as does speculative fiction, and, you know, that Victorian gothic aesthetic. 

The prospect more interesting than reading steampunk fiction is, of course, writing some, but the last thing I need is another novel to wrestle with, and I haven't got any ideas, anyway. It's really a pity that the Evangeline project can't be manipulated into a steampunk sort of universe, but, despite the plot being very vague, only one character having a name--I did settle on the surname Nox, by the by, for what it's worth--and the rest of the lot being twice as vague as the plot, it's settled its universe and aesthetics rather solidly already. I'm beginning to think of it in terms of, well, Anne Rice with a great splash of L.M. Montgomery. (You know, if Anne Rice wrote well.) Probably a few dashes of Gaiman and L'Engle for good measure, and hopefully a great deal of me, as it's my book and all and also all of these writers excepting Anne Rice are far, far more fantastic than I can ever dream of being anyway.


And. Um. Kind of odd specific-yet-very-vague music request, actually. Has anyone got moody, melancholy, atmospheric music that references the ocean, lost love, and preferrably both? I need a song about drowning, too. I'm particularly looking for music that sounds oceany, and a bit old, you know--not necessarily lacking in electronic instrumentation, but not screaming 'MODERN DAY!' at you in two-foot capitals, either. Currently I've got things like Dido's 'My Lover's Gone', Vienna Teng's 'Between', and some very awesome Solas songs that none of you except for [profile] lady_moriel is likely ever to have heard (and I don't think she's even got one of them). It's, er, for a mix. Which sprang out of nowhere because 'Between' was kind of perfect. It also happens to be a mix for an obscure branch of an obscure branch of the Tolkienverse (any 'The Mariner's Wife' fans out there? Hiiii...), and, um, yeah. I really do need a drowning song especially. 

Also, I made angelfood cake yesterday, and it was v. good.
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i.  Last night, [profile] lady_moriel inadvertently forced me to recall in vivid detail the worst novel I have ever read. She doesn't know it, because the really long comment I wrote got eaten by Vox (and what I was replying to didn't have anything to do with really bad novels), but, oy, I am dying to recap what I remember about the book, because it was so bad that it was really brilliant. I hunted it up on Amazon somehow, despite having forgotten the title and only remembering the female protagonist's truly terrible name (Volanna. VOLANNA. I kept imagining her with whiskers.), and it is all flooding back to me in great, nauseating waves. I really am going to have to recap it. I almost want to read it again, so that I can piece together what I remember about The Mysterious Child From Nowhere (Except Totally Not) and "some stars and planety stuff crashed! Let's betroth our infant children right now!" and The Really Buxom Girl From The Bakery(?) And Her Scheming Mother, and the Really Hawt Blacksmith-Except-Not Protagonist, whose physical fantasticness had to be mentioned at least five times per chapter, and the Awkward Prophecy, and The Evil Bloke Volanna Is Supposed to Marry (look, rule of thumb, do not promise your children to people with names like Lomar. It is just a bad idea.) and, oh blimey, the heavy-handed morality lessons and jarring references to the Old Testament (in a fantasy novel, and it wasn't historical fantasy, either). I also found out that there are sequels, which a very sick and disturbed part of me also wants to read, and egad I need therapy now

ii. [personal profile] builtofsorrow (in particular) will be interested to know that Simon Winchester, author of the fantastically titled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (!!!!), has written another book about our beloved OED, by the name of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. (I couldn't help but think forty-two! it's forty-two! over and over again, because...well, because.) I checked it out from the library this afternoon and can hardly wait to read it. 


iv. I totally forgot to add to the Deathly Hallows release date squee, which I am definitely having, but it is a lot more mild than it will get later. I mean, when we start getting spoilers, or a book cover, or maybe when summer is getting nearer, I am going to be a lot more frenetic in my fangirly glee. Right now, it's mainly just 'oh, nifty, now I know where to direct the squee'. (Still, the next time I visit Waldenbooks and there is a preorder sign on the desk, I am going to skip joyously. Again. Er. Did I mention that a while back, before there was a title or a release date, my local Waldenbooks was advertising preordering, and I scurried behind some shelves to skip gleefully, and then skipped, beaming widely, through the mall, cackling to myself?)

I pulled up Amazon to look for something else and impulsively clicked on the Deathly Hallows advertisement (ad-VER-tis-ment). There was a page of forum discussions, one of which was titled 'shipping' and had forty replies. I thought, 'oh no, what are they bickering about now?' and clicked it out of morbid curiosity.

It was about shipping, all right. The sort involving boxes and the kinds of dates made of numbers and UPS. Nary a romantic pairing in sight.

Fandom has ruined my mind.
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I was actually joking when I commented on

[profile] ressie_noldo's Happy 2007 entry (dratted Indians, getting to the new year before us), but then I ended up having a go at it, so, um, I welcomed in 2007 in probably-predictable Banui style: sitting at the computer writing ballad-fic (yes, ballad-fic, it's for 'The House Carpenter'/'D(a)emon Lover', if you're interested, because it's one of my very favourite ballads and one I've had a very long relationship with; also, ballad-fic, unlike, say, Potter-fic, has a possibility of maybe making me money someday, except hardly anyone wants weird short stories, I reckon) and listening to Deb Talan, with the Black Death and my pocket Eliot (which is currently in the stage of Falling To Bits, held together with a hairband) beside me. Hopefully this bodes well for the upcoming year. Like, maybe someone will discover an Eliot epic in the vein of 'Prufrock' that never got published. And I will write fic about it. And maybe go on to write about my other very favourite Child ballad, 'The Grey Selchie'. And eat--well, ack, that doesn't bode well for my weight-loss hopes. (I say hopes, not plans. Plans and I do not go together well.)

Speaking of selchies, the family and I watched The Secret of Roan Inish last night--before midnight; after midnight we were engaged in some very, very trippy early cartoons (some of them kind of reminded me of Terry Gilliam's animated bits in Monty Python's Flying Circus, except his stuff was better, and it wasn't supposed to, somehow, make sense, which meant that you weren't terribly, terribly afraid that everyone involved wasn't also heavily involved in, say, opium)--um, anyway, it's a very good film, and I really loved it, but the main point of talking about it is because it reignited my interest in the selchie legend, which I've always been fond of on account of being very intimately in love with Solas' eerie version of 'The Grey Selchie' since the age of twelve. Also, Jane Yolen's retelling in The Book of Ballads is rather good. What I'm saying is...actually, I don't know what the real point of this is. Selchies are nifty, and I want to write about them. Which sounds really shallow when you put it like that--the really interesting thing about the selchie tales, I suppose, is all of the motivations and reactions which are typically left out. Would a selchie-wife really love the husband who held her in thrall, and if so, how and why? What about someone attempting to gain control over a selchie for nefarious reasons? What sort of fellow would marry a seal-woman he knew nothing about, and what would village gossip say? What about the children of a selchie? I mean, really, what about them? It's all very fascinating, I think. (And, maybe this is completely out there, but are there any traditional ballads with vampires in? Not that I would want to incorporate one into a current project, mind. I would never do that.)

 


Well, yikes. Why am I suddenly realising that no-one is going to read this straight-through?

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