First,


more animals

Have *you* ever lined up all the cat toys in one area? Wow. And when we add in the (stolen) wine corks, paper crumples, scotch tape cores, (stolen)favorite pens, (stolen) water bottle caps, and strings ... wow! No wonder the house feels small sometimes.


Other things that came to my attention yesterday for some reason or another:

http://www.teachsoap.com/mp.html

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/11/20/harvey.home.destroyed.wave

http://www.hodgsonmill.com/roi/673/Bread-Mixes/

Meanswhile, I really am working. To the office later, and tomorrow some, and on we go.

Tags: random thoughts
Current Location: East of Winslow, west of Bangor
Current Music: grey on gray

I lost my hat. My nice, dorky fleece-lined baseball cap with the ear-flaps. I had it yesterday. I wore it yesterday afternoon. I took it off when I got in the car, put it in my bag, took it (I thought) into the house. Except this morning I couldn't find it in my bag. Oh, no worries, I thought; it's in the car. Except not.

Sigh.

Not the season to be hatless.

Tags: it's all about the clothes
Current Mood: le sigh

So, today, as part of the Outcome of yesterday's acrimonious meeting in which it was Revealed that my boss and I are blockheads bent upon Inconveniencing the Princess of the Galaxy, who has -- wait for it -- A Book to Write...Today, I did a mountain of data entry. It took me every single minute of my work day; which meant I have a Whole Buncha Ketchup tomorrow, doing my Regularly Scheduled Work, which of course had to be ignored today, so that the PotG will no longer be Inconvenienced. About this. Until it's Revealed that I Did It All Wrong.

But, that's tomorrow. Or possibly, Monday.

Today -- in fact, this evening -- there was a (scarily brief) edit letter for Longeye waiting in my inbox. I think we've resolved everything that was asked. It took, like, an hour. Um. Eep.

Steve is making Good Smells in the kitchen. Rolls, he says. They're not ready yet, he says. They sure smell ready...

I suppose I ought to pay these bills; they're due soon, and there's money in the checkbook. After I do that, I'll get back with the page proofs for Duainfey.

Evil Roy Slade has arrived from Netflix. Just sayin'...

Tags: day-job, duainfey, longeye
Current Mood: ok, NOW I'm pissed off

The other day alanajoli had an interesting post about the creation of secondary universes, and about the readers' reactions. Then yesterday scribblerworks posted a discussion of secondary world map making that kinda came at the question from a different angle.

It won't be a surprise to anyone here that I've been a huge fan of secondary universes since I was a little kid. My own began coalescing in my mind when I was eight, but I got really serious about it when I was twelve. It never felt like I was inventing anything. It always felt like I was trying to squint through a window, that if I sat down to draw (I drew all the stories in my early days because writing was so fatiguing) then it just wrote itself. So when I read Tolkien when I was fourteen not only was I blown away by the story itself, but because here was a grownup who acted as if he'd discovered his world, too. So I wasn't wrong, or bad, or insane, and writing about magic and places unseen wasn't a frivolous waste of time when I could be working on something useful, ha ha, take that, grownups!

Subsequently, stories and details in S-d always felt like discovery, not like invention. I'll be reading along about something, and some part of my brain goes, wait! It's kinds like that in . . . Bermund! Or, ho, if you change this and this, that's the color of the dye they use making cloth in Geranda.

But I did try my hand at consciously constructing a world, to see what that felt like. I did it with Wren's, but found that willfully choosing elements never kept my interest wrong. There was something in that discovery mode that kept me at it.

scribblerworks talked about map making, and the point came up about influences. When one has been influenced by the same northern tales that influenced Tolkien, it's more than likely that some structural elements will be shared. Same in culture building.

So anyway, how about you who write? What fueled your world building? Wanting to make a cool world? Building a world around an element you liked? Intellectual challenge? Or window-watching? Also, how much participation in other worlds do you do as reader, as alanajoli asked? It sees to me that the range of participation goes from fanfiction, where one tries to heed canon, but takes over the storyverse long enough to fit one's own vision into it, to the other end, little imagining, reading for other aspects.

When I'm reading, I really, really like being intensely involved. Being visually oriented, I relish the details, but I have to have a clue to context. I read a fantasy a couple months ago where the fantasy terms were thrown in with no hint of what they meant in context, so you had sentences like She ran across the vjerj on trubvg0back, leaping the rrrxtz and listening to the sssuvhg in the phrugh.. You had to go to the back of the book to discover that the vjerj was plains, trubg0back was ramhorn, rrrxtz were low shrubs with spikes, etc. Why not just say plains, ramhorn, low shrub with spikes? Nothing here is a new concept: if the trub, for example, had eight legs and tentacles on its muzzle and tweeted like a bird, then I'd be totally behind memorizing the term. But memorizing terms for stuff already extant in English (and culturally neutral) isn't fun for me, though it might be plenty of fun for other readers.

I tend to get more involved if the world has appeal. If it's Gritty-Noir World, I tend to read past details of festering sores, rotting garbage everywhere, the nuclear glow of night, etc. The Blue Sword had lots and lots of made-up words in it, but McKinley was great about the context, and I loved that world so much the terms just added to the flavor, even if dyslexia-brain could never remember them two pages after their introduction. Her context was pretty reliable.

The fanfic urge comes on me only when I really, really want to rewrite an ending. But so far I rarely do those--I tend to be a canon freak, and thus always want to know if every detail is right.

I am having one of those fullblown allergy attacks; sneezing loud enough to wake sleeping dogs; dripping from the nose and tearing frantically, and feeling cross about the whole thing. As an antidote I tried a new recipe: lentil and edamame stew. It's probably not a surprise that it was tasty; it was a surprise that my family all like it, and want me to make it again some time (with a little less onion). Success, and a new arrow in my culinary quiver!

Back to my tissues.

EDIT: 4:50PM Scrapbook (aka pics.livejournal.com) is back up! Thank you.

---------------

Sorry guys for the late notice! We've had to bring down the ScrapBook databases for some emergency maintenance. This means pics in your LiveJournal gallery are going to be unavailable. They should be back up within the next hour. I'll update this post when they're back online and we've checked them out.

bt

Breakfast with Steve at Tim Horton's, then early to work for a full day, to wit:

Early meeting, followed by two hours of intensive hole-punching and three-ring binder filing, followed by a confrontation, an extremely acrimonious meeting, and Even More Data Entry. For the record, I am a blockhead. And so is my boss.

Stopped for milkshakes on the way home -- good call. Talked to Steve -- very good call. Did dishes. At Management's urging, bought another year for the Theo Waitley LJ. Will now update the firewall, and go curl up again with the page proofs for the Duainfey mass market. One hundred fifty pages in and no sex yet. Maybe my hands won't fall off tonight, but I kinda wish they would.

Tags: day-job, duainfey
Current Mood: downtrodden

Using the fondant-covered cake I did a couple of weeks ago (for those who came in late, it's fondant over a styrofoam cake-form), I got to learn some fiddly piping techniques (aka "stringwork") and to work with draping fondant a little.

Closer perusal of the "curtainwork" piping shows that I need practice. Lots, maybe buckets, of practice, as I have neither a steady hand nor a keen eye, and patience...well, not so much. Ideally, there's supposed to be at least one more vertical between each of the existing verticals, so that you get a very tight effect. Unfortunately, the instructor's royal icing was lumpy (I say this not to dis her, but to point out that we are all, as humans, fallible) and getting one perfect string, let alone fifteen or twenty, out of my icing bag was damned near impossible. I hate working with royal icing (there! I said it!), which never seems to flow as nicely as buttercream.

The little widget between the "curtains" is a lace point, done weeks earlier and glued into position with royal icing.

Then we tried draping swags with fondant. Next time I do this I'm mixing a bit of gum paste into the fondant to stiffen it a touch. Fondant as it is is satiny--which is lovely--but doesn't hold its shape very well. So it drapes beautifully--has that 1930s slipper-satin evening gown look--but a bow or flower tends to soften into a curly little widge. Still, after I'd put up a couple of draped swags, I started making little flowers out of spare scraps. It's like making rolled "roses" out of satin--the same softness and tendency to unroll. Still, the very softness has an elegance to it, I think.

Still, we all agree that this looks like a very large hat for a very large Church Lady on her way to Easter services. An eccentric Church Lady.

Last week Avocado and her friend Holly spent the Veterans' Day break decorating a cake for a school progress. This is the architecture of a cell: once they took the cake to school they put in toothpicks with little flags labeling all the various parts of the cake cell.

Once they'd gotten an A on the project, they ate it. That's what I call homework.

1. I'm home. Is good.
2. Reunion was good. The internet connection at the Westminster location was better than nothing but ...extremely frustrating when the damn Dell rebooted itself without warning. Me, I was reluctant to trust the WiFi with much more than quick surfing, so there's catch=up needed in email and other stuff web-related.
3. Visited a number of bookstores on SRM Publisher and Lee&Miller business, with mixed results.
4. My last post sparked some discussion of/about Apple's business model. Guess what -- Apple is really causing people problems now and it'll get worse:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/18/apples_new_macbooks_have_built_in_copy_protection_measures.html
... the more I see of these DRM schemes the more it smacks of locking people in for life. We'd discussed getting Sharon a Mac, but I hope she won't go there.
5. Boskone 2009 dropped us a note inviting us to participate in programs. See you there?
6. This post brought to you by "time to take clothes from the washer and put them in to dry, take 2."
7. Back to the other keyboard work, yessir.

Right, I forgot, these links of Lee & Miller interest provided by a friend --- sigh, forgetful in my old age am I!

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=8866

http://www.sablelitreviews.com/barbara-karmazin-writers-life/

http://www.buchtips.net/rez3655-der-agent-und-die-soeldnerin.htm

http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2008/11/blast-off.html

http://sausconys-books.livejournal.com/61445.html

http://nerdworld.blogs.time.com/

Current Mood: determined
Current Music: Dylan