My Antonia - Willa Cather
Winesburg, Oh - Sherwood Anderson
Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo (translated by Luc Sante) I was liking this TOO much and finding the dropped threads too annoying so I'm switching to the Penguin unabridged edition.
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

Attempting an embed . . . otherwise the cartoon is here

Resonance in HP Book format

Revolution in HP Book format

So authentic looking it's almost creepy.

Robin sent these a long time ago and I'm finally getting around to posting them. (They were linked from the comments before in case these seem familiar.) Robin was a total dear for doing these, as well as giving me the files to keep Resolution updated. I'm going to hack at that a bit tonight, mostly because I have a massive work deadline at the end of next week (argh) and really, playing with latex sounds like MUCH more fun.

Prose poetry class again tonight. Me, in a poetry class. Still makes me laugh. One of the seven signs of a personal apocalypse?

My first attempt: (Must be five sentences and in the style of Gary Young. I can count the sentences, but the style thing is a toss-up.)

In the morning the furnace roars up the center of the house, and the clicking igniter wakes the cats, who dutifully demand breakfast even before the sky brightens. The wind and the rain have stripped the color, stripped everything, from the trees, but by afternoon the sluggish sun pushes wind-tossed curls of leaf through balmy air. Spring green, Irish green, invades the garden beds in carpets of self-seeded arugula, kale, and chicory. The deer ignore this bounty in favor of the sweetly fattening apples and pears congregating under the shelter of the trees. The unforgiving snow will come, but we are given repeated, tenuous, second chances.

I picked up a book on Harvard Square this summer entitled Reading Frames in Modern Fiction by Mary Ann Caws. I'm really excited about this book. It's exactly the sort of thing I want to learn more about. Trouble is I have read very few of the works discussed, so I loaded up at the used book store in Syracuse, and more recently in Vancouver at MacLeods.

The reading list consists of:

Tess and Jude by Hardy
Mansfield Park and Persuasion by Austen (which I've read, most of, but I should probably re-read)
Pierre by Melville (no copy of this book exists, apparently. I've tried not only my two big Syracuse stores, but also the big red phoenix barn outside Ithaca, and now MacLeods. I'll have to order online, which kills the romance, I tell ya.)
Later Henry James
--A Small Boy and Others
--The Wings of the Dove
--The Golden Bowl
--The Real Thing ...
(hey, wait, I just read this one on a spree of short story reading through an old college textbook Short Story and Its Writer, whoo hoo... Hm, it was a lowkey and kinda weird story that if I got the point it was a little weak for the number of words.)
--The Author of Beltraffio
--The Friends of the Friends
--Jolly Corner
(Juice! by the time I get through this, I can write a thesis on James...)
--Turn of the Screw
--Sacred Fount
--The Ambassadors
(Dang, I really really really better like James...)
--The Awkward Age
--The Portrait of a Lady (hm, maybe I've read this one too...)
(Perhaps High Modernist Framing is not SO important. Shew...)
Marble Faun by Hawthorne
Lighthouse and Waves by Woolf (this is very sad, but I have never read any Virginia Woolf. Long overdue...)

First across the line is Tess of the D'Ubervilles.

I have just a bit to say about this one. The use of nature vs. agriculture vs. human society wove throughout it making a nice framing. Near the end the the metaphors across these echo each other a little too strongly. The ending was waay too much like Adam Bede, (spoiler alert) girl makes small mistake (really, is led into it) and in the end commits murder and is executed. Yay. Nice sense of wry humor though. Needed more of it. Also two major spots where the characters seemed to go out of character to serve the story. When Angel walks out, his internal workings didn't seem believable in light of the setup. His actions were believable, but not what was going on in his head. Maybe the other spot is less an OOC problem than that the author pulls back unexpectedly. When Tess's family is stuck in an exceptionally bad run of luck after her father dies and the house they thought they rented had already been taken, it was jarring to go from pages and pages of internal dissection to suddenly skipping over to, oh, she's given into D'Uberville, and it's a done deal. Huh?

I'm looking forward to reading more detailed interpretation of the framing, since it's pretty accessible.

I don't have a card reader on me that will let me read this trip's pictures, so here's an old pic from Vancouver. It better represents where the story is about now, anyway. ;-) Especially those big boulders just visible through the mist at the approaching bend in the river...



I've been applying a few things I learned in writing classes, the main one is probably: replace generic words with something more specific. That way when you do haul out the ordinary word, it actually means something by virtue of being ordinary. Immediacy, immediacy, immediacy. Did I mention immediacy?

48 just went to beta and this will be short because I still have to leave a note for the neighborkid about the very complicated catfood situation we now have due to my sweet cat's food allergies. Hopefully my fat, always voraciously hungry cat does not simply eat the neighborkid before he has a chance to read the note.


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see more Lol Celebs

I split and loaded three wheelbarrows full of wood onto the porch to dry for convenient winter use in the fireplace and now I'm going to be a lump and watch my wolverines.

Then write.

Did a bit of accidental British English research: The bloody minded overly-polite bureaucrat always wins and the editor's worst columnist (hopefully)

It's been crazytime. Starting October every year, it's always crazytime. Then all of a sudden it's January!

On top of normal winter preparations, Kevin was sick for 3 weeks, so I was holding down the fort by myself as well as playing nurse. He got much worse right before he got better. (At one point he said, "So go online and look up exactly how this thing kills you." (Interestingly enough, it kills the way SARS does, but I digress...)) Do not get this flu if you can help it. I actually caught it first and gave it to him, but I was only sick for a day and a half. Don't know if that was thanks to the swine flu shot I got in 1976 . . . who knows. I'd recommend getting vaccinated, on that note.

Had a contractor here for two weeks. He just finished last Friday. Select stairs all the way from the basement and the attic were getting wobbly, cracking in half, and threatening to fall in. I did some of the worst of them years ago but I just didn't have time to deal with it right now. Unfortunately having a contractor around all day, five days a week, means you do nothing besides work on the house, even though you hired someone because you didn't have time. I'm still repairing plaster and painting, but at least that's on my own schedule now. We got a nice trial run cold spell last week, and the drafts in one only partly heated room were just amazing. I'm thinking, after I've finished taping and rejoining all the cracks (I now understand why I find areas where new drywall has simply been layered over the old), of drilling holes high in some walls and pumping in high expansion Great Stuff (the Black Can) just to see if that helps. Since I'm patching plaster on a mass scale anyway, what's a few more 5/8 inch holes?

In case you were wondering . . . yeah I live in a hovel. An extremely affordable hovel, fortunately, but nevertheless it sometimes demands care, right now. And the kitchen is nice, because we redid that to our exact specifications about 10 years ago.

I pulled off a bit of trim one evening last week to better smear on spackle on a narrow strip in a corner, and discovered that the original doorway was larger but apparently the builder didn't have the right door (I'm guessing), so they very messily shimmed in, with random scrap wood, a smaller door frame. It's really ugly. Eh, but the trim will hide it again . . . Kevin looked at this and double deep layer of wallboard beyond that and said, hey, we should just knock this bathroom down to the studs when we redo it. And I said, we should just firebomb the house, that would be a better idea.

At any rate... Chapter 48 (did I say 47, yikes!). I'm *really* happy with what I've got so far--it creeps ME out to re-read it--but it's still not done. I really love this kind of writing, where the narrator is growing disturbed and that's tainting not only the character's experience of events, but also their internalization of everything. Mmmm mmm.

I actually put the chapter down to jot this blog post down, and I'm going back to it right now...

From Roman-Emperors.org:

Shortly after his birth, his father was raised to the imperial purple in 379. Events in Illyricum with the massive influx of Ostrogothic and Visigothic peoples had resulted in the defeat of the Roman army and the death of the emperor, Valens. . . . the emperor wanted to insure that his infant son would bear some legitimacy should he die on campaign. Whatever the reason, Arcadius was proclaimed Augustus in January of 383 at the age of five or six.

That's not the best written pseudocyclopedic entry in the world, but you get the idea.

I wanted an Emperor from the Severan Dynasty, but alas. They were either murderous or had names even a British wizard would not tolerate carrying through life.

Caracalla is a rather interesting name, but he had his brother assassinated.

Macrinus was a self-made man, and not strictly one of the Severans, but in the middle of the dynasty. Rose to power through, eh, what else, assassination.

Elagabalus? Er. No. Although he was born Varius Avitus Bassianus. Varius was on the short list. You know that means he CHOSE that name Elagabalus.

Alexander Severus. I toyed with Alexander for a bit. Kinda bold. A little too normal. This is like that story of goldilocks and the three bears, isn't it?

I thought of masculinizing one of women's names from the dynasty, but apparently they were all named Julia. Julius? That would get pegged to someone completely different.

So, I made my way forward in time down the list to Arcadius. I like what the word "arcade" invokes. A pleasant glass-covered passageway. A place of fun. I also like the A alliteration with Arion as a restart from the letter S alliteration. A glancing kind of renewal there.

Whoa, and I gotta get to bed.

. . . do not mention the murder.

( read short short )

Okay. Birth scenes are tough. No real surprise there, but it is done and the betas have it.

In the theme of the chapter I leave you with this pic from munich. It was a sunny day and we were sunning by the Isar. Something went whacky with the exposure.

ravens on the river shale

Someone asked what we do in writing class. I've taken four different classes so far and am looking at the catalog for fall, so this is a good time to review this.

( read more about writing classes )

My two-year-old niece singing the ABCs. She sings this to herself about 150 times a day, but the camera and large audience gives her trouble until late in the alphabet. She makes up for it on the finish.



On the Resolution front . . . I've been in massive writing mode and quickly getting 47 to draft form. One scene left. Might get into editing mode this evening.

Quick post, because I really have to get to sleep, been short for several days now. Got fed soy (by a dinner guest!) and feel a little out of sorts because of that too. So much for being polite and not interrogating the guests about their tahini dressing. Tahini put me in the mind of middle eastern, which is generally a safe cuisine.

Writing classes are making me self conscious about what I'm writing. A mix of bad and good there on that. Re-reading 45 while working on 46, I though 45 looked pretty good.

Off to bed, or I risk rambling aimlessly.

Oh yeah, tomatoes are finally ripening. yay! [Imagine a picture of tomatoes here]

In the usual places.

http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/viewstory.php?psid=213117
http://owl.tauri.org/stories.php?psid=5321
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3470741/45/

To go along with this chapter I leave you with a night scene from Bilbao:

Crossing the bridge from old town near the train station.

Sigh. I applied for the writing certificate program at the downtown writer's center in Syracuse and didn't get accepted.

This isn't a huge deal. The only difference between being in the program and just taking classes is you get 4 hours of one-on-one consulting with various staff per semester.

On the other hand I've been batting 1000 on the critter front. I've had two bee stings in a week (one directly on a vein which seems to be reacting really grotesquely, although it looks like it's finally starting to heal this morning) and then yesterday at a lakeside party we decided to go kayaking. Lots of spiders in the boats, we were warned. Yeah, no problem. What's a few daddy long legs? Okay, they mentioned the spiders, they did not mention the snakes. I'm cool with snakes, when I a) know they are there and am not discovering them accidentally when b) I am not in a kayak in the middle of a lake. The little garter snake (looked much bigger on the water, I swear) got taken home as a pet by one of the families at the party.

Link to PDF downloads

You can choose ten-chapter chunks or the whole thing at 15MB. Fully illustrated. (I feel like adding, amaze your friends or something here...)

The scenes I wrote over the weekend had a bad plot hole so I had to ditch half of it and push the other half into future chapters. Just got a chance to rewrite the last 1/4 of the chapter tonight.

Yummy bad Harry. I think I got inspired a bit by yummy bad young Voldemort. Just a tad.

On the topic of creepy things. Here's a pic of the spider we found in our room in Germany.

That's a bavarian beer krug to give you a sense of size. the largest spider I've seen outside of captivity. Small spiders I usually just leave be, buuuuut, not this one. I let it go on the emergency exit out back. It was pretty sad and desperate to get out of the glass. Yeah, hard to imagine something that looks like that being sad and desperate, but really, even spider body language is easy to read on this count. Especially when the spider is this big.

"is that why you couldn't close the deal with Hermione...?" mega lolz

Added: and Harry would be better if he didn't sound so much like the lost tracks from the first Beastie Boys album.