"Out Of Ambit": Diane Duane's weblog

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Monday, June 30, 2003

Maybe I didn't need to know about this
But, as they say, "she who peeps through the keyhole will see what will vex her."

Well, I'm not vexed as such. But I guess there's nothing that Some People won't merchandise...

(Thanks to the Accordion Guy for the link.)

posted by Diane: 6/30/2003 09:20:00 PM | link to this post

Things the Writer Lies There In The Middle Of The Night Asking Herself: no. 1 in a series

Did Aaron Sorkin really have the last episode of year 4 in his mind when he wrote this dialogue, all that while ago? Or did he just look at it in retrospect and think, "Yeah, that looks like a good way to play it, let's go..."?

BARTLET
My getting killed would be bad enough,
but that is not the nightmare scenario.
The nightmare scenario, sweetheart, is
you getting kidnapped! You go out to a
bar or a party in some club and you get
up and you go to the restroom and
somebody comes from behind and puts
his hand across your mouth and drags
you out the back door. You're so
petrified you don't even notice the
bodies of a few Secret Service agents
lying on the ground with bullet holes
in their heads. Then you're driven away
in the car. It's a big party with lots of
noise and lots of people coming and
going, and it's a half hour before
someone says, "Hey, where's
Zoey?" It's another fifteen minutes
before the first phone call. It's another
hour and a half before anyone even
thinks to shut down all the airports!
Now we're off to the races! You're tied
to a chair in a cargo shack somewhere
in the middle of Uganda and I am told
that I have 72 hours to get Israel to
free 460 imprisoned terrorists. So I'm
on the phone pleading with Binyamin
and he's saying: "I'm sorry, Mr.
President, but Israel simply does not
negotiate with terrorists, period, it's
the only way we can survive." So now
we got a new problem because this
country no longer has a Commander-
in-chief, but a father going out of his
mind because his little girl is in a
shack somewhere in the middle of
Uganda with a gun to her head! Do
you get it?!

ZOEY
Yes.

(sigh) There are some images from that last episode that keep repeating
on me like a bowl of one of Peter's more aggressive chilies. Particularly those
washed-out monochrome images of that single terrified eye...

posted by Diane: 6/30/2003 11:57:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, June 29, 2003

404 stuff
Here's a new variant on the theme... (Thanks to kung fu grippe for the link.)

posted by Diane: 6/29/2003 11:17:00 PM | link to this post

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

What has this guy done to "This Old House"?...
You occasionally run into strange cultural stuff when you're up in the mountains in Switzerland. Cantonal -ethnic jokes, the foehn, Heaven knows what else. Some things are odder than others.

One of the bigger restaurant/hotels in Leukerbad is the Roemerhof. The name refers (as one might guess) to the Romans, who were the first ones up here (besides the local Celts) to notice the hot water coming out of the ground. They beat a lasting and ancient path to the water, one which is the basis for the modern road which winds its way up from Leuk in the Rhone valley.

The Roemerhof restaurant has a big outdoor terrace which seems to be frequented by most of the locals between lunch and dinner. (This means about 1500 people in a town that has about twenty hotels and at least a hundred apartment buildings offering "ferienwohnungen", holiday apartments of the kind that UK users call "self-catering": basic linens are usually included in the price, but you bring your own food and whatever else. ) Right now Leukerbad is in what can best be called "shoulder season": not everything is shut, but most things are on "reduced hours" until the really serious summer season kicks in in July.

The Roemerhof has a guy who comes in to play keyboards and generally entertain the locals at the late lunch-early dinner-dinner periods. He's pretty good. For one thing, he doesn't let his keyboard do all the work. He makes his chords with his own hands (a tendency I honor, myself dating from a time when keyboards weren't as smart as they are now, and a keyboard artist was expected to be able to execute a complete "round-the-clock" chromatic chord sequence with his/her own hands).

We had a weird cultural moment a little while ago. Our entertainment played a song which was clearly identifiable as "This Old House" (not the TV theme...). What brought my head up was the moment in which the words "Lucky Ducky" suddenly got into the song...thus turning a fairly cheerful musing on the nature of mortality into something completely un-parseable.

I have to look into this and find out What Happened To The Song. More reports as they become germane.

Meanwhile, the temperatures are unseasonably high (mid-80's) and the sun
has been out pretty much costantly. My left arm is sunburnt (but not the right. Go figure.) It's really a shame we have to go tomorrow.

Coolest piece of tech spotted: a little electric "hauler" that grapples onto a "trailer hitch" thing on the front of a wheelchair-user's chair, and hauls them along the road at 10-20 kph. Very cool. It's like being at the chariot races.

Nicest local cat: Iggi, who is a brown tabby with unusually tiny feet,
and very friendly.

posted by Diane: 6/25/2003 04:12:00 PM | link to this post

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Oh goody, a new Blogger interface to get used to
And on a "German-speaking" keyboard, as well. Fascinating.

There hasn't been a lot of blogging the past few days, possibly because the weather has been so spectacularly sunny and unseasonably hot for this part of the world -- but we're having a great time. The food has been super, and the pools and leisure facilities are out of this world. We've both picked up a little tan. Only today has the weather gotten a little less perfect, dropping a very small amount of rain this morning. But the cloud is breaking already. Nothing to do but gaze out at the mountains and relax...

The only thing marring the general perfection of life at the moment is that the Young Wizards website is down; the server seems to be having some kind of fit. Oh well...let's see if it puts itself right in the next few hours.

posted by Diane: 6/24/2003 11:11:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, June 20, 2003

Pack pack pack pack pack
Boy, do I hate packing. It's bad enough getting the clothes sorted out: then there's all the wiring for the office-on-the-road. Clie sync cables, the mike for Dragon Dictate, phone cables (not all hotels are wireless yet... mutter...) phone chargers, Bluetooth cards... Ack.

And just when you think it's all handled, you find that one piece of clothing you wanted to bring with...the one that never made it into the laundry two days ago. ARGH!

Don't mind me.
posted by Diane: 6/20/2003 07:31:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, June 19, 2003

So it's away
And everything's fine now. (Knowing that a mood swing is a mood swing does take some of the thrill-ride quality away from it.)

So now I can pack, because starting tomorrow, right after the house-sitter arrives, we get a little time to ourselves. In some order or other, we will visit Peter's mum (here represented by her justly famous soda bread recipe): see That Kickass Party Town, Z�rich: visit the sublime and hilarious J�rg and Bice in Bern: and soak our heads for a short period in Leukerbad the beautiful. And then, much too soon, come home and go back to work again. (See, there are these Romulans...)

I may still blog. I may not. Herself only knows what I'll do. But I will think kindly of all of you in the Blogosphere while lying in the Alpentherme (or even the Burgerbad) and allowing 2 l/s of hot mineral water (not the stinky kind: Leukerbad's water is like hot Perrier...) to pour on my head.

posted by Diane: 6/19/2003 06:25:00 PM | link to this post

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

It's such a grind
I have to take a break and blog a little here.

Tomorrow (it would have been today, but DHL in Ireland has done something weird to their pickup and flight schedules: never mind...) -- tomorrow, I say, the copy-edited manuscript for Wizard's Holiday goes back to the publisher. I'm in the middle of the last changes I can make before we go to page proofs, probably in about a month.

The MS is presently a pile of paper which has many, many Day-Glo Post-It notes sticking out of it. I thought I was done with the MS this morning, but noooo, I had to read it through again...and find all these things that need dealing with that didn't get dealt with. Ah well: better to deal with them. But how is it I missed them on the first pass?

I feel like a complete basket case...but at this point in a MS-grooming, that's completely normal. I find myself looking at things I wrote as if I expected my readership to just intuit them somehow...and I feel like I'm not the writer I was (if indeed I ever was that writer. If you see what I mean.) This perception has as much to do with blood sugar and eyestrain as anything else, I know that...but there it is regardless.

One by one the Post-Its come out as paragraphs and sometimes whole pages get inserted to clarify issues which I thought (at the time of writing) would have been plain even to paramecia, but which I now see were obscure to everyone on Earth but me. I roll my eyes at my own obtuseness. (Just once or twice I roll them at my editor and copy-editor, but only a little: here and there they've missed something that really is obvious. In 99% of the notes in the MS, though, they're right on. And in Lynn I am truly blessed in a copy-editor who does not do what one of Peter's did, correcting his MS not to house style, but to her own...which included removing all apostrophes from dialogue because "the use of apostrophes gave an unnecessarily modern flavor to a period fantasy novel". He put every one of them back; the dialogue was "contemporary" to those speaking it, and if you take the C-E's line of reasoning too far, you wind up writing novels in Gothic, or Norman French. "Which limits your market rather," P. says.)

(sigh) This process is kind of like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. So much fun when you stop... I look forward to about 1 AM, when I should be finished, with great joy. ...Yet good things are getting done here. At least one scene got written which made me tear up slightly: a rarity. A couple of other scenes made me chuckle out loud (also fairly rare). It's too soon for me to tell whether this book is any good; ask me again in October, when it comes out. .

And this always happens. Always. The Big Mood Swing, spread over months -- from finishing the first draft in a blaze of sweat and glory, to the rewrite and copyedit, usually spent cowering and clutching my head in multiply recurring fits of acute embarrassment, to the point where I go over the page proofs, a little calmer but still not fully convinced. But at the same time, there's usually another book in progress, and this complicates the clinical picture somewhat. (There will be this year, for sure: Wizards at War really needs to go to the publisher in October.)

...Sigh. Back to work. I tell myself everything will be fine when I'm done. But right now I don't believe it.

Mothers, don't let your kids be writers!

(...As if you could stop them.)

posted by Diane: 6/18/2003 09:05:00 PM | link to this post

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Harry Potter and the Theft of the Decade
I was wondering whether something like this might eventually happen. Weird to see that it has --

$1.7m Harry Potter books stolen...

....Turns out that story was confused: the real amount (according to the BBC) is more like Stg 130,000. Downgrade to "Theft Of The Week."

posted by Diane: 6/17/2003 12:15:00 PM | link to this post

Monday, June 16, 2003

How very interesting
Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror

posted by Diane: 6/16/2003 02:29:00 PM | link to this post

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Writer-In-A-Can 1: Meeting the Transcendent Pig
Comments here, in the quoted parts, from a friend:

"So the Pig is one of those characters that just waits on the sidelines for a good book to wander into whether he was meant to or not? ;) "

The Pig would say, "That last requires a definition of who's doing the meaning..."

"No wonder you get writers complaining about their characters running away from them."

(snort) I wouldn't be one of those as a rule. I've said it before: if a character routinely shows an inclination not to do as they're told, to the point where their actions threaten to derail a carefully designed plot, I kill them. Plotting is mine, saith Me: I will handle it -- and I expect my characters to "understand" that I have their best interests at heart, even though it may not look like it at the time. They start getting disruptive, I return them to the Creativity Pool and tell them to find some other author. We've got work to do here.

That said: "sidelines", in the sports idiom, are exactly where some of my characters are. I usually have one eye on players who haven't yet entered the game, as it were, and I'm not above one of them sidling over to the manager in the dugout, also as it were, and whispering, "Boss, come on, break the lineup and let me bat after him..." If I can be convinced that it's a good idea, sure, why not? -- as long as the main thrust of the through story is assisted.

I'm not going to add spoiler protection on what follows, except to suggest that people who don't want to know one way my characters get developed should probably refrain from reading it.

Flash back to June of 2000. Sometimes, when circumstances at home haven't been quiet enough for writing to get done in a timely way, I take off for a week or so with the portable to be by myself with the work. We have a friend in Switzerland who has a small studio apartment in a remote spot on Mount Rigi, and for a nominal charge to cover heat and power and resort tax and so on, one or the other of us can catch a cheapo flight via Ryanair/Easyjet to Zurich, catch the train downcountry and up the mountain, and go hole up there in perfect quiet and just get on with it.

It's a great spot. There are no roads. There are no cars. (That trip I got to see one of the neighbors having their newly-cut hay brought down the mountain by helicopter.) There is no phone in the apartment (though on top of old Rigi is a massive candy-striped cellphone mast with so many emitters on it that it ought to be possible to receive calls on one's fillings, and the Nokia connected to the portable makes it possible to pick up the e-mail and send off completed files anyway.) It's absolutely quiet up there, and all the views are wonderful, especially the southern one (see DILEMMA p. 129 for a slightly reworked view of the Alps as seen from the Vierwaldst�tersee area). There are no distractions. You can even order your groceries online from LeShop.ch and have them delivered to the local post office/train station for you to pick up.

But for stuff like milk and bread and fresh vegetables and so on it's silly to do that. After a day or three of hard work the urge to get out a little further than the apartment's terrace gets strong, and besides, you need fresh bread...and Swiss bread is the best in the world...so you grab a shopping bag and walk down the paved footpath to the dorfladen or village shop in Rigi-Kaltbad, about half an hour's walk down the mountain, and then (if you're a lazy thing like me) avoid the climb back up by catching the little cogwheel Rigi-Bahn train back to the apartment.

Rigi-Kaltbad is where I was when the Pig ran into me.

I have to write carefully about this, because people are prone to misunderstand it. After twenty years of this work, I've found that -- for me at least -- there are modes of creativity which can briefly overlay the normal senses, so that things that genuinely aren't there except in your imagination seem for a few moments to coexist with things that have what passes for physical existence. It doesn't qualify as hallucination, since never for more than the initial split second of surprise are you in any doubt that what you're experiencing is an internally sourced artifact of the making-it-up process. It's not a state that can be induced or forced. And it's not invariably useful. Sometimes it's just funny, your brain making a visual or aural joke to break the tension. Sometimes it turns out to have been helpful after you've figured out to what use the data or suggestion can be put. It's never to be taken as gospel, but it's always something to pay attention to when it happens, which for me isn't all that often.

So I've done my shopping and got my bread and milk and so on, and it's going to be about another hour and a half before the train comes through. Scene-setting here: Rigi-Kaltbad is all one steep hill. It's a small resort -- I guess from the name there must have been a small spa there at one point or another -- and has a number of good small hotels. One of them is right by the train station, which is literally only a place where the track briefly becomes flat so that when the train stops, people can get in and out without immediately falling either uphill or downhill. The nearest hotel is set at a right angle to the tracks, directly across from the station building, and the front of it, one story up, has a narrow terrace restaurant.

This is the best place to wait for the train, since if you've paid for what you've had, all you have to do is walk down the outside stairs and walk across the tracks to board. I went up there and had a salad and a couple decis of white wine. Nice day, warm, sun leaning westward, the lesser of the two views showing to the north -- Luzern, and the Jura in the distance. When lunch was done I pulled out the pad I always carry with me up there (the laptop was locked up in the apartment) and started to go over the remainder of the Dilemma outline and the beginning notes for the broad "arc" outline for the next three books. There were some details that were evading me.

I kept getting distracted. The day was gorgeous. The surroundings were gorgeous. The restaurant manager, waiting tables, let me alone except to bring me a little more wine and to pause by me briefly to deadhead some petunias in the nearby windowbox hanging over the railing. I stared at the train station for a while, and the building site to the left of it where they had finished tearing down the century-old hotel there and were rebuilding it on the same site, and then I turned my attention to the pad again.

Pad. Pen. Red and white checked tablecloth. Something standing beside the table. White. A pig. A large pig, its back at nearly the same level as the table.

"You never come see me any more," says the Pig in a voice partaking about equally of Milton Berle and Harlan Ellison. "You don't even call."

The next second contains the following thoughts, in more or less this order:

(1) A pig?

(2) Boy, this is a good one.

(3) Why a pig?

(4) Oh, it's him...

(5) Now isn't that interesting. I wonder....

"You come here often?" I "say" to the Pig, since I feel it's rude to treat one of these visitations entirely as if I were making it up. Then I laugh. Dumb line.

He laughs too, and he's gone. Reality, such as it is, reasserts itself in toto. But I've been reminded of something I hadn't thought about in a while. I think about it. Some ideas start to arrange themselves in configurations they hadn't been in before. These look like much better configurations than the earlier ones. I start making notes. The train comes. I ignore it. I ignore the next one. And the next. I finally catch the last train up, around the time it gets too dark to write.

When I get home I check my own reference to the Pig, and check the one in Barry Hughart's BRIDGE OF BIRDS. I do a big old web search and another search at the main library at Trinity, and find hardly anything. Through a mutual acquaintance I get in contact with Hughart (who never made any use of the character beyond the one throwaway reference) to see if he knows anything more about the Pig. He gets back to me in due time and adds a little info from another source besides the Larousse, a large work on Chinese mythology, but there's really very little data, and nothing to prevent me going in the direction I'm heading already.

So I write the Pig my way.

And now we add the spoilers. There are a couple sentences' worth of material here vaguely having to do with the next three books, so don't blame me if you go ahead and read this and then later you're sorry.

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As things develop it will become obvious why the Pig has become involved with this storyline in Wizard's Dilemma and not before. This particular internal arc will take at least three books to resolve...maybe more. Probably it's wiser to say nothing more at this point, as this business is still shaping itself.

posted by Diane: 6/15/2003 04:27:00 PM | link to this post

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Not a lot of blogging for the next few days
The copyedited MS for Wizard's Holiday has come back, and I have a lot of work to do to get it handled before we go away for a few days off at the end of next week. Just so you all know not to expect any long articles... (I may republish a few things from other sources, though -- writeups of this or that which people have requested.)

posted by Diane: 6/14/2003 07:19:00 AM | link to this post

Hebesphenomegacorona
The word alone is worth the price of admission. (Another good one from the same source: "gyrobifastigium".) But wait, there's more!

Here's a picture of one aboard the Intenational Space Station.

Those wild and crazy astronauts; you gotta love 'em...

posted by Diane: 6/14/2003 06:57:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, June 13, 2003

Strange Search Terms
Every now and then I go through the user logs to see who's come to see the blog, and where they came from. A lot of people arrive via Google. But some of the searches that bring them here...well, they're a little weird.

Here's today's best one:

"free fonts pasture of muppets"

Hokay.....

posted by Diane: 6/13/2003 09:13:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, June 12, 2003

The job you really don't want
Bearing in mind that this was the kind of family who would torture you for not performing well enough in the national soccer team...you don't want this to be your job description:

Saddam Hussein's ghostwriter.

posted by Diane: 6/12/2003 12:43:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Two words I wouldn't have thought belonged so close to each other
"Sausage" and "origami."

(link via Die Puny Humans)

posted by Diane: 6/10/2003 08:31:00 PM | link to this post

Warning: hardware geekery ahead
The time is approaching when I'm going to be replacing Ryoh-ohki with her smarter younger sister (who will also be Ryoh-ohki). When the first machine gets back from her impending service, she's promised to a good home with a charming hotelier in Bern, a lady who will take good care of her and who's as big a hardware geek, if not a bigger one, than I am.

Yet at the same time, committed as I am to the MM-1 (also known as the Sharp Actius, now that they've started rolling it out in the US), there are other temptations. This would be one of them.

I've been getting increasingly intrigued by the tablet-PC concept, and the tablet version of the Mebius Muramasa TN-1 looks like a nice implementation of that. I'm impressed with the quality of Sharp's laptops by now, having worked extensively with both Ryoh-ohki and Peter's machine, the heavier and more butch Ken-ohki. If as I think the TN-1 is more of the same, that alone would be an attraction. I'd like to get my hands on one of these and play with it a little. The hardware specs are good enough: 1.1 gHz Intel Speedstep processor, 256-768 meg RAM, 30 gig hard drive, regular LAN and wireless LAN, all the usual ports for a machine of this kind, and (interestingly) a fingerprint lock. The only downside, for me, is the weight. 1.9 kg...mutter. That's almost twice what I'm used to carrying these days: more even than Ken-ohki weighs with his CD-R/W drive in. And the size (a little bigger than Ken-ohki) makes it more difficult to do what I like to do with Ryoh-ohki...keep her in my shoulderbag. Especially on the road, where I have no desire to reveal what I'm carrying by exhibiting something too obviously a computer bag...and also don't feel like having to schlep around something that weighs as much as some boat anchors.

And every time I start thinking about all that extra weight, I go back to the Dynamism site and look at this again...

"It's too small for you," Jason (my sales-and-sometimes-support guy at Dynamism) keeps telling me. Well, maybe. But my hands aren't exactly huge, and I wrote several novels on Allegra, my Acer TravelMate, without too much trouble. Her keyboard's only slightly bigger than the U101's. (She is presently in honorable retirement as the machine we give to houseguests. ...And yes, all my machines have names and genders, and it's not just a network issue. I find they work better that way. Don't anybody bring up the Pathetic Fallacy. [If I suffer from a fallacy, it's more likely to be the empathetic one: or as Brandoch Daha would put it, "Ever she perversely affecteth the losing side in a quarrel."]) ...And this machine plays exactly into a prediction I made to Peter years ago: that one day there would be a PC no bigger than a Filofax.

...It's gonna be a while before I have to make up my mind about this issue. Big and unusual, or small and neat?...

Hmmmm....

posted by Diane: 6/10/2003 07:54:00 AM | link to this post

Notes to yesterday
(a) The courier from Fountains and Decor never did arrive. Mutter. They'd better be here today before noon...otherwise I can't take delivery on the pots until Thursday, as between then and now we have a lot of running around to do before we turn the rental car back in.

(b) FedEx, instead of bringing the MS. here, dropped it at the pub, as they've been asked not to do unless we're not home. The last few times, the excuse was, "We didn't see a car there so we thought nobody was at home." The landlady at the pub having explained to the driver in great detail that we didn't have a car, I wonder what the excuse is going to be this time? Must call FedEx and sort this out. Well, maybe it was another driver.

(c) There was a (c), but now I can't remember what it was. Oh well. (This comes of getting up when the daylight suggests it's time to do so, and posting before the caffeine has set in.)

(Then again, why should I complain? The more daylight I get, the happier I am. And the more work I can do, which is a good thing, since now I have a very busy week ahead of me, making the necessary revisions to Holiday.)

posted by Diane: 6/10/2003 05:15:00 AM | link to this post

Monday, June 09, 2003

The only reason Beemer let me sleep late yesterday
-- was that the world was about to go slightly nuts. Like this:

0900: Awakened by Beemer. Feed cats. Shower, dress, eat a little something, spend the time until approximately 1200 puttering around the Web, tidying website, etc.

1200ish: Peter wakes up. More showering, dressing, eating. Peter points out to me small waterspot he's noticed in the bedroom ceiling. "Might be a leak in the roof," he says. "I'll take a look at that later... it doesn't look serious."

1400ish: We drive over to Fountains and Decor in Dublin to get the pond supplies and pond plants I've been wanting. Score numerous marginals, including some nice water iris, and also (something I didn't think I'd find there) two gorgeous topiary "standard" bay trees and pots for them, to go by either side of the front door. Also a new enzymatic/bacterial anti-algae formulation to kill "blanketweed" in pond. (The stuff is a nuisance: with these long days' worth of sunlight, and the speed at which the stuff grows, I have to clean out the pond pump every other day, sometimes every day.)

1700ish: Return home in triumph. Stick most plants into "shallow end" of pond to be dealt with tomorrow, put others in shallow dishes of water. Introduce magic anti-blanketweed stuff to pond via filterbox. Peter goes upstairs to take a look at the waterspot through the attic access in the upstairs bathroom.

1715: Phone rings. Editor calls to let me know that copyedited manuscript for Wizard's Holiday is on its way. Says he likes book, too. A lot. In the middle of this very pleasant phone call, which frankly could have gone on for another hour or so before I got tired of it (if indeed then), hollering comes from upstairs: "GET ME A POT RIGHT NOW!"

Uh oh. Drop phone in cat bed, race upstairs with saucepan. Find perspiring husband trying to shut down leak (which broke loose bigtime as soon as he touched it) from joint between cold-water storage tank and hose that leads to the well outside. Give husband pot. Husband places pot, runs downstairs, throws master circuitbreaker for house to kill power to well pump.

Fish phone out of cat bed, say goodbye to editor (with intense regret). Call landlord. Landlord promises to call plumber first thing in the morning. (And does, too. He's a super landlord.)

1800-0845: Power restored to house...but not water: P finds the circuitbreaker that handles the pump, shuts it down. Funny how sometimes you can skip a shower, if you're busy, but if you want one and can't have it, life becomes unlivable. Ditto re: drinking water, etc.

0500 this morning or thereabouts: Husband comes to bed, says his lateness is my fault because I wrote a good book which kept him up reading. At this time of day, my only possible response is: "Yeah, big deal, tell me all about it sometime when I'm conscious."

0830: Wake up suddenly (once again, cat has failed to get me up at 0600, but maybe this is a good thing.) Realize the plumber is going to be here any moment, and besides that, numerous things are scheduled to be delivered: chair, plants from Fountains & Decor, MS. via FedEx, etc. Leap from bed and start tidying the place. (Should have done this yesterday.) Urge husband also to leap from bed and start tidying the place. Response not unprintable in reality, but I can hear P. even when he's got the silencer on. Nonetheless, husband leaps from bed and also starts tidying. All things not good for plumber to see (i.e. much piled-up laundry, many unshelved books, etc) thrown into P's office with great speed and door shut. Husband pulls on clothing, lies down again to resume sleep.

Tea cannot be made because there is no water. In slightly grim mood, go out to fishpond to feed fish. Mood changes to utter shock to discover that fish are in exactly three inches of water and looking most bemused. Where did all the water go since yesterday??!! Discover that after dosing pond filter box with magic anti-algal stuff, box was not replaced in proper position to make sure that all water re-enters pond properly. Since approximately 5 PM yesterday, pond has been quietly emptying itself down the back of the pond shell.

Because water is cut off from house before well to keep cold-tank leak under control, pond cannot be refilled until plumber arrives. Bubble positions her small interested self on stones surrounding pond and gazes down at fish which are now in only three inches of water instead of three feet of it. Tempt Bubble inside with kitty milk. Bubble drinks milk, returns to fish. Several times.

Reflect that it's an ill wind, etc., and that with only three inches of water in the pond, this is a good time to plant in the marginals along the back (unreachable when the pond is full). Do so. This also protects fish from Bubble.

0900: Plumber arrives. Thank Herself! Plumber fixes leak in approximately five minutes, departs. Pump turned back on. Water again, hurray! Now we can have tea. But first run outside to start refilling fishpond.

0915: Peter checks leak one more time, just to make sure, then goes to have shower. Discovers that only hot water works...no cold. Hear him thinking things, in great detail, silencer or no silencer. (This is, after all, the same plumber who installed our shower cubicle upside down.)

0918: Aeron chair arrives at last. Much joy, for about two minutes. There are things more important than chairs right now. We both want a shower a lot.

0920: Peter disassembles shower. Nothing wrong with that.

0940: Peter goes into attic space, discovers that plumber shut off cold water feed to shower while working on tank, forgot to turn it back on. P now does so. Cold water now running to shower. Hurray!

1000: Unbox chair. Chair is wonderful. Hurray! Mail arrives. Mail contains check for recently written short story. Hurray!

1015: Fountains and Decor calls. Bay trees (now potted) will be delivered today. Hurray!

1100: Finally have cup of tea. Sit down in chair for first time. Pond is full again. Hurray!

Sheesh. It's a good thing I didn't have anything to do today...

posted by Diane: 6/09/2003 04:22:00 PM | link to this post

E. E. "Doc" Smith fans, here it is: the "spy ray"

Trust Doc to get there first.

posted by Diane: 6/09/2003 03:17:00 PM | link to this post

Sunday, June 08, 2003

A noteworthy event (locally, anyway)
Wow, Beemer let me sleep until almost 9 AM. How did that happen?...

posted by Diane: 6/08/2003 10:10:00 AM | link to this post

Saturday, June 07, 2003

A moment to breathe
Wizard's Holiday is with its editor now, and I expect I should be hearing from him momentarily with notes on the manuscript. While that's happening...there's this strange brief halcyon time (three or four days, anyway...) in which I actually can sit around for the better part of a day and not do anything.

-- For some values of the above, anyway. "Not doing anything" this week has included: work on updating the "European Cuisines" website, preparatory to moving it into its own domain: testing new webtracking software: some assorted gardening: going up to the local nursery to consider what tree to plant in the hedge to replace the one destroyed by the joyriders who nearly crashed through the hedge and into the corner of the house: stripping unnecessary files off Ryoh-ohki's hard drive, since she may have to go back to Japan next week for a service (the keyboard has begun acting up in the wake of the sake incident last week, though there are also signs that it might be putting itself right -- it's hard to tell, just hafta keep hacking at it for a while): doing the laundry: cleaning the fishpond: doing "travel agent" things regarding an upcoming trip during which Peter and I will go away and soak our heads for a week...

And there's still been time to get some other writing done. While gearing up to get the Rihannsu sorted out at last (and also doing early prep work for Wizards at War I've been able to at last finish "Herself", the Irish fantasy story I've been fiddling with for the best part of six months, and get it off to its editors, who liked it. Now I get to write a story about a game show for another anthology. The brain is ticking over on this one, which I suspect will be another candidate for an eventual, putative Duane short-story anthology called New Gods for Old. (Assuming the thing ever happens. )

And yes, pre-work work on The Door Into Starlight is going on as well. Don't think I'm not sensitive to the background screams and cries of those who've been so patient for so long. But things are coming together now.

In all of this, I'm finding the new version of Dragon Naturally Speaking to be a big help...and so is the little creature to the right. I dictate into it, and then (via a USB cable) Dragon magically sucks the words out of the recorder and transcribes them. So I can go out for a walk in the early morning, spend a lovely couple of hours talking to myself, and then come back and -- instead of having to type out the resultant material -- can have a cup of tea and watch the computer do it. Ah, technology...what a wonder! (When it works....)

If the recorder has a weakness, it's that (a) the file-folder system it uses is frankly Byzantine in its complexity, and (b) the controls are a perfect evocation of that last ad in the movie Crazy People: "Caucasians are just too damn big." The rocker switch is very small, does about five different things, and if you push your finger a millimeter in the wrong direction at a crucial moment, you're screwed. However, the tool is so powerful and useful that I've just sort of resigned myself to the steepness of the learning curve.

Meanwhile, they've started harvesting their barley, up the hill. We're having a few days of dryish weather, and all the local farmers seem to be taking advantage of it. This means that the early-morning walks are slightly complicated by huge harvesting machines rumbling up and down the roads (and the necessity for them to get far enough away, after passing me, so that I can record again without a lot of noise which will give Dragon the pip).

...An afterthought, just in passing. There's also one other thing which has been an issue, now that I'm doing a lot more dictation than I have for the last year or so: how to get past feeling stupid while dictating. I don't know if others who compose while dictating have experienced the problem, but it was a big hurdle for me -- getting past the self-consciousness about telling a story out loud to no one (since when it's working well, there's no particular sense of me being there, either). Even when there's no one for miles around, this affects me...though less and less with practice. -- What's funny, though, on these morning story runs, is the looks I get from drivers who see me walking along "talking to myself". In certain moods I like to make sure the recorder is visible...not easy, it's so small! In other moods, I don't give a damn...let them think I'm crazy. Like the people in town who see me talking to Peter using the Bluespoon wireless earpiece -- so small it can't be seen when my hair gets over it -- and who don't see the flashing blue light it produces when in active use. :) (There it is on the left -- on my monitor it's nearly life size, a shade under two inches long [35 mm]; it weighs about ten grams. Mine is just plain matte blue -- I think it was a slightly older version of the one shown here.)

(Of course, sometimes when people do see it the results are similarly amusing. A bunch of guys at the airside bar at Dublin Airport a couple of weeks ago saw me walking back and forth while talking to Peter, and did see the bright blue flashing; they were fascinated. One of them shouted loudly enough for half the terminal to hear, "Hey, lady, c'mere, we want to see your thing!" Well, gee, thanks, guys... Another one yelled, "Hey, Lieutenant Uhura!" Heh.)

(Oh...a tech note on the above stuff for those interested who've commented: specs/info for the Bluespoon can be seen here and here: specs, etc. for the Sony recorder are here.)

posted by Diane: 6/07/2003 09:53:00 AM | link to this post

Friday, June 06, 2003

I've got to have them

After all these years of marriage I've acquired from Peter a certain love of crew patches. So I have to have these...

(And I have a feeling Peter's going to want them too. In fact, I have a feeling that NASA is going to discover these patches are in much more demand than other recent ones...)

From the press release: "'It is exciting that our characters, which for so many years have been associated with space adventures in the animated world, should now have a chance to become part of a real and important space exploration,' said Jordan Sollitto, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Warner Bros. Consumer Products. 'We are thrilled about teaming up with NASA on these exciting missions and are looking forward to giving our characters the opportunity to touch down upon the Red Planet.'

"'More accurately, the planet is an understated fiery umber,' Marvin interjected.

"'I know.'"

(Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.)

posted by Diane: 6/06/2003 09:38:00 PM | link to this post

"Fairies defy chainsaw attacker to sprout new leaves on thorn bush"
How on Earth could I have missed this story the other day?

"The celebrated fairy bush of Latoon, Co Clare has confounded all expectations to sprout leaves again - eight months after a vandal's chain-saw was believed to have ended its life.

"In recent days, green leaves on the white thorn bush have been visible to motorists travelling along the �90 million Newmarket-on-Fergus bypass. Folklorist Mr Eddie Lenihan said yesterday he was 'delighted and relieved' that the fairy tree or 'sceach' was growing once more.

"The sceach received international attention four years ago when it was saved from destruction at the start of the roadworks scheme after a successful campaign by Mr Lenihan.

"He warned of a curse on the roadway if the fairy bush was destroyed and related how the sceach was a rendezvous point for Kerry fairies to discuss tactics on their way to do battle with the Connacht fairies.

"Clare County Council placed a wooden fence around the bush, however last August a vandal armed with a chain-saw reduced the tree to a stump after cutting down all the branches.

"County engineer Mr Tom Carey described the act as "deplorable" and the council reported the matter to the Garda�. However no one was apprehended for the attack. Now, with growth returning to the damaged sceach, Mr Lenihan remarked yesterday: 'The fairies are able to look after their own property.' He said the sceach offers a window to the 'other world'.

"Asked what he believes has become of the vandal, Mr Lenihan said: 'Well, after the despicable act was carried out on the tree, I rang an old man who was very familiar with the sceach and had told me stories about it. After telling him about the attack, there was a long pause before he asked, "Is he still alive?", referring to the vandal who had chopped down the branches. I won't say anything more but I would not like to be him.'"

...The bush is indeed moderately celebrated: see this story which appeared in the New York Times in 1999. Lenihan himself is a seanachai, a semi-professional storyteller who is also a moderately well-known folklorist.

It should be said that the hawthorn is a very tough tree. There's one behind our house which fell down in some storms late last autumn. However, since only about three-quarters of its roots were pulled out, it has gracefully declined to die and is now in flower as well. (It also allows Peter to come in and say things like, "The cat's up the tree with the sheep.")

In the NYT story, I'm also interested by the comment of the UCD folklore archivist about the widespread "passive belief" in Old Things. After you've been here for a while, you get a sense that there's a lot of it scattered around this country. But mostly people won't discuss it too openly even among other natives...and only ever so rarely when someone with a non-local accent (like mine) is standing there. The neighbors are concerned about looking or sounding as if they're stuck in a previous century. But get them alone, and sometimes you hear interesting things. The hill near our house is supposed to be haunted, for example, though by what isn't clear. I've never had any problems with it...but one of the neighbors, when her car broke down outside our house late at night, was so nervous about walking near that hill in the dark that she knocked on the door and asked to be given a ride home.

That said, walking a mile or so on a dark night near our house would not be fun. There are no streetlights. There are no sidewalks. There are very, very few houses, and their lights are mostly far away. If there's no starlight or moonlight, it's dark around here...and once or twice in such circumstances, walking home late from the pub, I've remembered Yeats's story about the man who was nearly scared to death by a ghost that was following him down a dark windy road...and which turned out to be some pages from the Irish Times. (A problem no longer possible with the online edition...)

It'll be interesting to see if anything further is heard about the sceach as we get closer to June 21st, St. John's Eve, the night when (it's said) the doors between the worlds stand open (and when they play softball in Reykjavik for 24 hours without stopping. Why stop when the Sun won't go down?)...

posted by Diane: 6/06/2003 11:14:00 AM | link to this post

These long summer days
They're the best... The sun comes up at 5 AM at the moment, and doesn't go down till quarter of eleven. I can get a lot of work done on a day like this.

The only problem with the period just to either side of the Solstice is that the cats -- particularly Miss Beemer -- become unbearable around now, in that they want their breakfast when it gets light. So Beemer puts her nose up mine around 0515 and starts doing the I Love You So Much, Give Me My Damn Breakfast Already routine. There are times this is particularly wearing, such as when I've been up later than usual (The West Wing last night. Why does RTE have to show it at 11:30....Oh well, at least we're getting it).

Don't imagine that any of them think of bothering Peter in this regard, either. They know better. He sleeps too effectively for them to wake him up. Whereas I unfortunately still have a lot of that nurse-wiring in my head, with its emphasis on assisting the weak and helpless rather than picking them up and throwing them at the wall. (sigh)

Never mind. Dawn is pretty this time of year...

posted by Diane: 6/06/2003 10:26:00 AM | link to this post

Thursday, June 05, 2003

A happy find
Convivium is a peer-reviewed online journal concerned with food representation in film, literature and the arts. This is an area dear to my heart -- and to Peter's: he's the only writer I know who's had an editor call him up and bawl him out because he'd written something too well. She was reading one of his manuscripts (I think it must have been Firebird) and she hit one of the juiciest of his killer "feast scenes" while still two hours away from her lunch... (I bet it was the description of the smetanyk that did it. Recipe follows.)

My favorite quote from one of this month's articles (on the use of the chile pepper motif in art, craft and commerce), from an artist who enjoys painting peppers and chiles:

"Peppers are currently my favorite painting subjects. They are available, cheap, and will sit still for a long time and can be eaten afterward."

posted by Diane: 6/05/2003 10:46:00 AM | link to this post

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

This morning's goofy headline...
Butt arrested over night club incident

(Sorry if this is "premium content"...) The gist of the story: "England and Manchester United soccer star Nicky Butt has been arrested by police over an alleged assault in a night club, a police source said today."

(snicker)

posted by Diane: 6/03/2003 10:03:00 AM | link to this post

Off to the Bloggers Meet in Dublin tonight
-- to hobnob, fraternize and otherwise mingle with other Irish bloggers. Tonight is also the Irish Sci-Fi Club meeting, so Peter and I are double-booked. See you all there (x2)!

posted by Diane: 6/03/2003 07:35:00 AM | link to this post

Monday, June 02, 2003

I may have missed the annular --

-- but others didn't. The lovely shot at the right comes from a photographer who was at Cape Wrath in Scotland for annular totality. Lots of other shots can be seen at the eclipse gallery page at Spaceweather.com.

posted by Diane: 6/02/2003 09:13:00 AM | link to this post

Sunday, June 01, 2003

Alaalu is a very large planet
Very large. I suspect I had some memory of Vance's "Big Planet" in the back of my mind (waaaay in the back: it must be twenty-five or thirty years since I read it).

I wanted a big, low-metal world. I did the "rough" calculations first and then sat down with the Planet Designer at http://www.cix.co.uk/~vicarage/planets/ to check my math (which is dodgy at the best of times) and make sure the world was possible. The trick is to keep the gravity roughly the same while still keeping an atmosphere on the thing. The interesting part, from Nita's and Kit's point of view, is the 120-hour day. (The year is 1421 days and change; axial tilt is 1.6 degrees.)

Alaalu's radius is almost exactly 34,000 km. This makes the equatorial diameter 64,000 km (polar is less: the planet is moderately oblate), and the circumference (by pi times D) a little over 201,000 km. (Yes, the "four times the size of Earth" line will need correcting: I think that may have survived from an earlier draft. Thanks for catching it.)

posted by Diane: 6/01/2003 05:59:00 PM | link to this post

For those interested...
-- the latest excerpt from Wizard's Holiday is up now at the YW site.

posted by Diane: 6/01/2003 02:05:00 PM | link to this post

And one other thing...

Wizardry powers Blogger. But you knew that!