desperance

I wonder if there's any point taking any of my how-to-grow-herbs-and-veggies books? Given that California is such a different climate, and all? I don't know how much of the information would be universal, and how much would be not-useful, and how much just plain wrong...

*surveys pile of books, and thinks about leaving them all*

Really, this ought to be a poll but, y'know. I don't apparently do polls.

So you'll just have to tell me in words, my dears.

That thing where the shop assistant rings in your purchases: is it a cash register, or is it a till? And do you think this has changed in your lifetime? Or does it change in your travels, transAtlantic or otherwise?

(And does one actually still say that purchases are rung in, or is that helplessly old-fashioned?)

If you make a firebomb out of a bottle of whisky and the tail of your shirt, because you're improvising and there's just no time to find petrol and soap and sugar and so forth for the proper Molotov, will it still explode? Is there enough oomph in regular retail alcohol, or will it just burn at the wick like an oil-lamp, or what...?

Brrr!

*changes clothes, dries hairlessness*

In retail adventures on the way, I did not hear a mixed group of pensioners on the escalator saying how much they liked to watch nude dancers doing the foxtrot. No. I did not. I misheard that, for sure. However loudly they spoke. They probably said "new". "New" dancers. Yes. That'll be it, then.

And there were no more soft cod's roes to be had, as I feared, but I did remember parcel tape.

In other news, cookery books are heavy. And my back hurts. I'm sure that's unrelated.

Before all that, I wrote 1200 words and finished my chapter and proofed a chapter of House of Bells. I should probably start another chapter now, but... yeah. Maybe I'll go talk to the vet instead.

A propos of nothing in particular, did you know that the Secular Games were a religious celebration? Like the secular clergy, it's not oxymoronic at all.

(...if people will keep making them up...)

The word "thistlish" doesn't seem to exist. Or didn't, until I wrote it in this novel. I still think I like it better than "thistleish", though; that "e" just looks redundant to me, if it isn't contributing to pronunciation-guidance.

The word "tetradelphous", though, absolutely does occur. Too bad I have no way to use it.

You may think yourselves spared. I was on the very verge, the very verge of beginning another day of oy-I-have-to-wait-in-for-a-delivery-oh-how-I-hate-this-as-you-know-Bob, when there was a knock on the door, and there was a very obliging delivery-person, checking the address and my presence before he blocked the road with his giant delivery truck.

And then he delivered all the boxes. All of them. Which greatly obliged the boys, because, y'know. Boxes.

Even in their flat-pack form, they are good. They are many! They make towers! The stacks are good for sharpening claws on! They are bound up with String!

So, yup. Exciting explorations are going on, forts and territories are being claimed and declared, ambushes are happening.

So I don't get to tell you about my long and sleepless night, the hours I spent reading in my Kindle ("just one more chapter", and how long has it been since I read in bed like that? And that is at least partly the device. I don't know if anyone's done a study to see if people actually read e-books differently - outside of the convenience factors, I mean - but I think it's there to be done. I know that shifting from typewriter to computer changed the way I wrote, and I suspect the same is true, that there's a shift in the reader's relationship to the text).

Anyway. I was all prepared for a day at home, and no. I am about to leave the boys to play among their boxes, and go do normal workstuffs. Then I shall come home and cut String, and there will be a mass expansion.

I like my Kindle more and more and more. Sometimes a gift is just exactly thoughtful, and just exactly timed; I shed books with one hand and acquire them with the other, and feel no guilt at all. It's all the fun of starting again, with none of the grief of having to.

Last night I read in it (I have decided: one reads in one's Kindle, not the thing itself. One doesn't read one's library, one reads one's book) in bed. Which was extremely comfortable,and the uniquely appalling pain in my neck this morning has nothing to do with that, no. (Nor of course anything to do with all this stupid stress that renders me mute and incapable and on the brink of terrible destructive rage, which I am not talking about in this post, no.)

Over the last three days I have written, gosh. Much. And am still not stopping, despite having the proof of House of Bells to check through this week also.

Here, have a clipping (from House of Bells, not the new stuff). We are in the 1960s, and in Soho:

...But here was Tarsier’s, all barrels and sawdust and bare wood. Here was Tony, perched as ever on a stool in the open window, exhibited to the street. Looking unfairly lovely, the dark tumble of his hair snaring the sunlight while the wide lapels of his jacket only showed off the breadth of his shoulders. Oozing self-content, that too. See me: here I am, the most fashionable man in London, waiting to eat oysters with the wickedest girl in England...
“You’re late,” he said, as she hoisted herself onto the high stool he had somehow kept for her despite the crush.
“Darling. Of course I’m late.” Sorry, Tony, sorry - but it was a rule now, never to apologise to anyone. She’d done too much of that, and it didn’t help at all. People liked to see you grovel, but that was all about punishment, not forgiveness. She’d been punished enough. She had that in writing, from a lord. “So were you, I expect.”
He grinned. “I was, but you win in the lateness stakes. I should know never to compete with a pro.”
Damn. She’d flinched at that, which made him twitch a little in his turn. Sometimes they played sensitivities like ping-pong. “Just a talented amateur,” she said quickly, as if it didn’t matter at all. Trying to cover up too late, as usual. “What shall we drink? Is it a Guinness day or a champagne day?”

Real life has too many cats categories.

I was trying to sort books, see.

I have this ... three-dimensional stack between the arm of the sofa and the nearest bookcase. It started out as a neat pile of overflow SF hardbacks, and became the-place-where-the-SF-hardbacks-go, and then the-place-where-the-new-SF-goes, and then the-place-where-what-I've-just-read-goes, and like that. It's kind of a book-and-paper mountain, and I can't get to the second case of SF hardbacks until it's clear, so. It was meant to be a project for today.

I had a box.

Actually, I had looked at the box and thought that's not going to be big enough, but hey. We do what we can.

Just, I can't. I can't deal. I was trying to put hardbacks-that-survive-the-first-filter into the box; but that leaves open the question of paperbacks, and hardbacks that don't, and paperbacks that don't, and, oh, paperbacks that I might well want to read in the next week or two (Steven Brust, largely), and...

And I thought I might put a CD on to help me through, but then I thought I might not hear the phone when Karen calls; and then one of my piles just fell magisterially over, and then I couldn't stop laughing until I looked down at my hand to try to understand the sticky, and realised that I was bleeding.

I don't even. Don't ask me.

As soon as the potatoes are done, I'm opening a bottle of wine and giving up down there. Coming back up here to seek refuge in work. I've written 2K words today; there will be more.

These are very rolly tomatoes. I keep bombarding poor Mac. Who endures it, and then looks up with that look that says "But I don't like tomatoes! Drop sossidges on my head! Sossidges!"

(There are, as it happens, sossidges. There is also fresh bread, and there will be piperade, if these tomatoes will cease to flee the knife. Why is it that everything, everything ends up on the floor? I used to think I was just clumsy. Then I thought I sheltered a poltergeist. Now I'm fairly convinced that it's a syndrome.)

I keep thinking there must be a smart parallel to be drawn with that childhood notion that even a stopped clock is right twice a day - but actually of course that isn't right, because time is a measurement of change, not of stasis. A stopped clock is never right, a dead thing, a waste of time and space.

Except -

There's a clock here in the Silence Room. A ticking clock. Except that it almost never ticks.

It reminds me of another childhood time line, an alleged review of the latest Rolls Royce where the reviewer allegedly said "the loudest thing in the cab here is the ticking of the clock," and Messrs Rolls & Royce allegedly looked at each other and said, "We must do something about that clock."

Here in the Silence Room, they do do something about that clock. Repeatedly. I come in, and it's ticking away; I come in again, and it's not. Over and over again. It fails far too frequently for a mechanical problem, if it was that badly busted they'd fix it or take it away; and it's far too frequent to be simply a failure-to-wind, no mainspring runs that short. No, I have figured this out, and it's a device. The failure of ticking is an artefact. The silence of the room is defined by the silence of the clock, the absence of that ticking. But it's notoriously hard to prove a negative, so we must needs be constantly reminded of it. Several times a week, the thing must tick, simply in order that that tick be taken away. Audibly taken away, again and again and...