A window on the world

Oh, but it looks cold out there. To judge not by the weather itself, which is invisible today, but by the people who inhabit it: hurrying head down, huddled into their coats and mufflers. (Mufflers! When did you last hear anyone call a scarf a muffler? I don't believe I ever have; as I remember, the little carol-singers in The Wind in the Willows are all done up in mufflers on Badger's doorstep, and that's where I learned it. But today the fashion is to wrap your scarf across your face, and - yeah. Mufflers.)

Anyway. I haven't been out in it, and I'm half hoping not to. I do need to go have a chat with the vet, but I am also half expecting a phone call of doom, and I'd sooner be in when it comes. I hate all phone calls, but it's easier to answer a ringing phone than it is to dial out. Is that odd? I don't think so; with an incoming call, at least you know the person on the other end wants to talk to you, and is ready to do so now. Calling out, you can never tell what you're interrupting but you're safe to be interrupting something; and you have to make your way through receptionists and office juniors and all of that before you get the person you're told you need to speak to, and and and. Hate hate hate.

So I shall sit at home and check my proofs (which is a virtue anyway, as they're due tomorrow; I actually need not to be writing Pandaemonium today, alas; thanks to alecaustin I have Desi has giant cannibalistic eels to contend with...), and hope that the bank rings me. Ugh.

The naming of books, and so forth

The Wind in the Willows. Does anyone ever talk about the title? I don't think I've ever heard it discussed; as a child, I don't think I ever thought about it. Books had names, and that was that. Names didn't have to have meaning.

Now, as a grown-up, every time I look at it I wonder. It's perfect, but not logically so: if there are windy willows anywhere in the text I don't remember them, so you're relying on the phrase itself and what it might evoke. Which may perhaps be that whole nostalgia piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn aethereal kick - even before you read the book, it might be - but that's only the shorter side of what the book's about. Which I guess is why the play is called Toad of Toad Hall.

Anyway. There it is; I think it's interesting. Like The Long Grass Whispers, which is another of those title/names I never thought about until I was a grown-up. (Does anybody still read The Long Grass Whispers? I was devoted to it, but I never saw it on any other kid's shelf; and then I didn't think about it through the years of my adolescence; and then when I was a young man I saw it in a children's bookshop and got excited/reminded, but didn't buy it, and I've never seen it since. Wikipedia's never heard of it, but Google remembers...)

Also, I have been reading Steven Brust with my morning coffee, and I just got to the bit where Sethra Lavode's servant turns out to be called Chaz. This took me aback, in a gratifying kind of way. Independent Chazerie! (Taltos is copyright 1988, so it doesn't exactly predate me, but it's coeval with my first book with my own name on the cover, so I think we can safely say he didn't get the name from me.)

Which reminds me: now that I have a Kindle and am inclined to read onscreen fictions, there's something else out there with a Chaz in it, that I need to investigate... *exit, in pursuit of Shadow Unit*

Breaking up is hard to do

So when I packed the interesting Asian cookery books, I barely stopped to think about it: just picked out the duplicates and kept everything else (well, bar one, a sort of '70s compendium that was fat and heavy and, no, not that interesting).

I just put that whole empty bookshelf out into the back alley for anyone to help themselves (wow: giving bookshelves away? I really must be leaving...). Which means that now I have easy access to the shelf behind it, where I kept books I didn't need such easy access to: which means the back end of the cookery collection, basically stuff I don't use and probably never will. And I'm putting two of those on the discard pile for every one that goes into a box for keeping, because honestly, when am I ever going to use The Harrod's Book of Entertaining? - but even so, it's hard. They're a part of the collection, damn it, and I hate breaking up a collection. Even the dull stuff has its place.

But its place is not California. No. The dull stuff isn't coming.

In other news, I am frying sossidges for cats lunch. They're I'm looking forward to that.

High he builded it, but it is gone

I have built ... a tower of boxes: six tall, almost as tall as I am, and a casserole-dish to crown it. Each box is full of cookery books, and heavy (I think it's the amount of china clay in all that glossy paper).

As tall as I am, and as narrow, more or less. And no mortar to hold the six together, only their own weight. And cats who like to hurtle onto high things, without much regard for what might be there already.

I can think of no way in which this could end badly.

In other news:

I keep reaching for my wineglass to take downstairs, but it is not there. Here. It is downstairs already, where the work is, where the proofs are. Up here is only playing, distraction, not-work.

*departs*

Desdaemona review!

What's more, it's deep and thoughtful:

Maureen Kincaid Speller reviews Desdaemona here.

Money shot:

Modern urban fantasy is not, or should not be, about escapism, about a withdrawal into a pink and fluffy world where magical powers grant you privilege and the automatic choice of the best of everything. It is about taking responsibility for what you do and accepting the consequences of your actions; about challenging the status quo, about doing what is right rather than what is appropriate. Desdaemona is a very moral urban fantasy, and that in part is what lifts it above much of what is currently being published. That, and the fact that Macallan, better known to some as Chaz Brenchley, is simply a very fine writer, making this novel a genuine pleasure to read.