Found Objects

Yesterday I finished transferring the blue-fluorescent-marker edit to electrons. Terms of Service is now officially finished. For the second time: this is the revised version, still innocent of slush piles.

Now for the synopsis. That word has an epithet when I think it that I won’t write in public, because that’s one skill I don’t have (didn’t have it in high school either). Boudewijn wrote the synopsis for the previous version, and what I’m trying to do now is to make it match the new one without showing the stitches. It’s slightly easier than it sounds, because most changes are cosmetic (though I did fix a continuity error or two, zapped a complete subplot and played down a little subplot that had never really come to fruition), but it’s still, well, The Very Hot Place.

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The Guardian, which I know from my time in England as a respectable paper though that may have changed, reported on February 8 that making pancakes can be bad for your health. The warning came from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, which actually exists. I had to look at the date to be sure it wasn’t the first of April; when I translated it for the kids they couldn’t stop giggling.

This didn’t keep me from making pancakes today. With bacon in honour of the week of the Publican and the Pharisee, pointedly not fasting because we’re not Pharisees who boast of fasting twice a week. Interesting tidbit: the Pharisees fasted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Of course, they didn’t have the Crucifixion to commemorate and fast for on Wednesdays and Fridays. The pancakes weren’t as good as usual, probably because I had only two eggs and used a bottle of beer in the batter which makes it less suitable for bacon pancakes, but a good time was had by all anyway.

“I can throw this in the paper recycling, right?” a kid asked when I was kneading bread dough, and when I saw what “this” was I almost said yes, but then I started thinking. Baking bread always does that to me. “No!” I said, “I’ll probably want to write about it.”

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This one was on Sunday, when we usually can’t make it, but it was in De Scheg (I’ll spare you the “click here” front page, but the little map marked PANOVIEW on the index page leads to a nice geek toy) so we rushed over after church, twenty minutes by bike. It was strange to use the sports hall where I sit every Saturday morning reading, or abusing manuscript with fluorescent markers, while the twins swim. Well, I don’t actually sit in the sports hall itself, but in the entrance hall where smoke wafts in every time the door opens because they forgot to have a designated smoking area far from the sliding doors.

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My aunt died last week. That didn’t make me very sad —she’d been incapacitated for fourteen months after a stroke already— but I did want to go the funeral. The problem is that I’ve grown apart from my family a lot: I didn’t go to the previous family funeral partly because I thought I’d make a mortal fool of myself. This time I thought “well, if it’s horrible, I can always use it as writing material!”

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Two thousand words into the thing about Vegelin the Great and I already have a conspiracy. Of the good guys, no less. They’ve just made a bad mistake, but then they don’t know what I know: that the prince they suspect of —well— not being entirely fit to rule is already, at fifteen, planning to kill his mother, Queen Mialle, and rule before his time.

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Revising what is now tentatively called A Voice from the North, the Frozen North thing, it suddenly came to me how to cut thirty thousand words out of Terms of Service and make it better.

I didn’t quite manage thirty thousand (in fact just under ten thousand), because even when I wrote the then-final draft of Terms of Service my style was almost as spare as I want it to be. I like writing lean; the moment it becomes florid under my hands I know I’m doing something wrong.

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That was my first thought when I got the paper out of the letterbox this morning. The next thought was that it should have been “Eek! The paper is wrong!”

Trouw has gone tabloid. And however many quality papers in the world have gone tabloid before, tabloid format still means “a rag” to me, not a real newspaper.

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A free concert of Ambon Country Rock, ballads, krontjong and other Indonesian music, in the local shopping mall on a Wednesday afternoon: that sounded delectable. It was Nightbreakers from Zoetermeer giving the concert, something I’d never heard of, but then I’m not well-versed in the genre.

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