February 8, 2003

It's the kind of dismal weather that makes the cats go out because they notice it isn't raining, then come in almost at once with a little drop of water at the end of every hair. If all the water suspended in the air decided to join forces and come down, it would rain. I sympathize with Spock, who contracted aspirant pneumonia from air like that in Uhura's Song.

This makes it even more appetizing to look for holiday houses in Portugal or Greece or Croatia ("in the middle of a medieval hilltop village opposite Venice" - hope that one is still available and we can get there by bus).

Writing

No measurable progress on the outline. Non-measurable progress: wrote over a thousand words and threw them away because they stank, tried to pick up from where those thousand words started and realized that the rest also stank, started over, and now I'm back at chapter 11 again with half the word count of the previous version. I'll get it to three pages yet. (but it still stinks)

People tell me that the outline should sell the book. Other people tell me that it's not the outline that has to sell the book. Which of them are right? I'm no good at guessing, especially not at second-guessing editors. Has any novel ever been rejected solely because of the author's lack of skill in writing outlines?

Vague, tentatively coalescing plans to write a silly collaboration with Zeborah. It started out as modern-day Middle Earth, until we realized that if it did grow into Something we'd never be able to submit it. This isn't writing, mind you, just talk, a few rounds of Letter Game that doesn't take more time away from writing than ordinary chatty e-mail (this to assuage any guilt before it crops up).

Reading

Best find in the library in the past, well, three years: A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey. I've reviewed it on Fading Memories. I've loved epistolary novels ever since Daddy Long Legs in my early teens.

The library also turned out to have two (count them) Magdalen Nabb mysteries on the shelf, but not in the electronic catalog ("Are you sure you didn't make any spelling errors?" as if n-a-b-b is so hard). Oh, and they have Death of a Dutchman in Dutch, but I don't read translations unless I can't read the original.

The World

Page by Page Books has classic books online for free: mostly American, but also the first two Doctor Dolittle books, and two by Agatha Christie, and Jerome K. Jerome. Not Three Men in a Boat though, that's somewhere else entirely, illustrations and all.

Looking for Daddy Long Legs, I found Project Book Read, "a massive online library", built on Christian principles but they don't believe in banning books. Except that they refuse to "publish any material promoting pornography, illegal activities, or works promoting racism, hatred, or other anti-social behavior." Well, I can live with that. The site is rather heavy with Shockwave (which my system doesn't like) but it's only annoying and doesn't make the site impossible to use.

Paired Listening: Sam Hinton and Sandy Denny. Both have shaped the way I think about folk music. It was amazing when my friend Katrina, Sam's granddaughter, gave me a CD of his music and most of the songs turned out to be familiar - from other singers who learned them from him. And Sandy Denny's voice is the one I wish I was born with.

Real Life

Three out of the five us are ill or have been ill - one with a persistent bacterial infection and two with cases of the Altairian two-step. Mine was mild, fortunately, only kept me from going folk dancing and made me thoroughly miserable while still able to do ordinary things. It's subsided into strange rumblings and stinks, soon to pass entirely.

Kids

Two of them are behind the next computer playing online games, but they don't have the IM client on so I can't send a message (except by talking to them, but that's so old-fashioned). The fourth-grader has Friday afternoon school. By rights the other two ought to be in third grade by now, but the school is gradually abolishing all the features that we chose it for in the first place, including twice-yearly advancement. They're doing third-grade work while still nominally in second grade. The only advantage of that, from their viewpoint, is that they get Friday afternoons off; for the rest it feels like repeating, even though they're top of the class.

Necessary Luxuries

Within the week my hair will once again be gloriously dark red. At the moment I'm drab greyish-brown on top and faded red-brown at the bottom. I've thought of letting it grow out and going grey, but I can do that when I'm fifty, in five years and eighteen days. For now, there are two packets of henna from the Body Shop waiting to be mixed. They change their henna every year: last time it was a plastic jar with the henna already pre-mixed into a kind of oily goo, this time it's back to powder. And you don't get plastic gloves and a plastic cap any more either. Cheesy names: "charismatic copper" and "revved up red brown", what's wrong with plain "copper" and "auburn"?

O Tempora

The COA (the outfit that handles requests for asylum) is closing down several small-scale facilities doing well, and keeping open large-scale problematic facilities. That is, moving people around on very short notice, even breaking up families. People are taken from places where they finally dare to feel safe and put in new unsafe surroundings.

Also, teenagers who have sought refuge in the Netherlands on their own are confined to what is called a "campus" but is in fact a prison camp: they're not allowed to get to feel at home in this country so they won't mind being sent back. At least, that's what the authorities say.

A few weeks ago a family of four, with children aged two and seven, who had lived in 's-Graveland for five years, were pulled from their beds early on Monday morning, given twenty minutes to dress and put in a transitory facility awaiting their deportation back to the country they fled because they didn't feel safe enough there to raise their children.

And on the island of Ameland, forty children are yanked out of school in the middle of the school year because the asylum-seekers' facility they're in has to be closed right now instead of in June when term ends, despite protest from everyone including the parents of the other twenty-eight children in that school, autochthonous Ameland people.

I'm now sure I don't live in a civilized country any more.

Before they fly away

They've all flown away...