March 2, 2003

Spring is in the air and the cats are shedding their winter coats. Leentje's fur yielded a handful of hair that I could have knitted a small kitten from if I had a kitten pattern. They love the brush, technically a dog brush, a parallellogram of firm foam rubber with hard rubber spikes. We call it "the tomcat brush" because we bought it for a previous tomcat whose coat was too dense for the cat comb.

Writing

I've moved my deadline for finishing the outline and sending the WIP out to Easter, Greek calendar, April 27th. I'm taking into account that I never get much done in Lent: that's eight weeks from today.

On my recent book-buying spree I saw so much newly released Extruded Fantasy Product on the shelves, all similar to the point of unmemorability, that I'm afraid I wrote the wrong book. People aren't looking for stories like mine, at least editors aren't. They're looking for trilogies of 500 pages per book with steamy romance and heroines in bursting bodices, whereas my word count stands firmly at 119.441 and Senthi spends most of her adult life as a celibate widow and never has enough in front to make the bodice even bulge.

Reading

The Serpent's Egg arrived the day after my birthday. It's delicious, but not really satisfying: it's clear that it's early Stevermer, it reads like a study for A College of Magics.

I went to Amsterdam on my birthday to spend my gift money:

Ella Enchanted, a delightful YA Cinderella romp by Gail Carson Levine. Read most of it on the train home and finished it before dinner.

Bellwether by Connie Willis, used but in perfect condition. We'd borrowed it from a friend before but sadly had to give it back. Boudewijn's review is on Fading Memories.

The Wealdwife's Tale by Paul Hazel. Very strange. The Communiqué of SF Canada calls it "a very funky retelling of the seven swans fairy tale" but I haven't read enough of it to have discovered that (interrupted by The Serpent's Egg arriving). It was especially strange to start it after finishing Ella Enchanted, because the beginning read like a dark version of the same story. I wouldn't have bought it if it hadn't been only 3 euros and I'm not sure I should have bought it at all. There's one like that in every batch.

Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, just because I felt like it. I got this and Ella Enchanted at a discount in the children's section of the American Book Center in Amsterdam when I said it was my birthday.

Stealing the Elf-King's Roses by Diane Duane. Haven't read it yet, but it looks appealing.

From the remaindered section of a mainstream bookshop: Molens in Nederland (Mills in the Netherlands) by Willem Roose, a large book with lots of pictures that looks superficially like a coffee-table book, but it has extensive historical and technical information as well.

I didn't buy: Mission of Gravity or the other Hal Clement that I can never remember the title of (Close to Critical, probably) with a character with the glorious name of Aminadorneldo; a near-perfect copy of A College of Magics to have a spare to give away; an SF book about a newspaper editor that would probably have been a nice fluffy read but put me off because it opened with a page and a half of infodump; Jo Walton's The Prize in the Game, which I'll gladly pay 13 euros for when it comes out in paperback, but I didn't want it badly enough to shell out 29 euros for the hardcover.

I'd have liked to buy: Lud-in-the-Mist which I left in the bookshop last time on a similar shopping spree because it had just been re-released and I was certain that they'd still have it in stock. They didn't. Same with The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. Other McKillip didn't appeal to me so much, though I was briefly tempted by The Book of Atrix Wolfe.

This was hard. I remember that it used to be easy to spend a sum like that (50 euros, practically the same in US $) on books, but either I've become more picky or the choice has become less (though Boudewijn says I'm merely out of practice).

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The World

By serendipity, I found Richard Harter's World, a web site of which the author says "This site isn't hot; it isn't cool; it's, well, it's sort of tepid, a cross between an e-zine and an intellectual rubbish heap." I can't really recommend it: Harter's outlook on life is too different from mine. But it's refreshing to read something with such an alien perspective and still not offensive (and when he does offend, he is courteous enough to warn of it).

It's hard to find things on the site unless you know where to look (or by serendipity), so here's Good and Evil, Fascism and Hogwarts and its deconstruction, Politics, Literature and Harry Potter. And the second of those is what I found when I was looking for a handy reference for "EFP", Extruded Fantasy Product.

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Real Life

We're all learning Greek because we have secured ourselves a holiday house on the island of Kea right next to a presumably tiny chapel to Saint Vlassios. Deposit paid (if the bank has understood our instructions), plane tickets bought, cattery booked, we've never been so early to arrange a holiday.

It's scary to spend all that money in one go and get only five little books of tickets in return. They're safely stashed away with the passports and the cats' vaccination books.

Oh, and the ATM card only needed a good cleaning with rubbing alcohol. I'll probably have to have it replaced before long, it happens more and more often, but at least I can get at the grocery money now.

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Kids

Back to school tomorrow, and miffed that they had to go to bed on time after a week of late nights.

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Necessary Luxuries

Today, Sunday, is the last meat day until Easter. We had rolled pork with garlic and bacon and there's still a bit of cold meat that we have to finish before midnight (no hard task). From tomorrow, there's a week of fish and dairy, then on to Lent when the necessary luxuries are likely to be cosmetic rather than culinary.

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O Tempora

Small update to February 3: the people on Ameland who have children in elementary school are allowed to stay until June to let them finish the school year. And the regime in the underage asylum-seekers' camp is being relaxed, though most of the inmates don't trust that (and I can't fault them for that). I'm still not completely convinced that I live in a civilized country.

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Before they fly away

A disconcerting dream in which someone I see about three times a year wrote me a letter saying he'd fallen desperately in love with me and for that reason didn't want to see me any more. Now in real life, he and I are both very married (not to each other, obviously) and though we're friends we'd be completely incompatible as lovers. Still, it was disconcerting. My subconscious seemed to assume that I'm an indifferent reader in my dreams, because it didn't send the letter in the man's attractive handwriting, but typed on a manual typewriter with a faded ribbon. Ah well.

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