A Procedural Note for the Weather Gods

I just came in from cleaning up the perennial garden for winter. I'm not anal about this--my goal is simply to flatten out the flowerbed so the first snow isn't marred by brown and flaky protuberances. (I feel the same way about my face.)

The dahlia tubers are safely inside now, so here's the plan. First, we need a hard frost so I can put the brush on the garden without feeling that I'm providing a haven for rodents and other itinerants. This is particularly important because my car glove compartment now is enhanced by a cake of Irish Spring deodorant soap, deterring (I hope) those rodents who had planned to spend the winter in my heating system.

Also, we need a hard frost because it's a pain shoveling snow when the ground is soft underneath.

Once the ground is firmly frozen, the gods have my permission to send snow. Lots of it, because this year I can ski.

Got that?

In other news: Rob and I went to New Surry Theatre in Blue Hill last night to see a workshop production of "Too Good To Be True," a one-act about a Maine family dealing with a mill closing, written by Rick Doyle of Bucksport. (That's Michael Reichgott, Shari Wick John, and Kittery Shy-Hermit hashing things out at right.) We were impressed, both by the play and by the acting. I sat in front of one of the women from the play-writing workshop I attended earlier this month, and we agreed that our perspective had been sharpened by our new-found (and fledgling) expertise. We both saw things that needed work...but not much.

Tomorrow on The Enchanted Inkpot, I'll be leading a book club discussion of The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. Join us!

Mickeycide: The Final Chapter

Nearly a year ago, I complained that Mickey, Minnie, and possibly several Mickey-and-Minnie-ettes had taken up residence in my car's heater box.

After many failed attempts, today--finally--is eviction day. As I write, my car is up in Ellsworth at Out-O-Town Auto, having its heating system removed, cleaned out, and reinstalled. I am praying, as I'm sure O-O-T Pete is, that no one is currently in residence.

It's been quite a siege. As far as I can tell, nest construction began last fall--I noticed when my heater fan started to sound like its stomach was rumbling. Pete vaccuumed out the fan, and got lots and lots of nest material, including lovely soft gray fur. Then a few weeks later he vacuumed it out again. Then his mechanic vaccuumed it out. And did it again and again, can't remember how many times. Our hope was that eventually the fan would suck all of the nest out of there, but this turned out to be the Taj Mahal of mouse nests. Complete with en-suite toilet, I'm sorry to say.

During the summer, it didn't matter that the air was redolent with mouse poop, because I kept the fan off most of the time and could open the windows. This fall, however, the air quality in my car took a nose-dive with the outside temperature. Eventually, I had to choose: Keep the heat off and die of frost-bite, or turn the heat on and die of pulmonary poopitis.

These mice, by the way, are trendy and hip modern mice. They have peanut allergies, and therefore ignore mousetraps baited with peanut butter. They adore the smell of Bounce dryer sheets, which a friend's mechanic recommended to fend off her resident rodents and which I distributed under the floor mats and in the glove box. I'm pretty sure they keep abreast of my planned attacks via Blackberry.

Finally, I consulted my insurance company, and discovered that there is a function for that "damage other than collision" line. I have a $250 deductible, but Hanover will cover all the rest of the cost of the Mickey-ectomy. This is an expensive proposition, because Pete has to remove the dashboard to get at the heating system.

Once I get the car home, the next task will be to discourage the little buggers from coming back. Pete suggests leftover deoderant. I'm thinking Irish Spring deoderant soap, which supposedly keeps deer away from gardens. (And, for all I know, keeps deer from nesting in your heater box.) At least my lungs will smell daisy-fresh.

IN OTHER NEWS: Pneumonia be damned--I went ahead and took an intense five-day playwriting course at the Stonington Opera House, taught by John Cariani. It was amazing, far exceeding my expectations. I'd intended it only as a way to kick-start my brain, which was getting a bit sluggish. But it also taught me new things about storytelling, and offered a bunch of helpful exercises for prying the story out of your cerebellum. John and the nine students may attempt to develop ten ten-minute plays for production in some form at the Opera House next fall. Stay tuned.

I said I wanted to talk about the Maine referendum vote. I lied. I don't want to talk about it. Here's the nub: I was very disappointed by the vote on gay marriage, particularly since I went to bed Election Night convinced that we'd won. I wish we could install a Europeanish system in which everyone gets a civil ceremony and those who want a church wedding layer that on top. That way, churches could do what they wanted and if your church wouldn't marry you, you'd just find one that would. Very sensible, in my view. And therefore impossible, probably.

November Book Review

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@Barrie Summy

The day after a massive referendum vote here in Maine (more on that later), it's a relief to distract myself with book stuff. Thanks as always to Barrie Summy for organizing The Book Review Club...as the text says, a list of other bloggy reviews is behind the icon above.

Fortune’s Folly
By Deva Fagan
Henry Holt & Co., 2009

Cinderella takes charge of her own fate in this marvelous tale by Deva Fagan.

Fagan lives in Maine and is one of my fellow bloggers on The Enchanted Inkpot. Those facts didn’t stack the deck for me, though—regardless of how much I like Fagan as a person I didn’t expect to be so enthralled by her book. High fantasy has to work pretty hard to get my attention. I demand my touch of reality…or at least I think I do.

FORTUNE’S FOLLY opened my mind, the first function of any good book. Stated baldly—poor girl gets snookered into helping a prince find the princess he’ll marry, falls in love with him in the process—Fagan’s plot is nothing unusual. But the characters are so marvelous, and the twists and turns so inventive, that I found myself galloping through this book in one sitting.

The story is set in a fantasy version of Renaissance Italy. Fortunata is the daughter of a celebrated shoemaker who lost his skills upon the death of his wife and believes he was deserted by the fairies who enchanted his tools. Fortunata doesn’t believe a word of that—she’s a realist, and she’s the one who’s out there on the street trying to inveigle the public into buying the monstrosities her despairing father now creates.

Fortunata and her father take to the road, looking for better luck. When they’re shanghaied by a mean-spirited traveling carnie, Fortunata becomes unwilling apprentice to a fortune-teller. She and we get our first hint of this book’s central question when she notices that even a fake fortune can inspire a customer to take charge of his or her fate. If the fortune then comes true, is that magic or simply skill?

Fortunata explores this question in all its richness when she is maneuvered into delivering a prophecy that will help a prince find the princess he will marry. Off the top of her head, Fortunata weaves the complicated saga of a weapon, a witch, an imprisoned royal beauty, and the magic shoes that will identify her. She then is horrified to learn that she must lead the prince on his quest for those things, her father’s life hanging in the balance.

How she deals with the quest and her relationship with the prince, working out the politics of two kingdoms in the process, is a beautifully engineered and compelling tale.

In the end, do we and Fortunata find out whether magic is real?

Maybe. That’s all I’m saying.

The Wages of Smugness

These are the times that try one's agnosticism. The times, I mean, when there actually does seem to be Divine Justice.

In early October, when Rob succumbed to a nasty flu-like germ, I--veteran of many ear infections--tried to get him to breathe steam and take decongestants. He refused, loudly questioning the cosmos about why he had to be inflicted with this woman butting in when she should just leave him the frig alone to wallow in his misery.

He got an ear infection, which he still is fighting. He went to the doctor, who gave him an antibiotic and also decongestants just like the ones I'd been promoting. I was smug about this. Also about the fact that, ten days later, I still hadn't gotten sick. Thank heaven, I said, that One of Us knows something about healthy living, and isn't it too bad the Other One doesn't follow her advice and stellar example.

Heaven, unfortunately, was listening to this crap, and a week ago Friday I got sick. I was not disheartened, but saw this as a chance to demonstrate the truly virtuous approach to illness. I set up the humidifier and took decongestants. I stayed in bed until my fever went away. I maintained my sense of humor and did not growl at my beloved when he asked me if I wanted anything.

As a reward for my virtue, and an obvious invitation to further smugness, I did not get an ear infection.

I got pneumonia.

Apparently, Divine Justice has a sly sense of humor.

Maybe not the flu, but...

...horrible, nonetheless. I picked up Rob's Disease, two weeks after exposure, as far as we can tell. Fever, dreadful headache, stubborn cough, total loss of appetite. (Last chance to get into the thin jeans!) I got it last Thursday afternoon, and yesterday the fever made a surprise re-appearance just when I thought I could lift my head to peer around blearily.

Nothing to report, unless you'd like an hourly update on exactly how I'm feeling and why. No? OK. Back to bed then.

Shrunken Novels and Little Else

I just realized I never posted about my Shrunken Manuscript experience, which was singular. So I figured I'd make up for it now, since there's not much else to report.

The Shrunken Manuscript technique came my way via Darcy Pattison, whose web site on revision I highly recommend. In July, just before I sent my editor the latest revision on SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS, I decided to give it a try.

You start the process by doing whatever is necessary to shrink your manuscript to about 30 pages: reduce the font size, eliminate all white space, narrow all margins. Then you decide what concerns you--in my case, whether everybody's sitting around talking too much, as my characters tend to do. You assign a color to each aspect of your novel that interests you, and mark up the manuscript with highlighters in the appropriate colors. In my case, I had colors for dialogue, description, exposition, action, and suspense. You can also stick colorful stickers at any place that you like a lot, although I found that less helpful because it was too subjective.

As I recall, dialogue was pink. Notice the decided pink tinge to the manuscript.

The end of the process is supposed to be spreading out your manuscript and stepping back to figure out if there are places where one color predominates more than you want it to, or if the colors aren't spread around the way you want them. (Sort of a visual composition exercise.) I found that I had my answers long before that point--it was informative enough just going through and marking up the manuscript.

Then it was just a matter of breaking up all the excessively pink places by cutting out their tiny individual bejesuses or interjecting a bit of green or purple or blue. Easy-peasy, right? HAhahahahahahahahaha.....

IN OTHER NEWS: Life has improved since the last post. Rob is on his feet, although he's still got a swollen eardrum and is having to take antihistamine pills, which he hates. The Work in Progress is humming along, 180 pages of excruciatingly rough draft so far and beginning to wind down toward the end. The nasty little voice does keep asking me if it's all Old Hat and poorly written beyond salvation and in general a Humongous Great Big Bore. I loftily ignore this voice until 3 a.m., when it borrows a megaphone.

Otherwise, there's practically nothing going on. I've been varnishing window sashes, because years of wintertime condensation have undermined the original varnish and the wood gets moldy. Rob is doing a marvelous job of holding himself back when every physical and spiritual inch of him is dying to grab the brush and do it right. Such is the torment of the Handy Person living with one who is constantly at war with the inanimate world.

So far I have managed not to tip over the can of varnish when it's poised over carpet or upholstery. In fact, I haven't tipped it over at all. (I suspect I just jinxed myself. *knocks on wood*)

I bribe myself into doing this project by listening to things, most recently an audio of MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH by Ariana Franklin. (The link is to the hardcover, because the audio book page doesn't have a cover photo for some reason.) I also have been listening to MISTRESS to bribe myself into exercising, except on the stationary bike where I'm reading Diana Wynne Jones' HOUSE OF MANY WAYS. Before I go to bed I'm immersed in Neal Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE. I suppose this could get confusing after a while, but it helps that they're hugely different from each other and each is excellent in its own way.

And not a preponderance of pink in any one of them.

In Which the Author Employs Sarcasm

It's been an inspiring couple of weeks at Castle Ne'er-do-Well.

*Cue sarcasm soundtrack.*

I hit the doldrums with The Gloucester Ghost, about three-quarters of the way through an increasingly rough draft. Kept applying the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair, and did grind out 1,000 words a day, the bare minimum for self-respect, but then gratefully ran off to do other things. And the very last bit I did needs to be redone, I realised the minute I finished it, because we're finding something out that we shouldn't know for a chapter or two. *Cue tragedy soundtrack.*

Among the distractions was preparing for a trip to Montreal, where I would meet my cousin Abigail for three days of frolic. I also planned to visit my on-line friend Lyny and her family, which includes a one-year-old and a three-year-old and seeing them would have been a real hoot.

"Would have been" because Rob got woefully sick last Friday, and has been on a fever rollercoaster ever since. We thought it was the flu, but it turns out to be an ear infection caused by who knows what, maybe a cold, maybe seasonal allergies. His temperature was below normal this morning, so he leapt out of bed declaring that he was going down to his studio to work. I threw a hissy which, surprisingly, had an effect. He sat and read this morning, then his temperature went up again and he went back to bed. He'll be like this all week, if his previous experiences with fever are any indication. He gets them about once or twice a decade, thank heaven.

The upshot is that tonight's the night I would have been with Lyny and Patrick and kids, and I'm home instead. Poor Abigail is all by herself in Montreal, although she's traveled alone before and is perfectly capable of entertaining herself.

Fortunately, I took a few days off from The Gloucester Ghost through all this, and when I got back to it today I had a much better time. Knock on wood.

The One Really Good Thing: On Monday, I went to the Belfast Free Library to talk to a teen book group, which was so much fun it almost made up for the ear-infected weekend. They'd all read The Unnameables and had astute questions and comments. They even said they wanted a sequel, mostly because they want to see what Mainland is like and how the Islanders would cope with seeing more of it. I want to see all that too, as I told them, although I've got a couple of pressing ideas that have to be dealt with first.

Anyway, many thanks to Jane Thompson, the youth services director, for choosing my book and inviting me over. Additional thanks and admiration to the lovely, intelligent kids in the group!