Diane

Possibly a good moment to have another look at this. (NB: not updated since 1999, apparently.)

I almost forgot…

The one thing I’m going to stay up for: Peter O’Toole’s acceptance of his special Oscar. That should be worth seeing.

Meanwhile, I’ve shifted my two buckets of dirt and stones for this hour. I can’t believe the effort digging that hole must have caused Peter. (You can see the [temporary] result of his labors alongside. This picture was taken before the various water plants died off for the winter. But there are plenty of leaves from the huge beech trees that line the opposite side of the road. Every now and then I alternate hauling buckets of dirt with pulling a bunch of the leaves out in a futile attempt to keep the water from turning into beech tea. But they just keep coming back, the way the kitchen sink somehow just keeps filling with dishes… Anyway, still plenty of work to do on the pond, as you can see. Shelving stones need to be added all around, more stones added in the back, etc etc. I’m not going to do any of that until the rockery work to the left is finished. Sometime in 2004, at this rate.)

I have this awful feeling that we may be in the middle of it.

We’ve had this happen before. Often enough, at least in this part of the country, we get some of our best weather of the year in late March and early to mid-April. The weather goes sunny and still, and though nighttime temperatures can drop to freezing, daytime temperatures rise into the high 60’s if not the low 70’s F — pretty warm for this part of the world. Then May hits and it starts to rain…

Today would be the sixth or maybe seventh day straight of this kind of weather. The cats have been having (literally) a field day in the increasing hours of sunlight, doing a lot of hunting in the grass of the the “paddock” or empty fenced field next to the house. The kittens seem to have found a nest of mice, and every day more livestock of various kinds gets brought into the kitchen to be played with and lost under major appliances (if said livestock is still alive, which is often the case). We’ve had mice and shrews and various large bugs, and I expect the first frog any minute now.

It’s good weather to garden in. Every hour or so I get up from writing to go out and do a few minutes’ worth of work on the second part of the rockery I started building the year before last. Originally this was just a rock-studded, weedy dirt bank with rocks and various ancient garbage embedded in it, and a hedge growing on top. During 2001 I dug that bank out, got rid of the weeds, rearranged many rocks, added some new ones, and put in various alpines and rockery plants. In 2002 we ordered in a fishpond “shell” to replace the cinderblock-and-pool-liner fishpond we’d erected in the walled-up spot where there had once been a gate into the yard.

With great labor (because the substrate ground is rocky) Peter dug out the hole for this shell. (During part of that period I was away on business, and the neighbors started teasing Peter about the hole he was digging, and the fact that they hadn’t seen me for a week or so.) Now it’s become time to deal with the bank on the left side of the fishpond. There’s no digging to do there — it’s just a place where the hedge grows on and in the older stone wall, part of which kept that joyriders’ car out of our house the other night. What I’ve been doing is taking the “spoil” that Peter dug out from the fishpond site and dumping it, bucket by bucket, at the foot of that wall, while adding some big stones to continue the rockery. The plants — heathers, daphne, skimmia, mahonia, various others — are lined up are all ready to plug in, in their appropriate order, as the groundwork is laid for them. Pretty soon this side of the rockery will extend right over to the wire fence that keeps the sheep out on the left side of the house. When that’s done, I’ll finish the rockwork around the front of the pool, making a place for the cats to sit and look at the fish, and in back, a waterfall.

There’s some slight urgency about all of this, since there’s never any telling how long this kind of weather will last. This morning’s map from Digital Atmosphere suggests that the high that’s been sitting over us has now passed on, leaving us for the moment with a benign but not very permanent “pressure trough”.

Better go out and move a few more buckets of dirt, before it all turns to mud…

Philip Morris loses a $10 billion verdict. …But don’t worry, guys; I’m sure the damages will be “light.”

If you gather that I think smoking is suicide — commercially-assisted suicide via an addictive substance — and that cigarette companies deserve every bit of the punishment they’re getting at the moment, then you’d be right. Peter’s dad died relatively young of complications of smoking, an event which still profoundly affects Peter: and in my early nursing days, I had to care for entirely too many people dying of lung cancer who were still resolutely smoking cigarette after cigarette through their tracheotomy stomae. The memory burns.

Time for the Saturday-morning cartoon-time sugar rush. (Boy, what would I have thought when I was eight, if someone had told me I would live to see a day when I could watch cartoons all day long? …Then there’s the flip side, possibly slightly depressing in retrospect: how would I have felt if someone had told me when I was eight that, when I was forty, I would be writing cartoons all day long? [Sometimes, anyway.] …Of course, to the kid I was then, I suspect it would have looked like heaven. I can just hear myself. “Wow, people write those? People pay you to write those? Yay, I can’t wait to grow up!!”)

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the sugar rush. Try Topher’s Breakfast Cereal Character Guide.

…A random thought as I wander through this site. Some of you will probably have seen the “Powerpuff Girls” episode in which the girls decide that their present personae aren’t cool enough. (I particularly love Buttercup’s dark enthusiasm about an antihero who looks suspiciously like Spawn: “He has scabs that never heal!“) …Anyway, Bubbles reinvents herself as a manga-originated, Hello-Kittyish knockoff called “Harmony Bunny”…who, when called upon to function, suddenly comes out with a declaration that sounds very, very, very much like the General Mills-sponsored Underdog’s old one: “When X is in danger, I am not slow: for it’s [in Harmony’s case] hop, hop, hop and away I go!”

Which leaves me wondering who on Genndy Tartakovsky’s staff put him onto this stuff. His bio says he was born in Moscow in 1970 and didn’t come to the US until 1977, at which point Underdog was long gone.

That’s enough mystery for one morning. Time for some cereal.

I was browsing through Major Fun’s weblog a day or so ago and found this (scroll down to the second entry). At the moment it seems like a good thing to share. It makes me think, too, of the connection between the Old English root word saelig, “holy, blessed”, and its descendant-word “silly”, and a sense in the literature of the older dialects of English that crazy or “simple” people were under the protection of God. …”The folly of Heaven is wiser than the wisdom of men…” (Now where does that come from? Sounds like it might be C.S. Lewis: or possibly Lewis quoting someone else.)

In any case, the reference to the Zohar has a Zen ring to it. So often, after issuing a koan, one Zen master or another just breaks up in gales of laughter and wanders away: and often enough, when a student “gets it”, the same result ensues….

“A Wizard Alone” has been chosen for inclusion on the New York Public Library’s “Books for the Teen Age” list for 2003. This is so neat in a number of ways…especially since frequent visits to NYPL’s main 42nd Street branch have always been wound together with the “Young Wizards” books. In particular, most of the heavy research for “Deep Wizardry” was done while working there in the “writer’s room”. (For those of you interested in such things, Alone also made the Locus 2002 Recommended Reading List; and the American Librarians’ Association and the Young Adult Library Services Association put “So You Want To Be A Wizard” on one of the 2003 ALA/YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults lists [specifically, the “Beyond Harry and Frodo” list]. So all in all, this has been a really good year for this kind of honor.)

It would be fun to be at the NYPL awards ceremony — I’ve never yet been at a ceremony where I’ve actually won something — but the event turns out to be, uh, today. 🙂 So somehow I don’t think I’m going to make it. A shame, as many other nice people who I’d like to see (such as Neil Gaiman) will be there. Oh well…maybe some other time.

Meanwhile, as regards matters closer to home: I’ve killed the “testbed blog” at http://secondambit.blogspot.com, as the RSS feed from outofambit.blogspot.com seems to be working just fine now.

According to an e-mail from my editor’s office at Warner, the book has just gone into its third printing.

Which delights me, and the only thing that leaves me bemused is: why, exactly? Better publicity? A better-convinced sales force? Better word of mouth? A better story?

Sunspots?…

Then let’s play “Nominate your Fantasy Security Council!” I’m not sure about the speculation about the Irish, though (and they’d probably have to disqualify themselves anyway, at the moment, since they were just on the SC last year. Hands up, everybody who noticed.)

but the excellent AccordionGuy beat me to it. The last line keeps coming back to me:

“Our business now is north.”

After endless spleen, spite and bombast from every side, this is so far the only genuinely noble thing to come out of this war. May Fate someday cross my path with this man’s, so I can shake him by the hand.

The goofy card below reminded me of this scene, which I thought I might share with you folks while I’m working on finishing the book. (Yes, I really am finishing it.)

Let’s see if it posts properly this time. (There seemed to be some difficulty with quotes appearing at the beginning of the “description” field in the RSS feed.)

“…Use �em for diagnostic purposes,” McCoy said. “Like the chess cubic. Archetypes.”

“Human archetypes,” Ael said.

“Some,” McCoy said. “Among hominid species, though, there are a lot of similarities in the oldest myths.” He cut the deck, placed the top half face down on the desk, next to the lower one. “Life and death, creation and destruction: we do a lot of the same things, though the motives may change from species to species. These aren�t about motives. You supply those.”

He looked up at her. “Shall I take one?” she said.

“As many as you like.”

“Three, then. A beginning: a middle: an end.”

“Three is one of the ways it�s done,” McCoy said.

She eyed the decks. “Must they be meditated upon, or is there some other requirement?”

McCoy shook his head. “Any way you like. It�s just a game.”

She threw him an amused glance and turned over the top three cards of the left-hand deck, from right to left.

In the first card a man stood at the top of a tower, looking out over mountains and sea, into a clear sunset sky with stars showing in it, and a waxing crescent moon riding high. He was leaning on a tall staff: beside him, from another staff like the first, a banner hung limp. In his free hand, unregarded, he held a small crystalline globe which seemed, in the moonlight, to have the shapes of continents graven on it: but the globe was delicate, almost invisible in the uncertain light, like a bubble.

In the second, a young man in old-fashioned shorts and T-shirt, with a light pack slung over his back, walked toward the edge of a cliff. A small dog was bouncing along beside him, but the young man didn�t seem to notice ether dog or cliff. His gaze was directed upward into the mountain air, and the sun burning down on the mist of the mountains all around him whited out anything else that might have been seen.

In the third, a man sat on a low chair in front of a vista of stormclouds, from which a veil of rain trailed over another landscape mostly obscured by mist. He was dressed in some kind of plain uniform, dark-colored, and in one hand, resting on his knee, he held a sharp straight sword upright. His expression was dark and grave, not revealing much.

McCoy sucked in his breath as he took in the cards at a glance. Ael looked at him, and said, “I have heard that sound before from my Master Engineer, when he tells me that we must have spares that we cannot afford…or make repairs for which we have no time. So the news is bad: but not mortally so.” She peered down at the third card. “And this worthy: who may he be?”

McCoy grinned briefly, though the expression was sardonic. “The original reference says, �A doctor, lawyer, or senator.�”

“Indeed.” She put up an eyebrow. “Well, there are enough of the last of those wandering about the landscape back home on ch�Rihan, and most of them wish me ill. Doctors we have in plenty; and legists as well, though in wartime sometimes they are quieter than normal. But there is little here to tell me which one of these is meant, and which will do me harm — if this card is meant as a harbinger of the future coming.”

“No. This…” He nodded at the first card. “Been musing on the nature of empire, have we, Commander?”

The look she gave him back was as sardonic as his own. “It would hardly take cards to tell you that. Though it is interesting that this comes up.” She sat back, folded her arms. “Doubts and fears enough, I have had,” she said. “And much time for reflection in these months during which Bloodwing and I have lived the silent life. Much time to revolve in my mind, again and again, what might be done next: what is being done at home. But comes a time when such reflection must stop.”

“That�s why this card is where it is,” McCoy said, “in the past. If you believe in this kind of thing.”

That left him with the third card, which he was frankly unwilling to deal with. “And this fearless youth,” Ael said. “But it is something other than fearlessness.”

“The Fool,” McCoy said. “Folly, in the classic sense of the word. Choices badly made. Error…confusion…even madness.”

She leaned forward to look at it, shook her head. “I would not be sure how to read that.”

“Neither would I,” McCoy said. “Probably nothing to it, Ael, as I told you. Just a game.”

“But he seems more than just a fool,” Ael said. “See, this card is different from the other two. �Rods�, �swords�: I would guess these cards are each part of a class within the larger deck. But this young man is of another class.”

“A bigger set of symbols,” McCoy said, “yes. The beginning of that other class, in fact. He could mean the beginning of a journey — but one into danger. The disorganized, the unknown…”

“Every day is unknown until it is over,” Ael said. “And sometimes even then. If this means our present is filled with uncertainty, that too would hardly be news. And the uncertainty will get worse: if the warning is against letting its increase unseat our reason, then I take it as good sense.”

She picked up the cards, handed them back to McCoy. He shuffled them back into the deck. “I thank you for showing them to me,” Ael said, getting up. “I take it you do not do so often.”

“No,” McCoy said, “because people might get the wrong ideas. Spock thinks I�m a witch doctor half the time as it is.”

Ael blinked. “A doctor surely,” she said, “but what might a witch be? Surely nothing I have seen on the ship.”

McCoy laughed and got up. “Probably simpler that you didn’t,” he said. Ael gave him an amused look and went out.

McCoy watched her go, then looked down at the deck again and reached out to it to put it away. He paused, and on impulse made a bet with himself — then turned over the top card.

The card showed a robed woman seated on a throne, in profile, very erect and still, and crowned. In one hand, point up, she held a sword. Behind her, in a windy sky, stormclouds blew tattering past. At her feet sat a small black cat with a thoughtful look in its eyes: not in profile, but looking out of the card at the one who read.

Uh oh, McCoy thought, and looked at the Queen of Swords for a moment, as thoughtful as the cat. The card was replete with meaning, as all the cards were, from the superficial to the profound. Sorrow, mourning, separation, long absence — those were the general indications. But McCoy was tempted for the moment, however unusual it might be, to take the card literally at face value. The heart of the problem of the moment was a woman with a sword. The card�s usual meaning, when read in the personal mode, indicated a woman in a position of power — though not a position that would let her use it. More generally, it suggested that trouble was coming, and a bad time.

Didn�t need a piece of plastic to tell me that, McCoy thought, picking up the card to put it away.

But I couldn’t tell you what that would be.

“…You have to be fairly familiar with both tarot cards and Nature’s Ineffable Harmonic Simultaneous 4-Day Time Cube Creation Principle (an unlikely combination) for this to make any sense, and even then I wouldn’t be too sure. But, hey, the Internet was just made for pages like this, so here it is.”