Today is Diana Wynne Jones's birthday. I suggest you celebrate by reading - Archer's Goon, say. Or Drowned Ammet, which does some things in the plot and character interrelations that'd make Dickens gasp in admiration for the way she makes none of it feel at all contrived.
Speaking of birthdays - the older I get, the less I want to pick up the phone. This bugs me. For instance, since our Paypal and Amazon accounts were set up by Damon, I need to protect us from confusion and potential legal and financial difficulties by getting a separate e-mail account to anchor my business use of those companies. The simplest thing to do is pick up the phone and ask our internet provider what the easiest way to do that is. But I keep putting it off.
And, a house-repair mystery: In the mud and powder rooms downstairs, we have developed two sets of absolutely straight, parallel seams of paint bubbling. It looks like a bad tape and float job along the borders of a drywall panel. But when the workman took the paint off, he revealed no tape and no abutting panels, but an amazingly straight and consistent crack in the drywall. He suggested that the crack and the paint bubbling were due to a leak; but the plumber finds no trace of such a thing.
So what the heck have the Borrowers been doing in my walls to create this effect?
I have concluded that real life exists to keep us from being too productive.
Showing posts with label houses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label houses. Show all posts
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Sunday, November 20, 2011
Idea Garage Sale: Caroline in the Friendly House
Old notes, verbatim, but with idiosyncratic shorthand deleted.
Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.
The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.
Ghost miscarried, died.
Ghost assists Caroline - how?
Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.
This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?
I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.
I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.
Yes, houses are a big deal to me.
Caroline moves into the friendly house. She is an architect and can look up the house's history fairly easily.
The ghost is an analogous age and position with Caroline - young, married, pregnant, newly moved into the house.
Ghost miscarried, died.
Ghost assists Caroline - how?
Maybe if I knew more about miscarriages. Possibly ghost had bad husband, doesn't trust Caroline's? Caroline caught between.
This is going to be another of your slow stories, isn't it?
I was trying to generate short stories when I wrote this. I think I probably could write it now, as a short novel - but it'd have to be an adult book unless I lost Caroline and got a totally different, YA heroine.
I had a specific house in mind when I wrote "the friendly house," by the way - a bungalow near Brackenridge Park that was mostly sunroom, which we looked at when househunting once long ago and loved, but couldn't take for various practical reasons. Last time I was by there, it had an ugly big chain link fence all the way around and two dobermans wearing paths in the yard. Which suggests an entirely different, much sadder, story.
Yes, houses are a big deal to me.
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