News: Island Refuge, Oral History, and Boat People!

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Guided by local folklore, archeologists found one of the "island refugia" (not really an island, but an ice-free zone in the middle of the Ice Age glacial area) that people boating down from Beringia used as a base for their marine hunting and gathering - 14,000 years ago! At last, at last, at last! It's amazing what you find when you look where the most knowledgeable people tell you to...

On a more personal note, turns out I enjoy making patchwork. Who knew? It may be genetic, as the gramma I take after the most was an avid quilter. Not going down that rabbit hole, though. This'll be a skirt. Because I have about two skirts that are fit to be seen in public.

Domestic Analogies. I Can Always Make Them.

Still alive here, and a miracle occurred - I learned how to install fly-front zippers! Part of my problem, it turned out, was that the markings on the pattern were confusing me. Now that everything's clicked, I can ignore them. I also successfully did a new, and more difficult, alteration to the pattern than anything I've done before; something I would have been incapable of doing six months ago, just because I couldn't have focused long enough to do it. So I have four pairs of pants that fit perfectly in the back and almost perfectly in the front - I still have some bugs to work out in fitting the waistband. But even allowing for that and my inability to get all the basting stitches pulled, they're still better than anything I could have gotten at a store. I probably cried less than I would have if I'd gone shopping, too.

None of which, alas, enables me to do what I need to do to start sending queries out again.

The trouble with queries is, that they are the exact opposite of how I need to do things. I can force myself to write them, but I inevitably do them badly. Sometimes, so badly that I wake up in the middle of the night with that excruciating twist in the stomach that says: "Holey cheese that was the worst possible way to do that and it's too late to take it back now."

And other people's advice on how to write them? Is a lot like the markings on the pattern intended to help me install a zipper. Obviously they work for some people - probably most people - and I needed them in order to learn, but they didn't - couldn't - take my alterations into account; and the markings and instructions and diagram laid things out so antithetically to the way I learn things my illegible notes on the instruction sheet say things like "And by left they mean right" and "Line up with the top not the bottom." (That my notes are illegible doesn't matter; making them renders it unnecessary for me ever to refer to them.) I get this in recipes, too. Food doesn't behave the way the recipe says it will, no matter how closely I follow the instructions. So after I've made a dish a few times and start succeeding with it, I ignore the recipe. Level measurement gets me a different result every time, but I make pancakes with scant measures of milk and heaping measurements of baking powder and they're good, low-sodium pancakes, which is what I'm after.

All of which gives me hope that I'm going to get the query thing down eventually, too. The truth is I've never sold anything on a pitch or a query - I've only ever sold on the work, and on personal contact with the editor. And I have no freaking clue how agents work as human beings let alone as professionals. They might as well be aliens, for all I can think my way into their space. It's really, really tempting to send the first X pages with a list of credits and a cover letter that says: "Look, I'm good at writing stories but I suck at selling things. Read the enclosed and if you want to see the rest, let me know. YA, lesbian western, complete, about 70,600 words. Thank you for your time."

For one thing, the agent who doesn't just delete that is probably an agent I could work with.

But that's not how the industry works. So I will just have to keep sending out queries full of excruciatingly wrong things to say like I kept putting in and ripping out zippers, like I kept throwing out pancakes with runny middles, till something clicks and I figure out the point at which the advice givers tell me to go left and I need to turn right.

Idea Garage Sale: The Bleeding Rolling Pin

I think that may be profanity in England, but I'm in Texas, so relax.

Last night I was making a quiche, with my nearly-brand-new rolling pin, only used once before, when it started bleeding all over the cloth and one corner of the crust I was rolling. For a moment I was positive I was in a horror movie!

A little experimentation demonstrated that an improbable amount of red-tinged water was trapped inside and leaking out around the handle. When it came trickling out it was obviously not bloody, at all - more probably traces of tomato paste and maybe some oxidation, if there's anything metal inside the pin; only the consistency of the dough and the cloth gave it the illusion of more body. So I put the pin by the sink to figure out how best to clean it properly later, changed cloths, tore off the contaminated part of the pie crust, finished rolling it out with a glass tumbler, and thought about the possibilities if it had been blood.

Many a cozy mystery has been born out of some similar mundane incident. Part of the appeal of the mystery genre is the way small details of daily life transform into vitally important signposts leading the world from chaos and mayhem back to justice and order. Similarly, part of the effect of horror is the incongruous intrusion of the bizarre and deadly into the familiar and secure. Like the family kitchen, presided over by the smiling cook who bakes love into every meal and so on.

Why would a rolling pin be bleeding?

Because it had battered someone to death and been imperfectly cleaned afterward? It'd take a lot of blunt-force trauma to make the average rolling pin into a murder weapon - but there is such a thing as a marble rolling pin, and that is plenty heavy enough for the job. The implication is of an unplanned, but meticulous, murder, by someone using a weapon of opportunity, with sufficient time to tidy up the evidence afterward, but insufficient experience of this rolling pin to anticipate the problem with cleaning it. Where, I wonder, did this person hide the body? If a body with a battered head had been found in the kitchen, presumably everything heavy in it would have been taken by the police to match to the wound.

If this is a horror story, though, the blood could well be revenge from beyond the grave - the rolling pin used to make the poisoned pie, or even the pie containing the Forbidden Ingredients that would poison only the allergic victim. The cook has misused the power of the kitchen; and the spirit of the dead haunts her through the kitchen which is her personal kingdom. Or perhaps the kitchen has a spirit of its own, a genius locii, that objects to being used in this way and will never let her cook in peace again. Who is the cook, and who the victim, and what is the relationship of the kitchen to either?

Or maybe only she can see the blood - if the story is one of psychological horror, if she's been kidding herself that she didn't mean to kill her neighbor by feeding her a pie with peanutbutter as the secret ingredient, but her conscience won't let her get away with that crap.

It is one of the great truths of life that two women may share a house, but not a kitchen. Kitchens are like ships - someone must be in charge, or no one can ever find anything.

And, as all the best horror and mystery writers know, that is exactly the kind of conflict from which the most savage hatreds spring.

Tax time again.

We always try to get ours knocked out in February, so it's not hanging over us. All I have to do is make sure the writing ledger is in order and show up at the appointment along with Damon on Monday.

I keep making tea and hoping it'll enable me to move ten feet into the chair in front of the desk with the ledger on it.

It's not working.

There's something about numbers, like a repelling force field.

Do as I say, not as I do. Keep up with your ledger during the year and have everything ready to go at tax time. So you don't have to go through this.

Dadgummit to Heck

I have now put the same damn zipper in wrong seven times.

Only four ways to put it in at all exist. Three of them are wrong. So I'm repeating myself. Multiple times.

But if I don't make my own pants I don't get pants that cover my butt. It actually costs me more woman-hours, and more tears of frustration, to buy a pair of pants that doesn't quite fit than to make one that fits perfectly.

And seven times is nothing - I'm well into double-digits for queries on every work I have ready to sell. So when I stop being lightheaded, and have gotten myself round some chocolate, I'm going for lucky #8.

Because even if you're bad at something, if it's the only way to get what you need, you're stuck.

Edit to Add: I was wrong. I just invented two brand-new wrong ways to put in a zipper. Clearly, I have talent for this. Too bad it's not one I can be paid for.

Tomorrow is another day. Today I'm thinking: Sims and more chocolate.

Ah, November

All hail Kitchen Sanitation Month. When working with your hands leave your brain free to think broadly and deeply; but leaves you too tired to write anything down.

Which explains a lot about history and literature, actually; who gets to do them, and how, and why. Because for the vast and silent majority of humanity, from before the dawn of man, every day must contain the level of sheer physical labor that Kitchen Sanitation Month entails, in order to survive comfortably. (Or, in a war zone or a famine, at all.)

Got to go get lunch and then get back on it.

I Keep Saying This in Different Ways

So anyway, I'm contemplating running a tabletop RPG again, which I haven't done in several years, and I'm going about it in this really backwards, sideways peculiar way. I described a vague setting to the players and asked them who they were in that setting; with their answers I asked some more questions and settled on a system, then produced more information; two of the prospective players have given me some solid character backgrounds, one has declared a class (the system chosen being class-based), one has given me enough background to give me a point around which to solidify the geography, and one is working Renfaire and hasn't given me much so far.

The idea here is to get as far away as possible from what we've been doing, as at least two of us are sick to death of the power creep, railroad plots, and sheer lack of story logic of the Pathfinder modules we've been running. I hope to create a low-powered, custom-tailored, sandboxy campaign that relies heavily on random chance, player initiative, and the GM's sense of story.

Because I kind of suck at game mechanics, but with supportive players who are good at the mechanics, I find, a sense of story logic serves pretty well, instead.

People are way too focused on learning how to do stuff. People trying to cook have meltdowns because there's an ingredient in an otherwise yummy-sounding recipe that they never heard of, or which is only available in large quantities and to use it up they'll have to search for other recipes that include it, and invariably those recipes have another ingredient...

People trying to write for publication want to know how to do it, what are the steps, what do I do next?

Would-be artists want to know how to draw, what's supposed to be in the portfolio, what will get them a commission?

And they don't want to do things until they know how they're done. Which often means, they wind up not doing it and eating another lousy meal out of a can.

Knock it off.

Yes, you need skills. Yes, if you want to go public there are protocols to follow. But - breathe, okay? You know how you learn to do things? You do them.

Recipes are not necessary if you know what you like and how to do a handful of basic cooking tasks. Write your story the way you need to write it, play your game the way it's fun, write and draw and film and snap photos and shove most of it in a drawer and write and draw and film and snap more photos. Burn a pie or two and throw it out and make another pie.

I'm making pants this week. I'm making the same pattern I made before, months ago, the ones I'm wearing today. That time, it took me three tries to install the zipper. I wrote a note on the pattern about it. You know how many tries it took me to install the zipper this time, notes and all? Three. I also cut the waistband the wrong length and had to rip it all off again when I thought it was all done but the hook, eye, and hem. So what? Next week I'm gonna have a new pair of pants that Miss Thai has not yet lovingly shredded during laptime. I could've had 'em this weekend, but what's the hurry? If I have to go to the farmer's market or the game in a pair of pants with cat claw snags all over them, anybody who notices will forget in five minutes and in any case what kind of person notices things like that and actually cares about them? Nobody whose opinion I respect.

I don't know how that game's gonna turn out. I don't know what we'll be doing in it in more than very vague outline. But I'm not on deadline, I know my audience intimately, and I'm quite sure that, even if it's a train wreck, we're gonna have fun and we're gonna laugh a lot.

My WIP is also kind of a train wreck. But there's a lot of potential there. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, maybe in the end this'll be the one that puts me on the roster of classics; or maybe no one but me will ever read it. But nobody's gonna read it if I don't write it.

Peaches

Peaches that have gone bad make a particular sound when you cut into them. Sometimes only half of the peach is off, so I cut the whole thing, listening for a good bit.

A teacher will consciously notice this sound when instructing someone in the art of peach pie, and will stop to point it out. There, that sound, yes, if it sounds like that it's overripe. See, the texture's spongy. A good peach is smooth and silent and bright gold. It might still cook down all right, if the color's good; but if it's discolored just pitch it.

A writer will consciously notice this sound when writing a scene in which someone is making a peach pie, when summoning up the huge mound of details about the process from which she will select one, or maybe two, that will enable the reader to extrapolate the experience of peach pie making without spending a lot of space on it, that will create the maximum effect from the character's innocent, sunny, summery activity while the villain sneaks up behind her with a garotte.

A poet will consciously notice this when writing a poem about summer as embodied as a peach.

A great poet will make someone who has never sliced a peach hear the sound.

This is all probably analogous of something profound. But for some reason I'm hungry...

The Blueberry Trick

So, Damon had a bad day at work yesterday, and expects to have a bad one today; so I made him pound cake.

The thing is, Damon's mother is the Queen of Pound Cake. She's famous for it, and not just in her family. In her church, it is assumed that she will bring pound cake to whatever it is and it will all be eaten. She makes them as big as angel-food cakes and cuts them in half to give to people, to save time. She has probably made more pound cakes than I have ever made meals, and she has perfected the process. I will never make a pound cake half as good as the ones Damon grew up eating.

But his mother is not here, and I am, so I made it. And I added blueberries. Lots and lots and lots of blueberries. Because his mother never does that, and blueberries are his favorite fruit, and they are so cheap this week that buying two pints is cheaper than buying a half-pint other times of the year, so why not?

It is easy to read the Mistresses of Literature and think "I will never do this as well as she did." (Men never make me feel this way. Just saying.) No, you won't do what Diana Wynne Jones, or Jane Austen, or Charlotte Bronte, or Ursula K. LeGuin, or Agatha Christie, or Dorothy L. Sayers, did/does as well as them. That's a given.

But you can do something slightly different as well as you can do it, and it will still be worth reading. Because you have something you do that they don't. You have some kind of metaphorical blueberries. And people will like what you do better, if you aren't stingy with them.

Not Missing Ingredients

A couple of weeks ago I made a sweet potato pie, but when I opened the can of evaporated milk it was all yellow and separated. Somehow this particular can, the last one in the pantry, had survived ten years of baking and Kitchen Sanitation Months - its sell-by date was in 2004!

So, onto the compost heap with that mess and here I was, with the oven on, the shell ready, the eggs and spices mashed into the sweet potatoes, Damon had the car so I would have had to bus to the grocery store, and I thought - oh, what the heck? We eat mashed sweet potatoes, right? And I scooped the mixture into the shell, and baked it for 35 minutes.

It was the best sweet potato pie I'd ever made. It didn't take forever to set. It was light and fluffy and tasty. It did not seem to be trying to pass itself off as a pumpkin pie. It was great!

So yesterday, I made another one, again without the evaporated milk. (In fact I keep forgetting to put evaporated milk onto the grocery list.) And it's still good.

Did I ever tell you about the bananafanafofaser bread? We had friends over for board games and I was making chocolate chip banana bread, but I accidentally dumped in half a bag of butterscotch chips instead of chocolate chips. So I polled the audience - should I scrap the batch, keep it and start a second one, or throw in half a bag of chocolate chips as well and see what happened? The vote was unanimously for dumping in the chocolate chips. The result was gooey but good, and one of the guests insisted on getting the recipe because the banana bread recipe she uses never came out this well. We dubbed it bananafanafofaser bread because we were playing Star Munchkin and it seemed obvious. The situation on one level is the opposite of the pie; on another level, it is identical.

This is pretty much how I bake. And write. And live. Just because the recipe, or the literary formula, or the TV tropes list, or one of the cultures in which you are imbedded, includes an ingredient, doesn't mean it's necessary, to you, in this case. I substitute all the time; I leave stuff out; I throw stuff in because it sounds tasty; I screw up and I deal with it.

Sometimes you get an unuseable mess. Sometimes you get a supreme success you can never repeat. Sometimes you change your standard mode of operation. Sometimes you inspire somebody else to greatness - or to a new dish in their repertoire.

Idea Garage Sale: Home, Secret Home

So I was sitting here thinking about today's Garage Sale, and everything I came up with seemed like a variation on a theme, or possibly something I'd offered up before, and I was seriously considering just not doing it today. So I clicked over to another tab and read newsgroups, and found someone mystified by a sporadically damp place inside his garage. A particular spot on the concrete slab forms puddles periodically, but it's not directly correlated with rainfall and he can't find a source of drip. So it was suggested that maybe he was looking in the wrong direction, that the water might be coming in laterally, or even from below. Concrete looks solid, but if you break a piece you can see that it's porous. Murderers have found to their distress that concrete does not necessarily mask what it was poured to hide.

And I suddenly remembered the time I was dismantling the woodshed that was on our property once, including taking apart and moving the woodpile, and how I started finding bits of trash that made me nervous, that started the story generator in my head suggesting that I was shortly going to find human bones or a mummified cat or an enigmatic artifact, relic of some deep-buried crime or at least guilty secret.

What I found was decayed Christmas wreaths, but that's not the point.

When I was in middle school I realized that an awful lot of books started with moving into a new home, and that this was always a much more fruitful process in books than in real life. (Air Force brat. I felt like I'd moved a lot and was an expert.) New homes in books had mysteries, ghosts, hidden treasures! They had not, as all the homes I moved into had, been emptied down to their bones, recently painted and sheetrocked, and all their secrets hauled off in a dumpster. They were not, as most of the homes being moved into at any given time in the late 20th century were, brand-new builds on land that had previously been a ranch or hunting lease or orchard or farm.

But what if it's a secret that the management company selling the place wouldn't find in its clean-and-spiff-up, or its new build; or that even belonged to someone within that company or on a work crew, who chose this place to bury it, in hope of - what?

What kind of secret would depend on the target audience and genre. A brand new garage with an old body under it is a natural jumping-off point for a murder mystery, but in real life it would be a police case, and for a book we want something of personal resonance to the homeowner and her family. So that takes us straight to "ghost," and the problem of learning who the ghost is, and how to put it to rest, without having any control of the evidence or any pull with the police.

"The Clue in the Woodpile" is a good solid middle-grade mystery title, and I couldn't swear to you there isn't a Nancy Drew called that - a lockbox full of odd, not obviously significant objects and messages in cipher.

Maybe you're taking down a stone wall and find a "post office" used by children in pre-internet days to communicate when they couldn't get together reliably. What could have been left so long that could still affect you today?

This is all vague, but the impact of the hook requires specific, evocative items. So you look at your environment and its history. Who used this land? Who passed through it? What history lies unacknowledged beneath your feet? And what consequences does the secret have in this place, today?

Almost any piece of land in the world can be a murder dump site; but say you go with that. There's murders, and there's murders. Do you live in an area where lynching and private justice were respectable within living memory? Could a crime, uncovered now, of which you yourself are innocent, undermine your own claim on a property, or undermine family dynamics that seem solid and essential?

Are you in a former war zone?

Are you sure you're not? Indian wars, range wars, the war on drugs: they all leave their traces; they all have their mysteries, their secrets, their espionage, and their treachery.

And those are just the realistic options! Allow in ghosts, offended nature spirits, local legends and magical traditions (you do too have a magical tradition, even if you only call it "superstition" or "religion"), and think about all that could have been hidden, or what could have been taken and be trying to get back -

Yeah, there's no place like home. Maybe it's time to research your property and see what stories are lurking there.

Maybe next week I'll tell you about mine.

Dagnab It...

The thing is, I want to write a mosaic. Lots of short pieces, overlapping points of view, creating a whole picture that the reader feels she's walked through as through real places and events.

But you need the right plot for that. And I can spin characters all day, but maneuvering them into a plot, that's different.

I think that's why the happy family serial killer story doesn't quite work. (Yet. I haven't given up on it.)

Will I know the right plot when I see it, that is the question?

I'm tired of throwing characters and scenes at the page and not seeing a saleable work emerge. Maybe I should pick some subject or other and do blind research.

Making a Mess of Things

So it's Kitchen Sanitation Month.

Which means the kitchen is a mess.

Because that's how it works - in order to get things really clean, you have to get your hands dirty; and when you're doing a big job like this, getting into all the corners and throwing out the expired stuff and fixing what needs fixing and replacing the roach traps, putting things in order, a side effect is a huge temporary increase in disorder. Recycling, trash, and compost containers overflow and have to be emptied much more often than usual (though really you ought to empty the kitchen compost container at least once a day). And let's not talk about what happens to the floor. (Which is white tile. White. Tile. Whatever previous owner did that, I could strangle on a regular basis, but it's way down on the list of Stuff We Gotta Fix in This House.)

It's exactly the same as revising a manuscript, with one notable exception. When you're revising a manuscript, you have to get your hands dirty. You have to make a mess of it. Word processors disguise this somewhat, because you can take out paragraphs and bits of words and even move stuff around without it leaving visible traces if you don't want visible traces. I have some old typescripts up in the attic that I was revising with pens, scissors, tape, and different-colors of paper, because dear heaven, you can't retype the thing from scratch constantly. And whereas the cat can only disrupt word processing by standing on your keyboard and mousepad, his options for disrupting on-paper revision were practically limitless - as are his options for disrupting Kitchen Sanitation Month. (I don't want to flick the bucket water at him because it's got bleach in it.)

Still, however you do it, it's a messy, difficult, time-consuming job. And - just like Kitchen Sanitation - you have to go back and reclean stuff you've already cleaned pretty often, because you can't fix the plot hole in Chapter 23 without messing up some foreshadowing in Chapter 2, creating a continuity error in Chapter 15, and having a major characterization epiphany that requires you to reread every reference to the heroine's younger brother and adjust accordingly; any more than you can wash the dust off the good china without getting the sink and dishwasher dirty again. But you have to sanitize the sink and dishwasher first or the dishes won't be sanitized.

Still - and this is why writing is more fun than housework - revision has one huge advantage over Kitchen Sanitation Month, and that is, that while you will reach a point at which you're done revising a particular manuscript, you will never truly be done cleaning the kitchen.

You know, when you send your best version of a manuscript off to submission, that you'll run another polishing rag over it every three or four rejections; and if you get accepted you'll probably have to revise for the editor; and then there'll be copyediting; and then you'll have to proof the galleys; but eventually, at last, it'll be a book, bound and out the door and even if you reread it later and find something you think you could have done better, it'll be too late. That book is printed and it's staying the way you left it.

The kitchen will never, ever reach this point.

Remember that next time you're fed up with revising. Or you look at a work and can only see what a huge mess it is. Or the whole project begins to seem less worthwhile.

Caracterization

So Moby Dent, the Great White Car, keeps having to go to the car doctor, and it becomes clear that the day approaches when we will have no choice but to donate his inert husk to NPR or the Kidney Foundation or something; by which time, living where we do, we need to have another vehicle already in the driveway. Which means Damon and I spent a lot of Veteran's Day carshopping like responsible adults, when we would rather have been gaming or reading or watching a Netflix marathon. (We did go see the Thor movie and sat through the credits for both extra scenes because Damon always sits through the credits and catches the extra scenes. You can't fool him!)

Now, I have never bought a car before in my life. Apart from the driving school's learning vehicle, and the rental I drove briefly in Santa Fe last month, Moby is the only car I've ever controlled. Even Damon hasn't bought a car in the usual sense since before I met him, though he's been through a few cars since then. There's always been a cheap car available from some nearby source when he needed on, a co-worker letting something go cheap or whatever. Moby himself was an in-family transaction, originally purchased by my father-in-law. The result of this is that neither of us is all that sure what we want in a car, except for a handful of things - manual backups for all systems, for example - that we are unlikely to get.

(Forget the back-up camera and the GPS; when, as will inevitably happen, it dies in an intersection and all the systems go out, I want to be able to roll down the window so I can communicate with the helpful people pushing me out of traffic! That is what I call a safety feature! How the heck are you supposed to get out of a modern car when the bad guys run you off the road into the lake and everything shorts out? You can't count on the bad guys shooting your windshield out for you. And what I really, really want is a button on the dash that expands and contracts various parts of the car; so I can drive a compact when I need to park in Austin, a truck when I need to haul plants or furniture, a sedan when driving people around, etc.)

When I normally think about cars, which I don't do often, I think of them in terms of characterization. What sort of car would this or that character drive? I don't know anything about makes and models, but you don't have to in order to do this particular exercise. A pickup truck implies a certain culture; whether the truck is old and beat up, new and shiny, old and shiny, extended-cab, black or white or silver or blue or red, will assist the reader to slot the driver into certain economic and social places in that culture; and then you fill up the back (or not) and that's a powerful but digestible amount of information crammed into, at most, a couple of sentences. If the owner of the pickup also has a town car and a '65 Mustang in the driveway, then that's as good as an infodump.

But does that really work? How many people - how many characters - are out there with no more conscious choice about the kinds of cars they drive than Damon and I have had?

Would anybody look at Moby and make any kind of accurate deduction about how who Damon and I are?

And would anybody who knew Damon and me have predicted that we would go looking at smaller SUVs this weekend? Which is what we did. Damon's idea. Surprised me; yet if there's anybody you'd think I'd know it'd be him. I think of myself as a compact car person (and I did rent a compact in New Mexico, but that was for expense and besides, I was driving it from the airport in Albuquerque to the hotel, and from the hotel back to the airport - I don't even need a back seat for that!), but a compact would not be suitable for avocational archeology trips, and one of the SUVs we got into yesterday felt too small on the inside. Apparently I need psychological space inside a car I'm driving. (Damon just needs some head and leg room.) If I don't know what kind of car I want myself, how can I characterize other people with them?

Yet the first car salesman we had yesterday got a line on us pretty quick. We never said: We want something durable, but by the third thing we looked at he was bringing up maintenance issues and telling us which ones would last us the longest. And that was before he found out how old Moby is. And this is in fact what we want in everything: something we won't have to keep replacing or renovating.

So the lesson I take away from this is that characterization via car is valid, but that I don't have a handle on how to do it. I'll need to pay attention to the car salesmen, because the good ones will have a handle on it - they'll need to, in order to do their jobs - and I can perhaps learn from that.

I generally think of myself as pretty good at characterization, but no matter how good you are at something, you'll always find areas to improve.

Interlude, with Animals

I realize that it's dark and Miss Thai is not sitting on my keyboard. So I go down to the back door and call through the screen, singing the Thai song (which is the chorus of "The Boxer" with a string of "Thais" instead of "La la li") to summon her. It's dark. Something white, but not white enough, approaches with cat-like approaching sounds. I turn on the outside light to be sure.

"You called?" The raccoon on the steps sits up and twitches her whiskers at me.

"You are not my cat," I say.

"But I live here," says the raccoon. "You might as well let me in."

"Sorry," I say, and go call out the front door, where Thai appears. "Where have you been?" She demands. "Get up there on the computer so I can snub you!"

I know it ought to bother me that raccoons live in our attic, but they keep the rats out and in any case none of the people who were supposed to bid on projects to exclude them from the attic has ever gotten back to us. I believe the height of our roof terrifies them. The coons don't get into the trash because there's nothing worth their while in the trash. It all goes on the compost heap. I don't really garden enough to keep a compost heap, but it's well worth it for keeping the wildlife and the sour smells outside rather than in.

And Thai typically snubs me elaborately for five minutes or so. If she really wants to punish me she stays outside out of my line of sight as I call and call and imagine horrible deaths she might have suffered, then appears magically as soon as my husband comes out to look for her.

Yet Another Sewing Analogy

So I'm making a pattern I've never sewn before, and on Friday it came time to make the back center seam of a bodice with a lining and no zipper. I read the directions, and they made no sense. None. I tried to follow the directions and they still made no sense. I manipulated the pieces as directed and it all seemed physically impossible. So I gave up.

I woke up a number of times during the weekend, worrying about this bodice.

Yesterday I went back to it. And it was easy. Obvious, even. This despite the fact that I was pretty light-headed, which makes seeing how two-dimensional patterns translate into three-dimensional garments exponentially more difficult for me.

Sometimes you have to let a problem rest and let your backbrain deal with it. I can't promise it'll take as short a time as a weekend. That block at Ch. 10 I referred to awhile ago has been there a good deal longer than that. But the backbrain does in fact keep working, out of sight, if your frontbrain will let go of a problem and allow it.

They don't seem to be able to work simultaneously, sorry.

Rat Hard vs. Driving Hard

Once, I had a year from hell. So did everyone around me. That was one of the things that made it so hellish.

I had to finally learn to drive during that year, because Damon was too sick to do it and we couldn't afford to be dependent on our friends - who were also having hellish years and none of whom lived within a mile of us - for rides to the doctor. I found it enormously difficult, but I operated on the presumption that if I had to do something, I could do it, so I took driving lessons.

During the early part of that year, our cats, who are the worst hunters in the world, double-teamed a rat, chased it all over the house, and mortally wounded it. This was all deduced from forensic evidence - I had to clean up the rat blood. At first we assumed that the rat had eventually gotten away, but in a few days we realized that it had been mortally wounded. And died. Somewhere in the downstairs hall closet where Damon keeps his comic book boxes.

Damon at this time was bedridden, so while he slept I got into old clothes and rubber gloves, gathered "shovels and rakes and implements of destruction," and started taking the closet apart. Cleaning up deceased animals has always been Damon's job because I am a wimp, but I told myself I had to do this, so I could do it, so I gritted my teeth and got on with it.

And then I found the rat. And I couldn't.

I tried. Honest, I did. But it was as if a physical force field went up between me and it. I tried till I cried and I could not make myself do it. I couldn't even make myself use one of the long implements, much less reach into the closet with my rubber-gloved hands. After the first glimpse, I couldn't make myself look into the closet. I finally had to admit to myself that I had reached the limits of my strength and there was nothing to do but ask someone else to do the job I couldn't.

So I called M, our old housemate, who is completely unreliable about daily things like taking his turn at the dishes and getting his junk out of the high-traffic area and showing up on time for - anything - but who is completely reliable about responding to anyone he can interpret as a damsel in distress. M, I knew, would be delighted to clean up a dead rat so he could be my hero, if he happened to be at home. Which he was not. And his wife, who might or might not have been able to deal with a dead rat under normal circumstances, was home with the baby and a cold. But his brother happened to have dropped in on her, and he cheerfully came and cleared out the rat for me and I never had to look at or smell the thing again. And I had a new term in my personal vocabulary. A thing that is "rat hard" is too hard for me to do, even when I have to, and when I run up against that, then there's no point beating myself up about it. I just have to find another way.

The day after I discovered my limits that way, I had a driving lesson. We were getting down to the wire on the number of lessons I had left, and the instructor was teaching me to parallel park. This is a crucial skill to learn when driving in Texas, because if you can do it, you'd pretty much have to run over somebody to fail the rest of the test, and if you fail that, you fail the whole thing. Parallel parking is the first item in the test procedure and if you fail it they stop the test right there and you can go home to practice parallel parking some more. So we were out there in the empty parking lot with the cones and the imaginary Mercedes on either side and the problem was that I can't see straight.

It was before I learned why I can't see straight, but I'd known for years that I can't and it's one of the reasons I'd never bothered getting my license. However, I'd been walking under the influence of this peculiarity for most of my life and I found that most of my compensatory habits served me just as well in the car as when walking - until it came time to go in reverse. I was hopeless at going backwards. I couldn't tell when I was straight, I couldn't tell when I was turning, I couldn't tell where the bumper was, and I hit one or the other imaginary Mercedes every time. We spent half an hour just working on reversing and I just couldn't do it right.

At which point I put my head down on the steering wheel and told the instructor about the rat, ending the story with: "But this isn't like that. This is something I can learn to do."

And eventually I did do it, though it'd be a bit much to say I learned how to parallel park. I took me three tries to pass the driving test and I still can't line myself up parallel to and within the correct distance of the curb without someone outside the car giving me hand signals. In the eight years since then I've parallel parked "in the wild" exactly once - but I did it without hitting the other cars and that was all I asked of myself.

So that was another addition to my personal vocabulary. Impossibly steep learning curves are only "driving hard," and at the end of a horrible spell of failing and trying again and crying with frustration and failing and trying again and failing and crying and failing eventually, if I don't throw in the towel and declare defeat, I will get it done.

So the first question I ask myself when faced with something that's too hard is, Is it rat hard, or only driving hard? Because if it's rat hard, I need to stop wasting time and find the way around it; but if it's driving hard, it's time to move on to the second question; which is, How bad do I want it? Is it worth the effort and frustration and stress of learning to do it? Because if it's not, I need to stop wasting time working at it; but if it is, I need to get on with it.

I have never met a creative problem that was more than "driving hard."

Whether this story and this distinction do you any good, I don't know. Here they are for what they're worth.

Adjustment

Late today, because the computer was sick - needed a new power supply. I've been writing a blog post in my head all day, but it seems to be two posts intertwined and I'm not sure I can separate them out enough. And it's late and I feel crappy, so I'll take the shortest component I can tease out.

I've remarked more than once on the difference between brains and their capacities at different periods of our lives. The advantage of the mature brain is that, though it has trouble learning brand new things, if it was trained well during its early years, it doesn't have to; it can recognize commonalities between this new thing it's doing and that old thing that it's done before, a hundred different times, in a hundred different guises.

But I was reminded again this weekend that you can't afford to get cocky about that. Not, at any rate, in any creative activity. Because each time you do it is different.

In this case, it was the slacks. I cut the waistband too small. As far as I could (or can) tell, I cut it exactly the same size as I did last time I made that pattern, and I can still wear the slacks I made that time; but I could barely get into the new ones and they would not have been comfortable to wear. Either I'd marked the pattern wrong, or something was different about the fabric, or - something. This morning I recut them (this is why I always buy at least half an extra yard of fabric; it leaves me with a varied stack of remnants too small to make a garment of, but it gives me lots of room to make mistakes) and now they fit, at last.

But I've found the same thing with other projects. This or that rhetorical trick, structural element, viewpoint, whatever, worked last time I wrote a story; but it won't work for this one. I can fight it, or I can try something different. I worked well with this editor on that book, but she's not right for this one. The greatest sonneteer in the world will write a bad sonnet if the poem in question is really a haiku.

You've got to work with what you've got, not with what you used last time.

Just because you know how to do something, doesn't mean you'll do it right this time.

The mature brain can't make much in the way of new synapses; but it can still be flexible.

That Time of Year Again; or Why Am I Never Prepared for What Always Happens??

As Kitchen Sanitation Month draws to a close, I am faced with the reality that I still don't understand how the crisper drawers in my refrigerator are set up.

It looks perfectly simple when I'm taking it apart for cleaning, and then when I go to put it back not one bit of it makes any sense. The only thing I know for certain is that the holes on the sides of the frame fit into those little knobs on the sides of the refrigerator. That's the baseline. But once the frame's back in place - this part moves this way so this end must be the front, but if I try to put it in that way the glass won't lie flat and if I put it in the other way there's nothing to hook the ends into and the slots on the sides of the drawers should lock into something but there's nothing except this bit and in that case how does the drawer move at all? Every year I go through this. Every single year.

It's not just that I'm mechanically hopeless. Damon's much better at this sort of thing than I am, and when I enlist his aid he's soon as bewildered as I am. At the moment we have an arrangement that almost works, but one of the drawers sticks so much that we can tell something's still off. I'm hoping that, having gotten so close and slept on it, I can get to the "oh, of course, I do this to that and then everything fits" moment, which is also a yearly occurrence, as soon as I go down there and look. You'd think it'd get easier every year, but it seems to get harder.

This, of course, is what notes are for. Maybe this is the year we make some. But will we then be able to find them next time Kitchen Sanitation Month rolls around? All we can do is the best we can do, but I'm not convinced we've done our best on this one.

I'm sure nobody who reads this blog ever has problems like this. :)

A Few Thoughts on Baking

First off, I'd like to state for the record (in light of the recent Garage Sale about the guy who runs around taking stuff I like off the market) that I have never liked Twinkies and haven't eaten one for at least 30 years. So Hostess's failure is not my fault. And anyway you know somebody's going to buy up the rights and make an equally tasteless, nutritionless knock-off about the time the people who bought them all up decide it's time to dump them on E-bay.

Second, tomorrow being Thanksgiving, I'm baking today. Damon specifically requested that I make dilly casserole bread, which we haven't had for awhile because it's pretty high sodium, like all bread, and because I have trouble getting yeast breads to rise. When it works it's about as yummy as bread gets, though.

Since I'm not sure whether my trouble with bread rising is down to overbeating or to the ambient temperature in my kitchen - which is, counterintuitively, the coolest room in the house - I made two batches, one of which I underbeat, if anything. That one's taking its time rising, too, but it looks like I might have two decent batches of dilly bread. Which is twice as many as I need but what the family doesn't eat tomorrow the gaming group can eat over the weekend, and what I was afraid of was of having none.

I went very short of sleep last night, my head aches, and making even one batch was more of a chore than it should have been, but -

That's how you know when you're really engaged with a job. When you take pains over it, even excessive ones, even when your body is protesting, because you want to be sure it's done right.

If you're not doing that, you're doing the wrong things. Stop it, and do something else; or make up your mind to it, and do it right.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.