Nattering

Happy New Year, and the wishes for whatever you long for to be yours. I am currently longing for delicious champagne cocktails, and wonders, a cocktail maestro is on hand to prepare them.

I take this as a good sign.

Also, having caught up, I'll be back and posting next week.

It's rainy and dreary. Our roof seems to have a small leak, based on the small drip drip drip in our utility room when the rain comes down hard; this is only to be expected in a hundred-year-old plus house, so I'm not too worried about it. Especially since the source is mysterious despite Christopher journeying onto the shingles, the roof itself isn't that old, and our neighbor who used to be a carpenter says their hundred-year-old house built at the same time as ours also has a mysterious leak and they don't worry about it too much. Don't worry or leave dread scenarios in the comments. We'll call someone to look at it, promise.    

Anyway, there's part of me that feels very Pippi Longstocking about it.* Leaky houses always seemed like the kind of glamorous thing encountered in books, while, you know, the far less glamorous flooded basements were the stuff of my own childhood. No alluring buckets, only the ugly roar of shopvacs. I just need to wear mismatched patterned knee socks around the house, and the effect will be even better.

My sojourn from the creepy island book is done, and today I dive back in. The beginning of winter (in terms of actual weather) seems like an ideal time to hunker down in the writing bunker. Hibernation only without the hibernation part**. Oh, how I love this part of any project. The first time you roll up your sleeves armed with pen and someone else's notes and begin the journey to version 2.0. Or from beta release to one that is… less beta.

I've been cheating on hangovers for the past week or so, experimenting with sticking little links at Tumblr instead. This seems easier to manage, and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, with random natterings like this one and book recommendations landing here. We'll see.

For now, I'm donning those socks and rolling up my sleeves.

*Or very Rivane Neuenschwander–when we were last in NYC Scott took us to the New Museum and they had a big exhibition of her work on display, including a riveting immersive installation called Rain Rains involving aluminum buckets hung from the ceiling dripping water into buckets below. The cumulative soundscape ended up making everyone quiet as they began to take it in. Pretty amazing.

**There's a new issue of LCRW just out on the street and the Dear Aunt G features much on the topic of hibernation. Also, space madness. Forewarned is forearmed.

Stop playing Fallen London (effing nightmares!) or whatever productive activities you're engaged in immediately. It's time for Dear Aunt G to answer some more questions for the upcoming ish of LCRW. Entrust your burning inquiries to Gavin within the strictest of confidences.

Note: There has been a rash–an outbreak, really–of questions of the, shall we say, meta variety. We can only handle so many of these. Surely you've got a few more specific conundrums to feed the advice-o-tron.

I seem to be embracing this random Friday thing after all.

1. If someone nice at St. Martin's wanted to send me an ARC of Jennifer Crusie's Maybe This Time, I'd be very happy about it. It's a take on The Turn of the Screw. I know I could just ask, but this way is better. And it's out at the end of the month, anyway, and it's not like I lack a massive stack of books I can't wait to read. But it'd make me happy to have it NOW and I'd do the post office dance. (In my stack, an ARC of Karen Joy Fowler's short story collection from Small Beer. Major dancing.)

2. We just finished season one of Fringe, a show that I've taken way more of a shine to than I thought I would at first. Which just goes to show something about tastes and assumptions not always being predictable, even when they're your own. I wonder if some of it is Brad Anderson's hand, since most of my favorite episodes are the ones directed by him–in fact, the science fiction of Fringe seems to share a lot in common with the science fiction of Happy Accidents, albeit with a bit more of an overt genre take coloring it. The gonzo humanity of it strikes me as similar though; audaciously, outrageously posited, but narrowed down on individual lives in a way that makes it compelling to go along with, to care about. Also, I am President and Treasurer of the Nina Sharp Fan Club. I don't care if she turns out to be good or evil or sit somewhere in between–I'll still love her. I cheer when she comes on screen. She makes me want to write an essay. Season two doesn't come out on DVD until next month. Boo.

3. Pulling a link to a fascinating story from the comments on the last post since I probably won't do hangovers until next week: Crop Circles on Wall Street, a story about what mapping out traffic at certain times on Wall Street in a certain way shows (nefarious activity). The guy whose spotting the trends names the patterns, which are maybe my favorite part of the story: "Castle Wall, The Waste Pool, Depth Ping, Boston Shuffle, BOTvsBOT, etc." Very science fictional, no? And, hey, if I'm including links, here's one to famous literary last words at the Guardian.

4. Am still playing catch up, but turned in another PW piece this morning, and will do some proofing and reviewing this weekend. I also owe emails, maybe even to you. Maybe you don't even know I owe you an email. But I do. And you will get it soon, maybe?

5. The creepy island novel proceeds apace, which is to say it's clicked back into place and I'm moving ahead. Running seems so hard to me that it must be an apt metaphor for novel writing. My last novel was pretty much a sprint–it never slowed down, just kept coming and I tried to gallop along and keep up with it. (Until revision started, of course.) This one is a marathon, even though it's theoretically simpler than the last (it's a standalone, for one), and I basically paused to take a big breath at the first third mark and–more recently–at the two thirds mark. I'm hoping to finish a draft this month, and am relieved that it suddenly seems doable. For the record, I would much rather write a novel than undertake a sprint or a marathon. I was the girl who faked running the mile to the cheerleading coach, and loathed that the basketball coach actually watched us the whole time to prevent cheating. Plus, after I finish, I get to go down to the place it's set for a last dose of research before revision. And we all know that island means BEACH.