useful beauty
Apr. 5th, 2023 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomi·Still working on the Guardian script; April is such a quiet time I ought to get ahead. In episode 33 at the pillar, the shadow man starts talking and Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan turn their heads to him in unison, obviously remembering the existence of other people for the first time. And in their sunlit moment on the bench, the music is so damn sad when they smile at each other, this is a tragedy going to happen all right.
·Writing book 2 fairly steadily. At 60K+, I’ve finally gotten to the part where everything happens at once (why is my natural writing structure “nothing happens for 2/3 of the book and then everything happens”?), and it’s scaring me to death—big irrevocable events and my characters having big irrevocable emotions in reaction to them, and also making some of them happen, and creating an actual shape rather than “this happened and then this happened” is not easy, and also (yet another thing that works against me), a lot of the things happening aren’t even going to be resolved in this book, they’re all getting pushed forward to book 3, working title The Aftermath. To be fair, I am enjoying it! I keep thinking, aah, I’m tired and it’s late, what would happen if I didn’t write tonight, and then I start reluctantly and I end up with at least my daily quota of 500 words. But, aah.
·So I really did not do this on purpose, but my favorite chocolate in the world is a flavor of Ritter Sport called Olympia, containing a mixture of yogurt, honey, and hazelnuts. It’s hard to find and doesn’t exist in Japanese stores, so I ordered myself some for my birthday. Three bars, to be precise. I was expecting the usual bars—divided into little square four-by-four grids—but when they arrived, I found I had ordered three VERY LARGE bars of EIGHT-BY-EIGHT grids instead. I mean. I can’t say I regret it?
·Rereading Erica H. Smith’s Waters of Time series, one of my annual rereads, and as always being awed by her long-distance plotting skills (including throwaway lines that become important plot points hundreds, if not thousands of pages later) and ability to expand from two to, what, a dozen POVs and keep them all in character. (George and Olivia are lovely, but I personally favor Rinaldo and Janet most—the dry-voiced consummate outsiders who like to see the work done right—and among non-POV characters, I adore Gerrit and his proverbs and his glass art.) As she says of one of her own characters, “One began to feel, even if one knew better, … that he was real.” If the world was in better shape, people would be talking about this series as among the major works of early 21st-c SFF.
·Listening to the Arensky piano trio and piano quintet, a couple of old favorites—one of those kleinmeisters (what’s the proper German plural?) who got absolutely inspired twice in his career. Big warm melodic Romantic delight. (I’m in two minds about the quintet performance linked, but I like their name—Take 5 Piano Quintet—so much I couldn’t resist, and they seem to have an interesting repertoire.)
·Reading the diary of Barbellion (pseudonym of a British naturalist who died of MS in 1919, very young) and enjoying its self-deprecation, humor, frustration, and moments of beauty. Some of my favorite entries are excerpted below.
·(Almost) literally one zillion photos of cherry blossoms and other spring flowers, so I gave up and put them in their own post, see next.
Be safe and well.
·Writing book 2 fairly steadily. At 60K+, I’ve finally gotten to the part where everything happens at once (why is my natural writing structure “nothing happens for 2/3 of the book and then everything happens”?), and it’s scaring me to death—big irrevocable events and my characters having big irrevocable emotions in reaction to them, and also making some of them happen, and creating an actual shape rather than “this happened and then this happened” is not easy, and also (yet another thing that works against me), a lot of the things happening aren’t even going to be resolved in this book, they’re all getting pushed forward to book 3, working title The Aftermath. To be fair, I am enjoying it! I keep thinking, aah, I’m tired and it’s late, what would happen if I didn’t write tonight, and then I start reluctantly and I end up with at least my daily quota of 500 words. But, aah.
·So I really did not do this on purpose, but my favorite chocolate in the world is a flavor of Ritter Sport called Olympia, containing a mixture of yogurt, honey, and hazelnuts. It’s hard to find and doesn’t exist in Japanese stores, so I ordered myself some for my birthday. Three bars, to be precise. I was expecting the usual bars—divided into little square four-by-four grids—but when they arrived, I found I had ordered three VERY LARGE bars of EIGHT-BY-EIGHT grids instead. I mean. I can’t say I regret it?
·Rereading Erica H. Smith’s Waters of Time series, one of my annual rereads, and as always being awed by her long-distance plotting skills (including throwaway lines that become important plot points hundreds, if not thousands of pages later) and ability to expand from two to, what, a dozen POVs and keep them all in character. (George and Olivia are lovely, but I personally favor Rinaldo and Janet most—the dry-voiced consummate outsiders who like to see the work done right—and among non-POV characters, I adore Gerrit and his proverbs and his glass art.) As she says of one of her own characters, “One began to feel, even if one knew better, … that he was real.” If the world was in better shape, people would be talking about this series as among the major works of early 21st-c SFF.
·Listening to the Arensky piano trio and piano quintet, a couple of old favorites—one of those kleinmeisters (what’s the proper German plural?) who got absolutely inspired twice in his career. Big warm melodic Romantic delight. (I’m in two minds about the quintet performance linked, but I like their name—Take 5 Piano Quintet—so much I couldn’t resist, and they seem to have an interesting repertoire.)
·Reading the diary of Barbellion (pseudonym of a British naturalist who died of MS in 1919, very young) and enjoying its self-deprecation, humor, frustration, and moments of beauty. Some of my favorite entries are excerpted below.
July 14, 1914
Have finished my essay. But am written out — obviously. To-night I struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen. But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand, unable to produce a word.
October 7, 1914
To me woman is the wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, ‘WOMAN.’
May 30, 1915
After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun filtered in thro’ the greenery casting a ‘dim, religious light.’
‘It’s like a cathedral,’ I chattered away, ‘stained glass windows, pillars, aisles — all complete.’
‘It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this,’ she said. ‘At C—— Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon Beech. . .’
‘Sir Henry Wood was the organist.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor.’
We laughed over our silliness!
June 1, 1915
Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little coups d’oeil, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on the keeper’s gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path, the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks pours in thro’ the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in bv the open lattice.
March 11, 1917
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.
Have finished my essay. But am written out — obviously. To-night I struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen. But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand, unable to produce a word.
October 7, 1914
To me woman is the wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, ‘WOMAN.’
May 30, 1915
After a lunch of scrambled eggs and rhubarb and cream went up into the Beech Wood again and sat on a rug at the foot of a tree. The sun filtered in thro’ the greenery casting a ‘dim, religious light.’
‘It’s like a cathedral,’ I chattered away, ‘stained glass windows, pillars, aisles — all complete.’
‘It would be nice to be married in a Cathedral like this,’ she said. ‘At C—— Hall Cathedral, by the Rev. Canon Beech. . .’
‘Sir Henry Wood was the organist.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and the Rev. Blackbird the precentor.’
We laughed over our silliness!
June 1, 1915
Sunlight and a fresh wind. A day of tiny cameos, little coups d’oeil, fleeting impressions snapshotted on the mind: the glint on the keeper’s gun as he crossed a field a mile away below us, sunlight all along a silken hawser which some Spider engineer had spun between the tops of two tall trees spanning the whole width of a bridle path, the constant patter of Shrew-mice over dead leaves, the pendulum of a Bumble-bee in a flower, and the just perceptible oscillation of the tree tops in the wind. While we are at meals the perfume of Lilac and Stocks pours in thro’ the window and when we go to bed it is still pouring in bv the open lattice.
March 11, 1917
In this Journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations: grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapours, all the varying reactions to environment of this jelly which is I.
·(Almost) literally one zillion photos of cherry blossoms and other spring flowers, so I gave up and put them in their own post, see next.
Be safe and well.
