Having signally failed (again) last night.  I need either to learn not to fall asleep in the bath or how to keep the water hot and just sleep in the bath.  I sleep there so much better than I sleep in bed.  Maybe it’s because Scorpio is a water sign.  So it’s not my fault.  It’s that I’m doomed.

B_twin left today and . . . it started raining about two hours later.  Speaking of water and never mind the astrology.  BUT THE HELLHOUNDS ATE DINNER.  Rain?  Fine.  Whatever.  Let it rain.  I can deal with (almost) ANYTHING . . . as long as the hellhounds keep eating.*

And furthermore it’s Friday.  And that means tomorrow is . . .

Rainycity1

O.K., now it’s really time to go pick up The Blue Sword again… not that it’s ever not time to read it, but Kes’ visions are reminding me of Harry’s and I’m being called…

You know I keep banging on about how the Story exists and all a poor dope of a writer can do is choose her words as well as she’s able.  But a story does try and come to a writer who has (maybe) a hope of relating to or engaging with it.  If a lost and confused story about the early expansion of the railroad across the North American continent in the 19th century shows up panting on my doorstep, I will attempt to repress my shudder of horror (stories have feelings), pat it on its head, and send it back to the Story Council for reassignment.

Stories about girls who do things come to me.  So do stories about girls who have visions before/during/after they do things.  I assume one of the reasons stories with visions in them see me as a kindred spirit is because I’ve always been rotten with visions myself.  Most of them are story related.**

***MILD SPOILER WARNING***

BLUE SWORD began with a vision of Harry pulling that mountain down.  CHALICE began with the Master saving his Chalice’s life on that cold hillside.  PEGASUS began with the night of Sylvi’s twelfth birthday.  Sometimes the vividest visions however are not where a story begins, but where I realised it was a story.  Peter was mulling over the difficulty of raising an orphan baby dragon*** because you need to keep it hot, but my recollection (which may well be faulty) is that he was thinking of something like a bucket or wheelbarrow of embers.  It was when I saw some random teenage boy put a baby dragon down his shirt that I knew the story was live for me.  And baby critters with big brains tend to need serious contact with their mums;  I don’t know that a brainy dragonlet would do very well stranded in a barrow of embers, even if the barrow was topped up regularly.  And then of course it turns out that the dragons in this particular story are marsupials, and their babies are born pretty well foetal. . . .

And so on.  There have been a few periods in my life—not recently, fortunately, it’s another of those ‘getting old is a good thing (mostly)’ things—when I’ve thought that my tendency to visions meant I was nuts.  Eventually I decided that if I coped (more or less) in the real world too, who cares?  Poor Kes is going to have a harder time hanging onto her sanity—or her belief in her sanity—since her stories/visions are showing, and, I will tell you for free, will continue to show, an alarming tendency to break into our so-called real world and mess her around.

Bratsche

My favorite sentence/image of this week’s episode is: I saw the banner flying from its topmost tower very plainly: two sword blades crossed to divide it into quarters, and in the quarters were a horse, a hawk, a sighthound and a rose. I wanted the whole Kes story from the very beginning, but that line bumped it further over an invisible enticing ledge for me.

Oh good.  Whatever works.***  ::Shuffles feet::  Mind you I haven’t much idea about this part of the story myself.  I can feel that it’s live or I wouldn’t have put even this much in–I don’t even know how to describe it, but that banner is as real as the chair I’m sitting in, or Cecelia Bartoli on the CD player.  I can also feel where I need to go to find someone—someone I mean who lives there—to talk to about it.  There’s a fair amount of seething going on behind that bit of scenery.  But I kind of imagine them drawing straws, and whoever gets the short straw has to talk to me first.  —No, no, no, the loser is saying, clutching his/her hair.  You know what she’s like!†

Your nicer readers may respect you.  Your characters . . . nah.

* * *

* B_twin said, I’ve seen skinnier dogs.  Good thing you weren’t here a month ago, I said.  I don’t think we were ever quite in danger of the neighbours ringing up the RSPCA^ but I felt we were getting close.  When the only food that’s going into them is what I’m prying their mouths open and stuffing down . . . they get really skinny.  I will go on force-feeding when they’re still not voluntarily eating enough to keep a hummingbird alive^^ but every sixteenth-mouthful scrap that I didn’t have to poke into them helps . . . including my stress level.

^ I’ve said this before, haven’t I:  Yes.  And let the RSPCA try to make them eat.

^^ Although hummingbirds are another of these tiny frantic things, like shrews, that have to eat pretty well constantly to avoid starving to death.  I thought this was fascinating:  http://www.hummingbirds.net/hainsworth.html

Anorexic hummingbirds don’t survive to breed.  Note that I have turned away all inquiries about breeding from the hellhounds not only because I don’t want them to find out what sex is.

From http://www.worldofhummingbirds.com/facts.php :

‘A hummingbird can weigh anywhere between 2 and 20 grams.  A penny weighs 2.5 grams.’   And even several times 2.5 grams of food a day is not going to keep an 18,000-gram hellhound alive for long.

(Also from http://www.worldofhummingbirds.com/facts.php)  ‘A hummingbird’s brain is 4.2% of its body weight, the largest proportion in the bird kingdom.’#  Yes, but 4.2% of 2 to 20 grams still doesn’t leave a lot of room for Sanskrit and quantum physics.  Has anyone tried to find out if hummingbirds can learn weird human-type stuff like coming when called or pressing an itsy-bitsy lever that dispenses food?

# Note that you’re seeing in action WHY WRITING THE BLASTED BLOG TAKES SO LONG.  Pretty much every time I look something up—like the eating habits of hummingbirds—I get into an ‘oooh shiny’ rut and half an hour later. . . .

** But it’s not surprising that when Jesus decided to hoick me over the ‘believer’ line he showed up in a vision.

*** Words to live by.  Where a lot of professions meet on common ground, I guess:  writers, mechanics, ditch diggers, bakers, critter trainers, shoe salespersons.  Probably not accountants and surgeons.  And I wish these were the words by which computer programmers lived.

† I’m sitting here on this chair, listening to Cecelia Bartoli, and realising that the first person I speak to isn’t going to have a clue about the banner and is going to think I’m, ahem, nuts for wanting to know.

††We were discussing ideas for short stories for FIRE ELEMENTALS, right?  Long, long, long ago.  Four FIRE novels^ ago.  Before Peter realised what he had married.

^ Peter wrote TEARS OF A SALAMANDER, remember.  It’s not only me.