Link: Rambling. And cheese. No, not really.

Just a pointer to a post on the other blog, where I ramble about... well, where I ramble.

Theater Image: By Smatprt. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Bad Peony Timing

So. Gardening. This blog once had garden content. Then the garden filled up. Then winter came. Then NaNoWriMo came. Then I started the 100-fiction-words-a-day resolve, which is still in effect as a goal. And there wasn't a lot of gardening, in my writing or in real life.

But the days are getting longer, and this weekend was deceptively springlike. And, most important, I may have access to some fresh gardening space soon.

Bwahaha.

So it's time to start the spring gardening dance. Seed catalogs. Websites. Peonies. At this moment, particularly peonies. And, yes, I realize that it would have been much better to have thought of this in the fall.

I used to garden in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bay Area weather doesn't support peonies--there isn't enough winter chill. All the same, many of the garden centers sell the things, presenting me every year with those gorgeous pictures on glossy boxes of peony roots. Every gardener knows that there are plenty of things sold in garden centers that are highly unlikely to do anything at all in the garden, but that's usually about skill. And skill improves every year, so each spring the gardener buys a new batch of plants, and most die, but some unexpectedly live, or even bloom, and so everybody's happy.

But when the garden centers sell something that simply won't bloom unless you live a few thousand feet up a mountain or dump a truckful of ice on it every few days through the winter, that seems to be an unfair stacking of the deck. I planted and lost a couple of peonies before reading about them and learning that they were a doomed pursuit. Then I ignored what I read and planted some more. But nothing ever bloomed.

So when I moved to a Southern Oregon garden that not only supported peonies, but had one already blooming, I was excited. I planned to plant many more.  But we had new paths made and new beds built, and in all that tromping around, peony roots seemed somehow too fragile to insert and too hard to keep track of. So we installed roses for me and irises for Himself, and space filled up.

And then one fall I had a spark of peony determination, one that wouldn't wait for catalogs and mail-order, and I planted six of what they were selling at the hardware store. And then we revamped the irrigation system, and then we did remodeling, and people did their very best not to walk on the flower beds, but planting more seemed like a mistake. And then, two or maybe three years later, those peonies bloomed, and they were lovely, but they were still what they were selling at the hardware store. They weren't gasp-and-fall-down peonies. And the garden was full.

Anyway. Enough history. Now I may have another chance to plant the really glorious peonies, the ones that transcend the hardware store. Except... it's spring. And I should have planted them in the fall.

Hmph.

The quick thing to do would be to search local nurseries and buy any potted peonies that I can find. The sensible thing to do would be to accept reality, prepare a luxurious bed, perhaps plant a few annuals to keep myself entertained, and order roots for perfect, glorious, transcendent peonies, to be received and planted in the fall.

What, I wonder, are the odds that I'm going to do the sensible thing?

First Pink Peony Image: By Epibase. Wikimedia Commons.
Second Pink Peony Image: By Epibase. Wikimedia Commons.
White Peony Image: By Usien. Wikimedia Commons.
Striped Peony Image: By LapisLauzli Tomorrow. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Rambling

So, as I've mentioned on the other blog, I haven't been doing much writing this past couple of weeks. And it's not just writing that isn't happening; my brain's usual production of silly daydream stories has been drastically reduced as well. In fact, even my dreams aren't offering much in the way of plot. But I have been doing a lot of reading. Unlike last year, this year I'm keeping up with the 100+ reading challenge, and I can imagine exceeding it. Maybe.

This made me wonder if my mind is unidirectional, either absorbing or producing, and not both. But what causes the direction to flip? Seasonal change? The end of the holidays? The tragic resumption of work at the end of the holidays? Seasonal Affective Disorder? What's the deal?

I also (whispering) read a novel that didn't involve a murder.  Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, a nice low-key story with no crime to speak of. Is it possible that aliens borrowed my brain and didn't get the fluff and fold process quite right before returning it? I read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, too, but that one does involve a murder, even if it is sold with the regular novels at the non-mystery end of the bookstore.

Puzzlement.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Vignette: Herringbone

(A scene that would come from my 2009 NaNoWriMo novel, if I rewrote it enough. (The novel, that is.) Reality is shifting, and Emily's just discovered one alarming piece of evidence, at her Aunt Clara's house, a place that Henry occasionally visits.)

Henry shook his head. "What do you mean, it changed?"

"I mean," Emily said, "that yesterday it was a flagstone path, and today it's brick."

"So you're losing your memory."

She frowned at him, then flounced out of her seat, exasperated. "Wait."

He waited.

She returned with a cellphone, and sat down to peck at the screen.

"You're calling somebody?"

"Wait."

"I am waiting."

"Here." She thrust the phone at him. "I took a picture of one of the cats, lolling on the path. Right out there. Yesterday."

"And?"

"And, look at the path."

He looked. He looked down at the image of the garden on the phone, then looked up and through the French doors, at the same bit of garden. He walked to the doors and again compared image with reality. He opened the doors and walked out, down the path in the garden. The brick path.

He took a few steps down the path, a few steps back, again comparing the photo with the scene in front of him. Finally, he said, "Well."

"You see?"

"Maybe--"

"What?"

He said, "I don't know."

"You were going to say, 'Maybe somebody played a prank and installed the brick path last night', weren't you? And then you saw the moss, and the cracks. That path's been there for years."

"Yeah."

"Except it wasn't there yesterday."

"Yeah."

She nodded. "And then you wondered if I Photoshoppped that photo and put it on my phone, to mess with your mind."

"Well, no. But maybe somebody put it on there for you. Or something. That's what I was thinking."

"I remember taking the photo. You don't have anything but the photo for evidence, but I remember taking the photo. And, really, you don't remember the flagstones?"

He backed up to the French doors. "Sort of. I don't remember the bricks. I remember thinking that that rosebush, the one in the corner, was a nice shot of color in the summer, and that you needed something else for color in the winter because the whole place was so..."

"Gray."

"Right."

"Like flagstones." She folded her arms.

"Right."

"Like the path that was there yesterday."

"Also right."

"So what's the conclusion here?"

"Matching straitjackets?"

Image: By Jean-Noele Lefargue. Wikimedia Commons.

Vignette: Painkillers

"My head hurts."

"Try some aspirin."

"Aspirin never works for me."

"Try some caffeine."

"Caffeine makes me nervous."

"Take a nap."

"I can't sleep; my head hurts."

"Did you want a solution here?"

"No, I want sympathy."

"How about a nice cup of tea?"

"That's not sympathy, that's caffeine."

"Look, it's the best I can do without turning into a girl."

"Sympathy makes you a girl?"

"Yes. Sympathy has to be expressed with an 'awwwwww' in a baby voice. That turns you into a girl. Instantly."

"Can't you just produce the sympathy and then switch back?"

"I'm not risking it."

"You might like being a girl."

"Nail polish. Panty hose. Lipstick. All that smiling. No, thank you."

"You claimed that women enjoy wearing panty hose."

"I lied."

"You'd never have to wear a tie again."

"Tempting, but insufficient."

"No draft."

"I'm already too old for the draft."

"You could take bubble baths."

"I can't wish for bubble baths without, again, turning into a girl."

"So you would wish for them if you could."

"We are not going there."

"You could cry."

"Oh, my God, no. That's worse than the panty hose."

"You could wear high heels."

"You've changed sides in this debate, haven't you?"

"Apparently. We could discuss girdles."

"Please tell me that women no longer wear girdles."

"Some of them do. They just have different names."

"We need to stop now."

"Am I giving you my headache?"

"Yes."

Image: By Stilfehler. Wikimedia Commons.

Vignette: Morning

(On the "back on the horse" principle, also known as "post something!")

A muffin.

It was a blueberry muffin, at least. No bran, none of those odd little unidentified grain berries. Nothing to inspire the remark, "At least it's got fiber."

And it was hot, like a proper pulled-out-of-Grandma's-oven muffin. And the blueberries looked real.

But all the same, she didn't want a muffin. She wanted chicken. Or beef. Yes, beef. A nice ribeye steak, without all the fat trimmed off the way they insist on doing these days. And a baked potato, with one of those round scoops of butter.

Yes. That would do nicely. Would have done nicely. But here, instead, was a muffin, sitting sturdy and pudgy on the plate.

She picked it up and pulled off the steamy paper, and ripped its little muffiny head off, and put a pat of butter on the bottom of the top and another one on the top of the bottom. And watched them melt. And thought about sour cream and chives. And crispy fat. That was really a ribeye's reason for existence, that crispy fat. And beer. Don't forget the beer.

And you could follow a nice ribeye with pie. That would be a far better excuse for the blueberries' existence. Pie. With ice cream or whipped cream or heavy cream.

Breakfast.

Feh.

Image: By Kevin Payravi. Wikimedia Commons.

Ramble: Fiction and Blogging and E-Books and Whining

"So what do you think?"
"Um..."
"Yeah, I know."
"Well, I mean, it's fine. It's perfectly correct and the grammar's fine and the paragraphs break where they should, and so on."
"Uh huh."
"It's just..."
"Yeah."
"...just..."
"Dull."
"Well, I wouldn't say that."
"But it's true?"
"I'm withholding my answer."
"It's like I'm shoving words around with those things. Those things that they push those things around with in that sport. Stop looking at me like that. Curling! You know, curling, where they push boulders around on the ice very very slowly."
"Yeah. Got it."
"That's all you have to say?"
"How about a nice cup of tea?"

So, it usually takes some struggling to get me to write my self-assigned two hundred words of fiction a day, but I'm usually moderately satisfied with the result. Lately, however, it's been more of a struggle, and the product has been bad. Not even a good, entertaining kind of bad, but a dreary, plodding kind of bad that makes me imagine someone reading it and keeping their eyes down after they're done, pretending to still be reading while they desperately try to think of something pleasant to say about it. That's why you haven't seen a vignette here in, er, ten days.

So, OK, fine, how about doing some reading? That's been weird, too. I keep setting out to read a book, and looking up twenty minutes later to realize that I'm on the computer, in a blog or forum.

It's partly the books that I'm trying to read. For years, I've been selecting used paperbacks using what I call the first paragraph test, and for years it's worked.

What's the test? Well, a first paragraph has to have at least a little action. It shouldn't have any character description, a character's full name, or any setting detail, without a darn good excuse. Anything along the lines of "Jane Janet Jones, accomplished actress, pushed her rippling midnight-dark hair behind her delicate shell-like ears, a tiny line forming between her fine green eyes as she looked out at the November weather through the window of her small but luxuriously appointed third-floor Boston brownstone apartment ..." will send the book right back to the shelf. And after it avoids those pitfalls, it needs an "I know it when I see it" engaging surprise about it.

I just picked up my copy of Final Curtain, by Ngaio Marsh, expecting a good first paragraph, and I was rewarded:

"Considered severally," said Troy, coming angrily into the studio, "a carbuncle, a month's furlough and a husband returning from the antipodes don't seem like the ingredients for a hell-brew. Collectively, they amount to precisely that."

Now, that's a first paragraph. I'm even willing to forgive the full name ("Katti Bostock") in the following paragraph.

But Final Curtain was written in (let me check) 1947. It appears that in recent years, writers and/or publishers have learned about the first paragraph test. I'm a third of the way through a paperback mystery that sported a very promising first paragraph, but quickly shifted to Generic Witty Banter between Generic Feisty Heroine and Generic Protective But Slightly Controlling Hero. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with Banter and Feisty and Protective; it's the "generic" part that I object to. At least I didn't buy the whole series. I've been known to do that, when entranced with a good first paragraph.

Um. What was my point? Yes! My point was why I'm not reading. It's partly books that cheated on the first paragraph test. And it's partly Internet addiction. So that's where the E-Books come in.

(A digression: How do you spell E-Books? Ebooks? eBooks? e-books?)

I find that if I have a book open in my Mac Kindle reader thingie, I occasionally look up to realize that I'm reading the thing. And if I have the same book in my phone, I can read it during those few-minute pauses out in the world when, lately, I too often find that I don't have an actual print book on me. So E-Books, while I vaguely disapprove of them, do get me reading.

And to circle around to my original point, it's possible that my inability to write is coming from my failure to do enough enjoyable reading. In an effort to fix this, I'm hunting down new books by writers whose writing I like--Martha Grimes, Calvin Trillin, and Margaret Visser, to start. I've already violated my anti-E-Book principles and downloaded The Black Cat by Martha Grimes, and I may move on to Margaret Visser's latest book, the one about "thank you" customs.

(Another digression: Do any of you read Martha Grimes? How do you feel about her recent tendency to fully verbalize the thoughts of cats and dogs? I love the rest of her stuff, and I've always loved the opinionated animals, but the verbalizing? Not working for me.)

So. Um. There we are. I continue to produce two hundred words on many days, but for now, they continue to be drearily, twitchily bad. So I'm reading about Richard Jury. Yay!

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.