standing on a star unstable

I was going to write up a semi-serious post about how hard I've been ducking anxiety about this whole trip, including all last night on the plane and a large part of the day, but that's a serious post for another day. I'm in far better shape now, post nap, post learning the phrase "Ich spreche wenig Deutsche" (I speak LITTLE German), and post obtaining the internet. Traveling alone is hard; connectivity makes it easier.

I'm holed up in a pleasant hotel built on the cloister grounds of Hildegard's abbey (well, one of 'em; she founded two). I've bonded with my innkeeper, which makes me feel less lonely, too. Actually, he's wonderful, and copied for me a map of the original cloister (the hotel is on the cloister's old grounds), which is something I've been looking for!

Things I quite like about Germany:

Driving is FUN here. Traffic is so well regulated and the drivers are so good, that the break-neck speeds were not intimidating. People are impatient with hesitant driving (or bad driving), but you know, that's okay. I felt about a dozen times safer driving out of the Frankfurt airport than I do, say, on 696 heading out to Troy at home. I'm actually looking forward to the next Autobahn trip. My rental car is nothing to write home about, but it's tiny, and zippy thereby, so it's fine.

Coming out into the Rhine Valley was a revelatory experience not unlike the first time I saw the Yorkshire Dales. Only, with castles and monuments. Seriously, I came into the valley, and was like, "RHINE!" And it was all wide and pretty! I ended up in some crazy nature-preserve/orchard/cow pasture area, and walked around by the water, enjoying this happy accident, and thought THAT was cool before I drove onward to find this gorgeous, steep rocky hillside (does it qualify as a mountain?)--terraced, with puffs of white smoke billowing up in places, and dotted with a giant statue and a couple of castles. It was so randomly Gothick, and I totally fell in love.

I don't like not knowing the language. It bothers me far more than I'd have imagined, to be so hampered. I didn't think phrasebooks were so bad, but, no, they are. I wish I'd prepared more... but at the same time, I wasn't willing to prepare on a maybe, and that was the rub. And once I decided I was really coming over, I poured my concentration into Romanian, because there are fewer English speakers in Romania.

Hey, look, The IT Crowd in German! (Yes, I've had the TV on all evening while enjoying my connectivity, in hopes that I will absorb some German. I can pick up more than I could, which isn't saying much, and it's not helping me speak it, but oh, well. Es tut mir leid.) The thing I like most about all this dubbed TV is how close the voice actors match the original voices. It's stunningly good at times.

I was accosted by a little old lady in a parking garage today who went on a tirade in German--she was obviously confused about something, and I haltingly tried to tell her I didn't speak German, but I think instead I just asked if she spoke German, which she obviously did. She continued to pelt me with questions and observations while I stood there and stared at her, until my brain kicked into gear. I asked her in German if she spoke English. No! Well, a little, but no! (I understood this, at least, and she said it in German.) I asked her in French if she spoke French. "A little!" --she replied in German. We were both so flustered at this point, that the next conversation was a complete mishmash of English, French and German and I still have no idea what either of us actually said (except at one point she said, "stage 3" which actually helped clarify the whole situation). The gist of it was that she'd parked on level 3, and couldn't find her car. "C'est deux," I said, waving around us. The lightbulb went on over her head. She was on the wrong level! Her car was not missing!

I like seeing Heidi Klum advertising stuff in her native language. I don't know why.

I find it weird how many people who can identify me on sight as an American (or at least an English speaker)--and how many who can't. I would expect it to be all one way, but perhaps it's actually a learned skill to identify in that fashion, and not something that's so super-obvious.

Anyway, turns out the cable for my camera and my Kindle? Is just the cable for my Kindle. So no pics for now.

More later, and we can hope for more coherence at that time, as well!

There's not going to be any peace on my desk until this manuscript goes away or I find another task lighting solution. Basically, I may've bought the halogen lamp for just this sort of paper-manuscript fiddling, but Merlin wants his lamp back, DAMMIT WOMAN, I'm trying to sleep!

Only a third of the way done with this pass, but it goes fast when I don't get bogged down looking up translations for etymologies of Romanian words I don't really know the provenance of, and by gum, if I EVER write another book set in a culture where I'm such a novice-tourist again, I may have to take up some self-destructive habits.

Didn't get to the Historical Thesaurus today, which is good, because I have another word to add to the list: "rat out." (Okay, it's a phrase.)

I can't believe I leave the country in 2.5 days. Oh, god, it sounds even worse put that way. I need to finish packing.

If I had to time travel thirty years into the past--which is within my own lifetime, mind you--I would not be able to fit in. If for no other reason (and there would be other reasons), I would seem incredibly hyperactive and attention deficit.

The question is, would I be able to shed all the multi-tasking, phone-checking, can't-sit-still behaviors I've developed just to keep up with this world? Could I sink with relief back into the slower pace?

Or would I be unable to assimilate? Would I move to New York and do one of those jobs everyone needed cocaine to keep on top of--but I probably wouldn't at this point? I have a feeling your average connected 20-something now is firing on more cylinders than a top exec of decades past--and all just to keep up with their social networks and obligations.

And that's not even adding in the layers and layers of stress-coping mechanisms I've developed in a day job whose pressures increase exponentially quarterly with no commensurate give anywhere. (This is a situation that the employed find themselves in a lot in this recession, I'm given to understand. This is also a widespread phenomenon.)

Bleah, she said as she tried to settle down and really focus on her manuscript.

Skipping around. (Newbery Reading Post I)

( 2000s )

( 1940s )

( 1930s )

Left my CEM at work two days in a row, as though I am resistant to working on it or something, which I'm actually not. So I'm going in early to snag it and get some good coffee shop work in before heading back in to the ILL office to Make the Books Go (tm). Good thing there's a coffee shop in the library next door. (Too bad the coffee/tea isn't so great.)

This weekend I'm going to do the practice pack for Europe. And clean all the things. And finish the copyedit. As I proclaimed at work: I no longer have time to procrastinate.

I bought a handful of things yesterday to make the trip go a little smoother. A new invisible shield for my iPod touch, frex--that was a revelation, as it basically looks like I got it a new screen. Oh, yeah, the old shield was scratched to heck! But it was a low-market brand. I'd forgotten the actual Invisible Shield (tm) brand was so good. I got one for my Kindle too, since I'm not willing to sacrifice it to my travel bag.

With the time I, ahem, freed up by leaving my CEM at work, I rewrote the beginning to Contract Book II. It's snappier. Not sure it's better. But I'm going to work under the assumption that it's better to get to this one piece of the conflict earlier, as it's a better motivation for, oh, everything that happens in the first third of the book, and it's better to introduce the characters properly, and. Yeah. The reasons I'm not convinced it's better? It's not as light. But I wasn't sure I was doing anything other than light at the beginning--light and funny, sure, but just light? Not so much a goal.

Okay, going to rescue my manuscript.

Per Steve Buchheit's brilliant recent realization, I went and nabbed all the Lang #color# Fairy Books from Project Gutenberg. There are helpfully formatted Kindle editions, even. I also nabbed all the Oscar Wilde and Grimm fairy stories there.

Per my last entry on the copy-edits: I stetted "only".

My cat Mordred ambushed me with a morning nap and I woke up with his feet pressed in my face--and my husband taking a picture.

I'm doing just about everything I can think of instead of working on this edit, which is stupid, so I'm forcing myself onward now. I'm not sure where the resistance is coming from, considering I have a policy of just flagging stuff I can't decide about, and moving on.

I have been sharply curtailing meat consumption--personally, but as I'm the main cook and shopper around the house, there, too. I just had a Quorn burger, to try that out. Not my fave. Their chicken nuggets are a thousand times tastier than "real" chicken nuggets, though. In any meat process where the final product is so far removed from the source, you have to imagine the vegetarian option stands a very decent chance of being tastier (as well as healthier--we all know it's healthier).

Anyway, the meat curtailing is partly environmental consideration, part health consideration, and also somewhat ethical/moral consideration. It's also a conundrum for me.

I was raised vegetarian through my teen years, and I don't think that was good for me, because it was my mother's choice and I didn't have the dedication to be prudent with my nutrition when she wasn't around (which, frankly, was a lot). I know I ate about 1300 calories a day in the 9th grade, because we did food diaries in health class, and my health teacher expressed (very brief) concern about the amount I ate. About 400-500 calories of my daily total would be urgently purchased ice-cream in the cafeteria because it was still vegetarian (I knew/believed meat would make me sick after so long off it) and I had to have something to supplement the meager salads I would pack. So not healthy. SO NOT HEALTHY.

So, I am choosing to go slowly and carefully with meat curtailment. I've spent a couple of years building healthier eating patterns (like anything I undertake, it goes in fits and starts), so it's really all part of the same project, when you look at it like that.

Well, that was good for like another few minutes of MS avoidance. I'm done, y'all. I'm done! Back to work.

Except: curtsied or curtseyed? Curtsied is preferred, but curtseyed is still correct, and looks closer to courtesy to me, which I find important. And looks older. With this book, I incline towards old-fashioned at times with my word choices and spellings, in spite of also picking some extremely modern phrasings. I realize this is not how others would do this, but it's my way of reconciling writing a Thoroughly Modern Fairy Tale in a Very Old Setting.

My only compunction against pulling all my curtseyeds back into the book is that it could be a stumbling block for a younger reader. "Curts - eyed." No. Having had the worst time with "curlicue" when I was younger--well, maybe it's a fear of "cur" words--I don't know.

As ever, thoughts welcome.

Copy-edited manuscript. Waiting in my door. Kinda stuck in there, clinging halfway up. Like Spider-Man.

It's so... real.

Awesomely, though? dancingwriter was my freelance proofer on this. Which I figured out sometime in the last ten minutes. I KNOW dancingwriter. Many of you know her. I AM MUCH LESS SCARED NOW. Not because I think she's gone easy on me or anything--just a quick glance through the work of my publisher's in-house copyeditor plus dancingwriter, AND my editor's Nth pass on top of those... Eep. It's a wonder I don't crumble up in a ball of grammar-doubt and vocabulary-fraught.

It's more real than cover art, in a way. I mean, cover art is all well and good, and that'll go on the book, and be the icon of the book, the symbol of it, but that's just it--it's the icon of it, the symbol of it. (I can't share my cover art yet, but it's beautiful, so, so, so beautiful, and I grow to love it more each day.) Whereas the copy edits make the book a thousand times more real in my mind. I (frequently) buy books based on their covers, yes, but I judge them for their copy editing.

I don't do insomnia, but about every three years or so, my body forgets this.

I wonder if this has to do with the lowest barometric pressure in recorded history or whatever hyperbole they were using earlier today ("Earlier, the agency said the storm's pressure was worse than that produced the Blizzard of 1978, the March 1993 "Storm of the Century" or the November 1975 storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter, memorialized in a song by Gordon Lightfoot."), or something else entirely.

In any event, my eyes can't de-sandpaper enough to consider doing something productive with this time, I don't think. I'm also yawning like crazy. The body is tired--the mind is definitely tired--so what gives? Dunno. Quite possibly the weather, though I also still have a lump of undigested dinner in my belly, in what seems to be the ongoing tummy upsets of fall 2010. Either way, am not a fan. Gaw.

Edited to add: Doesn't that news snippet I stole need a "which" or what?

Tell me, o friendslist, wherein all knowledge is contained...

Suggestions for fiction books appropriate for reading in Germany?

Let me splain what I mean before you suggest.

I have often had happy coincidences of reading during my travels, such that there are certain books that may not actually be as good as I think they are, except that I read them in the right place and at the right time.

I read Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor on a bus from Bath to Glastonbury. I do not generally like cozy mysteries, and I really don't like books that pretend to be a) sequels to Austen works or b) fiction about Austen, but I have loved that series to death because of that fortuitous start to the series. The setting was key, I think, as I was high off my first cream tea and my first trip abroad. (Also, the way Stephanie Barron manages to reinterpret Jane is intelligent, and 90% of the time does not make me snarl, but rather grin. Except for book 2. Book 2 was a lot of snarling.)

I read the first of Laurel K. Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, Kiss of Shadows, while visiting my friend Stephanie in LA. The book starts out on LA before moving to the fairy courts of the midwest, and the book is inextricably associated with sitting at a random food court in the Valley while Steph attended to her tutoring before we spent the day wandering around Santa Monica. The key was also in the sunshine, the 80 degree weather, and the fact that it was February and I was NOT in Michigan. Heaven. Loved the book and series long after I left Anita Blake behind, perhaps for the happy memories alone.

I read Byatt's Possession while on a train to Poitiers. Now, it would have been better to be on a train to Britanny--we didn't hit Brittany until the following week--but it still worked because before I finished the book, I ended up in an avenue of pollarded trees growing over the ruins of what purported to be Melusine's castle, next to an old church that sold "Melumiel" --Melusine honey. It could not have been more perfect. Even though there are like a dozen Melusine castles in the world.

And those are just the times where synergy has been created, more or less, happened by accident. Sure, I picked the books before I went on the trips, but I had no real idea how strong the connection was to France when I packed Possession for my French trip, and knew nothing about where Kiss of Shadows started out... Now, I've managed to force the issue a couple of times, too, and to great success--most notably, reading Wuthering Heights for the first time while spending five days in Haworth. It's like a wonderful fever dream to me now. I had tried--and failed--to read and enjoy Wuthering Heights no less than five times in my life before that trip (I even wrote a term paper on it without successfully completing the book, or doing even more than skimming it).

So, now I am heading off into parts unknown. I don't have a literary connection with Germany. (Ancestral? Yes. Historical? Yes. Literary? Only The Nibelungenlied and... Heidi--and that book is pro-Swiss, anti-German.) I have no idea what books to take. (I know I'm taking a lot more than I ever thought possible, though, thank you, Kindle!) I'm not too fussed about it, but I kind of feel like I'm overlooking something. Is there something out there that would be perfect, that would tie itself in to my experience and just take the whole thing to a new level? I mean, besides my Charlemagne bio I'm dragging along.

I'd say the same thing for Romania, but I have combed and recombed the Romania-based English literature of the world and know how little is out there and how little of it interest me, and besides--I wrote the book that fits with Romania for my brain. And if that doesn't work, I can read Kostova's The Historian finally. (I've been avoiding the Dracula stuff. My Romania is not about Dracula. Even though it is. (It's complicated! If my book had a Facebook page, it would indeed have the relationship status of "it's complicated with... Dracula!") Uhm. I've said too much.)

So.... fiction books about or redolent of Germany? Medieval or Roman eras, Renaissance at the latest? Anyone? Bueller? German analogues perfectly acceptable if you know a great fantasy series. And I'm deeply not picky about genre, at this point.

Here's hoping my friendslist is more well rounded than me. :)

Merlin, my writing cat, invented the art of sleeping under my halogen desk lamp. No, really, he'll tell you.



To the point where I had to make him his own special spot NEXT to my desk on a little four-drawer cabinet, because he had taken to such great sprawling I couldn't actually use my desk. He even has his own little gray faux-fur throw.

Today, his brother not only discovered the Spot of Great Warmth, but stole it. For like an hour.

And Merlin alternately paced over top of Arthur's head, stood watch, or tried to catch as much halogen heat as he could by huddling on the strip of desk next to Arthur's head. ANGST! CAT ANGST!



Merlin got down to disconsolately yowl a bit. Then Arthur moved, and Merlin was RIGHT THERE, OMG, are you out of my freaking spot yet? But Arthur was not out of the spot. Arthur was just preparing himself for a bath.

Merlin got back on the desk and tried to stare him down.

Arthur cleaned himself in his own good time, and finally left. Things to puke, places to pee.

Merlin flopped down immediately back in his spot, closed his eyes, and groaned contentedly. I'd take another picture, but it's nearly identical to pic 1 above.

...

Also, earlier today, I saw a squirrel acrobat: