aamcnamara

I wrote 64 whole words today!

There are, as always, excellent reasons for this. One is that I showed off my political cartoons to 1crowdedhour at the library. Another is that I started reading Delany's About Writing this morning.

And then I read it on the bus to the library, and possibly missed my bus back from the library while reading it at the stop (I was reading! I'm not sure!), and read it on the alternative bus back toward home, and while walking home from said bus...

In summary, I think Samuel R. Delany is really, really awesome. I knew this already, and in fact had read several of the essays here contained before (in Jewel-Hinged Jaw), but even the short months since reading Jaw had given me a different perspective on those pieces, and they are surrounded in this by other essays and letters and interviews...

Delany makes me feel ignorant, unsophisticated, like I never read (anything, or anything good), and like I don't try hard enough. He consistently humbles me in every single way possible and some I didn't think were. Also, every time I read his essays or letters or interviews this one quote from DWJ's Year of the Griffin comes floating back to me--the one about Elda floating into breakfast with her mind feeling like a stack of umbrellas that have been opened, some of them inside out. My mind usually feels like that afterward.

So writing, even sixty-four words, feels like a major accomplishment. Instead of reading Delany's essays and going "I could never have that determination to the work, I may as well give up now" I took it and grabbed a prompt and wrote. Okay, two paragraphs (one a sentence of dialogue), but still! Not becoming completely discouraged! This is victory.

And then I stopped and wrote over three hundred words of analysis of possibly what those two paragraphs imply about the rest of the story. There is probably way more I could write down, and will. But in the meantime: sixty-four words! Hooray!

(The thing that is not a word is 'rimned', which I totally thought was a word until I figured out that I was conflating 'rimmed' and 'limned' into one portmanteau word that meant what I wanted it to. Now I think that 'rimned' should be a word. Intuitive? Votes?)

This might have to be enough for today.

Today which, among other things, was my first day at the library. Really I'm more of a rare books person, and they have me working in archives, which--okay, I can deal with that. (Although if you keep scrapbooks, or plan on donating your papers: please, make your (under- or un-paid) archivists happy. Organize things.) It's a pity that I don't get to play with the awesome rare books (full set of Audobon! huge manuscript of monk music from the 15th or 16th century!), but sometimes that's just life.

After I had spent sufficient hours digging through and organizing papers, I begged off--promising to return tomorrow--checked out Megan Whalen Turner's Queen of Attolia and King of Attolia (I didn't get them when I read them, and enough awesome people of my acquaintance love them that I was willing to try again; on evidence of Queen, which I have read again now, I was right to do so), and wandered down the pedestrian mall for a while before I went home.

Now I am talking simultaneously to far too many people for someone sitting at her computer in her living room, and I had better get some sleep so I don't completely fall over tomorrow, but--hey. I sat down and wrote a couple of pages, at least. That's something.

Other awesome thing: I also get to work in the bindery, where they use a tool called a bonefolder.

That needs to stand on its own, I think. Bonefolder.

Ideas for what a bonefolder should be are absolutely welcome in comments. I have a few already (tool to fold bones with, peculiar word for a grave, creepy creepy character in a children's book--or book for anyone, really--story that's a record of someone's life who's dead now), but I would love to hear more! (Also I can say what it is in this universe and what it's used for, but that's no fun.)

Dear Alena's sense of rhythm,

"Ginormosity" is not a word.

Love,
Alena's vocabulary