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Year-end License Plate Report

December 31, 2010 - View Single Entry

As noted, I did spot South Dakota at the very beginning of the month. Nothing after that, however -- except for all those Norwegian plates I saw on the other side of the Atlantic. So the final tally for 2010 is 45. Missing were, from east to west, West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Alaska.

North Dakota, Mississippi, and Alaska were all no-shows for the second year in a row. Hell, it's been at least 10 years since I saw North Dakota. Has hell frozen over yet?

Maybe 2011 will bring a Peace Garden State plate within my range of vision. If it does, maybe then I'll retire.

Malvina Winter Rider

December 27, 2010 - View Single Entry

We have been having Some Weather, like right now (6 p.m.) it's 24°F and the wind is barreling around corners like a runaway freight train. Ordinarily (whatever that is) I might be curled up inside with Travvy, Morgana, Hekate, and Sierra Nevada, but I'm looking after the puppyhorse and her Dales pony sidekick, so I'm out on the road shortly after 7 a.m. and again around 5 p.m., rain or shine.

Both rain and shine have been in short supply since the day before Christmas, when I brilliantly, presciently did my laundry. Take yesterday afternoon, for instance. The weather was getting worse and worse, and as it did consensus emerged via e-mail that writers' group wasn't going to happen last night. I, however, had to feed the ponies, so around 5 p.m. Travvy and I set out in the valiant Malvina Forester.

I'd barely got past the West Tisbury School, meaning I was less than a mile from home, before I started to think that this was a Really Bad Idea. Ahead of me looked like the view from the deck of the USS Enterprise as it goes into warp speed. Branches were down, the power lines were drooping low, low, low, and it took serious concentration to keep track of the right side of the road. Had I missed my turn for Buttonwood Farm Road? Where the hell was I going to turn around if I had? Turned out I hadn't, but a monster pickup with snowplow attached was blocking the entrance. After a very long 30 seconds or so, the driver got the idea that I wasn't going to crash through the snow barrier and he really did have to move. Fortunately nothing came along State Road while Malvina was waiting broadside to traffic headed up-island.

The single-lane dirt roads were mostly invisible under the snow. We took it on faith that the road was somewhere in the gap between the trees. The ponies got fed. Getting home wasn't as harrowing as the voyage out, but I sure was glad to get there.

This morning the snow had stopped, but the wind was just hitting its stride; Old County and State Roads were clear, but the side roads, including the one I live on, were up to four inches deep in slippery slushy snow. Once again we made it to the barn, and we made it home.

Malvina Forester is a total all-weather trooper. Uhura Mazda wouldn't have made it, any of it. All-wheel drive rocks.

Signs of Life

December 24, 2010 - View Single Entry

'Twas the night before Christmas and in the middle of my kitchen stood a drying rack draped with five pairs of jeans, one sweatshirt, and two undies that didn't quite dry on the line. Almost but not quite. For three days past the winter solstice this is good. A bright, breezy, just-above-freezing day before I ran out of underwear -- this is very good.

I did not see any clotheslines in Oslo. Would clothes dry outdoors with only six hours of daylight, even if the temperature stayed above freezing? I doubt it.

My sourdough starter was out on the counter doubling all day, and now I've put half of it to work. It'll spend the night raising batter for tomorrow's bread -- and the rolls I plan to take to Christmas dinner.

I'm horse-sitting through the 30th. No, I'm not entirely out of the horse biz. My charges are Coltrane the Dales pony and Contessa the mini -- Rhodry's nemesis the puppyhorse. When I showed up this morning, neither Coltrane nor Contessa was hanging around waiting for hay. This was unusual. I put some hay in the stall, some out in the pasture. No one came to get it. This was very unusual. Coltrane came up, checked it out, ate a mouthful, and returned to the far end of the pasture. No sign of Contessa. This was downright weird.

I put 1 and 1 and 1 together and finally caught on: Contessa was loose. Memo to Contessa: If you want to stay loose, you've got to train your accomplice better. With friends like him, who needs the FBI? Two stars in the Big Dipper point the way to the North Star. Coltrane points the way to Contessa.

Contessa was not too hard to catch, mainly because I remembered to fill my pocket with grain the first time around.

Her escape route was pretty clear: a section of the pasture that's fenced entirely with electric wire. If there was any charge in electric wire, my finger could not detect it. I closed the gate to that section and then, only then, let Contessa back into the pasture.

She was in the pasture when I showed up to feed supper. Score one for my side.

And I've got several weeks' worth of clean underwear. Bread is rising on the counter. Life is good.

Books

December 23, 2010 - View Single Entry

Not My Book: The Endnotes is on its way back to New York by UPS. The moon is waning, the year is on its last legs: are these omens enough to suggest that it's gone for good? Here's hoping. I overnighted the parcel, though it's unlikely that anyone will do anything with it in calendar 2010. A parcel in transit retains some connection to its place of origin. Once it's delivered to the mailroom of Publisher Who Should Know Better, it's demonstrably, irrevocably Not My Book.

I e-mailed the production editor that the parcel was en route, along with the tracking number. I seriously considered adding something along the lines of "If this book is pulled out of production, would you let me know? It would restore a little of my faith in U.S. corporate publishing." But I sat on my hands so my fingers could not type the words.

The things we don't say, and the reasons we don't say them. Conspiracy theories give satisfyingly convoluted explanations for why crap happens, but most crap happens because of the things we don't say, and the reasons we don't say them.

Good ol' Bismarck was, I believe, the one who observed that it is best not to watch laws or sausage being made. In my weekly newspaper days, I added "the news." Book publishing has to be as haphazard as the making of laws, sausage, and news, and it's true, the longer and deeper my acquaintance with "the trade," the less faith I have in the outcome. Once upon a time I was an avid reader. This has not been true for many years. I never decided to stop reading, it just happened. In 1996 I stopped writing the fantasy & science fiction column for Feminist Bookstore News. By the end of 1998 I'd gotten back into horses and started working on what became The Mud of the Place. There's a connection among all these things, but I don't want to examine it too closely or pin it down too precisely. My standard excuse for not reading much is "I read for a living."

As Dryden said in Lawrence of Arabia, "The man who tells lies merely conceals the truth. The man who tells half lies has forgotten where he put it."

So a couple of weeks ago I was hanging around Logan Airport waiting for Flight 630 to Reykjavik and the idea came upon me that it would be a good idea to buy a couple of books to read in transit. There was a bookstore handy (which is probably what gave me the idea), so I browsed. It had been a very long time since I browsed in a real-time bookstore, not looking for a particular title, just waiting for something interesting to catch my eye. The first interesting title was Vanessa & Virginia, by Susan Sellers. Aha, I thought: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, of course; this could be interesting. I bought it without realizing that it was a novel, even though it says "A Novel" on the cover.

The second was Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna. I admire Kingsolver, though it's been quite a while since I've read anything by her, and someone had mentioned The Lacuna recently.

I'd finished Vanessa & Virginia by the time I got back from Norway. I like it. It's beautifully written and, since it's told from Vanessa's point of view, the descriptions of painting are intriguing. I did find it a little thin -- there's a lot more to this story, I think.

I'm halfway through The Lacuna. Already I know it's a great book. I laugh out loud, I'm stunned into silence; I'm awed by the way the author turns landscape into image into metaphor. When I pulled it off the bookshop shelf, I didn't know what it was about, or that such real-life characters as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky play major roles in it. Or that one of Kingsolver's intentions was to explore the connection of art and politics.

Well. The astonishing incompetence of Not My Book was dragging me down to despair, but the magnificence of The Lacuna is providing an antidote of sorts. Human beings can spin the written word into multi-faceted worlds of light and shadow. I'd almost forgotten that.

Not My Book

December 20, 2010 - View Single Entry

Mired in a messy manuscript or butting heads with a cloddish writer, some editors console themselves by repeating a mantra: "It's not my book, not my book, not my book."

This works, up to a point. The job is completed, and within a few weeks you've forgotten all about it and its author. In the general scheme of a freelancer's life, one nasty job is not a big deal.

I'm currently working on the hands-down worst manuscript I've ever been assigned by a reputable publisher. I tried chanting to myself: Not my book, not my book . . . Didn't work. This book is so bad, it's appallingly bad, infuriatingly bad, demoralizingly bad. It's a 1,200-page biography of a minor figure in 20th-century U.S. journalism. Justice could have been done to this individual's life in 400 pages or so.

Why is this book so long? It's long because it's unfocused. The author doesn't know what story she wants to tell, and if you don't know what story you want to tell, you have no way of deciding what must be included and what can be left out. Some 180 of this book's 1,200 pages are endnotes, and the overwhelming majority of the notes cite primary sources: letters, telegrams, newspaper articles, and the like. The result is a long, very long, pastiche of quotes with no storyline holding them together.

What makes this frustrating is that some glimmers of story can be spotted in the pastiche: a decent book could be written from this material, I'm sure of it. This manuscript reads like a first sprawling draft -- which is why for the first few hundred pages I kept hoping that the production editor was going to call and say, "You're not going to believe this, but I accidentally sent you an unedited draft of the book. I'm so sorry!"

No such luck. So I slogged onward, through page after page of amateurish prose (no one ever says anything in this book; they bleat, confide, crow, cackle, and worse), and finally, around page 700 or so, my curiosity got the better of me. Why was this book so bad? Why was the publisher publishing it? I'd never heard of the author, so I Googled. Turns out her only previous book-length work was the letters of a Famous Person, which she edited. In effect this is her first book.

So where the hell was her editor?? The author might not realize just how bad this book is, but no way could the editor be that ignorant. Remember the emperor who went parading in his skivvies, convinced that he was garbed in opulent robes? The emperor's clothiers were unscrupulous, and his courtiers -- and most of his people -- were willing to be fooled. Editors at big publishing houses don't work in a vacuum. Other people have to know that this book isn't ready for prime time, but it's moving toward the limelight anyway.

Not knowing why, or who's in whose pocket, I couldn't say, "Guys, this book sucks, you know that?" But I couldn't say nothing either, so I did mention the lack of focus, the interminable length, and my feeling that the author hadn't really grappled with her subject. No response, but I didn't expect one.

The only encouraging sign is that I can't find any advance buzz about this book. That's unusual. I'm hoping it means it can still be pulled out of production and either overhauled or deep-sixed.

It's not my book, true, but I've wasted dozens of hours on it, and though I'm getting paid for those hours, I can't help wishing they'd been used to better effect.