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InvitationsOctober 30, 2010 It's been an interesting week in Lake Wobegon, to paraphrase a contemporary sage. Monday morning started off in the usual OK but not unusually interesting manner. The sun doesn't come up till after 7 these days, so by the time Trav and I go out for our long a.m. walk it's usually close to 7:30. When we got back, I woke up Morgana and Hekate (desktop and laptop, respectively), then put the kettle on for tea and the double-boiler sleeve for oatmeal. By then Morgana and Hekate were wide awake. I can tell by the twinkly Microsoft tune that each one plays. (Morgana's speakers used to be turned off all the time. I don't really like to hear computers beeping and singing at me. YouTube and Pandora changed that. Now the default setting is On.) I sat down on my desk chair, rested Hekate's lap desk (the cheapest version from Levenger -- one of the handiest things I've bought in the last 10 years) on my lap, and downloaded e-mail. Amid the newspaper digests (which I barely glance at), New! Exciting! Act Now! offers from several online retailers, and a dozen or so posts to Copyediting-L was this subject line: invitation to come to Oslo and work on K's book project Well, I knew what that was about but that's a long way from saying I believed what I was reading. K is a Norwegian academic. I edited a English-language academic paper for her. This worked out well. She has a book due out soon in Norwegian; she wants to produce an English-language version that can be published in Britain or the U.S. Last winter we discussed this in "somewhere down the road" terms: L, USian by birth and Norwegian by marriage and long residence, will do the translation and I'll do the editing. (A couple of years ago I edited L's book, Writing for Scholars. We had a ball working on it and everyone was happy with the result.) I assumed we'd do K's book the way we did the earlier projects: by e-mail. With invitation to come to Oslo and work on K's book project my assumptions went out the window. My first thought was, Sh*t, my passport expired in 1979. My second was, I haven't been out of the country since 1975, unless you count a trip to Toronto in 1992. My third was, How the fook does one go about getting a passport on Martha's Vineyard? At this point I realized I was in problem-solving mode. In other words, I was going to accept the invitation. By the end of the week I'd had passport pictures taken at Mosher's, the photo shop in Vineyard Haven; filled out the passport application on the State Department's website; and taken photos, application, and my birth certificate down to the West Tisbury library, where Colleen the librarian doubles as a passport agent. With luck I'll have my passport before I'm due to leave. Current plan is for me to arrive in Oslo on 8 December. K, L, and I will work intensively on the book from the 9th to the 11th, then L will show me a little bit of Oslo before she has to get back to work and I have to come home, probably on the 13th or 14th. Trav will probably have to go to Animal Health Care, which is a kennel and grooming establishment as well as a veterinary practice. Rhodry never spent a night in a kennel, unless you count the two nights, one in his first year and the other in what turned out to be his last, that he spent in the pound. There was always someone who could look after him when I went away. At the moment I don't know anyone who has both the savvy and the facilities to look after Mr. T. That's the downside, but mostly invitation to come to Oslo is a huge gift from the universe. For the last year or so, I've been pretty much sleepwalking through my life. Mud of the Place went nowhere, my essay in Trivia 10 went nowhere; I'm having a harder and harder time persuading myself that writing is worth doing or that any of the writing I've ever done was worth the effort I put into it. Pretty much the only interesting thing in my life these days is Travvy. Dog training is interesting and challenging, but even in my most self-delusional moments I can't convince myself that it's my reason for being on the planet. invitation to come to Oslo didn't happen in isolation either. A couple of weeks ago I got another e-mail, asking me to be on the fantasy/science fiction jury for a literary award program. For many years I've had major reservations about this program in general, and its f/sf award in particular was a standing joke in the f/sf circles I frequented. The new award administrator, however, was someone whose name I knew and respected from the old days, so over the next few days I asked questions: How are nominees chosen? Can the jurors consider worthy books even if they haven't been nominated by their publishers or authors? Do the jurors get to discuss what they're reading, or is this a "read in isolation and then vote" thing? The answers were all promising. I decided that I really should be reading something other than dog-training books. The more I don't read, the harder it is to convince myself that writing is worthwhile. So this week I said I'd do it.
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