misc. mutterings

[truepenny]

0 words written today.

On the other hand, I taught myself the ASL finger-spelling alphabet (with the help of the extremely nice site, ASL Fingerspelling), a thing I've wanted to do since my sister tried and failed to teach it to me when I was five or six.

Also got most of the way through the Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix. Will post thoughts on it when I've finished.

If you're curious about Diana Wynne Jones's Witch's Business (or, to use its original and infinitely preferable title, Wilkins' Tooth, grumble, grumble, stupid American publishers, grumble), just follow the bouncing cut-tag.

Wilkins' Tooth is a very early DWJ book, her first book for children. The plot is flimsy and rather incoherent, the villain entirely lacking in any motivation besides being, well, a villain and the adults in general cardboard plot devices, but the children are fully realized, quirky and funny in the best DWJ tradition. The gang of bullies have splendid language, disgusting without being in any way obscene. They use "disemboweled" as a free-roaming adjective; my favorite of their epithets is "curried vampires," which one couldn't quite get away with in casual conversation, but it's really tempting to try. It's a short book and a light one, but if you're a DWJ fan, you'll gulp it down as happily as I did.

Comments

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

If we ever meet, we can spell at one another!

Wilkin's Tooth

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

...was the first Diana Wynne Jones novel I ever read.
Yes, I suppose it doesn't bear up next to her later novels, which are fucking brilliant, but it's was memorable. (I don't recall the gang swearing by "curried vampires" though: I remember colours. "Purple this!" and "Orange that!")

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Which will be incredibly geeky, but also fun--which is a pretty good descriptor of most of the stuff I do anyway.

Re: Wilkin's Tooth

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Definitely not colors. Picking a sentence of Buster Knell's dialogue at random: "I got a much better degutted brains-in-gravy idea than that." The book doesn't say anywhere that it's been revised, so perhaps the colors are some other book? They aren't ringing any bells for me.

Re: Wilkin's Tooth

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

No - I checked the names. Silas, Buster Knell, a plot based on a pantomime/fairy story (won't say which one, for spoilers). But in the version I read, around 25 years ago, Buster Knell and his gang swore by purple, orange, green - etc.

It's possible that the version now out is Diana Wynne Jones's original idea - she uses something similiar to this in Witch Week - and her editor made her change the oaths to simple colours. (Also possible that Witch's Business is her original title.) That would explain why there's no indication that this is a revised edition. I run into her occasionally at cons and parties: if I remember, I'll ask next time.

Re: Wilkin's Tooth

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, huh. Weird. You're right; that smacks of editorial interference somewhere. I was actually thinking as I was reading that the intended audience, i.e., kids between 8 and 12, would absolutely LOVE that use of language. Perhaps that's what the publisher was complaining about. *g*