First four questions
Apr. 30th, 2005 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyAsk a question.
1. If you were a musical instument, which one would you be, and why?
The answer that immediately springs to mind is, of course, the piano. But I'm not sure that a piano is actually the musical instrument I'd be. It's just the one I can play. When I was a kid, I wanted to learn cello, and then wanted to learn French horn (both vetoed by my parents, and I ended up learning flute instead--NOT the same), which suggests that my soul resonates to the deeper-voiced instruments. Not quite as deep as the bassoon and the tuba, though, thanks just the same.
I think I'd be a cello. Deep-voiced (which I'm not, personally, although I am an alto), able to sing, a little awkward, not as flashy as the violin, but with staying power.
2. What's your favourite cat-wax?
I actually don't like cat-waxing as an image. It disturbs me. Cat-vacuuming, on the other hand, doesn't bother me at all. Go figure.
But to answer the actual question ... ego-surfing is good cat-vacuuming. The IMDb, Wikipedia, and Bartleby can chew up hours and look (sort of) like "research."
There's also The Language Construction Kit, The Calendar FAQ, Woodhouse's English-Greek Dictionary (and that's ancient Greek, not modern), The Kanji Site, the SCA's page about heraldry, HelpMeFind.com Roses (roses are beautiful, and they have the most AMAZING names), Etherington & Roberts' Dictionary of descriptive terminology in bookbinding and book-conservation, a variety of astronomy sites, an online annotated Tarot ... basically, Google and Google image search are the greatest cat vacuums a girl could ever have.
And there's always Panda Cam.
3. Favorite muppet, and why.
I LOVE THEM ALL!!!!!
No, really. I can't choose. Although I suppose I empathize most with Kermit.
4. How long do you typically take between books? Or to put it another way, when do you suspect you'll start work on the next one?
Um. I don't actually work on novels as discrete units. So there's Mélusine, whose page proofs I am ignoring even as I type this; Kekropia, which I just turned in; The Mirador (book 3), of which I have a complete draft that's going to need fairly extensive revisions because the backstory has done that sand dune thing and isn't where it was a year ago; Summerdown (book 4), of which I have about 50 pages and a LOT of questions. Then there's A Companion to Wolves (which my lovely and talented co-author![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala is waiting for me to finish editing and send back to her), The Emperor of the Elflands, which is about half finished but has developed gaping holes below the water-line of the plot, and I need to figure out how to patch them before we founder ... and a number of other projects, all in even more fragmentary states than that. (papersky, the Arthurian noir with Rossetti's wombat is still mulling, but I think we're going to get there eventually.) My writing life is like a fugue, with the different projects weaving in and out of each other.
The practical down-to-earth answer is that I'm going to deal with these page-proofs, revise the short story I've been working on, finish editing ACtW, and then either start rereading The Mirador to figure out what bits are going to need to be dismantled and rebuilt or plunge back into TEotE and try to get this plot thing thrashed out. Or, more likely, both. I'll probably take a few days off in between finishing the page proofs and picking up ACtW again, but also probably not as many days as I think I will. I don't do vacations very well.
My brain does need time to recharge, and I know that. But I'm very bad at being patient with it.
1. If you were a musical instument, which one would you be, and why?
The answer that immediately springs to mind is, of course, the piano. But I'm not sure that a piano is actually the musical instrument I'd be. It's just the one I can play. When I was a kid, I wanted to learn cello, and then wanted to learn French horn (both vetoed by my parents, and I ended up learning flute instead--NOT the same), which suggests that my soul resonates to the deeper-voiced instruments. Not quite as deep as the bassoon and the tuba, though, thanks just the same.
I think I'd be a cello. Deep-voiced (which I'm not, personally, although I am an alto), able to sing, a little awkward, not as flashy as the violin, but with staying power.
2. What's your favourite cat-wax?
I actually don't like cat-waxing as an image. It disturbs me. Cat-vacuuming, on the other hand, doesn't bother me at all. Go figure.
But to answer the actual question ... ego-surfing is good cat-vacuuming. The IMDb, Wikipedia, and Bartleby can chew up hours and look (sort of) like "research."
There's also The Language Construction Kit, The Calendar FAQ, Woodhouse's English-Greek Dictionary (and that's ancient Greek, not modern), The Kanji Site, the SCA's page about heraldry, HelpMeFind.com Roses (roses are beautiful, and they have the most AMAZING names), Etherington & Roberts' Dictionary of descriptive terminology in bookbinding and book-conservation, a variety of astronomy sites, an online annotated Tarot ... basically, Google and Google image search are the greatest cat vacuums a girl could ever have.
And there's always Panda Cam.
3. Favorite muppet, and why.
I LOVE THEM ALL!!!!!
No, really. I can't choose. Although I suppose I empathize most with Kermit.
4. How long do you typically take between books? Or to put it another way, when do you suspect you'll start work on the next one?
Um. I don't actually work on novels as discrete units. So there's Mélusine, whose page proofs I am ignoring even as I type this; Kekropia, which I just turned in; The Mirador (book 3), of which I have a complete draft that's going to need fairly extensive revisions because the backstory has done that sand dune thing and isn't where it was a year ago; Summerdown (book 4), of which I have about 50 pages and a LOT of questions. Then there's A Companion to Wolves (which my lovely and talented co-author
matociquala is waiting for me to finish editing and send back to her), The Emperor of the Elflands, which is about half finished but has developed gaping holes below the water-line of the plot, and I need to figure out how to patch them before we founder ... and a number of other projects, all in even more fragmentary states than that. (papersky, the Arthurian noir with Rossetti's wombat is still mulling, but I think we're going to get there eventually.) My writing life is like a fugue, with the different projects weaving in and out of each other.The practical down-to-earth answer is that I'm going to deal with these page-proofs, revise the short story I've been working on, finish editing ACtW, and then either start rereading The Mirador to figure out what bits are going to need to be dismantled and rebuilt or plunge back into TEotE and try to get this plot thing thrashed out. Or, more likely, both. I'll probably take a few days off in between finishing the page proofs and picking up ACtW again, but also probably not as many days as I think I will. I don't do vacations very well.
My brain does need time to recharge, and I know that. But I'm very bad at being patient with it.
