Season of mice and mellow fruitfulness

[pameladean]

I was going to post yesterday that Arwen had caught the first mouse of the season. Being emphatically Lydy's cat, she brought it, not quite dead, to Lydy. But I did not post, and this morning, running up the basement stairs after moving the laundry along, I thought, "My goodness, that dead leaf sure does look a lot like a mouse; the stem is the tail, and... oh." Very small, very dead mouse. I removed it to the outdoors. I hope none of them gets upstairs, as Ari is very good at incapacitating them but even worse at delivering a clean killing blow than Arwen. We do not know who did in the one on the stairs, but I suspect Naomi, because Ari was upstairs for a considerable period before I found the mouse. Jordan is a very good mouse watcher, but is primarily a theoretician and seldom, if ever, catches any.

I don't know where they are getting in.

I'm hoping to do a series of posts talking about things I'd have written about at the time if Zeno's Manuscript had not eaten my brain. Soonish.

Pamela

Comments

[pameladean]

Con was given that name for three reasons. One was that I wanted it to be clear that people in the Dubious Hills didn't regard gender when giving names -- her actual name is Conrad, which is also a connection to the Secret Country. I am not sure, in the event, that this actually made it into the book. Much of my cogitation never does.

The second reason, converging on this one, is that there's a character about Con's age in Madeleine L'Engle's A Winter's Love. She is named Emily Conrad Bowen, after her mother, whose maiden name is Emily Conrad, but she is always called Con or Connie, presumably to avoid confusion. Her personality is a more realistic version of Con's; I think of Con as the way little Emily Conrad Bowen might have been if she'd grown up in the Dubious Hills with magic rather than in a more or less realistic venue.

The third reason is a character is Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree, who is a young man named Con. I forget what that's short for, but he's rather dangerous, and I wanted that reminder when I was writing Con.

P.

[aedifica]

I'm pretty sure Con being Conrad didn't make it to the published version of the book. It's a neat detail to know now, though.