Three things are all I can scramble up

[pameladean]

If I had felt able to go to Philadelphia this spring, I'd have already been to the Flower show. However, if you are there anyway or it's handy to you, do contemplate this amazing production:

http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/589704.html?nc=43

Twelfth Night is among the most malleable of Shakespeare's plays in terms of setting, and while I'd back away slowly from steampunk renderings of some of them, I think this one will work gorgeously.





I am not participating in any panels at Minicon this year, which is a mercy, because whenever I do, they are scheduled against mrissa's reading and I miss the reading. I am also doing a reading myself, fortunately not scheduled against hers. It's at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday afternoon. I haven't actually figured out what to read yet. I suppose it will be something from the Amazing Expanding and Shrinking novel. I've already read most of the non-spoilerish pieces from it, but I can probably either read a piece that's been cut, or read some new material that hasn't been cut YET. That should give things an air!





Despite the unseasonably warm temperatures, plants are behaving cautiously. I surmise that they do so because it's so dry. The Minnesota River may be brimming over to the point where it looks as if a not unreasonable amount of additional water would allow it to swallow the interstate, but nothing has fallen from the sky for much too long, and we are three inches under our proper yearly precipitation.

Even so, I have purple, gold, and pale-yellow crocuses. The rabbit population must have crashed, but not before they completely did in my longest-lived tulips, the red ones on the south side of the house that always bloomed weeks before any others. I will have to get some more. There are tiny green leaf-buds on the mock orange in front, and winter aconite is coming up, though it doesn't show any disposition to actually bloom yet. The scilla appeared suddenly, as it is wont to do, and its buds are showing blue already. In sunny spots in other people's yard, it's blooming already. The south-facing peony has sent up red shoots, and so, alas, has the Japanese knotweed. I wonder if we'll manage to eat the knotweed shoots this year. Not that this would discourage the plants in the slightest.

Eric and I have had a couple of useful working sessions where he ruthlessly dug up unwanted saplings while I raked the lawn, raked a winter's and more worth of sunflower-seed hulls into piles, and removed a startling array of gardening implements from the raised beds: tattered Walls o' Water, various plant supports, little trays of gravel, and ancient decaying plastic bags whose leaves went to compost long ago. All this wreckage can be laid at the feet of the Amazing Etc. Novel. This year, however, there will be a garden. I just have to dig out the volunteer phlox and dame's rocket and put it somewhere else.





All right, a fourth thing. I have quit sulking and resumed work on the novel. Chapter 13 is a finicky annoying patchwork job, assimilating parts of three original chapters widely separated in the original timeline of the book, so that maintaining continuity is a minor nightmare. I hope to have it done by Minicon, and I think, if I'm lucky, I should then be able to slay a number of chapters wholesale. The book will still be too long, but I'll worry about that later.

I hope you are enjoying your spring or fall, whichever it is for you at the moment.

Pamela

Comments

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Oooooooh, shiny (steampunk Shakespeare) -- I will have to go.

Unrelated, I posted a link to pictures of peep craziness earlier today -- I think you and your mother would both like them.

[pameladean]

Oh, good! I hope you'll feel like doing a detailed report!

Will check out the peep craziness. I believe my mother is aging her peeps even as I type. (She only likes eating the stale ones.)

P.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Some of my pansies have overwintered under the mulched leaves. In pulling the leaves back to plant peas, I found them! I'm quite overexcited about it.

We got rather a lot of rain last week, but we're dry again now. It's deliciously warm today, but it feels like it will crash down to be cold again soon. Ah, spring, so tricksy.

[pameladean]

Pansies can be so obliging, as long as it's not too hot. Even then, they just disappear quietly and reappear with no fanfare when the weather is civilized again.

I think today is the warmest day we have had so far, or will be later. It's not natural for March and it worries me, but I'm enjoying being able to do my yard work at a leisurely pace instead of waiting and waiting and waiting and then having to do everything in a single weekend.

P.

[raphaela.livejournal.com]

I thought of you today. I visited a library near my office, and looked for your work. What a sad library, with no Pamela Dean. Granted, they also had no Charles DeLint, and no Terry Pratchett, but doubles of some other authors I won't mention in the same breath (who are, undoubtedly, good people, and very well liked.) I considered sharing one of mine with them, but am Gollumesque when it comes to my hardbacks.

[pameladean]

Libraries aren't necessarily pleased by random donations, either; sometimes it upsets their process, or they don't have books because nobody wants them in the first place; they may have culled mine already.

I am quite resigned to my fate there if they don't have any de Lint either. Usually he's there and I'm not. 8-)

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am not participating in any panels at Minicon this year, which is a mercy, because whenever I do, they are scheduled against mrissa's reading and I miss the reading.

Oh. Well, honey. Oh.

[pameladean]

I'll sit in the back and be very quiet, honest!

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh no, don't do that! Then I'll think the funny bits don't work and I'll have to go home and rework them.

No, I just thought that not having you on any panels was a high price to pay. I'll just corner you and make you tell me something you think about books, is what.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I have me some petrified peeps from 2006, or possibly 2005, on my office bookshelf, in front of a metric buttload of books about Yorkist-era England.

Edited to add:

[pameladean]

*snork*

It looks as if they are all doing a presentation involving a case of peeps -- maybe the peeps are about to be handed out as awards in some inconceivable ceremony.

P.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yay for writing!

[pameladean]

I'll be glad to get to the actual writing. This is more like doing a jigsaw puzzle -- never one of my talents.

P.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Yay on getting back to the book, even if it is jigsawing right now instead of writing per se.

[orcaarrow.livejournal.com]

I am looking forward to the novel. I truly appreciate you letting us in on your process. I know it can not be easy for you.

[eub.livejournal.com]

I wonder if we'll manage to eat the knotweed shoots this year.

I just was fed knotweed for the first time, roasted, and it was delicious! But I will not plant any in our yard.

[lcohen]

i have learned that i will be in chicago during the time when you will be giving a reading at wiscon, so i will miss that :( . i am arriving on thursday, leaving sat morning, returning sat evening too late to get to the GoH speeches, leaving on monday, not too early. so i need to find a time to catch up with you.....