This is the grossest self-indulgence

However, while waiting for Elise to come over for tea, I must, I must, I must post ten more first lines. I think I can stop then. I hope so.

"The mowing machine's whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood tall and thick and Pa was cutting it for hay." Laura Ingalls Wilder, THE LONG WINTER

"The room was dark." Emma Bull, BONE DANCE
(This is not how the book starts in my head. In my head, it starts "I came up on my back in the dirt." Thus the perils of reading works in progress.)

"Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt." Jane Austen, PERSUASION

"One night after dinner when David was reading *Doctor Doolittle in the Moon* and his father was reading the newspaper, and his mother was darning socks, his father suddenly exclaimed: 'Well, now, *that's* very odd!' " Eleanor Cameron, THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSHROOM PLANET

"The whale, the traitor; the note she left me and the run-in with the Post police; and how I felt about her and what she turned out to be -- all this you know." Raphael Carter, THE FORTUNATE FALL

"I divide the books Nero Wolfe reads into four grades: A, B, C, and D." Rex Stout, PLOT IT YOURSELF

"The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin." Vladimir Nabokov, PNIN

"Rosemary Brown picked a stick of rhubarb from the end of the garden, and taking care not to spill the sugar in the saucer she was carrying, bent herself double and crept between the currant bushes." Barbara Sleigh, THE KINGDOM OF CARBONEL

"She stayed long enough at the front door to listen to their footfalls die away along the graveled drive, as if she wanted to taste to the last morsel her furious disappointment and humiliation." Eleanor Cameron, A ROOM MADE OF WINDOWS

" 'Nothing ever happens to me.' " Mary Stewart, MY BROTHER MICHAEL

This is terrible, I apologize, I won't do it again, honest.

Pamela

What's in my head

Well, some of it. When I was typing in the first sentence of THE KINGDOM OF CARBONEL, I was very much startled to read ahead and find this as the next bit: "Then she sat down in the green cave made by the unpruned branches which met over her head. The ground was covered with coarse grass, and it made a very comfortable secret place."

If I saw a critic take this passage and point out that the Secret Country books have a whole magical order centered around some Green Caves, and are in multiple layers about secret places, I would probably shake my head derisively. And a lot of such connections would probably be spurious, for me or any author. But this one in fact isn't.

Elise came over for tea today. She was 45 minutes late, which was just as well, because at the designated time I would have been up, medicated, and dress, but with dripping hair and a consciousness in a very similar state. David came upstairs just as she had got her coat off and I had put the kettle on, and they had a conversation and scheduled some sessions to photograph jewellery.

She brought me a necklace called "Questionable Information from Rabbits," which, after I admired it some time ago, she had put away until I forgot about it, and brought out as a late birthday present. It's on white metal with glass and some plastic beads in quite an array of colors, some very candy-like and some subtle. It went very well with my thistle-colored shirt. I told her that "Alice, Long After," which is all in blues and silvers with some pale purple, also went well with the shirt, and she told me that of course they are part of a series.

She had some class projects to show us, in copper, and was full of schemes to make many things.

We had Earl Grey, provided by me, and "Pamela's" ginger-almond cookies, provided by her. I consulted her about a very knotty problem I have been chewing over and agitating myself about, and she took what she called "the hardass" approach, on the grounds that that might be the one I had most trouble adopting, and it was useful for showing the range of options.

She had to rush off to an appointment; luckily we had looked at the bus schedule in plenty of time to determine that it would take longer than she had thought to get where she needed to be. I hope she was not too late.

I shovelled the front walks again after she was gone, and then I went upstairs and broke the toilet. Well, it happened to break when I flushed it. The plastic rod connecting the handle to the top of the stopper broke clean off. But that is a problem for another day. It can be flushed by lifting the stopper manually, at the cost of a little splashing.

I am still reading VAST and glaring at my book. I have a date with Eric. It's excellent to be getting to have mid-week dates. During the Semester From Hell that was very seldom possible.

I need to get back into the habit of walking daily. I got disgusted with the cold weather and quit, and once it warmed up, there was snow to shovel.

Pamela

Just a note

I'm having a lot of difficulty with Live Journal at the moment. I'll get "Connection closed by remote server" two or three times and then often a failure to achieve a data lock, or something like that. With a journal entry I will persevere, but sometimes with a comment I won't. I'm hoping it will clear up soon. In the meantime, I will discourse briefly on A ROOM MADE Of WINDOWS. It was only the second book I had encountered about a young girl who wanted to be a writer, and who in fact was writing. The first, of course, was LITTLE WOMEN. I got to Alcott so young, I am not sure if Jo really was like me or if I, being malleable, made myself as like her as I could. Julia, in ROOM, is not like me, except in the furious determination of writing. I loved that book passionately and still reread it with immense attention, interest, and discovery.

Pamela