Moss of Ember
Nov. 15th, 2019 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ismoThe day started at 5 am again. That's just too darn early. If I wake up, and then I have a thought, that thought will drag all of its peers along with it until I'm swept away in a buffalo stampede of unwelcome ruminations. And I didn't do much of anything until it got light. Then I played the violin and went out for a walk, and when I came back, the waterproofers were in the basement. They fixed the leak and reconnected the washer and dryer--YESSS--but they didn't put the sink back or put the doors back up. SIGH. They say they'll be back next week. We went to the UU lunch gathering, which was held this time at the minister's house. She had ordered in some loaded baked potatoes, for which we paid ten bucks apiece. They were not as agreeable as I had hoped. It was a good idea, given that there are a lot of vegan and vegan-adjacent and gluten-intolerant people involved--but (and here's me being crochety) jeez louise, who pays TEN DOLLARS for a POTATO? I don't care how much extra crap it has sprinkled on top. I could buy 20 pounds of potatoes for that price. And almost everyone has a nubbin of cheese in the drawer from which you can grate a few cents' worth onto your spud. Plus it would taste better if actually freshly baked.
Honestly, it is hard to blog about the quotidian, because I've been smacked upside the head by a couple of things today. One was a blog post by somebody who was responding to a meme about the decade being about to end, and what have you accomplished in the last ten years. Holy crap. I'm not even going there, but I made a long list of most of the things that happened in my last ten years, and it wasn't a good idea to look back. It's not a list of accomplishments. It's more a list of things I had to let go, and different kinds of pain that I would happily have done without until the end of my days. To hell with improving my damn character. Of course, there are also aspects of life that I'm very grateful for, but they aren't my accomplishments, really--just my good fortune. This occupied more space in my brain than I wanted it to.
And the second thing I saw just tonight, this article in Slate about a writer, John M. Ford. His name was familiar to me, and maybe a couple of his pieces, but I knew nothing of his life until now. It kind of brought tears to my eyes because by the sound of it, he was the kind of writer I wanted to be--still do, really.
“He could have had a more successful career,” Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa’s husband and Tor’s editor in chief, said, “if he had been more disciplined about his writing” and stuck to one genre, or written a series. “But Mike wanted to write what he wanted to write.”
It's ironic that the person who shared the article on Facebook where I read it was one of my former editors, and he was always pointing out to me that I should try harder to write something that would be easier to sell. We don't admire the wild ones until they're safely dead, I guess. Apparently Tor has reached a settlement with Ford's heirs and will be reprinting his work soon. I really want to read it all, now. Especially after finally reading his award winning story poem, Winter Solstice, Camelot Station--originally written on a Christmas card to a friend. The part that made me tear up:
Now two men stand on the dirty snow,
The conductor waves a lantern and the train grinds on.
The ugly men start walking, the new arrival behind,
Singing "Wenceslas" off-key till the other says stop.
There are two horses waiting for them. Rather plain horses,
Considering. The men mount up.
By the roundhouse they pause,
And look at the locos, the water, the sand, and the coal,
They look for a long time at the turntable,
Until the one who is King says "It all seemed so simple, once,"
And the best knight in the world says "It is. We make it hard."
They ride on, toward Camelot by the service road.
Oh god yes. It's worth a lifetime to write one thing that deep, she said sadly, as the waning moon swam away into the clouds like the last boat to Avalon.
Honestly, it is hard to blog about the quotidian, because I've been smacked upside the head by a couple of things today. One was a blog post by somebody who was responding to a meme about the decade being about to end, and what have you accomplished in the last ten years. Holy crap. I'm not even going there, but I made a long list of most of the things that happened in my last ten years, and it wasn't a good idea to look back. It's not a list of accomplishments. It's more a list of things I had to let go, and different kinds of pain that I would happily have done without until the end of my days. To hell with improving my damn character. Of course, there are also aspects of life that I'm very grateful for, but they aren't my accomplishments, really--just my good fortune. This occupied more space in my brain than I wanted it to.
And the second thing I saw just tonight, this article in Slate about a writer, John M. Ford. His name was familiar to me, and maybe a couple of his pieces, but I knew nothing of his life until now. It kind of brought tears to my eyes because by the sound of it, he was the kind of writer I wanted to be--still do, really.
“He could have had a more successful career,” Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa’s husband and Tor’s editor in chief, said, “if he had been more disciplined about his writing” and stuck to one genre, or written a series. “But Mike wanted to write what he wanted to write.”
It's ironic that the person who shared the article on Facebook where I read it was one of my former editors, and he was always pointing out to me that I should try harder to write something that would be easier to sell. We don't admire the wild ones until they're safely dead, I guess. Apparently Tor has reached a settlement with Ford's heirs and will be reprinting his work soon. I really want to read it all, now. Especially after finally reading his award winning story poem, Winter Solstice, Camelot Station--originally written on a Christmas card to a friend. The part that made me tear up:
Now two men stand on the dirty snow,
The conductor waves a lantern and the train grinds on.
The ugly men start walking, the new arrival behind,
Singing "Wenceslas" off-key till the other says stop.
There are two horses waiting for them. Rather plain horses,
Considering. The men mount up.
By the roundhouse they pause,
And look at the locos, the water, the sand, and the coal,
They look for a long time at the turntable,
Until the one who is King says "It all seemed so simple, once,"
And the best knight in the world says "It is. We make it hard."
They ride on, toward Camelot by the service road.
Oh god yes. It's worth a lifetime to write one thing that deep, she said sadly, as the waning moon swam away into the clouds like the last boat to Avalon.
