– writing –
I reached the halfway point in typing out the manuscript of Land of Hills and Valleys last week (typing and editing-as-I-go, which makes it essentially a second draft). Which feels like a massive accomplishment after being set back almost the whole month of April by a nasty bout with influenza. I was in bed with a fever for a whole week, and pretty much devoid of energy for a couple weeks following, so I hardly touched Land of Hills and Valleys until almost the end of the month. Hopefully editing Part II will go rather more smoothly. I might share a snippet or two on my Facebook author page soon, so if you’re on Facebook, hop over and give the page a like if you don’t want to miss them!
One thing I am definitely doing in this novel is including chapter epigraphs. Epigraphs are awesome when well done (examples: Sayers’ Unnatural Death, Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Suzannah Rowntree’s Pendragon’s Heir, anything by Mary Stewart), and I’ve always wanted to try it myself. Picking out just the right ones is fun, if challenging—sometimes it’s pure delight at seeing a quotation “click” perfectly with the theme or events of a chapter; and other times it feels more like this passage from P.G. Wodehouse.
– reading –
I’ve done a lot of comfort reading, or I should perhaps say comfort re-reading, this spring; especially while sick. Among other things, I re-confirmed Saturday’s Child and Greensleeves as two of my favorite novels, and more recently revisited the first western by Eugene Rhodes that I ever read, Copper Streak Trail. For sheer entertainment by prose style, especially in dialogue, Rhodes is hard to beat. (I also deduce that Stevenson’s Kidnapped must have been a favorite book of his, since he used a quotation from it as an epigraph in Good Men and True, and some of the Scotch dialect terms of a character in Copper Streak Trail sound strongly familiar!)
I also finally got around to starting America Moved, a compilation of memoir writings by Booth Tarkington, after having had it on my bookshelf for about a year. The first half is reminiscences from his childhood and youth, up to the time his first book was published; and it’s fun to see how some scraps of his early experiences and memories later found their way into his books.) It’s also strangely comforting to find that a future two-time Pulitzer winner spent four years scribbling and struggling and collecting rejection letters and generally being considered a loafer and a failure by everyone outside his family before he finally had his first manuscript accepted, at the age of twenty-seven (and that only because his loyal sister marched into the McClure’s office and made sure an editor read it).
– listening –
Back around Christmastime, when listening to music on YouTube one evening, I stumbled across the the bluegrass group the Mark O’Connor Band. (You know how those YouTube browsing sessions go: you start out looking for a particular Christmas carol and wind up an hour later watching old talent show auditions, having covered opera, folk, and Broadway in between.) I love their sound in general, though just a handful of their songs are my favorites from their oeuvre: “Always Do,” “Coming Home,” the instrumental “Jerusalem Ridge”—and my absolute top favorite, the lyrical instrumental piece “Fiddler Going Home.” Hope they record another album sometime soon!
I’ve also been on a little Western soundtrack kick lately. From what I know of it I’ve never felt any desire to read or watch Lonesome Dove, but boy oh boy, I love the miniseries theme music by Basil Poledouris. The rich, sweeping melody could be the soundtrack to just about anything Western that you wanted it to be. Some other parts of the soundtrack are a little too jangly and twangy for my taste, but a few of my favorite tracks that feature the main theme are “Night Mares,” “The Leaving,” and “Captain Call’s Journey.”
– otherwise –
It is spring. I think I used to take spring rather for granted, until a few years when winter was a tough time for me and seemed to go on forever, so that when spring finally arrived it seemed like a miracle. These days, I revel in every bit of it: the hundred-and-one shades of soft green in the budding woods, the brilliant cheery yellow of daffodils and forsythia, the pink and white blossoming trees, the robins and the violets and the blue sky and even the spring rain showers.
As of right now, it’s a pretty chilly spring. All my nice warm-weather clothes have been hanging in the closet untouched for weeks, while I wear about three long-sleeve shirts I didn’t pack for the season over and over again. But even though I would very much welcome some milder temperatures, I’m not in any hurry to rush this season past to get to summer. No, not one bit.
image: Monfocus // pixabay
Leave a Reply