The Dragonfly Workshop

two posts in a day ... wow

2012-01-01T19:17:00.000-08:00

I have just gone through the About Me etc pages at the top of this blog and halfheartedly cut them. I feel deeply ambiguous about their existence. And then there's the fact that this blog contains bits of me from the last four years, in which, as one does when one goes from sixteen to twenty, I've changed.

So this isn't meant to be especially introspective about this fact or anything, but when I said a moment ago that my neglect of this blog is indicative mainly of less time spent on the computer, that's true. Actually, basically that sums it up. But the person who used to write this blog is the person who spent most of her time on the internet, and it's probably not as if I've lost the tint of narcissism necessary to blog about one's life (I'm not self-aware enough to know that) but I feel like it's time to come clean.

I don't want to be done blogging. Coming off four and a half very strange months, I'm aware I've probably disconnected too fully from the things that used to make up my life.

At the same time, I can't see myself reimmersing.

What prompted this was reading through the page I'd written about myself and realizing that in it I set aside distinct sections for various aspects of the media I enjoy and the books I have written, without saying much about who I actually am. It's perfectly possible, granted, that these things did make up my life and some continue to -- I still love many of the books on my list of favorites.

The point is, I'm not directed in the direction I must have been when I listed my favorite TV shows. (I have cut that section, not because I dislike them now, but because they're not part of my life.) I kept the bit of my links page listing blogs I allegedly read, with the caveat that with the exception of John Green's I check them every couple of weeks rather than every day.

I don't know if I felt I owed the internet an explanation or something, but there it is. I don't blog much.

Also my camera doesn't function so the space that used to be taken up by pictures is now taken up with, well, nothing.

Happy 2012!

2012-01-01T18:50:00.000-08:00

I did not, in fact, stay up till midnight. I was pedestrian and went to bed before 9.

On the whole, I am glad it is 2012 and not 2011 any longer. Here is to a better year!

On another note, as of last month I have had this blog for four years. If I post less, it's mainly because I spend less time on the computer doing anything other than working on the thesis that never ends.

(it will end. It will end in about four months. This is much more concerning than neverendingness. I am going to go write chapter two.)

The merits of being a senior at Whitman College: homework over all your breaks.

work work work

2011-12-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone reads the blog anymore, I still sometimes feel the need to update.

So Whitman doesn't really give its seniors much of a Christmas break, even less so when said seniors are doing honors theses.

I've spent much of the break reading a, uh, riveting volume called Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. I'm four a five chapters through it but I've got to take an essay exam of some sort on it at the end of January and as a result ... I have to drag myself to write little summary bits in the margin of every paragraph in hopes of being able to outline the thing so I can study.

And then of course there's the thesis.

I've spent much of the morning editing the first chapter. Currently I think I have 32 pages total: an 11-page introduction plus historiography, and a 21-page chapter. I'm hoping to get a decent start on chapter two in the rest of the break. Since I have four chapters left they can't possibly all be as long as the first, but I'll work it out somehow. I'm guessing 15 or so for the remaining four, which would make sixty, which would make the thesis a bit over ninety pages. Just about right.

Finally, we are tearing our house apart and my father gave himself a mustache for a mercifully short portion of yesterday afternoon.

Snow!

2011-12-12T08:49:00.000-08:00

We've had snow and freezing fog this weekend. Cassandra, Eleanor, and I just signed a lease on a house for next year (June 2012-May 2013) and I took these pictures outside our current house on the way to do so. It's just been so beautiful.

Winning

2011-11-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

My internet stopped working last night so I was unable to report, but I hit 50,000 words around eight o' clock!

50,861, to be exact. That's in sixteen days. Tsk tsk. The novel's not finished but it's on its way. Hoo-ray!

NaNoWriMo 2011

2011-11-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

I have been sick for a week. I'm getting better, but mornings still feel pretty icky and I'm behind on homework.

But I'm still doing NaNoWriMo.

In 2008, I won in four days. In 2009 and 2010, it took me seven. This year, it's day nine and I'm halfway through.

Funny.

I can't decide how I feel about it, because once upon a time I might have thought that taking more time would make it a better novel, but past experience has shown me that the way I write just happens all at once, and if it's coming slow, maybe it's not as inspired.

Hmm. That said, I guess I'm enjoying it. I've been doing 2-3 thousand words a day, generally. There just aren't enough hours for more. I have Latin homework, two essays, and a thesis. I should start researching for my orals soon, but I haven't. Life, as I know it, is busier and more complicated than it's been before, even though I guess technically I have less homework.

My hair . . . month 20

2011-10-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

If my hair were a child, it would be talking.

Ladies and gentlemen, in lieu of another post in which I promise to blog more frequently and promptly fail, I instead would like to share my walking-and-talking hair.

No, I'm not living in a shadow world; merely, my bathroom is so radically yellow that if I put up the original picture, which looked like this

It would be mightily hard on the eyes.

In the ongoing vein of excuses for poor pictures, the below is blurry, because the camera battery was about to give out so I went with what I got.

The dress, incidentally, is one I made over the break. I keep hearing it's "rennaissance-y," which I suppose I just about asked for.

Love,
Brynne

Catching up

2011-10-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

So much has happened in the last month and a half it's difficult to get back into blogging, which is likely why I posted exactly one time in the month of September. Given that I've had this blog for four years and have posted at least once in every month since December 2007, it maybe is surprising I didn't have a dry a spell as that before.

Fall break is next weekend. I've been really bad about taking pictures, but I'm going to make an effort to be better about it in the coming months. (It would help if my camera didn't reject reading a memory card 50% of the time and had a battery that lasted longer than five minutes.)

I have pictures of one event, which was the end of September when Eleanor and I started to paint our house sign. We haven't finished it yet; it's still sitting on our kitchen floor. But here it is in progress:

Ultimately it will say THE WHIRL in large white letters but the coat had to dry 48 hours and we haven't had time to finish it since then. Don't worry, we will!

...and what I want most right now....

2011-09-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

A month. It's been nearly a month since I last posted. Gracious.

It's been a rough month in a lot of ways but a few updatable facts on my life:

I LOVE LATIN. Love love love. Though the way we're learning it is, as my professor says, like drinking from a fire hose, I am keeping up and enjoying it enormously. In fact, after I write this post I will be off to write a prose composition in Latin and then learn six ways to conjugate the third and fourth conjugations, which is the sort of mechanical thing hated by most of the universe and enjoyed by me.
My thesis proposal goes to the department on Friday. Right now I am waiting on my advisor to send back more edits. Nervous nervous nervous.
Creative writing is fun; though I'm not sure how much I'm getting out of the learn-to-write bits of it, it's nice to have an excuse to write an entire short story every week.
Living off campus with Eleanor and Cassandra is wonderful.

Last but not least:

As per the norm on this particular workshop blog, what I want most in the whole world right now is four yards of some pretty fabric and my sewing machine, because yesterday in class I plotted a pattern for a winter dress in my notebook, and I want to make it.

So if someone has a teleporter, four yards of fabric, and a sewing machine, send them my way.

Thank you.

the Whirl

2011-08-22T09:11:00.001-07:00

Despite everything yesterday, I have still come to Walla Walla and am sitting in my Whirl-house with Eleanor. Iti going to be ok. :)

goodbyes

2011-08-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

Grampa Woodbury died this morning.

I'll miss him.

Getting ready

2011-08-12T12:32:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that in nine days I am moving into a house.

As a matter of fact, I have been well aware of this and counting down for approximately the past week.

Two weeks.

Month.

Whatever. Anyway, I am moving into a house, and my friends and I have exchanged a flurry of emails and ideas for things to buy and when to go (Eleanor and I the 21st; Cassandra the 25th) and meanwhile I have been sewing sewing sewing sewing.

Maybe I have gone a little overboard.

I have taken some of the things I have made - like oven mitts - up to the house already. The Whirl. Its name is The Whirl. And at our Whirl we will have:

A bag lady, of course. You hang her on a wall and stuff plastic bags up her skirt, which has elastic around the hem to keep them in. She is lovely and cheerful. The skirt (which is either synthetic or satin or some combination thereof) is made of fabric which actually came in the house. It looked ugly in the place I found it but attached to our bag lady it is beautiful.

She might not be all that necessary, however, because I have also made us reusable grocery bags.

Four of them, of my brother's blue jeans plus fabric left over from various other projects. (The blue-with-white sprigs my grandmother might recognize as a birthday present - I used the better part of it in a dress but there was still enough left over to make shopping pretty!) :)

This is one of my favorite, if least useful, things I have made: Coasters. Embroidered Hobbit-themed coasters.

"Far over the Misty Mountains cold..." says one; the other, "Never laugh at live dragons!"

This is the one I like best:

"Tea is at four ... but you are welcome at any time."

Somewhat more directly useful: hotpads. I actually have four, as well as two oven mitts, but the rest are already at the house. It's just these two that are still hanging out here.

This is more frivolity ... Eleanor and I have been going to greater and greater lengths to poke fun at our inside jokes, and a tablecloth covered in watermelons is a direct result of our silliness. But! A tablecloth!

And these are curtains for my bedroom windows, because the current ones are made of the same fabric as the bag lady's skirt - which looks absolutely awful with light behind it. I hope these will be better.

I am sure that in the next nine days more projects will come to light, because I can't not sew! but in the meantime, I have at least one more assigned project that must be complete before I go back, and I will tackle that before I take on prettifying my house any more. :)

break 'em

2011-08-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

I am sitting at the kitchen table drinking English breakfast tea, about to eat a fried egg on toast. I have nothing of note to blog about, but that is ok. I never used to and I blogged anyway. :)

So instead I will just say silly things. Like, in The Hobbit, at the end of the Unexpected Party - just before they're off to bed, Thorin says to Bilbo: he wants six eggs with his ham, "Fried, not poached, and mind you don't break 'em."

Aside from the mental image of a dwarf eating six runny-yolked eggs with his ham, which is a little bit horrifying, I always had difficulty figuring out what he meant. I got fried eggs and poached eggs as two different kinds of eggs, but I struggled with the parting shot: How do you cook an egg without breaking it? Unless you boil it, I felt, you had to crack the shell.

Those of you who have made fried eggs are laughing now because it is obvious. When you fry an egg you try not to break the yolk (or I do, anyway - maybe some people like it broken, although then it sort of just becomes a cheeseless omelet).

Well. This mystery solved, I will return to my eggs, toast, and tea, a proper hobbit. I have eight and a half hours straight of babysitting today so, you understand, I need to be well-fortified.

One day later:

2011-08-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

I was twenty yesterday. In the true spirit of this sewing-and-hair blog I bring the first pictures of me at 20 to you in the form of Look How Long My Hair Has Grown:

In truth I had a better excuse than just laziness for not blogging at all in a week; Eleanor was here.

And I am sewing: I have several projects in the works. More on that later!

scrunchies and buns

2011-07-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

All Brynne ever blogs about is sewing and hair. I know, I know. But I don't want to spoil the new Harry Potter film for those who haven't seen it, and no one wants more Cat Stevens birthday announcements (it was yesterday). So!

Yesterday I rearranged my room entirely and made my desk into a sewing table.

(Cleverly hidden under the white curtain is my mass of fabrics and yarns, which take up surprisingly little space - I use them, you see, and I limit my acquisition.)

I really like it, and the cat does does too...

But it has driven me to sew some more. My hair is getting longer and longer - it's mid-back - and I've been doing a lot of buns, using stretched-out scrunchies probably purchased by my mother in 1995. They're a little bit pathetic, many of them, and I decided it was time to replenish our stock.

I still haven't got it quite right; my elastic isn't stretchy enough for my very, very, very, very, very thick hair. So they're a little tight for buns, but they are great for ponytails and the ends of braids. Even though scrunchies haven't been "in" since the '90s, they're a lot better for my hair than those little elastics - maybe it's just the curliness, but they always always get caught in my hair.

But while I was poking around on the internet for how-tos regarding scrunchie-making (I didn't end up using any one; I took my favorite aspects and experimented with a bunch of different ways), I came across this blog tutorial on sewing bun-makers:

http://www.ikatbag.com/2009/06/operation-summer-hair-rescue-part-2-how.html

Basically they are a piece of fabric with flexible wire around the perimeter and a slit in the middle. I didn't use her directions exactly, either, because (see very, very, very thick hair) the hole in the middle of the bun-maker was about half the size I needed it to be. I made three for me and two for my mother.

There's this nice site by a cheesy company that makes them that has tutorial videos. So armed with this knowledge I managed to put my hair in a nice double bun using two of the things. And, shockingly, it's about as easy as the instructionals make it seem - even if I don't have shiny, straight hair like the lady in the video, my hair is exactly the right length for this.

It looks a lot fancier than it is. So easy. Before I made them I hunted around the internet and found a bunch of blog posts complaining about how the bun-makers don't work, but I think it's a lot easier if you see a demonstration. I just did it for Mum. Because I have so much curl, I think I have too much hair to easily do a single bun, but with hers the hair-toy was actually a little too big. But that's good - it means it'll still work as it gets longer.

Yay for that experiment.

On the Hogwarts Express

2011-07-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

Thursday I am hopping the bus to Portland to see the last Harry Potter movie with my friend Emma! I have made a costume. For your amusement here are some pictures. I don't have a full-length mirror so bear with the classy towels in the background ...:

I kept trying to get the skirt but the mirror was too high. It's made from a fairly heavy fabric - denim-ish, though light for denim - and it's charcoal gray. I made it this afternoon. Pleated, an inch or two above the knee, with a narrow black velvet ribbon around the top. The shirt is just a white shirt.

The cloak! I also made it myself, from scratch. Well. I made use of an old Halloween costume that was a rectangle of fabric with a hole cut in the middle; this has rather more flair, as I pleated it at the top to create a hood/collar and attached a black velvet tie.

Another attempt at a more comprehensive picture. As you can see, the cloak hangs asymmetrically.

Finally, a fuller shot. As you can see, I am a Ravenclaw. I'm going to attempt to make a badge tomorrow.

I've never been to a midnight showing before, nor dressed up for a movie. Sort of exciting.

Sheltering Branch 2011

2011-07-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

Friends, friends.

I know you know we know I have been to many iterations of Sheltering Branch Bahá'í School.

But this was the best ever.

We had a lot of really great things.

We had Red Grammer. Do not be confused, people: it's great that he is a kind of Bahá'í celebrity and all, but that's not why it was so awesome he was there. It was awesome because he is the nicest person I have ever met. Like, think Mr. Rogers. Times twelve. Here he is with my mother:

Quite apart from Red, the music (of all kinds) was amazing.

The variety of times and places in which Taran was spotted reading was pretty amazing.

The scenery was amazing.

The friends were amazing.

The family was amazing.

Rarely have I been this displeased on the last day that it was time to leave, but rarely have I felt this good the day after returning home. I don't feel drained by grueling encounters with the outside world; now I mostly just feel like I have better tools for dealing with it. Yay. :) A good week.

heading out

2011-07-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

Today is the day, my friends, that we leave for Sheltering Branch.

I don't know if I linked to it lately, but I update my writing blog once a week, so you're missing out on, like, everything of value I have to say.

Like that I wrote another novel last week ....

So anyway, read that in my absence and pretend you miss me. :)

Soon soon soon!

2011-06-29T18:08:00.000-07:00

So Sheltering Branch is Saturday.

How on earth did that happen?

I'm the registrar this year, and one of the benefits of this fact is that I will get to meet every single person who's coming to me - okay, as if a fifth aren't related to me as it is. But.

I am such a neglectful blogger. I must apologize. Even if it is a lame thing to do. So here are two things to make up for my lameness.

1. John Green's new book is up on Amazon for preorder! The Fault in Our Stars, and it's currently the top-selling book on Amazon, which is CRAZY-awesome. (I assume that's not what the cover is actually going to look like, but when your book is at the top of Amazon you need something for a cover.)

2. Here, have a song. As it's the one I've just been listening to.

backing up

2011-06-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Father's Day and I DIDN'T SAY A WORD. So here is last year's post. Reduce, reuse, recycle, folks!

I am drinking English breakfast tea and backing up my documents on CDs (I know, there are probably newer, more efficient ways of going about this but CDs still work for me so ...) because, although I have no plans to get a new computer, I have had it since 2007 and I am fully aware that laptops' lifespans can be short. Even if I had to reformat my hard drive instead of buy a new computer it would still spell disaster if I lost everything.

It transpires that my folder of stories alone was nearly enough to fill an entire CD. If I were smart I would be using DVD-Rs, but my computer is bad at writing them and last time I did that, when I needed the discs some of them hadn't written and I lost a lot of music.

So. We're taking the old faithful route.

I prefer to drink my English breakfast tea at a table or with a book so I can feel like I am a hobbit, but sometimes I find myself on my bedroom floor typing things. What is there to do but go with it?

rain

2011-06-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

Rain in Pendleton, again, and I'm up at six in the morning emailing my thesis advisor about topics. I hope he sees the timestamp on the message I just sent (5:57!) and presumes that I am diligent and conscientious.

It has been twelve days since I posted. In that time Eleanor was visiting (the 3rd till yesterday) and we had a fantastic time, although both of us have had pretty bad hay fever; she reacts particularly to grass pollens and the cottonwood has been driving me crazy, to the extent that I dreamed last night someone was waving it in my face and I had to go to the doctor and have special scans because the pollen count in my lungs had multiplied to 576 (I don't know what I thought that meant).

It was still a nice visit. Good to have friends who are like family.

It is no longer actively raining and the roses on my windowsill are beautiful. Luke the cat is lying in a puddle on my bedroom floor, in the exact spot he was when I fell asleep eight hours ago. Twitch twitch go his ears. He knows I'm writing about him.

I hope it will be a good Monday.

My hair . . . month 16.

2011-06-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

So I know this doesn't really interest anyone but me. But my hair is growing and growing and I have not blogged self-absorbedly about it in months! So, of course, we are long overdue for a 6:30-in-the-morning-picture-of-my-slept-on-hair.

Look at all of that.

And, incidentally, a picture from June 2, 2010 - a year minus a day ago.

Aaa! It seems between then and now I've lost my shoulders - they have vanished!

Well that's encouraging.

That's all I got for you today. Babysitting at 7:45. Later!

So here we are

2011-05-31T06:44:00.000-07:00

I am back from Windstock, about to plunge back into life.

I am watching the six-month-old 7:45-11:45 three days a week, which is why I am writing this now. Also I woke up early (around five o' clock in the morning) every day at Windstock and wrote in my journal.

It makes me so introspective every year. I start thinking: What can I do to change myself? What can I do to change the way things are around me? We talked a lot about developing as individuals and society. How bettering yourself certainly benefits you but that we need to be conscious of our role in a community and our ability to help that community: what we bring to it.

Much food for thought.

We came back exhausted and unshowered, of course, and I went to bed at 8:30, all of which is why I did not write about the weekend yesterday. There's too much to really sort through in a blog post anyway. And increasingly I find that I'm less likely to dichotomize "good years" and "bad years" (equally so with Sheltering Branch, although there have never really been "bad" Sheltering Branches. Or Windstocks. Harder and easier ones, though).

It is hard - and Carew said this too - to see all these people (there were 83 youth there) once a year and not be able to build the friendships you'd like because you have three days every year and that's all. One of thse unfortunate things about living on the eastern side of the state.

May sewing projects

2011-05-21T10:26:00.000-07:00

I promised photos of my many sewing exploits, and so here they are!

This is my first-ever proper non-Regency dress. I did it without a pattern but by looking at an assortment of dresses (my own and others' - mostly others', since prior to this week my supply was limited). It is just light quilting cotton.

It ended up taking a full three yards, because I lined the skirt. It makes it a little poofy, but it's worth it to not have a see-through dress. :)

I also, for the first time in my life, installed a zipper up the back. It was surprisingly simple - one of those things that always intimidated me but did not turn out to be all that hard.

Flush with success, I followed up on this dress with another:

It's more or less of the same make (zipper, lined skirt, high waist), but with a different neckline. Instead of gathering and binding it, I put in a three-inch-wide interfaced collar - the fabric makes it difficult to see, but this picture is a little clearer:

As with the zipper, I discovered that curves are easy to sew if you pin well enough. This dress turned out pretty tight in the shoulders, meaning that it is not very practical for everyday wear, but it's nice to have fancy clothes too. I have a lot of skirts but none of them are all that dressy. So this is good.

Both these dresses are pretty short - the green one is around knee-length and the other is slightly above (I got the fabric from my grandma so I don't know exactly how much I ended up using, but I imagine it was a little under three yards, too). The third thing I've made this week is a long skirt (around ankle-length mostly) from more Grandma-gifted fabric. This is a not very clear picture of it:

It is literally just two large squares of fabric, set at odd angles to one another, with a hole cut in the middle and a waistband and button sewn in. I still haven't finished hemming it (the red fabric is VERY fray-prone and needs a rolled hem) but I wore it yesterday and I like it. It's different lengths all around because of the oddness of the squares and it's very flouncy.

As you can see, my recent no-new-clothes doesn't actually mean I don't have any new clothes. :)

...Or books. Most of these have been unpacked from school and are still in piles because I need to make alphabetically appropriate shelf space for them, but the brown bag results from a trip to the used bookstore on Thursday.

Don't worry. I'll sort them out before too long. :)

Here I am

2011-05-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

At home.

I haven't really adjusted to the notion that it's a whole three months. I haven't unpacked anything. ANYTHING. After all, there is a crew of little girl cousins sleeping in my room. Auntie Linda and Auntie Jana are here with their offspring till tomorrow afternoon.

I don't mind. I love seeing them, and unpacking can wait. In the meantime, I have been baking and sewing like a madwoman. Today it has been scones and bread. I made two loaves this morning and since there is only a tiny bit of the second loaf left, I am in the middle of starting some more - some of which will be turned into cinnamon rolls tomorrow morning.

The monsters feed and feed and never grow weary.

The bread will rise overnight. And after I charge my camera, I will reveal some of the sewing projects.

Organic industry

2011-05-13T20:44:00.000-07:00

A quick note that is sort of related to my post on STUFF and SUSTAINABILITY as of a few weeks ago:

Here is a really depressing chart of all the organic food companies that are actually owned by Kraft, Heinz, General Mills, Nestle, etc. Spend too much time looking at it and you start wondering how organic "organic" actually is. Alas.

The Secret Third

2011-05-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

Just to refresh your memory (or if I somehow neglected to mention it) next year Cassandra, Eleanor, and I are living in a house.

An adorable, little, two-bedroom house.

Yesterday we went over there to pay the current occupants for many of their dishes and such. I purchased a dish set, a knife set, cutting boards, frying pans, and an iron and ironing board. Essentially the sorts of things I'd have to buy anyway.

The house is technically two bedrooms. Technically. But there is a Secret Third. And this little Secret Third, with its adjoining Secret Yellow Bathroom, is where I will be living next year.

I have pictures.

Maybe you all don't find house pictures as exciting as I do. But I love them. So bear with me here while I walk you through the Secret Third.

1. The Room

So it does not, strictly speaking, have a door. It has a curtain on either side of this door, which, according to the current residents, is pretty sound-proof.

They call the room a "mudroom," even though no one in their right mind would carpet one - so I think it has been used as a bedroom for some time, although it does have a door to the Great Beyond, or the sidewalk at least. I would like to replace those fantastically flowered curtains with something white and eyeletted.

The bed, alas, is leaving with its former owner, who is going to pick it up over the summer (she was abroad this semester or something, I think). I shall have to find myself a similar one somehow.

(this picture was taken from the doorway of the bathroom, which is to the left as you enter through the curtained doorframe.

This desk, however, is staying. Which is fantastic, as it's just the right size and I'd have had quite a time finding another this nice that fit in the same space.

That's all there is for the room: not much to see and it's tiny. But it's also adorable and I love it.

2. The Bathroom

It is bright yellow and contains a sink and a toilet and has curtains I don't mind.

I guess that technically makes it a half-bath.

3. The Closet

Is actually off the living room, not the bedroom, which is why it's not technically called a "bedroom". The wallpaper is extremely flowered and old-fashioned....

(that's Eleanor's shoulder there, I think)

But there is SO MUCH STORAGE SPACE.

The space is too small for me to get a very good picture of it for perspective (which goes for all three of these rooms, I suppose) but suffice to say there is room for more clothing than I will ever, ever want or need, and I will probably end up using the large majority of the space (particularly the shelves) to store things like suitcases, empty boxes, and electronics.

I can't wait to move in.

I don't have pictures of any of the other rooms (living room, dining area, kitchen, bedrooms, bathroom with shower) because there are still people living in them and I don't think they would have been too comfortable with me snapping pictures of their lives. But as of June 1st, it's OURS, and I plan on going up and checking in fairly immediately so as to be able to move the stuff I don't really want to unpack at home. Also, a bed when I have found one.

Six days till the end of the semester. We're hanging in there!

Mama

2011-05-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

Last June I talked about my Dad because it was Father's Day and even though we don't do a lot of celebrating of these kinds of holidays, they are important.

So today is Mother's Day. Since I'm not at home to hug my mother every ten minutes and make her something chocolate (that'll have to wait till next week) I must offer her simply virtual appreciation and virtual hugs. She is pretty amazing.

And three generations....

We don't look all that much alike, but the older I get, the more similar I realize we are. I love you, Mama!

Even if you gave me just a bran muffin for my first birthday.

A package in the mail

2011-05-06T13:47:00.000-07:00

I got a package today from two adorable little girls named Bella and Vivi! Thank you thank you thank you! And thank you Anna, of course.

I cannot wait to read this book. it says on the bottom: ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOFS - NOT FOR SALE. I feel such privilege!

My friend Eleanor named the dolly Neske (Nes-kah), which is apparently a Dutch diminutive of the name Agnes. She is simply adorable.

Neske with Aristophanes, Elmo, Mr. Bear, Bob, Bubblegum Bunny, and Shennie, on the windowseat.

...A windowseat which will only be mine for nine more days.

Wow.

Consuming

2011-05-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

So in July I became a vegetarian. I don't think I've talked about it all on here, but it happened pretty quietly to the extent that it transpires that my family evidently didn't get the memo till October, even though I remember talking about it. But at any rate. . . .

One of the blessings and/or curses of being a Whitman student is that you think a lot about things like sustainability and environmental issues. It's part of the package.

So one of the things I've been thinking about, as a result of the Whitman Vibe, is how the reduce/reuse/recycle mantra has been consolidated, in culture, into We Should Recycle. Even though the biggest, most important part of the mantra is to REDUCE. Reduce consumption. But Americans don't want to do that, of course, and we just come up with more "sustainable" ways to consume more.

Like this link: "25 Eco-Chic ideas for Your Home," which suggests that you should buy bamboo salad tongs because it's more sustainable than other kinds of wood. That's great and all but isn't that just another way of making ourselves feel better about our consumerist lifestyles? Some of the suggestions the website makes are less egregious, but a lot of it seems to be about buying things to be Eco-Chic. Emphasis on the Chic. My friend Eleanor, who took an environmental studies class last semester, talks about that: It's called "greenwashing" and it's the idea that you slap a GREEN! or SUSTAINABLE! or ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY! label on something and get people to buy it.

And so people buy things that say GREEN, and feel like they're contributing to saving the world, instead of doing the more effecting thing and not buying at all.

The second thing I've been thinking about is the negative effect globalization has had on the third world. This is because in my History of Mexico class we've been talking a lot about how bad NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was for Mexico (and for everyone really, except corporations). We make our goods in Central and South America and Southeast Asia for a pittance, where regulations are laxer and we don't have to think about it. And then we ship them back to this country. And no one's going to do anything about it because we want our cheap bananas and cheap clothes and cheap toys. Not to mention how environmentally problematic it is to be shipping stuff around the world.

I, obviously, don't have a solution and I'm obviously not the first person to think about these things. Because I like cheap clothes too. But that's brought me to what this post was actually about, which is that I've decided that between now and May 2012 I'm not going to buy any NEW clothes. I will shop at thrift stores and make things myself (emphasis on the making things myself, which I was planning to do anyway) but part of the point is that I feel like Americans in general and myself included spend an enormous amount of time spending an enormous amount of money on thing we don't need and won't wear.

I mean, how ridiculous is it that a primary stereotype of girls my age is that we shop for fun. Consuming goods is a leisure activity? That's outrageous.

I have clothes. I will wear them. I will buy fabric to make myself new clothes, which might sort of be slipping under that line but I feel like when I've put in enough effort to measure and cut and sew an item of clothing myself, it's more excusable even if I don't strictly need THAT, either.

Thoughts? Am I just been excessively idealistic? Is this a pointless exercise?

Updates: My Life

2011-05-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I know: I haven't exactly been the most attentive blogger since, oh, mid-August or so. I had a whole four posts in April. You know my excuses, and they are manifold.

However, as of today, I am essentially done with school.

Oh, not really. I have a week and a half left: It is Tuesday 3 May and I go home in twelve days, on Sunday 15 May. But as of tonight I have given my third and final presentation (on Gerald of Wales, thank you!) and although I still have four papers to turn in, I have written three of them and only have 350-500 more words on the third (easy peasy).

So what have I been up to in the last, uh, month?

1) Being sick. Very very very sick. For twelve days, April 13-25. I essentially missed two weeks of classes and woke up one morning to find that the semester was almost over. I am better now, although I am experiencing hay fever. This is somewhat unusual for me but I think I remember it happening last year: perhaps there is something about Walla Walla that is worse than other places.

2) Writing research papers. Since mid-March I have written, among other things:
-30 pages on Gerald of Wales
-12 pages on the influence of crusading rhetoric on the Christian conquest of Iberia (sometimes called the reconquista)
-18 pages on the Zapatista uprising of the '90s

3) Giving presentations. In the last two days I have presented on:
-The Iberia research paper (yesterday afternoon)
-The Irish Civil War (this morning, in Spanish)
-The Gerald paper (two hours ago)

Presentations have, it turns out, become vastly easier for me in the last week, to the extent that I'm a lot less freaked out by the idea of 45-minutes orals than I was a month ago. I mean, don't get me wrong. Still freaked out. But way less so.

The other thing I have done is write four pages of the sequel to Henny in the last two days. I know, a whole four. But there are worse things. Like, for example, not writing at all. Which has been the case since approximately November 7th. (Editing doesn't count in the same way since it's not the same kind of generation of new material.)

Plans for the summer?

1) Babysit: Sarah, Ava and Violet, and Sascha. Babies babies babies!
2) Sew: dresses and skirts for me
3) Write: Sinisters book 2 (the sequel to Henny); also, finish Across the River and put it up online
4) Go to Portland to visit Emma the weekend of Deathly Hallows
5) See Eleanor at some point
6) SHELTERING BRANCH!

And that is the story. I have other things to talk about too but I have been getting up at 6:30 most mornings (leftover from being sick and getting on an early-to-bed-early-to-rise schedule) so I had best be off to sleep. Here's to a less sporadic May posting schedule!

Love,
Brynne

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2011-04-29T17:22:00.001-07:00

...Part 2 now has a trailer.

I'm...not totally sure what to think, to be honest. But I'm excited anyway. It's HARRY, after all.

eyes closed

2011-04-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

I apologize for the neglect, esteemed blog.

I am on day seven of the flu and am going to the doctor in an hour. Missed class all day yesterday and am preparing to email more professors to miss today.

But I have saintly friends who have been taking very good care of me. Thank goodness for them.

Love,
Brynne

Latin

2011-04-11T16:43:00.000-07:00

Amusingly (ironically?) since my last post, I have decided that next semester I am going to take it: LATIN. To be a medievalist you have to. I don't think I want to be a medievalist, but I still think that it would be fun. Interesting. TERRIFYING.

I should update more often because otherwise life spins out of controls and leaves y'all hanging. I will. Never fear, I will. But the days elide and all the while I plug away at three research papers.

A link just for fun: All you ever wanted to know about Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Honors

2011-04-05T22:52:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this since last Thursday, but I have been talking to professors and it looks like it is happening, so I can blog about it: I am doing honors in history. Or I'm going to try.

I do not have a specific topic yet, though since it was only today that I discussed it with the professor with whom I'll work, that's not a huge problem. It'll be medieval Wales, of course. I can't NOT do medieval Wales. But what and when and where specifically is the bigger question, since I have to have enough to sustain an 80-130-page thesis.

That is mainly what honors means. I will also have to pass two of my three senior examinations with distinction and present on my research at the honors conference at the end of next year.

That is going to be my life between now and May 2012.

The whole thing is kind of crazy because two weeks ago I explained to my family all my reasons for choosing to not do honors. Like that I don't want to go to grad school (anytime soon anyway - given the mutability of my life this past week I'm leery of absolutes at the moment). Like that although it'll be my senior year it'll also only be my third at Whitman and I was nervous. Et cetera et cetera.

Well, things changed. And my advisor articulated one thing to me when we were discussing it that made me feel really good about that change: It's what historians do. Why am I a history major if not to do research? Anyway, I've already written two fairly long papers on the subject and the fact is that I have a pretty good start. I am supposed to write a bibliography and proposal over the summer (working with my professor) and I already have a really detailed starting point for that bibliography, since combining my sources for my previous two papers (one of which is in progress), I have 18 primary documents of varying lengths as well as 30 books and articles. Without even trying.

I need to narrow my focus from "medieval Wales", from "the relationship between Wales and England" even, and find something more specific. Something that will carry a minimum of 80 pages. Something that will be sustainable.

I wish I could read Middle Welsh. I wish there were a way I could learn it. In another life I would also like to know Latin, and theoretically I could start learning it next semester, but I don't think I will. Toooooo much on top of everything else!

So that is my big news. Good night.

Edit: Appropriately, this is my 1,000th post.

Diana Wynne Jones.

2011-03-26T09:22:00.000-07:00

She died today. I wrote the post about it on my writing blog.

I hope she is in a better place. <3

hippe homegrown

2011-03-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

Today I was making a pastry crust for tonight's dinner (pot pies) and reading the back of the Morton's salt container got me thinking. No doubt in the recent onslaught of anti-sodium rhetoric the poor folks at Morton's are concerned that people will stop using their product, and so the back of the canister said: Most of the sodium in your diet comes from processed foods, and cooking from scratch can help you control the amount of salt in your family's diet.

I.e., our salt won't hurt you. You should use it anyway.

But they're probably right. And I thought: how much of what we eat falls into that "processed" category? The taco seasoning my mum put in our chili the other night, yes. And the tofu cubes in the fridge and the veggie burgers in the freezer are probably also pretty processed.

The boys eat their fish sticks and their corndogs and their chicken nuggets. Those are pretty processed. But what about bread (I make it fairly regularly but the boys like storebought), corn chips, crackers? To what extent should those be labeled "processed"?

What about things that have relatively few ingredients but that we definitely don't make ourselves? Sour cream? Jam from the grocery store? String cheese?

I don't know how much we should really worry about this. Some things are easily replicable at home: on Monday I made graham crackers that are recognizable as such but taste much better, and require flour, butter, brown sugar, milk, vanilla, and baking soda. Honey if you like. I used them to make a graham cracker crust for a lemon custard pie made with local eggs (but lemon juice from a bottle). How pretentiously foodie, as my dad would say. But I do think it's valid: What is PROCESSED, really?

How much does it really matter?

the eighteenth day

2011-03-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

Funny how a week can go by without me blogging and the world doesn't end.

I've been working.

Not really.

I made Taran a quilt as a late birthday present and have been sewing some dolls. Baking inordinate amounts, as one does when one is hungry.

Working on papers.

Essentially, living life at home. It is so so nice to be here. To be watching all my little girls and sewing and, yes, doing homework, though not as much as I should.

Two snippets of my life right now:

I finished the first draft of my thirty-page research paper. Unfortunately, I now have a second fifteen-page one to write. Of which I have two pages.
WE FOUND A HOUSE FOR NEXT YEAR! It is small, blue, and adorable, and I will post pictures when I have them. It is impossible to describe how excited I am about this.

Today is the second-to-last day of fasting. And then, I think, using my brain will be easier.

Exciting news!

2011-03-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

Home and Haven and Henny are now available for free download on Smashwords.com, and will shortly also be on Amazon for 99 cents each. You can read them if you want to. :)

Home and Haven - at smashwords

Camille Washburn and her brother, Baxter, have lived with Steve and Laura Wright since their parents died in a drive-by shooting. Camille is nearly fourteen when Bax takes her to a little house in the folds of the hills of Eastern Washington, where she meets an old man named Richard Garrison who knew her mom and dad. He explains that Camille and her brother are heirs to supernatural powers for which their parents died.

Camille, Bax, and Richard’s grandson Alexis set out in search of the mythical Wooten Haven, looking for answers and seeking to escape the visions of the past that Camille is fighting. There are eight families, Richard told them, but they are all almost gone now, hunted by the same people who killed Camille’s parents.

Caught up in grudges hundreds of years old, Camille, Bax, and Alexis must turn and finally face their enemies: the ninth family, which has sought to destroy all the others in hopes of eliminating rivals, and for which Camille and Bax’s haven of a few hundred was only the latest victim. Together, Camille, Baxter, and Alexis confront them in hopes of saving what little remains of their people.

Henny - at Smashwords

Helen Blackwell is twelve years old and adrift in a changing world, trying to survive a new school and a new life and friends who aren’t interested in her anymore. She’s stuck in an advanced math with five other kids she doesn’t know and a pompous and impenetrable teacher, Mr. Graham.

He tells them that it’s not a math class at all. They can do magic. The six of them, left-handed, excited, and frustrated with a teacher who won’t tell them why they’re there, are plunged into a world of universes, spells, and rules they don’t understand. When the mysterious Donald Abramson abducts their teacher, Henny and her new friends must rescue him, but when they set out to do so they find that they’re caught in a story much bigger and more frightening than they had ever imagined.

I'm sorry my synopses are so lame. But they're there if you want them! :)

The tenth day: adjusting

2011-03-11T07:27:00.001-08:00

Going between school and home is so hard.

But I have twenty pages of my thirty-page research paper and I'm about to go work on it. It's nice to be back.

The eighth day: seared flesh

2011-03-09T07:40:00.000-08:00

The early morning adventures continue.

Sunrise was early enough today that Eleanor got up while I was in the process of eating, but it's always her job to make eggs and mine to make toast, so I made her toast while she cooked her egg. (As I'd discovered ten minutes previously, it's difficult to do both at once.)

We don't have a toaster. We set the oven to broil and put a piece of bread in on a cookie sheet. When it's nice and brown, I stick my hand in the oven and flip it over so that the other side can cook too.

This particular piece of toast was lacking in structural integrity. You have to be quick or you'll start to feel the hairs on the back of your hand curl, so when the corner of the toast came unattached I jerked my hand out to feel the cold air before I tried to flip it again. Only I didn't jerk out, I jerked up. My finger came into contact with the coil on the top of the oven, pleasantly set to about 600 degrees fahrenheit.

(This might be an exaggeration. I don't actually know what temperature "broil" is, I just know it's hot.)

I didn't actually know I'd burned myself. But I smelled it. The air definitely was giving off the savor of charred skin. It didn't hurt, though it does now. I finished my breakfast and put some aloe on it and when it started to hurt I iced it.

It transpires that the part that smelled the most of burnt flesh is in fact the bit that hurts the least. It's just a patch of brown skin on the side of my knuckle. But it followed a line back that quickly becomes red and painful and is currently wrapped in gauze and tape.

"Seared flesh" makes it sounds worse than it is. But "painful" is about accurate. Eleanor has a first aid kit that was helpful and we stole ice from the freezer upstairs and wrapped it in a towel.

All's well that ends well, right?

The fifth day: seeing the sun

2011-03-06T08:02:00.000-08:00

"Let's go out and look at the sun," says Eleanor at 6:50 this morning.

She's been getting up with me to eat fried egg on toast and drink tea before the sun rises. We were sitting on the couch falling asleep and she thought going outside might wake us up a little.

At 6:59 we come down the side stairs and out into the courtyard, in socks and pajamas. The pavement is cold cold cold under our feet and we stand there shivering for a minute, but the sun is beautiful, and the blue sky has a few gold streaks left in it and we are enjoying it but very very cold when Eleanor says:

"You have your swipe card, right?"

I check my pocket. "No."

We look at each other.

It's 7:02 in the morning. We're standing in our socks on the sidewalk in front of the dorm, which is locked up tight against anyone who doesn't have the magic black strip to slide through the magic black box so that the green light blinks and the beep sounds so that the door opens.

Further, it becomes apparent as we set off across the street and over painful cobbles, in socks and pajamas, all buildings on campus are subject to this rule at this time of the morning. We try the doors on the library, to no avail.

I have my phone, but Cassandra sleeps with hers turned off, and at any rate I doubt she would be pleased to receive a call at what is now 7:07 AM.

Then we see someone we know at the entrance to the dorm, across the street. We race back across the cobbled path and meet her in the crosswalk, blurting out the situation. She grins befuddledly but says, "Of course I'll let you back in," and so we set off back towards the dorm, her with the magic card in one hand. The sky is full blue now and I can smell bacon and eggs from the dining hall, which opens at some indeterminate but presumably close time.

The entrance hall is warm and the fuzzy carpet almost hurts my feet, which are numb. We race upstairs, trying to control our giggles. 7:11.

* * *

That was my morning post-breakfast. It's now eight o' clock and I'm about to start homework. Tomorrow is the first day of the last week before spring break and I am ready to go home, but it's a good day anyway.

The fourth day

2011-03-05T07:58:00.000-08:00

Fasting is a symbol. Fasting signifies abstinence from lust. Physical fasting is a symbol of that abstinence, and is a reminder; that is, just as a person abstains from physical appetites, he is to abstain from self-appetites and self-desires. But mere abstention from food has no effect on the spirit. It is only a symbol, a reminder. Otherwise it is of no importance. Fasting for this purpose does not mean entire abstinence from food. The golden rule as to food is, do not take too much or too little. Moderation is necessary.

-'Abdu'l-Bahá

This is clearer and clearer to me. The feeling I had on the first day hasn't changed. I've fasted out of obedience, out of self-deprivation, out of doing what I'm supposed to do, what other people are doing. But that's not why I'm fasting now, at least, that's why I thought I was but it feels more purposeful than that now. I don't want to use the word "transcendent" but I feel like that things that normally upset aren't, and the things I dislike doing aren't as tedious, and I've found a kind of peace in the last three days that makes me realize it's worth it in more concrete terms. I feel emotionally and spiritually full.

The first day

2011-03-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

Today was the first of the Fast. I'm writing this feeling a little overfull, but other than that, it has been far and away the easiest first day I have ever had.

Maybe it's being better mentally prepared. Maybe it's being better spiritually prepared. Maybe it's just that the fifth time around, it's less difficult than it once was.

In any case, I'm glad. I hope that tomorrow is as good. I got up at 5:30 this morning and said prayers and wrote in my journal for a while, and then I ate an egg on toast at about 6:15 and drank three glasses of water. I don't like water. Especially not from a kitchen sink. And so I've never really drunk as much I should in the mornings. Perhaps that also makes a difference.

In any case, I'm grateful for the day and I feel like for the first time it's easy to remember why I'm doing it. For myriad reasons, in the past that part has been a struggle. Even if tomorrow is harder - and it may well be that it is - I'm glad today was what it was.

strange things

2011-02-25T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'm home for the weekend. And I have spent the last hour and a half creating an author website for myself:

brynnemckay.com.

I will still blog here, of course. It's not like I do so that frequently anyway, but I don't figure as I'll write posts that are nothing but pictures of Cat Stevens records on that blog. Expect some new and exciting and crazy things over there, though, in the next month.

Love
Brynne

in the frying pan

2011-02-23T19:29:00.000-08:00

I just spent the last several hours writing a total of 9 pages of three papers. Coming up with 3 theses. Finding a total of 44 passages to cite in six different texts.

I feel fried.

Dead and fried.

On the plus side, Eleanor and I made chocolate chip cookies this afternoon and are in the middle of making bread for toast tomorrow morning. Toast and eggs. Life is pretty good.

I'm going home on Friday - hence the manic essay-scribbling. I also have some reading I need to get done but if I can lock down drafts of all three of these papers (I still have another page and a half or so to get through on the longest of them) then I think I'll be okay.

Breathing space.

Taran is 7!

2011-02-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

Because (continuing in the theme of the month) on February 18th, 2004, this happened

And I don't know how, but somehow this happened:

It suddenly seems so strange that I have this little brother who is four feet tall and reading.

At least the funny faces haven't changed.

My hair: year 1

2011-02-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

Exactly one.

So here you see it: February 17th, 2010, vs. today, February 17th, 2011. (The color difference is purely lighting. Sorry about that. I can't travel back in time and make myself take a better picture a year ago.)

Stretched for length:

My hair GROWS.

The only cutting I have done has been half an inch off the longest bits to make it a little less angled (works as a bob, not so well at shoulder-length and further) and I didn't stop trimming my bangs till July.

So now it's time to announce the goal:

2014.

I'm going to grow for four years and then see where I am. Keeping in mind that with 5-8 inches of shrink at my current length, "where I am" and "where I look like I am" are two different things. But I'm thinking long. This is what my hair looked like with two years + nine months of growth, even with monthly trims:

(August 2009)

LONG. It's going to be LONG.

I'm not saying I'm going to grow it till 2014 and cut it. I'm just saying, even if I get an urge to reach for the scissors between now and then, it's not gonna happen. I want to see where this goes.

Profesorial words of wisdom

2011-02-16T08:18:00.000-08:00

"I've been looking over the reading assignment and I decided I hadn't given you enough for next week," he says.... "But look how nice I am, I printed the new reading out for you! Isn't that friendly of me?"

Perhaps. Perhaps.

See, students start out with $50 worth of "free" print money. It cost five cents to print a one sided sheet and 9.5 (I think) to print a double-sided one.

We are four and a half weeks into the semester. I have $25 left.

That looks pretty friendly from my side of the fence.

Frederick

2011-02-14T08:14:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamed that Mum and Dad had another baby boy and named him Frederick.

I was really upset. Not because they had a baby, but because I'm not fond of the name, because it's not Welsh, and because they didn't tell me about it first, and I only found out when they announced on Facebook. I called them and said, "I want to be his sister, not his aunt!"

That was about it.

The gaps between my parents' children are regular. This is how it works:

Me
1.5 years
Carew
1.5+2.5=4 years
Gareth
4+2.5=6.5 years
Taran

So technically - and I'm not saying it's going to happen or that it should, Mum, so don't hurt me - 6.5+2.5=9 years, and that's how old Taran should be when the next kid is due.

Don't call him Frederick. And don't let me find out via the internet. ;)

P.S. Happy Valentine's day.

2007

2011-02-12T09:19:00.000-08:00

February is a month of retrospectives.

Four years ago RIGHT NOW, we were on a plane to China.

Today I sort of can't imagine going five months without seeing my mother. It was a huge thing to do at fifteen. In some ways I wasn't ready (though I certainly thought so!) but, on the other hand, I don't know if it's something you can ever really be "ready" for. Coming to college certainly felt like a smaller step as a result of five months in China at 15.

Four years.

That's a long time. It seems like another life entirely. I thought a lot of things about myself that didn't turn out to be true.

Sorry, sorry. I know. Introspection. But February always lends itself to such things.

Tea

2011-02-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentlemen, it's a beautiful day.

I got a record in the mail today. Which means that I now have

(1970)

(1971)

(I I know it doesn't have the album name on the cover, but it's Teaser and the Firecat.)

(1972)

(1973)

(1974)

(1975)

(1977)

(1978)

(Not my pictures. I need to charge my camera.)

This is the real reason I have a job; to pay for my record-buying excesses. However, it looks as if I'm done for now.

Hullo hullo

2011-02-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

From the other side of the week.

I have been thinking about authors I like who've died.

This was brought on by the fact that Brian Jacques died on February 5th, having published a novel a year since 1986. I'm not a fan of a lot of his later stuff, but his books (particularly the Redwall series) were still a significant part of my childhood. Redwall, Mattimeo, Legend of Luke, Mariel of Redwall, and Martin the Warrior were my favorites (I haven't read the three most recently published, Doomwyte, The Sable Queen, and The Rogue Crew, but I read the 19 that preceded them).

He was only 71. And even though many of the (particularly later) Redwall books were repetitive and trite, even though my brothers and I have heaped scorn on the series for the past few years, he was still a substantial part of my childhood. I could (but won't) share lots of stories I wrote when I was little about animals, influenced by Redwall, Watership Down, and David Clement-Davies' Fire Bringer, which have in common animal societies, prophecies, and riddles. I loved them. Loved loved loved. None of them are on the favorite childhood books list I made last summer, but they should be.

So I'm sorry about that.

I was thinking, too, about Lloyd Alexander, who died in 2007. (At the age of 83, two weeks after the death of his wife of 61 years, which is nice.) Looking at his bibliography, I'm amazed that I've only read twenty-one of his forty-one books - that seems like a travesty and I should remedy it.

Good authors. Dead authors. It's sad when your childhood idols are gone. Diana Wynne Jones has cancer. You feel like you have personal investment in these people even though you've never met them.

But there are lots of good authors who are still alive too. I was going to make an off-color joke about a bad author who died recently, but I will refrain from doing so for the sake of being a good person. :)

P.S. The title was a Lloyd Alexander reference. To a character who dies. Heh.

Pilgrimage

2011-02-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

It's evidently a week (or month, or year, or lifetime) for retrospection.

Three years ago today our pilgrimage to Haifa and 'Akká began. (Sort of. The time zone difference makes it difficult to judge.). Dad posted this on our first day, which I think was February 5th there. Mum and Dad and I all posted a lot. I'd forgotten.

I know it wasn't that long ago, but I'm in such a different place now. In pretty much every possible sense. At the time I had mixed feelings on how much it did for me, but I guess part of the problem was that I wanted it to do something for me. I mean. It was a profound experience but I was at a point in my life at which I guess I needed something, and maybe it was the answer and maybe it wasn't. I don't remember. I just remember it being really hard.

That's a kind of silly thing to say. But I think it was. Maybe it's hard for everyone in different ways, I don't know, and I don't know if I've ever really talked about it being hard or even if that's just a distorted picture from a three-year-old memory. But I remember feeling like I was holding on by my fingernails.

It's hard to reconcile that something can be like that but also an incredible spiritual experience. Because it was. It was amazing.

But I spent a lot of time inside my own head and I don't think that was a good thing.

I don't want to end on such an unpleasant note. So I guess I'll end with this: I'm glad I'm not sixteen anymore. I'm glad I'm in the place I am now and not the place I was then. And I think that the experience contributed to me being where I am now which means it was good. Maybe it was hard because I wanted to to make things better instead of give me the tools to do it myself.

P.S. I genuinely have had a really good week. It's just an introspective morning. :)

ten years

2011-02-01T08:37:00.000-08:00

Happy February! It's my six-months birthday.

And ten years ago tomorrow, we left State College. 2 February 2001.

(by the by ... I'd forgotten we had exactly the same kind of wood paneling in that house as the one we live in now)

I was pretty happy there. But even if moving to California wasn't the greatest idea in the world

Pendleton is a pretty great place to be from.

Library display

2011-01-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

I sit here on this foggy foggy January morning having just eated eggs and toast with Eleanor and I am feeling vaguely pensive. In twenty minutes I have to go to work and from there to the archives in the library to talk to people about texts related to my artifacts.

I also have to deal with the fact that one of the primary items I was planning for the exhibit is, it now becomes clear, about a foot too long for the display case.

So, hmm.

We'll see.

My hair: day 337

2011-01-20T10:46:00.000-08:00

If, that is, my math is to be believed. Just to distract myself from the reality of the next four months of my life.

(Note that I am always freaking out at this point in the semester, and disregard my whingeing above.)

My hair is growing. Yay!

schedules

2011-01-18T10:39:00.000-08:00

Today is my first day of classes in the new semester.

The fact that I have no class before 11 AM is not my fault. Due to various scheduling shifts and changes of mind, I ended up with a weird spread-out semester involving a night class and nothing after noon on Thursday. I am certainly not complaining. It means, however, that the first week (or maybe two) back at Whitman, before work starts, I have it really easy.

I've already decided seven hours of work per week, three mornings and one afternoon. Nothing before nine-thirty, which is pretty luxurious. But still,, I'm looking at my schedule now and thinking, "Do I really want to be out and about doing stuff 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM every single Monday for the next four months?"

Well. Whether I want to or not, it's up on my wall, and it's what I'm going to be doing. Because two weeks ago I thought, "Oh yeah, I can work an extra hour every week, my schedule's pretty empty."

Twenty-five page research paper aside, I suppose.

But sixteen credits and one job is perfectly reasonable, perfectly normal, especially since I will never have to take a class with a lab ever ever ever again as long as I live (I've set foot in the Whitman science building once. When I was twelve years old on a field trip to the planetarium).

So yay. This week I will spend on orientation in classes and getting a week ahead in all my readings. That's the plan, anyway. With nothing till 1:00 tomorrow (in two weeks I'll be working for two and a half hours in the morning on Wednesdays, but again, that hasn't started yet) I'll have plenty of time for it.

Bad things in the world

2011-01-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

Me: "It's not a good day for news. Yahoo says that Iran has hanged a prisoner every eight hours since the beginning of the new year, and there are gunfights going on in the Tunesian palace."
Eleanor: "Not a good morning."
Me: "No."
Taran: "Real gunfights?"
Me: "Yes."
Taran: "Is it a good thing or a bad thing?"
Me: "Bad. It means people are getting shot."
Taran: "For real? With real guns?"
Me: "Yes. With real guns."
Taran: "I didn't know that people did that."

I didn't want to be the one to disabuse him of the notion that guns only existed in stories. But.

He doesn't seem scarred. He's commenting on the twisty fluorescent lightbulb on my ceiling. But still ....

Toy Story 3

2011-01-14T23:12:00.000-08:00

Hello, good people. I just got back from three days in Salem with Eleanor. She is now here, till Monday, when we go back to Whitman.

Go back to Whitman.

I would be perfectly happy to stay home indefinitely, but at the same time I am not unhappy to be going back to school. But it does seem improbable that a week from now I will have finished the first week of classes. I hope it will prove to be a good selection.

This evening we went up to Grandma and Grampa's house and watched Toy Story 3. I cried at the end. This is not surprising. The film was made for people like me who grew up on the first two movies and, as a college student, remembers childhood toys with fondness. I think Taran enjoyed it but for much of the second half he was curled in my lap saying "I don't like this bit, it's scary." I think abandonment and growing up are two confusing things for a six-year-old to have to think about in a movie.

It made me glad I haven't gotten rid of many of my childhood toys. The film includes a little phone on wheels identical to the one I had when I was little, which I think is still somewhere in the closet. In particular though I still have my stuffed animals, most of which are here, although a few of the most beloved ones are at school with me. Mr Bear, Xooie, Shennie, the tiny bunny that was Mum's when she was little. And then some stuffed animals I associate primarily with school (Aristophanes, Elmo).

I think there was a point when I was about 15 when I felt I was too old for my toys and wished I didn't have to keep them (never Mr Bear, but some of the others) but I don't feel remotely that way anymore. They were my friends.

the eye of the storm

2011-01-09T20:34:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I am going to Salem (Oregon!) to spend a couple days at Eleanor's house, before coming back here on Thursday afternoon for the last three days of break. I can hardly believe there's only one week left, though it feels as if I've been home forever. . . .

This break has such a different quality from the last. I can't define it other than to say last break I spent a lot of time alone, and now I spend a lot of time together.

I know. You can't be together with just yourself. But.

Last break I wrote a novel. I don't think that's in the cards for the next week (though it could be! It was January 13th when I started The Underground last year). I blogged a lot of very long posts. (Is that the correct use of the verb "to blog"?) I read a lot of novels.

But I feel that this break is much more like normal life and much less like a disjointed in-between point without a room of my own, an idea of where I was going, a certainty about what I'd just done (finished a semester of college). Maybe this winter's normalcy has been helped along by the structure that watching babies lends to my days. Maybe I have more concrete projects. Maybe I just spend more time with my family in general.

Not sure.

But I know it's nice. I don't feel like I'm sitting in the eye of a storm, taking a deep breath before I plunge back in.

Well, okay, yeah. I do, a little, because every semester is more challenging than the last in some ways. But I feel mostly prepared, and that's the difference. The difference is probably also being one year older and one year more sure of who I am.

More books

2011-01-08T16:28:00.000-08:00

Only two, and I finished them both today.

The first is Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver, the sequel to The Bean Trees. I enjoyed it, but it was not entirely satisfying in its conclusion. I think perhaps I was put off by the transition from a first-person narrative about Taylor Greer to a third-person present tense narrative divided between a half-dozen people. All the same, I liked it for the same reasons I liked The Bean Trees.

The second is The High King's Tomb by Kristen Britain, which is the third in a series I started reading when I was about twelve. The first two were Green Rider and First Rider's Call; I remember enjoying them.

But the writing is SO BAD.

Overwrought and full of useless side plots. I found myself mentally cutting whole paragraphs - I went through the whole book editing because that was the only way I was going to make it through the whole thing. Were the first two this awful? Or is it just sequel-itis?

Cumbersome to the last.

I'm about to read Nation by Terry Pratchett. I hope this affords me more enjoyment.

my hair: month 10.5

2011-01-05T08:26:00.000-08:00

It's a Wednesday. Once upon a time, Wednesdays were Hair Picture Days. And for the sake of old times, and because I still have been taking pictures every so often, here's the State of the Hair today . . . slept-on, but growing growing growing:

That's 100% dry, obviously; wet, it's past armpit length.

Unrelatedly, this picture was also on my camera:

Which is the state of my hands yesterday (despite lotion) after our dishwasher quit working on Sunday.

little ones

2011-01-04T20:12:00.000-08:00

I should be showering and preparing for bed, since I have babysitting work early mornings during the week, but instead I am writing a blog post.

About the BABIES. Because that is what I have been doing lately. Playing with babies.

Sascha is nine months old and I watch her most weekday mornings, except last week, since she was sick. She is a drooler. But so so sweet. It doesn't take much to keep her happy ... you let her crawl around, you feed her, and you give her lots of love.

Ava and Violet are sisters - age 3 and age 15 months. I've had them two or three times a week all winter break, but I've been babysitting them since June, when Violet was Sascha's age. I love watching them grow up. I love that they love me. Violet showed up today walking! She's been taking steps for ages and ages but overnight suddenly she decided that it was easy. So she waddles and waddles. With her hands up in the air like she thinks she's going to fall, and a big grin plastered across her face because she's so hugely proud of her achievement.

Ava's favorite games when she's here are pretending to be a baby (which involves crawling around and being picked up and cuddled a lot - yes, she wants attention), taking all the stuffed animals off my shelf and piling them on my bed, and making rice. She's also discovered that we have (or Layli has) lots of Play-Dough, and she knows where our cookie cutters and rolling pins are, so she goes to the drawer and gets them out. While I'm keeping Violet out of the LEGO bins Ava shouts across the house, "I MADE YOU A HEART, BRYNNIE!" And her favorite book to read while she is here is Snuggle Puppy by Sandra Boynton.

Carew asked me the other day after they left: "So, Brynne, how many children are you planning on having?"

Yes. I am maternal. But, as I repeatedly find myself obliged to point out, there are a few crucial stages that we're missing, here. :)

evil

2011-01-02T07:28:00.000-08:00

Nothing like ushering in a new year with a little bit of evil.

I should flee. Pack my things and go. But one way or another this bit of evil is going to track me down and get me. That's how it works, you know.

goodbye, 2010

2010-12-31T21:06:00.000-08:00

Well, folks, we've come to the end of 2010.

I have been blogging since 2006, which amounts to a surprising number of new year posts, some admittedly more lackluster than others (last year's was kind of cool, or at least, the idea was).

I'm not making any resolutions. Whenever I do I forget about them, and then if they come to be it's only by accident. So why bother? Instead of looking forward, since it is the last day of the year rather than the first, I'll be all retrospective-like.

January

I wrote The Underground, the half-forgotten sequel to Home and Haven. (I just re-read it and edited it, so it's in its third draft now.) In five days.

And I met my friend Emma! Which is pretty cool, even if it's weird to think that I've known her less than a year.

February

I last cut my hair. (on the 17th, as a matter of fact).

Yeah, that's right - in my world, this is what's known as a BIG DEAL! Also February is too short to be that significant (but don't tell it I said that).

I got my job working for the history museum at Whitman, which is AWESOME. (Or maybe that was in January. If so it was at the very end.)

March

My first Fast away from home (including one memorable morning in which I managed to sleep through my alarm and wake up an hour after sunrise. That was a LONG day). And, of course, I started Across the River. In the middle of a class. Because, hey, it happens.

That was a good spring break. I spent it drawing maps with Taran and writing and listening to Welsh music. Also working on my behemoth essay on medieval Wales.

April

(OF COURSE I'm choosing strange pictures. It would be boring otherwise.)

In April Layli came to visit for the RenFaire (there was a RenFaire!) and I did a lot of schoolwork and made a lot of pies. I don't remember much of it besides that, to be perfectly honest, because school is school is school.

Oh wait. I declared my history major in April. That's pretty awesome.

May

I turned in a 26-page research paper and I finished my first year of college.

(These two things are linked in my mind, like somehow the first thing epitomizes the second, which I guess it sort of does but most first-years don't. I was technically a sophomore. But. But.)

I went to Windstock and the experience was absolutely fabulous and uplifting and you could almost call it spiritually life-changing. I think I tried to put it into words in a post but honestly I don't think I did it justice. Well, maybe. It's better than I remembered it being. But those kinds of experiences are things that don't suit themselves to What Happened lists like this one.

June

A quiet month. I did a lot of babysitting Ava and Violet (then ages 2 1/2 and 9 months) and reading and sewing things.

That sounds oddly familiar. Like my life hasn't changed. Only I did less sewing.

July

Sheltering Branch, of course.

I never think I can explain how much it means to me so I don't usually try. When I do it always comes out ridiculous. But seriously, people. Funny faces (and yellow lighting) aside. It is a BIG FAT DEAL. A bigger deal than my hair. I always come out of it dazed and making life decisions I didn't know I even thought about. So. Anyway.

That's July.

Well I also started watching Mackenna, which pretty well took over my life. I think I started the 12th or so. It was terrifying but made me pretty amazingly competent, all things considered.

August

Speaking of Mackenna. She was my August too.

And I turned nineteen.

My last year as a teenager.

I finished Across the River the day before I went back to school - good timing, that. Five months for a novel, Brynne? I know! I paced myself! Aren't you proud?

And I finished my regency gown, too.

And it had been six months since I cut my hair. (Recall what a big deal the whole hair thing is.)

September

I went back to Whitman for my second year. Cassandra as a roommate. I spent the first while lonely because Emma wasn't back and then made friends with Eleanor.

Carew came up to prospie (i.e. be a prospective student) at Whitman and hung out with us and we watched Harold and Maude.

And I went to school and was very stressed for most of the month because I suddenly found myself out and about 9-4 most days and that was a new thing for me.

October

A fantastic fall break in which Eleanor and Cassandra came to my house. I made twelve sock monkeys in two days.

The weekend after that was an insane one in which we stayed up till one in the morning talking in Spanish: vivimos en una lámpara en el afterlife con nuestros hombres?

There was also, of course, the regency ball on Halloween weekend; the above picture was obviously hair-doing before the event. We danced the night away. It was amazing.

November

I have next to no pictures from November 2010 because, well, NaNoWriMo, people. I wrote Declared Brain Dead in the first week and spent the rest of November (up until Thanksgiving anyway) doing lots of schoolwork to make up for that first week. Hence the tired picture above.

I also drank my weight in chai.

Not really.

Over Thanksgiving break I sewed. And baked. Surprise!

December

Well, that's now, isn't it?

I'm now officially halfway through my college career: three semesters down, three to go.

I've been sewing like a madwoman over break: more dolls than I know what to do with. (This is a lie. I know exactly what to do with them all.)

And I have edited The Underground, Across the River, and Declared Brain Dead once each: all three novels I wrote in this year. That's sort of appropriate, don't you think?

The pictures are entertaining enough but this is silly. As a summary of what I did, it's not bad. As a summary of my life? Could be better.

But that's okay. It's way more interesting than 2006.

The Reading List

2010-12-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

These are the books I have read so far over the break. It seems silly to do an entry for each one, so all together ... here.

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
This is what I thought of it.

The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver
A fun read, in the way that a lot of books are, books that are funny and fun but also make you think a little. I know that there is a sequel to this but I also remember hearing Mum discussing it with somebody when I was quite young so I know what happens, and I'm undecided: should I read it?

Criss Cross - Lynne Rae Perkins
I recommended this to Layli but she said it was too slow. It is slow. That's one of the interesting things about it, I think. Because it's about fourteen-year-olds slipping in and out of each other's lives, and to me it was very evocative of what it was to be fourteen. Uncertain and on the edge of things. Also it's set in the '70s. Which is always good. ;) More to the point, it made me want to write again, in part because it is beautifully written and in part because while I was reading it I was thinking about my NaNoWriMo novel and I started to see the shape of how it could be. Nothing like Criss Cross, but sometimes you just hit on things and you know what to do.

Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver
I liked this too. It made me think about what it means to grow up on the edge of a Reservation, and about how to most people who do, it doesn't seem to mean much. And it (like Paper Towns) also made me think about how people are connected, and how something can mean one thing to one person but something completely different to another.

The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
By this, my third Barbara Kingsolver, it was pretty obvious that she has a certain activist agenda. This one is pretty well-known - it's about a family that goes to Africa to be missionaries under the guidance of a controlling, fundamentalist pastor father and a mother he has broken down, who have four daughters who are all in different ways already carrying baggage from their upbringing. The interesting thing about it, I thought, was that this story was only the first half or so of the book. Up to this point, it was just another story of culture clash and colonialism, the clear message being, missionary=bad.

Only the second half follows each of the daughters through the rest of her life. The first half took place 1959-61. The second half is '61-'93, little scattered vignettes from the girls' lives. Each of them is marked by Africa in unimaginable ways and each takes a different path, haunted by what white people have done to Africa. And meanwhile the mother, back in the South, wonders: how much are we to blame? And another daughter asks: how can we help clean up our mess, when all our help only leads to worse things?

It was discomfiting in that sense. After I finished it I stood under the hot water of the shower thinking about how much we take it all for granted. But what can you do? What can anyone do?

White Cat - Holly Black
After the intense experience of the previous book, this was quite light. But good, I thought. The worldbuilding especially. It took a perfectly normal modern world and twisted it just slightly, i.e., added magic, which everyone knows about and is scared of, but talks about as a fact of life. And the implications of the magic were really well thought through, which I liked - the world was recognizable but some things were taken for granted that give you great pause when you try to translate them into the real world. Yet they fit. Nothing seemed out of place. I liked that. It's also the first in a series, so we'll have to see where she's going with it.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks - E. Lockheart
This has won all sorts of awards and it's quite clever and well-written, although pretty flip. And it talks a lot about the Panopticon and Foucault. And social disobedience. Which I found interesting and engaging, although the story itself wasn't that exciting. But I liked that too.

All in all it's been a pretty good run. I'm in the middle of Pegasus by Robin McKinley, which I'm enjoying, although the first three chapters or so are largely backstory. Which is a tricky thing to do, and there were one or two times when I thought, okay, get to the point already, but I'm willing to go through it because I know there'll be big payoff. There always is with Robin McKinley.

traditions

2010-12-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

Happy December 25th. I think there's another name for it, but I can't quite be sure.

I am standing in the kitchen making crepes. I flip them without a spatula, with my wrist and sometimes a few fingers to help it along if it catches on the edge of the pan. Layli says I must have no feeling left in them. But they are red from the exercise.

Every so often I turn the stack to make sure that the ones on the bottom don't get soggy. Bizarrely, I learned to make crepes at school, with thinned-out pancake batter with extra egg, and with my friends I ate the failures before we figured it out. More butter, more butter, more butter. Take it off the heat when you lay the batter on so you have a chance to spread it.

This morning I woke at seven and came downstairs to heat up the pan because in the night my subconscious decided these crepes would be a good idea. Mum had left our presents from Aunt Deb in our rooms, like a Hogwarts house-elf. It made me smile when I saw it in the morning and I unwrapped my books and hugged Christopher (who appears to be making an effort to incorporate himself into many of my blog posts as possible). Christopher is a string of continuity that ties my home life and my school life together (he exists in no small part thanks to Eleanor).

Strings, ties that bind, makes me think about Star Wars. There was a book about Qui-Gon Jinn called that: The Ties That Bind. A "Jedi Apprentice" book. They are all still sitting on our shelf and I wonder if perhaps Taran is ready for them. And it reminds me a story I wrote, about Qui-Gon when he was a little boy. I think I deleted it in a fit of frustration even though it was a dozen pages single-spaced, on the little old Gateway notebook Mum wrote her dissertation on. It's still upstairs. Perhaps the document is hiding there. Not that there is any way to transfer it - the floppy drive is broken on that laptop and it does not have internet. Strange to think that you can isolate a computer that way. There is always something you can do, now, to save your information. Put it on a flash drive or email it to yourself.

This is my Christmas morning: crepes and reminiscence of things that are not Christmas. A few wonderful books from Aunt Deb. Our real Christmas was a week ago with Grandma and Grampa, because that is what Christmas is.

But crepes and house-elves on Christmas morning are a tradition I could get used to.

'twas the night before Christmas....

2010-12-24T18:37:00.000-08:00

And we sit in our house smelling apple pie and chocolate creme pie and Christopher (ragdoll, remember?) sits on my lap helping me type this. Heh.

Tomorrow we will have a potluck for all the other people who are bereft of family and friends to celebrate with, and/or simply don't celebrate. Perhaps no one will come. But we expect a surprising number who don't want to have a lonely Christmas.

We have no tree and no particular traditions within our house for Christmas day. Perhaps I will get up early enough to make crepes for everyone or something (it sounds fun). But I feel like as the spirit of the holiday goes, this is pretty good.

Making things up

2010-12-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

Mum likes to tell me that I bring out "bad mother" stories where she did things to scar me. This isn't one. But this is a moment in my life when, I now realize, what I saw was completely different from what anyone else did.

My friend Jessie and I built a world. I think it was the winter I was eight, a full year before we left Pennsylvania, but it's possible it was later. I have little idea of the chronology of my life then, because everything before I moved here somehow seems to stretch on forever.

We built a world in which our dolls were alive and could talk and had feelings and understood us. In our world, we were the secret children of Jedi knights left on earth to combat Sith lords. We had a host of invisible pets at our call. And we could turn into tigers. We called each other by other names and and tracked the Sith around our neighborhoods. It was all one game - our lives were one game. We called this world The Mystery, a code name.

A particular feature of this game is that we could never acknowledge that this was what it was.

We never said "pretend that we ___". It was all dead serious.

Another feature was that we never talked about it in front of adults. Ever. Our brothers were privy to it only because they were generally present. I think they were confused about what we were doing; Carew once started to cry and told me that he didn't want me to turn into a tiger (he was six, I think). I didn't tell him it was a game - that never occurred to me. I hugged him and said that it was okay, being a tiger was fun.

One morning we were in our parents' room and he started to tell them about my invisible horses. I turned around and put my hand over his mouth and said "Shh!" And then when asked what he was going to say, I said, "Nothing" and glared at him.

At the time I was secretive and I didn't know why. I was sent to my room for a couple hours because I refused to say anything more but I heard Carew explaining the whole story, ending it with, "That's what Brynnie and Jessie say, but I don't think I really believe it." And while I lay there on my bed thinking that he had ruined my life, Dad came in, and I explained that Jessie and I liked to pretend things and that was all, and he told me Carew thought we believed it, and that was how I wasted an entire morning shut in my bedroom because I didn't want to tell my parents about my games.

Only it wasn't just that. Because after that day, we could never play the game again. We tried, but it didn't work. Once you've said out loud that something isn't real, it's no good anymore.

At the time I was furious at Carew for ruining it and I felt bad because I thought I was ruining it by not being able to believe anymore, this game that had been what Jessie and I always did together for months and months, maybe even nearly a year (certainly I remember this game being a catalyst for problems at my ninth birthday party).

Now I can see it differently, of course. For Carew, the line between what was real and what was pretend had to be concrete. I think the ambiguity of our game scared him. For me, if the pretend couldn't seem real, there was no point in pretending at all.

I am absolutely positive that this is one of about a thousand things that were fairly central to my childhood but that no one else knows anything about at all, until now. I was secretive about other things, but I was secretive about the games I played because telling people ruined them. If I talked about it, it became just a game, or a story I was telling myself, or something that wasn't magical anymore. It was too real to me to be real enough to someone else.

That might explain, though, why I dislike verbally relating the things I'm writing. When you have to distill it into a picture painted for someone else, it loses its complexity. The act of transferring it from brain to paper is treacherous enough. It takes enough courage to not feel silly when you're writing for yourself; when someone else hears about it you twist it to sound good and then it loses all meaning.

The History of Love

2010-12-18T21:21:00.000-08:00

by Nicole Krauss.

There are books that touch you in a way you don't quite understand. They are important and gripping and I want to put them into words but there are no words to take the feeling of the last page turned.

Usually I don't even try to write about it when I finish. But I feel like it's important. This book did for me what The Book Thief and what Paper Towns did.

It's exhausting to read that kind of book. Exhausting and absorbing. At 5:01 PM we were supposed to be at Grandma and Grampa's for Christmas dinner and I was still on the couch with the book in my hands because I didn't want to put it down and break the spell.

It's not a book I think I would have picked up if Eleanor hadn't put it on the list of books I absolutely positively had to read. I'm not even sure that at a different point it would have affected me all that much. It is striking and intricate with some questions left unanswered and some answers painfully honest. I'm not making sense. Books are hard to explain. I can write down a list of the ones that have struck me but if I read them again I don't know if I'll feel the same way about them, if I'll get any of that at all.

The History of Love tells a lot of stories. It's sad, it ends with dying, but it's also about life and the impossibility of things ever working out quite the way you wanted or expected them to. Those imperfections are dissatisfying but they make the surreal real.

Ragdolls

2010-12-17T11:41:00.000-08:00

I have some new friends hanging out in my room, most of whom are temporary, but all of whom have materialized in the last, oh, three days, that is, since I got back from school.

Finals are finals. Blah blah. They went fine. But I'm HOME. I have a regular babysitting gig 7:30-9 every weekday morning, and another 10-12 every Tuesday. (Carew asked me yesterday, "So, Brynne, how many children are you planning on having?" which is the kind of hilarious question little brothers are prone to asking.) But in the meantime, I've been sewing. And sewing. And sewing.

I don't believe that any of my friends at school know that I blog, or if they do they don't read it, so even though these things are for them, I think I am safe in sharing these.

I made adorable fleece pillow animals for Allison and Cassandra, because I suspect that they are more likely to appreciate these. Especially since Cassandra's two favorite things in the world are cats and the color purple.

They do not have names yet, but I think that all my siblings have hugged them because they are extremely soft and huggable.

For Emma I made ten-year-old Willamina Spencer

Who is, if I do say so myself, positively adorable. She has green eyes and brown hair and, as you can see, a Regency-style dress, which is appropriate.

For Eleanor I made this little boy called Julio.

I have been telling my family that he is Paul Simon but he, in fact, only resembles Paul Simon in the way he dresses, as evidenced by this picture.

The actual reason his name is Julio is too inexplicable to communicate, but Eleanor will find it highly entertaining.

Oh, and of course I had leftovers. Which is why one of the new ragdolls, Christopher, is not being given away:

For the time being, they're all hanging out on my bookshelf.

The main things I've learned from this experience are 1) that when you make a doll's head too large and then have to decapitate him in order to shrink it (notice that Christopher's neck is a little odd-looking) you feel like a horrible Frankenstein type because it's just human enough to make you feel sorry for it. And 2) That I really, really enjoy embroidery. The faces on the dolls and the animals were so much fun!

Oh, and lastly . . .

That even when you make a doll that is manifestly NOT Cat Stevens and then you give him a shirt that looks vaguely like on Cat Stevens once wore (I wanted to make a blue shirt, but there was no blue fabric left...) your siblings will give you no end of grief.

But that's what they're there for, isn't it?

Braveheart

2010-12-13T16:25:00.000-08:00

I just finished my medieval English history final and am dead, so I will tell you about other dead things.

Our professor likes to rant. And he likes to rant about how historically inaccurate "Braveheart" is, which is funny, because has never seen it. So one of my classmates emailed him towards the end of the semester and suggested that he screen the movie before finals and give us a running commentary on his thoughts. That's what we did last night.

He didn't talk that much, although he did turn out to be amusingly twitchy at movie violence. But here is a list of what I thought were the most egregious historical inaccuracies, keeping in mind that we just finished a course on the subject. Apologies for spoilers, only not really, because it was A VERY VERY BAD MOVIE:

William Wallace was a lowland Scot, not a highland Scot.
William Wallace was a landed knight, not a peasant. Even if he had been a "farmer," he would have had tenants to do the actual labor for him.
Scots did not wear kilts then. Lowland Scots didn't wear kilts till national revivals in the 1800s.
They didn't ever wear blue war paint, either.
This is more a comment on the quality of moviemaking, but the chainmail was AWFUL. It looked like it had been knitted from yarn and then spraypainted silver or something.
Edward II might have been gay, but all claims of his homosexuality were unsubstantiated and by and large made after the fact.
Thus, Edward I did not push his son's gay lover out of a window.
On that note, while I appreciate any vitriol directed at Edward I, he was not the lunatic the film portrays him as.
Primae noctis, which is cited in the movie as the historical right for a lord to take a woman for her wedding night, is a fabrication.
William Wallace's cries of FREEEDOMMMM! are completely anachronistic and based in Enlightenment rhetoric.
The thing with the Irish never happened.
EDWARD III WAS NOT THE LOVECHILD OF WILLIAM WALLACE AND PRINCESS ISABELLA. Isabella was ten years old when William Wallace died.
Edward I was not dying at the time William Wallace was killed (1305). He died of dysentery in 1307.

Beyond all this -

I thought it was a bad movie. None of the characters ever developed. It managed to be simultaneously brutally violent and action-packed, and really really slow. As in, slow-motion and long shots of people gazing into each others' eyes. Gratuitous. The movie was three hours and could have been two if all the slow motion was played at normal speed.

I already mentioned that the costuming is bad. It is bad.

While I appreciate that the highlands are picturesque, the movie had more lavishly wide scenery shots than The Lord of the Rings, and that's saying something. In Lord of the Rings it never feels gratuitous; here, it felt like padding. Yes, the Scottish highlands are beautiful. Now tell me why I'm watching this movie?

Let's not forget that Mel Gibson is an egomaniac, but we knew that already. My professor was exploding at the Christ-type depiction of William Wallace's murder . . . particularly farcical in light of the fact that Mel Gibson went on to make a certain movie in which he cast himself as Christ.

It portrayed medieval society as completely lacking in boundaries and legal proceedings. Particularly Scotland. No, not all Scots people lived in clusters of three huts in the middle of nowhere. And by the early 14th century English legal proceeding was pretty complex. I have this problem with a lot of depictions of the middle ages . . . yes, noble prerogatives were ridiculous by the standard of the present day, but life was not anarchy. Quite the opposite.

Wow. This movie won five Oscars - and was nominated for five more, ONE OF WHICH WAS "BEST COSTUME DESIGN". How?

728 years, or 8 years

2010-12-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

December 11th is a sad day and a happy day.

It's so important that last night I had a dream I'd missed remembering it, and spent most of the dream trying to figure out ways to fix that problem. (Time travel? I don't recall the dream that well, only that I was panicking because I'd realized it was December 17th: six days too late.)

728 years ago today Llywelyn ap Gruffydd died, which (especially if you're like my mother and have a doll of him on your desk) is very sad. Two minutes after I started this post I checked her blog and realized she already had it covered - so go read this.

Sad indeed.

But there is also happiness associated with December 11th, because on this day eight years ago, I wrote the journal entry that kicked off the biggest ongoing project of my life.

I started writing a daily journal because my mum told me to. It was really as simple as that. 11th December 2002, she thought it would be a good idea for this to happen. I don't have the journal book with me, but at some point I started the endeavor to type up my entries (it never got very far) and so I can proudly quote to you the first thing I wrote:

Wednesday, Dec. 17th, 2002
7:27AM Pendleton, Oregon

Mama has said that we have to write in a journal once every day; so here goes nothing!

Actually, I don’t find it all that difficult to write. It’s just that ‘every day’ that is kind of hard. Since it is only 7:30, (AM) I will not write about something that has happened today, as today has hardly started.

I didn't notice this when it was on paper, because it's hard to see past an eleven-year-old's handwriting, but even then, I had almost the same 'voice' I do now. Good or bad?

I guess "every day" was hard then. I think I was thirteen or so before it came easily, before I stopped having entries that looked like

Tue. Dec. 31st
Today’s new year’s eve!

-Brynne

Really exciting.

Sometime in the middle of July, 2005, I decided to be done with that stuff and write at least two pages every day. Two pages of whatever size paper I had at the time, which could range from the closelined 9x11 paper I have now, to those little dinky journal books. Sometimes I just drew (and still draw) pictures, but it's two pages of whatever has been going through my head every single day of my life for almost half of it.

The two-pages-a-day resolution came at about the time I really learned how to keep journal entries. At eleven, I wrote what I had done during the day. For the most part (when I wasn't ranting about how annoying my brothers were) I wrote as if I had an audience, which is to say, I didn't share very much of what I actually thought.

Partly the act of writing that stuff down is an acquired skill. It takes practice to find words to express frustration or happiness or any of those things, and I have a surprising number of entries that say, "I'm really mad right now, but it's too complicated to explain why." That still occasionally happens. Words for feelings are hard. I was discussing this with two of my friends the other day, because one of them, Eleanor, keeps a journal not as frequently as I but nearly, and like me, tracks her life by it. Cassandra, on the other hand, says that she always found writing in a diary more frustrating than helpful because what she wrote down was never more than an approximation.

That's true, but I also think it's something you can develop towards accuracy. Also, it stops mattering after a while. I like having that permanent paper record of my feelings at sixteen (painful though reading it can be), because it frequently reminds me that my memory of how I felt about things is very often completely different than what I thought I felt.

Does that make sense? I don't know if I remember wrong or if what I remember is more right, but either way, it's often different. Even if the journal entries are just what I thought was going on in my head, they're still odd and emotional and interesting to read. But that's not why I write them. I write them for what they give me in the current moment, which is an outlet. Once I got past picturing an invisible audience (or a cohort of brothers and their friends who could pick it up and read it), I just wrote what came into my head. And sometimes I did have cause to regret it, but it still did me good. My journals don't have a whole lot of daily life (not like what I shared above) but they do show the evolving continuum of Brynne.

And eight years and 43 volumes in, I had better feel that it's a good thing, because otherwise I've wasted a whole lot of effort.

Countdown

2010-12-08T18:19:00.000-08:00

One class finished.

Three to go.

It's hard to stay focused now. I have two tests to study for and three papers to turn in .

Then I get to go home.

Dead

2010-12-07T18:15:00.000-08:00

The week before finals is called Dead Week for a reason.

Like, really for a reason.

Today I'm doing things like making dinner.

Working on my study guide for my history final (which will involve one question that asks us to relate a Calvin and Hobbes quote to medieval history).

Editing an essay.

Filling out my time sheet (I've made about $240 this month! That might almost cover textbooks next semester!).

And

Being tired.

It's a cold day

2010-12-05T20:34:00.000-08:00

Have some more pictures. It snowed Thursday but by Friday morning it had nearly all melted off. Sadness. This is the view out my window, because it was too cold to go out, of course.

Oh yeah. That's me in a hat!

Humiliation

2010-12-04T21:00:00.001-08:00

This is Eleanor's fault.

100%.

Honestly.

EDIT: Explanations?

I also have one of Eleanor and Paul Simon but she would kill me if she knew I had put it on the internet. We keep trying to one-up each other in embarrassment (she set this particular picture as my desktop background as payback for me posting seven pictures of Paul Simon on her door) but it doesn't work very well when both of us contribute to our own humiliation.

Okay, that's not an explanation, that makes it sort of worse. But there you have it.

recipes

2010-12-04T18:59:00.000-08:00

When I cook, I almost never stick to the recipe. Often I don't use one at all. Sometimes, however, there are things that I don't know how to make. Here are a couple that I have done recently:

Chocolate fudge.

Leaving out the walnuts.

Cheesecake.

I got this recipe from my friend/former choir director. This is one that I never try to modify because it is amazing.

And today Eleanor and I made potato latkes for lunch. I had no cheesecloth or paper towels so I used a t-shirt to squeeze out the potato: yes. Yes, how very college.

When I'm not cooking things like this I have a couple basic recipes that I can pretty much modify infinitely. 'tis good stuff.

Jane Austen

2010-12-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

Mum pointed out to me, at least I think it was Mum, that I still haven't blogged about my Regency ball. And so I will do so now.

I don't have any photos of the actual dance. Therefore you will have to content yourself with our pre-dance photo shoot. Emma has a friend who took pictures for us, and there are over 200; these are just the ones I liked best.

I went to Portland on Friday, October 29th. It was late afternoon, early evening by the time I got to Emma's house, and we spent much of it baking apple pies and gluing pearls onto bobby pins to put in our hair the next morning. (It's hard work, being a Regency socialite.)

We had all morning to kill on Saturday, so we went to Powell's Books in Portland and then headed to the hotel where the ball would be held. They had set up a conference room upstairs as a kind of marketplace-cum-display area. One side of the room was all books on the period, written in the period, and tangentially related to the period, for sale in big messy piles. We'd just been to Powell's so I was feeling somewhat broke, else I'd have bought books. I still am missing Emma and Mansfield Park from my collection.

The other side of the room was the one that made me sort of start hyperventilating with excitement.

It was the clothes.

Now, up until this point I had watched all the Jane Austen movies I could and critiqued them for their accuracy costuming. I had spent hours and hours online looking up seam placement and mundane things like, that, which shouldn't in all honesty matter, but do.

Well.

It wasn't just that there were clothes. They had a museum-lent display of the evolution of fashion, from the Georgian to the Victorian, and they were dresses made in the period. And they had a wall of the kinds of accessories people wore, too. They had dressmakers selling Regency and other historical costumes, which incidentally is really no good at all because they won't be fitted properly unless by some miracle you happen to be the size of the dress the dressmaker chose to make.

What really induced my excitement, though, was seeing people dressed up in costume.

Okay, the first thing I noticed - being, I must admit, somewhat hypercritical and overinformed on the subject - was that many of them didn't actually fit that well. As in, might have been made for them, but were probably bought from a dressmaker and perhaps altered to fit. And some people cheated with things like plastic clips in their hair. (Bobby pins aren't exactly period, either, but they're closer).

But all the same.

At the little market not everyone was all dressed up - mostly just the people selling things, and some of the women shopping, who were probably there for the long haul - lectures and that sort of thing. Emma and I didn't pay for any of that. We were really there for the ball.

And so, the ball!

Emma went to her hairdresser to have her hair curled and put up. I just jabbed some pins in mine because it's at a length where I can do that, and of course, I don't have to touch a curling iron ever as long as I live. And then we went to her house and got dressed.

Getting dressed takes a long time.

Well. Her outfit didn't have any of the undergarments, so it took less. But even so, neither of us could properly get them on without help. After we'd accomplished that we drove out to a Victorian mansion and took pictures in the mist.

Freezing cold. Frigid. Sure, I had stockings, shift, corset, petticoat, dress, but when your arms are completely bare you still get goosebumps. Also it was wet. Portland in October is not friendly to having a train on your dress.

Still.

But the ball, Brynne, you say; the ball; how was the ball?

FANTASTIC.

We arrived at the hotel around 6:30 and, by some major miracle, found a parking spot less than a block away. (Paying for parking, by the way, is something that never comes up in Pendleton because I don't think there's a single parking meter in the entire town, meaning it's something I simply never think about. Fortunately Emma does think about it.)

Dinner was salad followed by salmon and wild rice or some such thing, which probably isn't especially period but nevertheless was nice. We were seated at a table with seven or eight other people, one of whom had been coming since the '80s. Most people were not in costume; Emma's and mine were almost certainly among the most accurate in regency period, though there were certainly many fantastic ones.

After we ate we "took a turn about the room" one, because you can't attend a Jane Austen event without saying that phrase, and two, because it was lovely to see all the costumes. It was clear to most of us that while we were there for the dance and the experience, many people were there because the Jane Austen Society of North America is their life. As a matter of fact, my English professor mentioned JASNA in class the very next week (she once gave a lecture at one of the balls) and described it as "a group of older ladies who like Jane Austen far too much." But I think she only said that because she was a member.

Then there was the promenade, where all the people in costume got up and walked around the room to show off and have pictures taken. And this was when Emma and I found something out: when you are two teenagers at an event comprised primarily of older women, people really like to take your picture. Who knows how many people now have photographs of Emma and me on their hard disks.

The only photo of me I have that's actually from the event

That was when we found Ellen, Abby, and Madison: the three other people there our age. We quickly determined that we were the Bennett sisters: I was Jane (being the oldest) and Emma was Lizzy (being the second), which wasn't really fair to the rest, but Kitty and Lydia and Mary are a great deal of fun to pretend to be.

Then was the dance.

English country dancing is, apparently, still taught in schools in England. No doubt they find it tedious. We, on the other hand, had the time of our lives. Emma and I went assuming that we wouldn't really participate much in the actual dancing part, since we didn't sign up for any workshops.

But the event is tailored for people who don't actually know what they're doing. They lined us up in the rows and called out the moves while the music played. Once we figured out what each signal meant it was easy to start a dance, and it only took a couple times through to learn it, especially when the person opposite you knew more what they were doing than you did.

And so we danced for four solid hours.

I can honestly say that it was even more fun than I expected. It was midnight when we returned to Emma's house; our feet hurt - everything hurt; even the restrained dances are good exercise - and we were exhausted, but we could see easily why characters in Jane Austen novels go to balls at nine and stay till five in the morning.

Life as a Regency socialite might get pretty inane after a while, but it might almost be worth it.

We could see why they had servants. We got back and had to help each other out of our gowns, pull fifty pins out of our hair, crawl into bed and go to sleep. No servants to make us breakfast in the morning. But it was such fun.

I think if more young people knew how much fun it was, the JASNA AGM would not be populated solely by older women.

So there is your detailed description of my Halloween weekend, with its orgy of photos and gushing on the fashion of the time. I really did put an enormous amount of research into it - sort of shocking in retrospect. Almost no one else had the full layers, and who could blame them? Regency stays are comfortable but I didn't slouch once the whole evening.

Jane would have been proud.

my hair: week . . . many. Month 8.5.

2010-12-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

YES! A lovely treat for my dear readers. Hair. Because you know you can never get enough of it.

(Incidentally, I feel like I, like many other self-absorbed bloggers, should have a contrived name for the people who read this. Dragonflies have larvae, right? Can you be my larvae?

Kidding.)

Yes. I have song lyrics written on my mirror. Eleanor put them there.

At some point I will have to trim it to a less grown-out-inverted-bob shape, because as you can tell from the first picture, the front and sides are sort of longer than the back (discounting growing-out bangs and layers).

touching

2010-12-01T17:01:00.000-08:00

Things I touched at work today:

A piece of Chinese embroidery from the Qing dynasty.

A very large spinning wheel.

A vase rescued from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

A human mandible.

A human skull.

Several slivers of wood (i.e. spears) originally used to kill fish.

A beaded 19th century purse.

A very rusty wagon wheel spoke.

A cowboy's stirrup.

A sinew of a deer.

Sometimes work is pretty awesome.

December

2010-12-01T09:08:00.000-08:00

In case you all didn't notice (as I've turned into one of those annoying people who keeps apologizing for it), I haven't exactly been blogging much lately.

But it is December First, and I'm in the home stretch of the semester, as the whiteboard in the front hall of my dorm so kindly reminds me every day. I will either go home two weeks from today or two weeks from yesterday, which means - guess what? I will have a BREAK.

Last night I finished the first draft of the last essay of the semester. And I thought, "maybe now that NaNoWriMo and essays are almost over, I'll feel like blogging again."

Actually, I thought that in the shower this morning. But let's go with it.

We had a November full of snow and today, the first day of December, it's gone. All of it. Well, except for lumps of ice along the edges of the sidewalk. I'm deeply disappointed. It's not even winter yet, but I want my winter! Now!

John Scalzi

2010-11-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

It's still snowing.

It basically has been since last Sunday. Let me say this in big letters:

IT NEVER SNOWS THIS EARLY IN PENDLETON.

It doesn't!

But for us, this Thanksgiving, it has. I'm glad. It makes it seem special. Even though I have to go back to school tomorrow, I'm relaxed. I've written three very bad drafts of essays but I can worry about that tomorrow and the next day and the two weeks after that, at which point I will be OUTTA THERE and back here for winter break.

In the meantime, I want to talk about the three novels I read yesterday.

Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony, by John Scalzi.

I've already read Zoe's Tale, which tells the same story as The Last Colony but from a completely different perspective, so I sort of knew a lot of the surprises the earlier books give away. But obviously I devoured them all in one day.

It's science fiction. I am usually not that interested in the genre. I've read almost all the Star Wars novels written before 2002 (and none of the ones written after) and I've read pretty much everything Timothy Zahn has ever done, because in retrospect his were the only Star Wars novels I enjoyed that much (the Corellian trilogy aside), and I've read all the Pern books, but beyond that, I view SF sort of the same way I view straight high fantasy. You've got a few really good ones, and you've got a lot of derivative trash.

Sorry.

But I loved these. Scalzi's a good writer; I've been following his blog, Whatever, for about six months and he's clever and funny, and that same voice comes through in his novels. I mean, Old Man's War was his first novel, and you can see it in some of the phrasing and the fact that the character is sort of maybe A LOT like him. But there were parts that had me laughing out loud. Particularly his use of improbable analogies drawn out too far, which can go so wrong if they're not handled right, but they are. I probably liked the first one best, for the novelty of it, but I enjoyed them all. Score one for science fiction.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I

2010-11-21T21:01:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I loved it.

Spoilers mixed in below - lots of them, but because they didn't alter the plot at all, only the kind where I go through the things I'm missing and the things they did right.

No, it wasn't perfect. As a movie all by itself, it was probably not the best of the series, if only because it couldn't possibly be all by itself. Gone are the days when they tried to make each movie stand on its own. It follows out of five and six, and it holds on to the things that matter.

Mum called it "slow and loving". It practically followed the book chapter by chapter, though it ellided stuff like the wedding preparations, of course. But it had the wedding! It had Bill and Fleur, finally! And it made changes I approved of. Like not making Harry decide to leave Ginny behind - at the wedding, as they're scrambling to go, Harry is looking frantically for her to make sure she's safe and/or take her with them, and Hermione grabs him and says "there's no time, we have to go!" No breakup, no Harry being drastically unfair to her, and since she's one of my favorites I appreciated that.

The only thing I really, really missed was that after Ron destroys the locket, there is never that moment where Harry says to him, "Hermione's just like my sister - I thought you knew." I figure that's because they don't want to resolve that particular tension until part II. There's other things not wrapped up, too, like the Taboo on Voldemort's name and Teddy Tonks (Dora Tonks started to say that she was pregnant but Mad-Eye cut her off). But I think they'll resolve all those things in the second half.

Slow and loving. They gave us the story of the Deathly Hallows in its entirety, with a whimsical little visual sequence with Hermione narrating. It happens exactly where and when it happens in the book.

And even if it makes it a relatively inaccessible, somewhat drifting film, I loved it.

A break.

2010-11-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

Eight days.

It's been eight days since I last blogged.

What can I say? I'm a busy girl. I'm at home for the break. Have been since Thursday.

Which suggests that I'm not so busy. But you know, that's okay with me too. I have two weeks of school left after Thanksgiving, plus one week of finals, and then I get to come home for an entire month. It's a hump I just want to get over.

School? Psh. So over it.

I'm writing three essays this week, so it's not the best time to be "over" that stuff - but I can get through that. I'm going to get through it all, basically, and that's the bottom line. Because then I get to be done.

Update: Across the River.

2010-11-12T19:45:00.000-08:00

I've spent the last two days hitting it pretty hard. Not so much in terms of plot - I haven't really changed anything - but majorly majorly in terms of writing. I did some plot restructuring when I started editing it in September, but I stopped when life started being too much for writing.

The plot is, I think, actually not too bad. It wraps up too quickly at the end, and leaves many threads for a sequel, which may be problematic if I never write one. But I think I will . . . I just need more ideas for it first. Also possibly a different protagonist. I don't really like writing two different things from the same character's perspective, largely because once you have taken her on one journey, if you don't have a trajectory again (if the romance is resolved, for example!) then it can be difficult to keep her from stagnating.

Part of my hard writing edit involved doing global searches on the biggest words in my Wordle last week. Observe last week:

And then we have today:

I didn't really worry about words like "men," "hand," "face," and "eyes," which I may overuse as descriptors but which don't feels as bad as "back" and "looked" did, because I knew they were symptoms of certain writing tics that drive me crazy. (I still talk about people's faces and eyes too much, but it's less epidemic.)

"Back" is so, so, so much better. I'm really relieved it's not the biggest word in my novel anymore. Same with "looked" - it's now hiding next to "magic" instead of dominating the wordle. "One" is still big-ish, but smaller.

The novel is currently 100,163 words. This is too long for a young adult novel. But I'm not particularly worried about this at the moment, since those kinds of rules are so beyond the point at which Across the River stands that they don't even matter much. It's a novel. I wrote it. I'm working on it. There are parts that I really like.

Generally speaking, that's a good thing. There are also parts that concern me, but so it goes.

Overuse

2010-11-08T11:45:00.000-08:00

Good news, guys.

I've found a new way to drive myself totally, completely insane.

You ready?

Wordle.net.

The idea is this: You paste in the text of your document and it tells you what your most frequently used words are. You can then go through and fix your word overuse.

Okay, great. I've done this before. But guess what awesome idea I had today?

Ten novels.

Let's see if my word usage has changed over the course of ten novels.

Has it?

"Back", "looked", "just", and "knew/know". WHAT! I kind of knew about the latter three, but BACK? What is it about the word BACK that has me so completely enthralled?

Check this out:

EXHIBIT A: PELATA'S QUEST

Back, Know, Looked, One, Time.

Apart from the names of my secondary characters (it was first person), particularly Tissar, Kerinel, and Mara, these appear to be the five biggest words as of January 2008."Eyes" is pretty high up there, too.

EXHIBIT B: TO MEND A WORLD

Once again: Tamen, Edha, Bradden, and Kendan are all pretty significant, although I'm pleased to see that my protagonist's name, Ella, is actually visible. Again, it's first person, so it doesn't show up except when other people are talking to her.

But here we see it: looked, know, back, one, eyes. AUGUST 2008. Eight months taught me nothing. (not to mention two years of trying to edit this story into acceptability.)

EXHIBIT C: THE STORYTELLER

I feel like this is actually slightly more reasonable in that there's a wider distribution of big words. We have Demai, Dagy, Father, and Siana, all of whom are relatively significant characters. Luin, the protagonist, also puts in an appearance, even though it's still first person. Little has joined Know, Back, One, Like, and Thought, but I'm also seeing SOME distribution of other, more interesting words. Apparently by fall of 2008 I was slightly less focused on those few big players.

EXHIBIT D: BRELETH

KNOW, BACK, ONE, LIKE, NOW, LOOKED, LITTLE, HEAD, JUST, THINK, RIGHT.

Again, at least it's a wider distribution. Obviously Ella plays a huge role in this story - it's from Tamen's perspective. A prequel to TMAW. This is probably the novel that still makes me squirm the most - I sort of hate it. NaNoWriMo 2008 . . . two years ago.

EXHIBIT E: HOME AND HAVEN

We're on to novel number five now, folks. Has Brynne learned anything?

First of all, Camille's brother Bax takes center stage, followed by friend Alexis. I think LIKE has upstaged BACK and LOOKED and KNOW, and EYES is less popular. I must have used a lot of similes. I would say that this was mostly May 2009, but in truth I've rewritten it enough times that it has pretty much been composed over the last year and a half. And still. Still these same words.

EXHIBIT F: HENNY

And poor Henny dominates. This is the point at which I gave third person narrative a try, and the problem with it is that when you have your character's name EVERYWHERE it sort of dominates all other words. I see plenty of our same friends (looked, back) but a lot less just and a lot less knew. Unfortunately, more like. Partly this is a novel about middle school girls and partly I do like my similes. August 2009. Some small improvement?

EXHIBIT G: THE HELIAND TRAIN

Pout. Maybe I shouldn't do NaNoWriMo (this was 2009) anymore, because I always end up with a love/hate relationship with them, emphasis on the hate. Obviously this is, again, third person, and Jacklen is our protagonist. One, know, and back, are joined in about equal measure by train, door, right, going. I think this is an active story but I'm not sure because I haven't looked at it in a while.

Persephone and Mr. Cotts are, obviously central characters. In case you were in any doubt.

EXHIBIT H: THE UNDERGROUND

This poor novel got written in January of this year and then promptly set aside, because it is a semi-sequel (more like a follow-up) to Home and Haven and what's the point, really, on editing it into perfection when I'm still twisting up and messing with what it's supposed to ride on? There are things in it that don't make sense anymore because I've changed the first one.

Okay. So we're back to first person. Emi, our narrator, hardly shows up, but her companions Nathanael/Nat, Bailey, Nora, and Morgan make their presence known. Also her mom. And the word LIKE takes center stage because this is a sixteen-year-old girl and she says like a lot. Unfortunately we still haven't gotten rid of BACK and LOOKED. Thought has gotten pretty small, thank God.

At this point it's hardly worth pointing out.

Only two more to go.

EXHIBIT I: ACROSS THE RIVER

Brened is not the narrator, Mari is, but it's fair to say it's mostly about him, so his name's dominance is excusable. Why is BACK the most popular word outside of his name, though? MEN (a new one!) and LOOKED and ONE and FACE and HAND are sort of next tier, and then we have words like MAGIC and NOW and THINK and TIME and STILL. LIKE remains popular. But you can tell this is more of a straight fantasy novel, I think.

Even if there are stupid amounts of the same words.

Okay. So if I hadn't kicked the habit last summer, there is NO WAY it's going to be gone by now.

EXHIBIT J: DECLARED BRAIN DEAD

Written freakin' LAST WEEK.

First: this is written from two separate first-person perspectives (Rachael's and Merel's) and I'm glad to see that there's a relatively even balance between the names of characters from their two different stories.

Unfortunately

SAME WORDS.

Should I be worried about this?

Are they just common words?

Or should I go on an expunging spree?

One week!

2010-11-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

I just typed "The End."

Seven days. 56,000 words. That's 8,000 words a day.

I'm exhausted.

The best part was that I didn't end up having to kill any of my main characters. I'm still toying with the idea of an epilogue, but I think on the whole it's better to leave it the way it is. We'll see.

12,000 words today. I'm exhausted.

This is the third time in my life I have written a novel in this period of time, and it's something that I frequently resolve not to do again and frequently end up, well, doing again.

This novel I just kind of . . . wrote.

I have no idea whatsoever if it was any good. It feels very . . . gappy. I don't have a very good memory of the flow at all.

So we'll see.

obvious

2010-11-05T16:52:00.000-07:00

Today was a pleasing, relaxing, and exciting day.

Yeah, that's right. All those things.

In the morning I went to my first-ever NaNoWriMo write-in with people I didn't know. Two of them. I didn't get a whole lot of writing done, but we had fun talking about writing and NaNo and family members doing NaNo.

Current word count: 36,279. So yeah. Averaging a little over 7,000 words per day.

The other really eventful thing I did was go shopping, which doesn't SOUND that exciting, except that we went to two very interesting places. The first was a bookstore. Where Cassandra bought me a book - Rampant by Diana Peterfreund. Most excellent! I've been wanting it since forever!

The second - well, first, actually, if we're talking chronologically - was the music shop.

It's such a typical local music store. I might put one like it in my novel because it's so quirky and interesting and potentially pertinent to my subject matter anyway. We went in there just for fun and to enjoy ourselves, but I came away with something much more exciting, which is now on my wall along with all the similar artifacts I've collected.

Shall I zoom that in a little for you?

Yes. Oh, yes.

They also had Back to Earth, New Masters, and some kind of special release album, but they were all more expensive (the last was around $250, which I assume means it's pretty rare). This was not particularly costly. It's not in premium condition and it's one of my less favorite albums. But I'm pretty happy with it. Now I only need Mona Bone Jakon, Tea for the Tillerman, Foreigner, Buddha and the Chocolate Box, Numbers, and Back to Earth, and my life will be complete.

It's pretty obvious from my room the kinds of things I'm interested in . . . Cat Stevens and Lord of the Rings. I'm okay with it.

It was funny, though. This is the conversation I had with the guy (mid-fifties or early sixties, long gray ponytail - basically the kind of guy you'd expect to find selling records in Walla Walla, Washington) in the record store:

Him: "So are you buying this for your mom?"
Me: "Nope. For me. I love Cat Stevens."
Him: "And he says very nice things about you." And then he proceeded to question me. "So what's his real name now?"
Me: "Yusuf."
Him: "Very good." Pause. I give him my driver's license so that he will exempt me from sales tax. We talk about Pendleton and Whitman and he makes some jokes. Then we have a conversation about how Yusuf's new albums aren't quite on par with the old ones.

Me to Eleanor, after we've left the store: "That guy is the kind of person my dad is going to be in twenty years."
Cassandra: "But he'll have waist-length dreadlocks instead of a ponytail?"

Yeah. And he'll be talking about an artist who is not Cat Stevens, because Cat Stevens is a significant tool in Dad's arsenal of Brynne-mockery.

But that's okay. I'm used to it.

Anyway, it's kind of an obvious joke.

AGM

2010-11-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have a couple pictures!

Not a lot.

But here are two of Emma and me and the three other girls at the event. I don't know what the photosharing deal is with these, so I'll just link them.

Serious

Smiley

Yes. We were the Bennet sisters.

So fun.

NaNoWriMo, day 2

2010-11-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

14,116.

The site is down so I can't update, so my nifty little stat tracker will be all out of whack. Well, darn. But if I could do 7,000 words or so both today and yesterday, then the rest of the week is going to be pretty good, because Monday and Tuesday are my busiest days.

I just need to finish my Magna Carta essay.

Also, I think that my next semester is going to be the scariest of my life. But I'll save that for another blog post.

Love,
Your very tired blogger.
Brynnie.

HALLOWEEN!

2010-10-31T20:36:00.000-07:00

I will save discussion of JASNA and my REGENCY BALL till I have picture and I'm not exhausted, but tonight is Halloween! And Eleanor and Cassandra and I have dressed up. I am wearing more makeup than I ever have in my life . . . including last year (when I went home).

Eleanor is Puck from Midsummer Night's Dream. I am a pirate.

When I say a lot of makeup, I MEAN it.

And lipstick. I've never worn lipstick before.

Me, Eleanor, Cassandra

Pirate-me looks startlingly like gypsy-me, hobbit-me, and renfaire-me when I remove my bandanna. But that's okay.

My friend Allison is just plain adorable.

The Summer Project: Part 5

2010-10-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

Finally! Fruition!

With a camera that I'd forgotten to charge and terrible lighting on a gray, gray, rainy day, I nevertheless managed to capture, at last, the full regalia.

It certainly sheds a whole new light on the lifestyle of these women. For one thing, wearing a corset - though it's pretty comfortable, at least, when I can lace it right, which I didn't this time, so it's gathering excessively at the waist - limits your mobility. It's not that it keeps you from breathing properly, not this kind, anyway. It's not that it's uncomfortable. But I have a twelve-inch piece of wood running straight down my front, which makes me sit up very straight indeed, even while I'm typing at this computer. The way my sleeves are cut forces my shoulders back, and I can't lift my arms very far above my head because of it. And of course I am essentially wearing three full-length dresses at once.

And I have a short train.

I still haven't decided how I'm going to put my hair up for the event. Whatever is done, either I'll have to do it before I put the dress on or Emma will have to do it for me, because of the limited range of motion due to the sleeves. And (as seen in the picture) it's parted in the middle because side parts were not the thing in those days.

At least I don't have to worry about curling it.

Since when I go to the ball I will have to wear this outfit for many hours, today is practice time. It's been about half an hour and I'm going to leave it on for another hour or so, I think. Like I said, it's not that it's uncomfortable; I just feel extremely limited.

I suppose it's time to go read sedately.

feeling groovy

2010-10-23T12:37:00.000-07:00

Hullo hullo.

Sometimes I wish weekends like this would stretch on forever. Eleanor and I made a massive batch of unusual pancakes, including normal things like blueberry and plain, but also strawberry, chocolate chip, apple, Bartholomew, and massive eat your facecook.

It's a rainy, quiet day and we're listening to Paul Simon proclaim that he's "feelin' groovy". That feels like about the pace of the weekend. I'm slowly converting my jeans into a patchwork quilt and everything feels so college. Sometimes we ("we" meaning Eleanor and I in particular) are very cynical about the lifestyle people tend to leave here. There are a lot of rich kids trying not to act like rich kids (witness: only three of the twelve Freshmen in my section last year were on financial aid) and that particularly becomes obvious on parents' weekend (i.e., now) because everyone takes out their daring piercings and puts on their polo shirts for their mums and dads.

I'm exaggerating. There is a perceptible difference, though, between the way people behave when they're independent at college and how they act when they're overwhelmed by swarms of people in their mid-fifties.

so exciting!

2010-10-21T15:14:00.000-07:00

we have a winner

2010-10-17T16:24:00.000-07:00

I JUST WON SOLITAIRE!

This isn't ordinary. This isn't the kind of game where you know if you sit down and play for long enough you'll eventually win. This is double-deck, no-holds-barred, teeth-grindingly frustrating epic solitaire.

I've been playing since I was nine years old.

This is the fifth time I've one.

Goes to show you two things: 1) that perseverance pays off, eventually, if you're pigheaded enough; and 2) that I obviously have free time, but I'm spending it doing things other than blogging.

a nice fall break.

2010-10-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

I actually have some PICTURES from this weekend! Wow! A picture post . . . how unusual!

No, but it was an AMAZING weekend, and in the five minutes I have before I must go to work, I will show you in how many ways.

Taran had a soccer game on Saturday. He scored FOUR GOALS. And was very pleased:

We also had fun with this very bizarre deer/cow/dinosaur statue on main street:

Cassandra, me, Eleanor, and Layli.

With Carew too.

Don't forget some very interesting tire swing antics!

And, just before we left, the people pile!

It was a good weekend.

The Last Pendragon

2010-10-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

One of my mum's novels is now available as a free ebook from smashwords.com or feedbooks.com - just search "The Last Pendragon". Go! Read it! It's good!

A short update.

2010-10-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

Good heavens, I've been home two days and I haven't blogged.

I must be having a good time.

I am; it's just nice to be back, which is why I've been AWOL. Of course, I'm always AWOL these days . . . .

The big news . . .

The big news is that I'm going to start querying soon.

:D

.

This comes to you in one-sentence fragments because I am sitting in the living room with all nine people in this house and I am distracted.

Sewing.

No homework.

. . . It's a good life.