MaW’s Blog

Yesterday I achieved seven thousand words during the meet. It’s a nice place to be after three days. I gave myself the evening off, although that was largely because I had a splitting headache for some reason.

I also bought myself a nice shiny new vacuum cleaner, which has so far been introduced to the bathroom and the bit of the kitchen that’s not underneath a pile of random stuff. The dust collector thingy has about half a carpet in it, it seems — and the carpets themselves are a different colour. Looks good, and makes me realise just how pathetic the cleaner that came with the flat is.

So, today I have no engagements or plans other than roasting a small chicken and some potatoes and carrots. I’ve got all the stuff to make stuffing, so I shall stuff the chicken and it will be delicious. I shall also make gravy and do things properly. Yum yum. No you can’t come, unless you bring your own potatoes as I only got enough for the one portion.

As for the writing, I hope to bash out another three thousand words today, thus bringing me up to 10,000 which will give me a little breathing space for next week which is going to be horribly busy. Fortunately my recorder teacher’s always thinking of how to make life easier and has moved my viol lesson to the same day as the viol consort (both at her house) so I now actually have a free evening which is almost like being given another 1,500 words on a silver platter.

The story itself is coming together nicely. I’m now up to the main three viewpoint characters and I’m gradually building the idea in the background that there’s something very odd going on with the priests. It won’t be long before one of the viewpoint characters finds out what it is, and then the readers will have been introduced to the central crisis, which is going to upend the world (not quite literally) and cause a great deal of consternation. It will also get Eiran and Princess Aru into the same place, allow Eiran to get some proper magical education and lead to the deaths of Eiran’s mentors, in order of acquisition.

He will get a happy ending, but I haven’t told him that yet.

Now most of you will know that I am not a fan of The Sun, but after today I might view it more favourably as a source of comedy.

Tony Blair today warned that the cost of climate change is so high, Sun readers should brace themselves for higher taxes

Okay so that’s not an exact quote, but it’s close enough. Personally I’m finally relieved to see that taxes are now being allocated by newspaper readership instead of on income like they used to be.

Well what do I write? I don’t really feel like much has happened to write about, but then again I do feel that I should write something, at least to prove to all the Livejournal people that it is worth sticking their heads out of that particular little world to look at the rest of the Web from time to time. If only free LJ accounts acted as RSS aggregators…

But such issues aside, I do seem to be finding a lot of people on LJ lately including Ciry and Chili from NWTSweS, a great pleasure. I should have tracked them down a long time ago.

Supposedly I have a concert on Friday with the Society of Recorder Players. This is find and dandy, and I can actually play the music for a change (it’s tenor stuff and none of the tenor parts are particularly complicated — especially the tenor part for Country Gardens which, save for the occurrance of one dotted quaver, one semiquaver and one triplet, is so dull as to be difficult to practise. Unfortunately it is, as with many tenor parts, fairly important when you look at the overall sound of the piece).

Although I do moan about boring tenor parts, I am fairly grateful I’m not playing descant. Not only are descant parts frequently more complicated, but if you get something wrong… let’s just say everybody notices.

Now I need to get hold of someone from the SRP and find out what they tend to wear to concerts.

Whether you like books or not, you have to admit that Project Gutenberg is a worthwhile idea.

LibriVox is to audiobooks what Project Gutenberg is to text. What is it about? Well, it’s a simple recipe. Take a public domain work — the wonderful PG contributers have ensured that there are many to choose from. Get a microphone, your computer and some recording software. Read the work aloud. Put it on the internet. Simple. Well okay, not quite that simple, but LibriVox have clear, sensible guidelines and lots of help and advice available.

LibriVox hosts a growing catalogue of public domain audiobooks read by volunteers from all over. Some are read by one person, some by many. Dramas may even be read by many different people, one for each character. Sure the quality varies, but it’s there, it’s understandable, and it’s free.

And now, it’s got my voice on it too. Something useful I can do while working on my speaking skills? Sign me up!

So far, I’ve done a few poems, a very small part from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde, a couple of chapters of Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood by George MacDonald, and what will be the third English recording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - once I go and edit it, that is.

So maybe that last is a bit redundant, but nobody’s read it with an English accent yet.

I should also mention that the project has been in existence for one year now, and they have an anniversary podcast. According to the blooper segment, as well as being plagued by all the diction and pronunciation problems which affect me (not to mention equipment malfunctions), there is also a chronic problem with cats interrupting the recording.

It didn’t work quite as well in the title, so I’ll put it here instead: what I actually want to talk about is people who don’t respect the sanctity of the cinema. It’s not a way I’ve really thought about it before, but it does make sense, my reaction when people are getting up and walking about and in and out all the time, talking to each other, giggling at things which have nothing to do with the film, playing with their mobile phones… my reaction is of horror and shock that people behave like this in this space which I feel is designated for a purpose, and the purpose is the watching of a film.

Not just the watching of the film, but the appreciation of it. The acceptance of its story, the suspension of disbelief (as far as the film itself allows that of course, some don’t!), the catharsis, the inevitable aural assault of the sound system that’s always rather too loud, and the endless stream of adverts which always seem to run for much longer in the cinema than they do on television.

Perhaps I could do without the last two, but I hope some sense of my point is getting through.

The film in which all this happened was Jet Li’s Fearless. It’s a big flashy martial arts film and it’s really rather good, but it’s clear they cut a lot out — more than an hour, I’m told, including everything with Michelle Yeoh in it. The result of this is that the plot takes some leaps in places which I don’t think all of the audience could follow, which might explain the restlessness. Although it might not — teenagers with mobiles are restless to start with these days, and nobody seemed to be able to decide where to sit.

There might be something about films in Mandarin with subtitles, too, but I’ll take that over dubbing any day.

So I mentioned a concert in the title. It was indeed a concert, and I went to help out as it was one in which I didn’t have to play. It was, it must be said, a concert at a much higher standard than I can currently play at. Musica Donum Dei is a group in which my recorder teacher plays. The programme was a nice selection of Telemann (my favourite, a suite for recorder and strings), Bach, Scarlatti (the usual stuff from Scarlatti — a very surprising harpsichord sonata) and Handel. Was a lovely day, and the cycle ride to Holme Pierrepont Hall is quite pleasant in good weather, especially once past Trent Bridge and out into increasingly rural settings.