|
I'm Not Boring You, Am I? |
|
Dr. Robert Runté on popular culture, education, and life. Recent Posts
Expresso Book Machine Not one of my best moments... origami The first two chapters of Edward Willett's lastes... 100th Birthday Rejection Letters April Fools Poetry Jackie Hurt Comments
or Email Runté
Archives
January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 
The Princess, The Mermaid, and Their Hot Air Ballon by Tigana Runté March 2003 Blog Indexes:
 |
Starburst Short List AnnouncedThe shortlist for the Starburst Award has been announced, and I was a bit surprised by how few of the finalists I had actually heard of, let alone read. It just goes to show how many Canadian authors are writing SF these days, and how diversified the field has become. Really, very impressive!Bit disappointed that more of my personal favorites were not short listed, like Lorina Stephen's Shadow Song, which is certainly literary enough for this juried award -- but then, I notice Kenneth Oppel only manages an honorable mention, so if a Governor General's award winner doesn't meet the standard.... I really appreciate how the shortlist was announced. The webpage shows the cover (good way to get a sense of tone for a book, at least sometimes) the cover blurb (let the book speak for itself), a comment from the jury (quick review explaining why it qualified for award), and brief bio identifying the author. All very informative. Certainly get a good overview of which titles would be of interest as readers of the genre; and a good overview of what's out there in Canadian SF these days. Will have to add all these titles to my Amazon.ca wish list.... My heartfelt thanks to the Jury and all those that made the award possible -- obviously a lot of work being done here to highlight Canadian SF, and obviously being very successful! Expresso Book MachineWent up to visit my mom this weekend, and stopped into the UofA bookstore to have a look at the Expresso book machine.
Labels: cyberculture, Popular culture, reviews, video clips, writing Not one of my best moments...This is wrong on so many levels, but they say confession is good for the soul....Wednesday I had a couple of teeth on the upper right crowned, only one of them turned out to be past saving, and the dentist had to pull it instead. So getting a tooth pulled isn't great, and the extraction was 'complicated' -- which means it felt like they had to break my upper jaw/skull to get it out, but okay, what's done is done. They sent me home to take Advil and hope for the best. I have to say, getting massive amounts of Advil in there before the swelling started worked wonders for keeping the tooth pain down to mild background noise, though the bleeding did make me nauseous, and Advil doesn't agree with my stomach all that well. The hole in my upper jaw where the tooth used to be reminded me pretty fast if I forgot to take the next dose on time, or if a stray piece of pasta wandered over to the side of the mouth I wasn't eating on. But four days on, it's not exactly foreground. Enter my wife's amazing spaghetti sauce. She's trying to keep to foods I can chew easily, right? But her spaghetti sauce is really good so it's no hardship for me or the kids. In fact, I blame her for what happens next. We have this wicked spaghetti ladle, specially designed to scoop up spaghetti in its wickedly long prongs. And having finished my portion of tonight's spaghetti, and as much of the kids' portion I could sneak off their plates when they were off arguing about something, there was still a little smidgen left in the cooking pot -- which I scooped up on said pronged ladle, and, um, stuck in my mouth.   As I said, not one of my best moments. Labels: humor origamiThis is pretty interesting: trailer for "Between the Folds".See also this great 18 minute TED talk on Origami. First rate, worth your time! Labels: Popular culture, reviews, video clips  The first two chapters of Edward Willett's lastest SF novel, Terra Insegura, are available as a podcast. Willett has the advantage over other authors that as a long-time radio personality (regular science guy stuff on CBC Regina) he is completely comfortable with the podcast format. 100th BirthdaySunday, April 5th, was my mother's 100th birthday. It was a small affair, attended only by myself, my wife, and our two daughters. There were several reasons we didn't want to make too big a deal out of it.First, my mom has good days and bad days, and I didn't much care for the idea of having a lot of people descend on my mom's nursing home if it turned out to be one of the bad days. In the event, she was mostly okay. (The nurse told me that mom hadn't wanted to get out of bed that morning, but that they had coaxed her into her wheel chair because they knew we were coming.) She was awake for most of the two hours we were there, and not in too much pain, and alert and in moderately good spirits, so we could have had more visitors, but you never know.  Mom having a cup of tea as one of the nurses we really like joins us for the celebration.
Third, I wasn't sure how big a deal to make of the fact that mom had made it to 100. When we last discussed her age earlier this year, she thought she was about 92. When I told her she was actually 99, she became very depressed, and said "Well, if that's true, then I'm done!" Fortunately, she forgot the conversation, and when I returned the next day, thought she was in her 80s. Rejection LettersLorina Stephens, author of Shadow Song reviewed here previously, has posted to her blog the rejection letters she received from the mainstream press before turning to self-publishing. I found the letters -- the reasons she was given by various publishers for not publishing her historical cultural fantasy novel -- fascinating, both as someone who read and loved the book, and as an aspiring writer myself. I asked Lorina if I could reprint her column here; my own commentary on the letters follows:Every writer gets them, those dreaded letters, forms, slips of paper or, more currently, emails that either cryptically or in detail describe why it is their work won't be appearing on that publisher's list. Given the reviews and success I'm meeting as a self-published author, who grew weary with excuses and the ritual of the publishing world, I thought I'd post five of many rejections I received for my novel, Shadow Song. You may, or may not, find them of interest. Posted by Five Rivers Chapmanry at 4/02/2009 06:20:00 AM That first rejection (from Berkley) leaves me banging my head against the wall. "Too quiet and domestic?" What the ???! Because, writing from female point of view is domestic, is it? Three rapes, four murders, and being stalked relentlessly is now considered "too quiet"? I guess Lorina needed to work in a couple more car chases?! I sympathize more with the Warner rejection. Thomsen clearly liked the book but couldn't sell Canadian content to an American publisher. That has a very long Canadian tradition -- Lorina is in fine company with that one. I get Girvan saying that it crosses too many genre boundaries to be marketable. Never mind that that is one of the big pluses of the book for me as a reader (Lorina's book certainly taught me a thing or two about historical romance -- I promise to stop making disparaging remarks about that genre ever again) the fact remains that publishers today are driven by the marketing department not the editors, so clear market category is a necessity of commercial success, if not artistic integrity. So I understand that they didn't know how to market Shadow Song, but it doesn't make me happy with the state of publishing. The comment on cultural appropriation is also understandable, if quite wrong in this instance. I can see a publisher not wanting to put themselves in the middle of a controversy when it has 200 other manuscripts with no such potential baggage. But aside from the fact that controversy is as likely to sell books as not, no one who read this book could accuse it of appropriation because it is clearly written from the point of view of the English heroine, not the natives. I think this comment must come from reading the synopsis rather than the book itself. I never heard of Goose Lane Editions, but since when does a Canadian publisher complain a book is 'too slow'? "Moves along slowly" is quintessentially Canadian, and one of the things I loved about this book. You don't get the sensual descriptions, the depth of character, the underlying tension of the relentless pursuit in a fast paced narrative. I am so tired of TV pacing that introduces a problem and solves it within 22 minutes (plus commercials). This book needs all the space it takes, and there isn't a wasted word or a redundant scene anywhere. I am more sympathetic to the economic reality that it is harder to justify the risk of a thick book on a new author, but by god, did they READ the book? Some risks are worth taking, and this book definitely will find its audience. I think what they are really saying is that they are too small time to be able to afford it. As for Hades Publishing, what can I say? I would have to agree that there are not enough fantasy elements for the book to fit comfortably within their fantasy line, so I would be okay if they had just said that, though again, it must be frustrating for Lorina having a great book nobody is able to market within their little niches -- but the other comments are just completely off the mark. I have to say, this has certainly given me pause about sending them my own manuscript. Some of the books Hades has sent me to review are appallingly bad (too bad for me to actually review) so I just thought they were having trouble finding the great books -- that they were so dismissive of Lorina's manuscript is... troubling. Though again, to be fair, the problem may be that they are responding to a synopsis, rather than the book itself. Could anyone sell a synopsis based on Romeo and Juliet? McBeth? The plots are stupid and predictable, if viewed in that light, but the writing...! And while I didn't see Lorina's novel as predictable -- certainly not the ending I expected -- I wonder how any plot synopsis can really do justice to any book, let alone one so based on characterization, sensual description, and spirituality. I wish more authors would print their rejection letters. It certainly will help me face my own inevitable rejection letters if I see books as good as Lorina's garnering such comments. But then I and other beginning writers have long been sustained by the stories of great novels which had been repeatedly rejected prior to their ultimate publication to critical acclaim and financial success. Alexei Panshin's first novel, Rites of Passage comes to mind, published by legendary editor Terry Carr as part of the initial round of the Ace Specials in the mid-1960s. After what? 28 rejections? Or was it 43? The details are a bit hazy at this remove, but the point was Panshin had just decided to give up on the novel, shelved it permanently after receiving the latest rejection, when Carr called him up and asked (based on having read a couple of Panshin's short stories while editing a best of collection) 'You don't have a novel kicking around by any chance, do you?" I can't imagine what Grade 10 would have been like for me without Panshin's fiction. I wrote my first English paper on a comparison of Rite of Passage with (mandatory Grade 10 novel) To Kill a Mocking Bird. The adventures of Anthony Villiers was 3/4 of the basis of the subculture of the group I hung with in high school. (Okay, admittedly we were total nerds, but come on --Anthony Villiers, people! This was the 60s after all.) Anyway, one cannot help but reflect on how many Alexei Panshins out there never got that phone call, never ultimately got published; and whether they would have availed themselves of the print on demand options available to modern authors; and whether we, the readers, could have found them -- the signal -- among all the noise.... However reassuring it is to realize that one's book can be still worthy, even if repeatedly rejected -it is also necessarily terrifying. What if nobody ever gets it? Well, not nobody, I guess. I love my book, even if no one else ever will.... April FoolsWell, we did a couple of childish pranks on our kids. On our way to bed, at 12:01 AM, we woke Tigana up and told her it was time for school. "You're kidding," she protested, "it feels like I just got to sleep!" which is pretty accurate. She got as far as the bathroom for her morning shower before she spotted the clock. "Oh, you guys! I knew it all along!" Back to bed.So then we went around setting the clocks an hour ahead. We originally thought we'd get them up an hour early, driving them to school to find the doors still closed, but that would have meant us getting up an hour early, so we went with plan B. The alarm goes off, and mom jumps up shouting, "Oh no! We've overslept! You have to be at school in 20 minutes!" followed by much running around getting ready -- complicated somewhat by Tigana telling Kasia that today was Pajama Day as her prank on Kasia -- jumping into the car and racing off to school. We got about a block before Tigana spotted the car clock, and called us on it. So we just drove to Tim's for breakfast. Enroute a little voice from the back says, "I knew it wasn't really PJ day either!" "That's okay," says Mom, "We've brought your day clothes to change into at school" "What? No, I want to wear PJs all day! It will be funny being the only one in PJs." Funny how different the kids are. Tigana would be mortified to show up in the wrong costume, but not Kasia. Waiting now for the other shoe to drop. What do the kids have planned for us/me? At 11 and 5, the only thing they agree on is their addiction to the show Prank Patrol. Memo to self: get kids to bed by 6PM, before they can do anything.... Labels: family PoetryThis poem has been doing the rounds of writer's blogs/Facebook/Twitter this week, and is now my favorite new poem:http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html Works for academics as much as writers. Jackie Hurt So I came in from my walk last night and turned around to see this on Jackie's hip. We phoned the vet immediately, even though it was after10:00 already; and then we tried to figure out what the hell had happened while we waited for the vet to call back.Mary and the kids had been playing with Jackie for an hour before I took Jackie out for her evening walk, and hadn't noticed anything, so it was pretty obvious it had to have happened on the walk. But I couldn't for the life of me figure out how she could have acquired such a wound while on a four foot leash without my noticing. I rewalked the route in my mind's eye, and while there is one fence on our usual route that has two nails sticking out of it, we always give it a wide birth; and while Jackie had had one of her freakouts barking at one of the neighbour dogs (most days she's okay with his barking from behind the fence, but every once in awhile he must bark something especially rude, because she pulls and jumps and goes nuts, as on this occasion) I could not see how my pulling on her leash could have resulted in a puncture wound like this. Mary's first thought was it was a gunshot wound. This is a bit paranoid, but only a bit because we had a candidate in mind who is crazy enough to think shooting our dog would be funny. But I would have heard something, or seen someone, surely. Even a BB gun would have made an audible piff. But then, worrying my way through the walk again and again, I suddenly remembered that Jackie had -- on one of the quiet stretches of our route where there are no other dogs --jerked around as if shot, and kept pulling to go back, starring at something. I remembered my saying at the time, "Jackie, there's nothing there, you're jumping at shadows". I thought nothing further of it, but now, in retrospect, I wonder if I had allowed Jackie to be injured without my even noticing. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that must have been the moment -- only a block or so before I found the wound, and Jackie had been convinced that there was something there -- what if I had missed some kid in the bushes with a BB gun, and ignored my dog's attempt to warn me? Or even if the gunshot wound seemed far fetched, what if there was some dangerous object sticking out of the lawn or a fence or one of those old garbage can sheds? I let my dog get hurt, and I hadn't even noticed or listened to her. Paroxysm of guilt that such a thing should happen on my watch. When the vet didn't phone back within the hour, we phoned a second vet who agreed to see Jackie immediately. She was really great, even though it was after midnight when we finally brought Jackie in. She told me that it wasn't a gunshot (which was somewhat reassuring -- it means I don't have to start driving to another neighbourhood for nightly walks); and that it looked older than the timeframe I had indicated. Once she shaved away Jackie's fur, it was obvious the puncture was from above, rather than from the side. The vet nominated a dog bite or a tree branch. So then it was Mary wracking her brain, trying to think what could have happened. The day before she had taken Jackie for an off leash run, but Mary was positive there had been no dog fights or any other hazards. And how could she not have noticed the wound? We couldn't see how it was possible. Eventually, we came up with our current theory, which is that there was a barbed wire fence at the off-leash park, and it is remotely possible that Jackie ran into a barb which sliced her open, but that the torn flap of skin remained over the cut, making it invisible -- and that when I had yanked Jackie back off the road during her freakout on our walk the next evening, she had tumbled onto her bum, and that was what rolled back the loose flap of skin, reveaing the wound. It makes sense to us, but we will never really know for sure. I certainly have become very paranoid about hidden obstructions on our night-time walks. So, the vet treated Jackie, gave her the 14 day antibiotics, gave us doggie equivalent of Advil, and the dreaded "cone" and sent Jackie home. I was very pleased with the vet's bedside manner, very impressed with Jackie's stoic acceptance of the pain, though a very sad picture. Being the hopeless softies we are, he hate having her in the cone so have tried protecting the wound by dressing Jackie in shorts and T-Shirt, but that's only good while we're there to watch Jackie closely -- she undoes the clothes if we aren't. So it will have to be kennel and cone for times we're both out, much as it pains us to see Jackie like that. Anyone have any experience dealing with these kind of puncture wounds? In their dogs, I mean. Self-Publishing and the Exception to the RuleIt's easy to see that the publishing industry, like the music industry before it, is undergoing major changes where in future it may not be uncommon to see writers simply bypassing the publishers altogether to sell directly to their readers. The new print-on-demand publishers (like Lulu) make it extremely easy and economical for writers to self-publish, especially where these have immediate access to on-line distribution through Amazon or Chapters. This is good, because in cutting out the middleman (publishers, retailers) costs can be kept down, yet with a much higher return from the cover price going directly to the writer. But this is also very bad, because without a publisher acting as 'referee', the reader has almost no way of navigating through the storm of self-publishing that is threatening to overwhelm us.Self-publishing is often legitimate when dealing with small niche or regional markets. As small publishers have increasingly been bought out by larger national publishers, and national publishers consolidated into global megapublishers, the big publishers have taken on so much debt acquiring their former competition, that they can no longer survive publishing books with limited appeal. To survive, they increasingly rely on economies of scale, and have been dropping even their formerly profitable midlist authors (those who sell 50,000-75,000 copies). So when authors I know turn up in limited editions from small regional presses or their own personal imprint, no problem. But finding new authors worthy of attention amongst the recent tidal wave of self-published titles is another matter entirely. Most self-published work is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- dreadful. As a reviewer these last 30 years, a lot of self-published titles have crossed my desk on their way to landfill, and they have generally ranged from dreadful to appalling. There was one author I recall who had a certain naive charm, in an amateurishly painful way, but she was the exception to the rule, and even her work wasn't good enough for me to actually review -- I don't see the point of really negative reviews when there are so many good titles worthy of recommendation. This history of self-publishing as synonymous with bad writing is a problem for those trying to catch the wave of the future, because professional reviewers have been conditioned to simply ignore any self-published work sent into them. Indeed, not only is it unlikely to be worthy of review space even in the local paper or niche market newsletter, the sort of individual that self-publishes is often the sort who takes personal affront at bad reviews, and there is only so much crank mail, tire-slashing, and death threats a reviewer can put up with before just deciding not to bother. Which sometimes leaves good writers who can't sell to the mega-publishers an uphill battle for acceptance. Once such title is Lorina Stephens' Shadow Song. From the perspective of the major publishers, Shadow Song is unmarketable for three reasons: (1) as a Historical Romance, it has way too many fantasy elements; as a fantasy novel, it reads too much like a Historical; and as a Canadian novel, it's too down beat for either. So when a marketing department can't figure out which imprint to bring it out under, the project just doesn't go forward. (2) There are elements here that could lead to charges either of cultural appropriation or subtle racism. Both charges would be false, the first person narration merely expressing the authentic views of a European from 1830, but from the publisher's point of view, why take on any controversy when there are a hundred other manuscripts that won't raise any flags. (3) I think this book has real potential as a companion to high school history / novel study classes, but there are three sex scenes that essentially block it from that market. So, I appreciate why the big publishers looking for an easy, surefire hit, passed on Shadow Song. But none of those considerations should matter to actual readers. It's simply a marvelous book, the exception that proves that sometimes self-published can be great. Indeed, I go so far as to say that the superior writing, backed by meticulous research and authentic characterization, elevates this cultural fantasy to candidate for Great Canadian Novel. As a historical romance, it features a ten year old girl thrust into life in 1830s Upper Canada (after sheltered aristocratic upbringing in England) and eventually into learning from First nation's shaman. The fantasy elements based on First Nation's culture are as convincing and riveting as any based on usual Celtic/Anglo traditions; the historical detail so finely rendered you can reach out to touch the settings; and the authentic voice of 1830s heroine gives narration fine Jane Austin feel-- with maybe touch of Black Donnellys thrown in. Definitely in the best tradition of dark, slow Canadian fiction, Shadow Song packs a powerful punch.  Highly recommended. (If you buy it, go for the green cover pictured here, rather than the original blue cover.) Bad Dog!Mary and I are reluctant to kennel Jackie during the day. Jackie is great at voluntarily going into her kennel at night, often without even being asked, but flops onto the ground and has to be dragged to her kennel on the rare occasions when we've kenneled her during the day. So, if we intend to be away for brief periods, we have been letting her roam the house.In anticipation of Jackie being at home alone, we go around closing bedroom doors and so on, so she just has the run of the basement and the ground floor -- kitchen, dinning room, and front room. I'm fairly good at policing those areas to ensure there is nothing left out that Jackie can destroy, though Jackie has been steadily educating us on what constitutes "potential toy" to her. The electrical cord on the vacuum cleaner, for example, took me by surprise; luckily it wasn't plugged in at a time. But just like with baby-proofing the house when Tigana and Kasia were small, we now automatically lift everything chewable up onto counters and shelves out of Jackie's reach. I have to confess that I may have occasionally accidently on purpose failed to put away particularly loathsome kids' toys – you know the ones I mean: the ugly stuffie that the kids insist they still want, even though neither has actually touched it in four years; or the politically incorrect bratz doll that somebody gave one of them for a birthday present; or the beloved teddy that has started to go a bit moldy. If these happen to be left on the basement floor, well, it's Jackie takes the blame on their dismemberment, not me for throwing them out; and the kids learn (very slowly, I must say) to pick up after themselves. So, after quickly checking that there was nothing on the floor except sacrificial kids' toys and a half dozen strategically placed Jackie toys, including a new stuffed gopher which should have been good entertainment for 2 hours, we left Jackie at home alone for a bit longer than usual -- four hours. We came home to find her toys and the kids' toys all perfectly fine, still scattered about the floor. However. The stuff – our stuff – on the dining room table.... So Jackie apparently climbed up onto the supposedly out-of-reach surface of the table and ate 1 silicon oven mitt (I would have though those essentially indestructible!); an assortment of pens; a bar of old soap (well, we sent 20 minutes reconstructing the pieces strewn around the room to ascertain that it was essentially all accounted for and we didn't have to phone the vet to pump her stomach); and – wait for it – my $400 ipod. Fortunately, I had my laptop and its power cord with me, or otherwise I'd no doubt be looking at a $4,000 replacement cost. But why oh why would a dog climb up on a dinning room table to eat an ipod? They can't taste that great. I was a bit surprised how calmly I took this—I listen to that ipod whenever I get the chance – it is my main source of CBC/NPR/BBC/TVO programming, and listening to shows like Sparks, Search Engine, and Q, is a significant resource for courses I teach on popular culture and cyberculture etc. Listening to the ipod is the only thing that made housework – especially alone in my brother's or mother's places – tolerable. Long drives, like when I go up to Edmonton to check on Mom or renovations to Doug's, I listen through external speakers. I'm not sure I manage without an ipod. When I asked Mary why I was being so philosophical about it, Mary reminded me of when we first met, and she had left her two dogs with me while she went out on the lecture circuit for a couple of weeks. I'd come home one day soon after to discover the two dogs had got into and torn apart a giant carton of crayons. There had been micro pieces of crayon spread over and rubbed into the living room carpet changing it from a standard neutral beige to a truly unique "rainbow". And to Mary's surprise and delight, my only reaction had to been to burst out laughing. It was obviously my fault, not the dogs', that I had left the crayons where they could chew them up. I think it was at that point she figured I'd make a passable father for her kids.... But it does mean we will have to kennel Jackie when we're away from now on, which seems so mean. At least, it's usually only for a couple of hours at a time this time of year, since Mary and I can work from home most of the time, just going in for actual classes or meetings. But still....  Dog Dreams So, I'm having a normal dream, something about waiting in the Green room just prior to addressing the Intergalactic Council (okay, I meant 'normal' for me) when suddenly my recently deceased dog, Pooka, shows up, barking like mad. It's the "Come quick, Jimmy's fallen down the well" kind of barking, so I cast about for the emergency. I become aware without quite knowing how, as you do in dreams, that the (I'm not quite clear who at this point) soul has left the body and we have to get it back in. So the background shifts, and I'm in the basement of my previous house (more or less) with Mary and Tigana all shouting at this free floating soul (which I half realize by now is Kasia) to go back to her body quickly before it's too late, and waving our arms as if to brush the soul back in the right direction on the air currents our fanning creates. Pooka is bouncing up and down and barking more frantically than any of us. Then I say, "I can't see it!" because, you know, souls are invisible, though I can approximate where there is a presence. And Pooka looks at me with "You're an idiot" frustrated expression I may have seen on his face more than a few times when he was alive, and he suddenly flops down, stops barking, or moving for that matter. And then there is tiny red spark floating up from Pooka. I know it is his soul floating up out of his body. It looks like a tiny solar system, with tiny loops within loops and a central red core, all sparkly in a tiny point of light kind of way. And it is coming towards me, and Mary calls, "Look out, don't let it touch you!" and I kind of lean back out of the way as it floats towards me, but it suddenly zooms into me, and I am half afraid of what it will try to make me do -- and then I wake up. I get up somewhat unwillingly and sluggishly wander to the bathroom, but there's this sense of -- well, Pooka still barking -- that sends me over to the baby monitor we still use to listen to the kids at night...and discover the plug has pulled out of the wall, and it's not on. So I run down to check on Kasia (not, I realize later, Tigana and Kasia, but specifically Kasia) and discover there is vomit everywhere -- the sheets, the walls, her stuffies; and she is fast asleep, face down in a two inch deep pool of the black and grey guck. I call Mary, and she runs down stairs, so I call out, "Kasia's okay" to reassure Mary, and then realize I should maybe check before I say that, but somehow I just knew it was true and that I had gotten there in time. Mary takes Kasia upstairs to our bed for the rest of the night, while I spend the next hour cleaning up the bed, walls, and surviving stuffies. So... Is that strictly a coincidence? Or did my subconscious notice that the monitor wasn't plugged in as I was getting ready for bed last night and finally got a notice through to my dreaming mind to check it? Or did my subconscious hear Kasia throwing up from downstairs through two closed doors -- not loud enough to wake me, but enough for my subconscious? Or is it really that the spirit of our dog is still watching over us and woke me up to save Kasia? Pooka was, after all, no ordinary dog; Mary named him Pooka for a reason. And regular readers of this blog will recall that as a toddler, Kasia had had a tendency to drop dead at random intervals for a couple of minutes at a time (see reflex anoxic seizures) so her having an out of body experience is not entirely out of the question. Indeed, while taking her bath last night, she had held her breath for fun, and I had watched as her face turned bright blue in seconds -- for other kids that's a metaphor, for Kasia, a horribly accurate description. I had tried not to freak, since it wasn't an attack, and there is this terrible fascination in watching this bright blue pattern emerge out of nowhere on her face, but I did ask her to stop doing that.... Anyway, I hadn't thought of her seizures for years, but maybe that bath-time incident is why it turned up in a dream last night -- but um, how is it that dream coincided with her actually being sick? Whatever explanation one comes up with in the cold light of day, at 3AM, the spirit of your recently departed dog waking you up to save your daughter seems a lot more credible. I tried to describe the feeling to Mary, and all I could come up with at 3AM was 'creepy, but in a good way' but that's not really it. "Other worldly?" It's hard to describe. But there's a quality completely different from my other dreams -- and as an SF reader/writer, I'm not talking content here, because the content is almost always way out there, depending on what I've been reading. But this was...'more real' doesn't describe it; nor 'more vivid', nor 'more urgent'... but more...'other directed'? Anyway, Kasia's fine, though we sat up with her through the night as she threw up several more times; looks like Norwalk virus to us. Kasia already seems over it, but by mid-afternoon Mary was throwing up and Tigana looks to be next. Me, I'm stuffing in the Cold FX, because you never know, it might help some. Labels: family, reflex anoxic seizures Training JackieDog training has been a slow process for us. Jackie is a hyperintelligent dog, so the problem, I know, lies largely with us. The first problem is that I started out talking to Jackie in "Dad mode", as if she were one of my kids. My natural tendency is to try to reason with Jackie and explain what I want, but of course, dogs don't have language, so what she hears is "Blah blah blah blah, Jackie, blah blah blah." which is probably not very helpful. And using my soft Dad voice meant that half the time she didn't even know I was talking to her. So the dog trainer told me, "Fix a mental picture in your head that you've come from the store and found that Jackie has trashed the inside of your car" and that seemed to help a lot. Now I bark at the dog, and at least she knows I'm talking to her. But that one was obvious, and sort of understandable. More troublesome was Jackie barking at other dogs on our walks. Even though she is a kind and gentle dog, she'd bark like crazy at certain other dogs, leap up, strain at the leash, even nip at us for holding her back. It was pretty problematic. The trainer suggested getting Jackie to "sit" while the other dog passed, but this was not initially successful. I'd get Jackie to sit, she'd sit for 3 seconds, I'd reward her good behaviour with a "Good Jackie!" and she would leap up and start barking all over again. This would be repeated over and over again -- I'd no sooner get her sitting then she'd leap up again. It was frustrating. Especially for Jackie....I eventually figured out that we had inadvertently taught Jackie that her release phrase was "Good Jackie". So from her point of view, I would order her to sit, then say, "okay, do what you want!" then get angry and yell, "sit" and no sooner have her sitting, when again I'd give her permission to go at it again. She must have thought "Make up your stupid mind!" or "stop teasing me!" I guess what happened was as I was teaching her various other things, we would do the 'trick', give her her treat, then say "good Jackie" and release/distract her to begin another round, so that without realizing it, "good Jackie" (or at least "good Jackie" the way I was saying it -- "good jackie" from my wife appears to be a different command, since she says it with a different intonation -- did I mention that Jackie is hyper-intelligent?) means, "command is over". So things have gotten a lot better once I replaced "good Jackie" with the new command, "Walk on" once the other dog has passed. Another example of miscommunication was my "Other side" command, which initially worked great at getting Jackie to switch from my right (or the 'wrong' side) to my left when we walk. I'd let her pee, or she'd go sniff something interesting, but come back to my right side, I'd say, "other side" and she instantly switch to my left side. It was great. Except one day she absolutely didn't get it. The more I insisted "other side", the more stubbornly she insisted on walking on the right. Eventually we came to a standstill, and she just sat down in frustration. I stopped and tried to think what was going wrong. "Other side!" I barked experimentally. Jackie stands up, looks down at the grass, gives the dog equivalent of a shrug and sits down. So I eventually figure out what the problem is. On our usual walks through the neighbourhood, our circular route keeps the grass on my left side, the curb on the right. At this particular juncture, I had taken a different route, and the curb was on my left, the grass on the right. Apparently, "Other side" meant to Jackie, reasonably enough, "go to the grass side". So here she was standing on the grass, and I'm shouting "Grass side!" to her. I'd sit down too. Labels: Jackie TreadmillOkay, this is pretty cool.Arthur Slade's article on writing novels while on a treadmill. I'm very tempted to try this.... Labels: clippings, video clips, work, writing |
