The writer is jealous of the cat – a not quite story.

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It is a well known fact that all humans are jealous of cats. How could we not be? They’re more agile, more beautiful. Their minds can take in both casual cruelty and complete, serene rest.

When the writer looks up in the middle of the day and sees the little white and grey cat asleep on the chair next to hers, belly up, blissful whiskers trembling in the stream of his exhalations… How to resist getting up and tickling the fluffy dandelion belly?

The cats protects his belly with front paws and looks up at writer with confused blinking eyes as if to say aw. Let me sleep. What was so important you had to wake me?

After a moment he stretches. Since I’m up his walk says, as he bounces out the office door. I might as well see if there’s anything good in the old food bowl.

If the writer is very, very good, perhaps in another life, as a reward, she’ll come back as a small grey and white puffball of feline fluff.

Simply the Best

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Still trying to get over this horrible cough/cold.  My lungs feel more compromised than a Victorian maiden caught skinny dipping with the stable boy.  So I’ve been sleeping and reading, since nothing else is happening.  Reading inevitably turns to my "comfort reads."

Giovanni Guareschi remains – to my mind – the best writer of short short fiction (Not flash. His stories run about 1 to 2 k words, I’d guess) who ever worked. This is probably a personal quirk of mine, predicated on having read him when I was very young, but maybe not. You judge. The stories are set in post WWII Italy, all the way to the sixties. The later sixties stories are not as good, but the man was getting old, after all.

The thing is with the coldwar setup and the communist mayor and the catholic priest as the main characters you’d expect a spy vs. spy cartoonish thing. It’s not even close. I re-read these books every fall to figure out how he does things with a minimal fuss. I buy his books used and new, when I can and give them to all and sundry, as much as I give Techniques Of The Selling Writer.

As an illustration, I’m copying below about two and a half pages of Technique of the Coup D’Etat, first published in Don Camillo and the Prodigal Son (though I have it in The Don Camillo Omnibus.)

So, here is Technique of the Coup D’Etat, by Giovanni Guareschi, translated by Frances Frenaye – follow if you will how he develops danger and sheer blood chilling creepiness without ever SAYING anything about it.

Technique of The Coup D’Etat by Giovanni Guareschi, translated by Frances Fernaye (Typos mine.)

At ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, the village square was swept with wind and rain, but a crowd had been gathered there for three or four hours to listen to the election news coming out of a radio loudspeaker. Suddenly the lights went out and everything was plunged into darkness. Someone went to the control box but came back saying there was nothing to be done. The trouble must be up the line or at the power plant, miles away. People hung around for half an hour or so, and then, as the rain began to come down even harder than before, they scattered to their homes, leaving the village silent and deserted. Peppone shut himself up in the People’s Palace, along with Lungo, Brusco, Straziami, and Gigio, the same leader of the "Red Wing" squad from Molinetto. They sat around uneasily by the light of a candle stump and cursed the power and light monopoly as an enemy of the people, until Smilzo burst in. He had gone to Rocca Verde on his motorcycle to see if anyone had news and now his eyes were popping out of his head and he was waving a sheet of paper.

"The Front has won!" he panted. "Fifty-two seats out of a hundred in the senate and fifty-one in the chamber. The other side is done for. We must get hold of our people and have a celebration. If there’s no light, we can set fire to a couple of haystacks nearby.

 

Continue reading “Simply the Best” →

Pity the Hoyt Boys

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I know you hate surly teens who come to the door on Halloween as much as the next person. We always thought one should stop trick or treating around 13. Well, Eric is thirteen this year, and we wanted him to have his last trick or treating. Because it’s the last year his brother will be around for Halloween, we decided to have Robert go with him as a costume accessory.

Explanation – Eric was all in black, suit, with red tie. His line was "Nice candy you got there. Shame if something were to happen to it!" At which point he snapped his fingers and Robert stepped forward with open briefcase and said "Trick or treat, sir/ma’am" he was collecting for Eric…

Anyway a lot of people took exception to this. Look, when kids come to your door on Halloween, if they made an effort, give them the benefit of the doubt. (I always do, anyway.) Eric LOOKS sixteen. He’s taller than both of us – tops out at six feet – but really, he’s thirteen and he is still a boy. As for his brother, at seventeen he might have been the world’s largest costume accessory, but no matter what he looks like, he’s not 21. He’s an older teen enjoying his brother’s last time trick or treating and enjoying helping him.

Poor boys. I shouldn’t have mixed up the baking powder and the baby powder. They just keep growing and growing and growing.

There’s only forty real people in the world

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

And some of them are hamburgers, as Captain Beefheart would say.

I’ve been mentioned on Instapundit.  It’s a very strange experience, kind of like the first time I was mentioned in Locus.  http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/

Here I was with my cup of coffee, seeing what the world had been up to before I was fully awake, when lo and behold, there was my name at the top.  (Under in the mail.)  Before my eyes focused I wondered what I’d done during the night while I was asleep that was so newsworthy.

I’ve bought more SF/F books on Glenn Reynold’s recommendation than I care to list, so finding myself mentioned in his blog was sort of like "oh, wow.  How small the world is."

What Matters Most When All Is Said And Done

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Thought out of nowhere — or perhaps not since I’ve "faced" this in many books and stories, from Tom in Draw One In The Dark facing the Great Sky Dragon and knowing there’s no way he walks out of there alive, to the girl in Something Worse Hereafter — in the Wings collection — who knows she’s dead, but there’s a second death and not how permanent, to probably countless others I’ve forgotten.

Those last few minutes fascinate me.  Oh, people die in their sleep, people die without knowing they’re going to die, but I suspect most of us are starkly wide awake for the end and we know there’s no return, that this time there will be no save.  We come into the world without knowing ourselves, and all the time we’ve known ourselves we’ve been alive.  How is it to face the undiscovered country?

Continue reading “What Matters Most When All Is Said And Done” →

A scandalous Ballad

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Or reason # 235 why Sarah ended up QUITE warped.

When I was reading Tess D’Ubervilles, there was some line to the effect that the working poor are rocked to sleep with stories of disgrace and misfortune.  If that’s the case I’m not sure what being rocked to sleep with medieval ballads makes one.  I do know I was a sickly child, and my parents went through everything they knew from music hall songs to medieval ballads, to keep me from crying.

I thought it might be interesting to translate these.  This one should probably be "the mower"  since scyther doesn’t really exist in the dictionary.  Indulge me however.  The last thing I want to imagine is that this is about garden machinery.

This exists in many versions — at least I’ve seen two printed that do not accord with the one I learned from family.  And I’m not going to lie and say it was transmitted orally in my family from the beginning.  Chances are slim.  we are a literate family and as such our knowledge comes from books as well as from speech.  However it came to me, here it is.  And to quote Pratchett you know the moment you’re dealing with a bastard daughter and St. John’s (The summer solstice) you’re in for some… interesting stuff.

A further note — I didn’t really try to rhyme, because that goes beyond my abilities in English.  I’m none too hot with meter in English, for that matter.  I just tried to get the flavor and sense of it.  And the story, of course.

 

Oh the great ruler of Rome

He had a bastard daughter

Whom indulged so much

That she had grown quite improper

Noblemen, dukes and earls

Men of the cloak and of the sword

All came begging for her hand

And all she denied with a word

Continue reading “A scandalous Ballad” →

Who was that pink-masked man?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

When I went grey at twenty eight, I started an odd journey with hair dye.  To begin with, while all I had were cruella-deville stripes, I used herbal dyes, or stuff that washes in/washes out. 

But then pneumonia — the worst one, which put me in ICU for eleven days — made the rest of my hair go white, till it was about 50%.  At this point I made a horrible discovery.  I have resistant-grey.  I.e., I can dye my hair till the cows come home, a week later it will be white.

Only as the next ten years went by, I found it was less "white" than "colorless".  My hair started looking like aluminum siding after fifty years in the sun.  I looked OLD — also hair and face did not look right together.  I settled into this thing where I would dye before cons, and pray it stuck long enough.

And then three or four years ago, I surfed the net for "resistant grey."  I ended up on the blog of a woman with my issue who was trying out all the brands and seeing which gave better coverage.  She’d been doing it for a while and nothing but the old, old brands worked, same as for me.  Woman lamenting she couldn’t use Feria and some of the nicer ones.

In comments, a comment I’m sure I don’t remember exactly but which ran like this "What on earth would you women do, without us f*gs to help you?  Have you never heard of Gray Magic?  Order some from Amazon, use it with any dye you want and dye your hair any color you like."

It’s been years, and I’m not even sure what blog I read this on.  However, Gray Magic has been keeping my hair the brown it used to be even between cons.  Allelluiah.

And thank you to that pink masked gentleman wherever he may be. <G>

The Rhythm is Gonna Get You

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Rhythm is Gonna Get You

In haste, because I’m actually still trying to write – it’s been a very odd day – and I have my Greek and Latin mid terms tomorrow, for which I’m somewhat less than prepared. (By which you should understand I’m flying by a prayer AND the seat of my pants.)

A brief exchange with my husband – who came in to find me playing Mika and rolled his eyes :D – reminds me that I had meant to write briefly about music to write by.

I don’t know if other writers have it. I know a few who do. I also know at least one who writes in front of the tv or movies. (I confess the only time I have written in front of the TV was my third Shakespeare book which was written in its entirety in about the month after 9/11. I didn’t feel I could take my eyes off what the world was up to just then. And writing only happened when sitting in front of the news.)

Now, as I believe I mentioned sometime before, when I’m asked if I’m a plotter or a pantser I always have to say "both." Because I write lovingly intricate plots, ahead of time. Then I sit down to write and ten chapters in I find the characters are not who I thought they were, or everything has gone strangely awry. Which forces me to sit down, unpick my plot and rethread it in a way that makes sense for where I am now. This happens every ten chapters or every fifty pages, whichever comes first.

Continue reading “The Rhythm is Gonna Get You” →

Treat Your Writer Well

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Particularly when you’re the writer.

I don’t remember where I read that beginning writers antecipate that their career will be — as their school career often was — a series of people, overawed by their amazing writing ability, patting them on the back and instead it most often resembles a series of kick in the teeth.  I do know after twenty years of trying to be a writer and watching people try and many drop by the way side that those who don’t get used to the kicks and learn to heal from them don’t last.  This is no field for wounded souls, even if we are all, more or less, emotional walking wounded.  (Not sure why, but that’s a consideration for another post.) Continue reading “Treat Your Writer Well” →