It's not her handwriting, but this is the story Spawn dictated over the weekend.
She then promptly refused to show the story to Nanna, because it would make said Nanna too sad, being reminded that Spawn lived so very far away.
I think I need to teach her about non sequiturs, and guns on the mantel.
To properly celebrate the move south, I spent Easter…back home. One of the perks of this arrangement was spending some time with Spawn, who can't quite tell my two younger brothers apart. "This are Ben," she told me as I pointed out one younger brother (not Ben, in actual fact). I pointed out the real Ben and she hesitated, perhaps sensing a trap, but soldiered bravely on: "This are… More Ben!"
The other perk of this arrangement was the availability of internet. Ah, bandwidth, how I've missed you! Enjoying the benefits of connectivity, I was stumbling videos and came across this gem: CNNNN's Next Country To Invade.
Around about the 0:48 mark people start putting pins into the map to demonstrate where the US should invade next.
Iran Korea Australia is screwed.
This weekend's adventures in relocation involved the purchasing of white goods (fridge and washing machine; not exciting in the least, but time-consuming). Oh yeah, I live the high life. (Also, payday cannot arrive soon enough.) Thankfully, Tess rescued me from myself today and dragged me through various shopping districts (where I fell in lust with expensive boots and spectacularly failed to purchase any clothing suitable for work, but did find a little black dress) and generally humoured me by laughing at my stories.
Apocalypse update: no more earthquakes, but I have used my umbrella more often in the last 3 days than I have in the last 3 years, so it's possible that Melbourne is now gearing up for floods. I apologise. GET TO THE HIGH GROUND. (Don't say I didn't warn you.)
Update on Spawn: a text message from home informs me that Spawn's favourite movie is currently The Princess Bride. This strikes me as a touch advanced for a two and a half year old, but I admit I know not whereof I speak. Regardless, the girl clearly has great taste.
Fun Research Fact of the day: This morning, as part of research for the novel in progress (the faerie novel, for those of you playing along at home), I stumbled across the wikipedia page of unusual deaths. My favourite (well, one of them) is poor Philitas of Cos, said to have studied false arguments and erroneous word-usage so intensely that he wasted away and starved to death.
I keep losing days. Today is Monday, apparently, but I'm pretty sure yesterday was Saturday. This means I'm either going insane, becoming ever more inattentive, Sunday was totally and utterly exactly the same as Saturday and thus they blurred into the one day in my memory… or Sunday just vanished out the calendar.
I'm betting on the last one. For sure.
My inattentiveness and the sameness of my days would have nothing to do with the deathmarch status of the revisions, nosiree, why do you ask?
In other truly momentous news, yesterday (er, Saturday?), Spawn greeted Brutus with the phrase "Hey, Brutus!"1
Wiktory! My work here is done.
"Has Apple bought the bloody Greek pantheon now?" (Me)
"I'm only hanging out with you so your girlfriend thinks you're a child person. You owe me." (From an 8yo)
"Meow likes ball!" (No prizes for guessing that one was Spawn. She used to call the cats by their name, but would always get them mixed up. She now refers to the cats individually and collectively as Meow. Much simpler.)
"I did warn you that you might find an Apple frustrating."
The Alien Onion reports on a new trend wherein "book" evolves into meaning "cool", which I am linking both because I find the evolution of the english language a fascinating process, and because my publishers really do rock.
Lately, my brain appears to be fixating on txtspeak and lolspeak. For example, the dinner discussion last night centred for some time around whether we could discern a kiwi accent in the sender's choice of spelling, or whether we were making it up.1 I've spent a good part of the last week training Spawn in lolspeak.2 Also, I appear to have degenerated entirely in my own standards. A lolspeak habit, I has one.
I wonder if my brain is working on a story about language that I don't know about yet.
After much procrastination, both before and during the session, and some 1200 words revised, a particularly muddy section of the second novel of The Binding is now officially fixed. The first draft had Amalia1 being evil, when really she's just impulsive and spiteful, so now all the evil occurs at her brother's instigation. This works much, much better, and quite frankly I'm not sure why I didn't realise that first time around. Who knows. Writers is nuts, after all.
Of course, 1200 words revised only puts me slightly over halfway towards today's have-to target, and only a smidge over one-third of the way towards today's would-love-to target. That would be because I still have lots of catching up to do.
Spawn and Brutus2 are visiting, you see, and by golly are they timesinks. Yesterday while I sat writing, Spawn emptied the cupboard, one hairclip at a time, narrating each object all the while. Hair clip! Hair clip! One two many hair clip! Medicine, for sore! Soap! I never realised I had so much in that cupboard, to be honest. Once she'd done all of that she dug out my shoes and my bag and said, That shoe, that bag, find choo choo train now?
We took her to see model steam trains on the weekend, you see, and we haven't heard the end of it since. She was so insistent that on Monday night we found ourselves at the local train station, watching trains come and go, for over an hour. I suspect the people at the station were starting to wonder if we didn't have a television and this was our next best cheap entertainment option.
This pic is totally unrelated to the post. I just visited the zoo recently, and who doesn't love otters. If you can count three, there's nothing wrong with your eyesight
Today featured a walk to the local park, where we did not find koalas, but we did find roosters. Very well-fed glossy roosters who declined to spend any time eating our bread. We also found the playground infested with other people's children, which was mostly okay except for the little girl who kept telling us to "Go away!" Luckily, Brutus, despite being half her age, was larger than her and had stronger pushing power and sorted her out quickly enough.
So, because I clearly have too much time on my hands it made such a good distraction, lolchildren.
This was the steepest kid's slippery dip I have ever seen. It was nearly vertical.
I wish I was joking about this, but we really did spend most of the visit to the park taking tanbark out of Brutus' mouth. Apparently it is tasty.
In writing news, I have only 30 pages left of proofs…before I get to go through and work on the pages I've tagged as requiring multiple-page fixes.
Spawn sat through the entire episode of Doctor Who last night (well, she did once she'd finally settled the beanbag to her satisfaction, a twenty-minute process which involved a great deal of manoeuvring and at one point landed her with her back to the television and a puzzled expression on her face) and, when the credits started rolling, she looked up and asked "More? More Doctor?"
Ah, a girl after my own heart.
In actual book-related news, we have a title!
The book previously known as Bound is now Shadow Queen.
The series itself (there are currently two books in the series, with plans for a third) is still lacking a title, but that will be finalised sooner rather than later, since Allen & Unwin are still planning a January '09 release.
January! It's still a somewhat boggling concept.
I was going to rip through yet more of the book today but, after the joys of the baby mines this morning, and my brother's farewell this afternoon, I hereby declare today a day off. Sometimes, you gotta take a break.
So instead I stalked the internet for an ipod-compatible version of the discovery channel commercial, to keep the dark moments at bay, and now I am a happy lil camper.
Boom De Yada!
I may well spend the rest of this afternoon teaching Spawn how to say that. So far she's mastered boom, although it does sound suspiciously similar to cow to me. But then, what would I know? I always thought gone and door sounded markedly different, but Spawn assures me otherwise.