Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I absolutely =heart= Ireland. I visited London and Ireland as my first trip
outside the USA, with my father, step-mother-to-be, and brother. An entire
week of good weather, which was evidently a bit unusual, judging from the
comments of the locals. I could live the rest of my life at the Cliffs of
Moher... if they could string me an ethernet connection.
Of course, I've adored Ireland since taking Celtic Literature in high
school. The above trip was in college and a dream come true.
  

    
Yeah, I have a feeling that my studies in Merlin helped me to enjoy
Ireland, N. Ireland, Wales and England that much more. Kicking myself
for not going to Scotland, but I went to Paris and Crete instead, so
who am I to grumble?

-squeaks, who has managed two trips to England, both during odd
heatwaves.
  

    
Oooh... I wanna go to Crete.

I live in Astoria, but it's not good enough.
  

    
Got here safe. My plan to only drive manuals in countries where you
drive on the left WORKED (I only drive an automatic in the US). Here
was I driving on the wrong side of the road for the first time in 8
years, easy as pie as my left hand was woggling the gear-stick around
for dear life.)

Anyway. Safe. Sound. & so to work. 
  

    
Also much too chilly to type in the hallway which is the only place I
can get online.
  

    
Shifting gears with one's left hand?  It sounds scary as anything!  No
wonder we drive on the right.

Have you had enough sleep?
  

    
        I think if I tried to drive a stick-shift in the UK, my brain would
tear itself in half.
  

    

I'd pay to see that.
  

    
Enough sleep, Martha? I hadn't had any sleep when I wrote the last
posts. I have now. (Going down to the shops, and then breakfast.)
  

    
Glad you got there safe and sound, Neil. Jetlagged?

Driving: When I was flying between the US and Hong Kong, I just kept
trying to get into the passenger seat on the wrong side of the car...
(HK goes with the British system) But I don't think I've tried crossing
any streets while looking on the wrong side. Yet. :P

-- Mimi
  

    
Hi Mimi -- not jetlagged yet. 

...

Staying in a friend's ancient Georgian manor house in Cork. She
doesn't live here very much, and it's not really been renovated. It's
lovely: paintings so time-darkened you can't tell what they were meant
to be, save for a woman's face or the moon staring out at you. Silent
peat fires which burn reassuringly in fireplaces and never manage to
lift the chill of the room they burn in; footsteps from upstairs when
I'm the only person in the house...

And I'm writing away, and eating enormous quantities of smoked salmon.

Good journey, except I had a 5 hour stopover in Dublin  on the way
here yesterday I'd not noticed from the tickets -- only frustrating as
if I'd known I could have found someone to go off to breakfast or
something with (there must be someone on the Well in Dublin).
  

    
Writing + peat fires + Cork + Irish smoked salmon (w/o doubt the best
in the world) sounds fantastic.  Enjoy that solid combo of creativity
and Omega 3's.

I was in Cork once for an rpg con, about 11 years ago.  I think it was
the last time I played an rpg.  (but it was a good one-- Call of
Cthulhu, and the gm was excellent.)
  

    
Glad you arrived safe n' sound. Am having a hard enough time parking
on San Francisco hills with a stick-shift, can't imagine having to do
that with my left hand. Gets even worse when you're staying in London
for a month, get used to people driving on the opposite side of the
road and then you take a weekend trip to France. It's probably good
that I didn't have a car...

Happy writing, and enjoy the atmosphere. I'm exceedingly jealous.

squeaks, who must now email her friend to say "I told you so" in a
nice way (vikings ZERO!!, giants 41)
  

    

I want to hear more about the footsteps upstairs...
  

    
        Yeah, me too.
  

    

e-mail from Bill Williams:

Hey all--
    I wouldn't typically do something of this nature, but my personal
involvement makes it hard to hold back. A few weeks back I read about a
worldwide effort to build solar-powered, internet-connected elementary
schools in Cambodia. After some discussion with another Slashdot reader, we
arranged to have the money collection done by JustGive (www.justgive.org),
in the interest of security and trust.
    Essentially, the goal is this: Collect $15,800 to fund the building of
an elementary school, complete with solar panels, computer, and stocked
bookshelf. If we can get about 1,100 people to donate just $14 apiece, we
can achieve our goal of sponsoring one school. If we can build more than
one... well, I'd feel like a proud papa.
    Please, humor me, and visit
http://badge.sourceforge.net/cambodiaschools, take a look around at the
information and linked articles we have there, and if you've got a few bucks
to spare, click over to JustGive. Each $14 gives you a vote in the naming of
the school, and hopefully a sense of having done something worthwhile with
your day.
    Thanks for listening.
--Bill
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the
opportunity in every difficulty." - Winston Churchill
  

    
The house in Cork sounds great.  I'll look for its dark fingers
creeping into the book when it's finally released.  

I have a theory that smoked salmon functions in roughly the same way
as Zoloft; sheer goodwill follows its consumption.  Unfortunately
there's no smoked salmon in my supermarket, only eels and live crabs. 
I spent 5 months looking for dillweed.  *sigh*  On the other hand, the
crab is really good.  :)

I second (or is it third?) the request for more stories about the
footsteps.  
  

    
Well, before I can do footsteps stories, I need to figure out a script
that'll get Dial Up Networking to hook compuserve NT into the Equant
network. My old TAPCIS program does it, so I can do e-mail, but the web
is a very long distance call to Dublin, and slow as an elderly turtle.
  

    
I just solved Chapter 18, which means I've cracked the book. It was
kind of like doing a giant crossword puzzle...

Years ago I decided that a story was anything that kept someone
turning the pages and didn;t leave them feeling cheated in the end. And
this worked on the first bit but kind of fell apart in the second
department. And I think, now, it's all SATISFYING.

From here out, it's mostly just typing. Which should be done by the
end of tomorrow, more or less. Hurrah. 
  

    
Hurrah!

(The scary thing is at this point you sound like you know more about
computers than I do.  When did that happen?)
  

    
Sounds fabulous!  Does that mean you get to take a break and wander
the corkish moores?  (If there is such a thing?).
  

    
wonder even.
  

    
Email from Mary Roane:

I highly recommend Clonmacnoise, if you've never been.  There are 7
churches on the site & it's as lovely a place as you'll ever see, on the
banks of the Shannon.  It's right in the middle of the island, so it's
close to most places.
 
On the other hand, a pint of the black stuff in a Dublin pub sounds pretty
wonderful, too.  At any rate, enjoy the rest of the week.
 
                                                           Mary (drinking
Typhoo and being .....well, it's not homesick if you never lived there, is
it?)
  

    
Emily -- I don't think the Cork house has crept into the book at all. 

I finished the book this morning. I cut a lot of stuff out of the
first draft, so now have a book that's 190,000 -- 20,000 words longer
than the last one. Sigh.

So today I e-mailed a few people, and my editors, copies of the novel,
and I cursed Word Perfect for not creating a rich text format document
that actually looks like the original Word Perfect document, dammit.

And I think I need to phone a few people and tell them I'm now all
theirs. (I'm 8 months behind on everything.)
  

    
Martha -- if I could get it to WORK, I'd know more about computers
than you do. As it is, I'll wait until Lenny bailes or someone comes by
and says "copy this into the script file"