"It's our bay"

No, it's not my Bay, that would be Monterey Bay, but it's our Bay. The San Francisco Bay is the outlet for the whole Central Valley and two rivers which may not look mighty on your world map but which deliver (where's my California Rivers book? It's usually right here) astonishing amounts of water. The Delta system begins at the bay (or ends there, depending on how you look at it)and involves most of that Great Valley (the geologists seem to always call it that instead of Central). The habitat of the Bay is a complicated, beautiful intersection of plant and animal communities, so rich in past times that people could live on a couple of hours' work each day lifting fish and invertebrates right out of the water.


More than you hoped to know about the San Francisco Bay oil spill can be found here.

Baykeepers and their calls for volunteers can be found here.

William Steig

When I was a kid my mother had almost all of William Steig's collected cartoon books. Somewhere along the way I let them go, alas. My favorite was The Agony in the Kindergarten, which depicted entirely too familiar situations in children's lives. (there was one of a perplexed, embarrassed, and mostly miserable boy, with the quote along the lines of "give him a toy and he'll be quiet for hours" which I remember whenever I give a baby a thing to mess with and they zone out for a long time with it)

He's the guy younger people remember for Dr. deSoto (mouse dentist), The Amazing Bone, the one about the mouse and the whale -- and Shrek (the book, not the movie). He started out as a New Yorker cartoonist, and his earliest cartoons look sort of derivative of Charles Addams, but it's possible that they were both responding to the same influences. His later New Yorker work, the stuff that got collected into the books I knew, was more reminiscent of Picasso than Addams.

Anyway, if you're in New York, you can trundle along to the Jewish Museum to see an exhibition of his life's work. Or you could buy the new retrospective book. Or you can click over to the online exhibition. Be sure to go all the way to the end and play the five lines game.

So

I posted Chapter 6 of The Conduit, which is 7 and most of 8 of the original. I started 7, so I'd know where I was with it.

In case you didn't catch it when I said so earlier, I'm posting these in private posts for now, and mentioning them in public to I don't know, brag on how fast the rewrite is going. It is a real rewrite. Not only am I changing from 1st to 3rd person, I'm normalizing chronology and changing other things as I go.

It's not all roses. When it was in first person, there were all these little places where the narrator could reflect on what a mindless thing he had been before, and how bits of consciousness unfolded and developed as he went along. But without that voice, I'm having to kind of get that in sideways. I'm afraid that it makes the story flat in some places, because at the beginning we're following closely along with a thing with no mind to speak of, which does not talk much and has no desire except to stay safe, fed, and not found.

Another thing I'm trying to do is to ratchet up the peril some. Honestly, I don't like doing it. My readers said I had to. But since the peril is supposed to increase as the story goes on, it's awkward having a lot at the beginning. Where do you go from up? So it's delicate.

And I decided that when I'm restive, or wanting to go read romances, I should just take a break and work on A Suitable Lover.

For other people, it's NanoWrimo, for me, it's finish the damned things already.

have to take Gloria to the dentist tomorrow, and I don't want to do that either.