Peeking into the rock

So I don't even know where I saw this, but this is the latest version I've seen of "post a bit of your work:" you go to page seven of what you're working on, count down seven lines, and copy the next seven.

This is what I get if I consider the whole novel as one manuscript instead of the various chapters independently:

"I have breeches," Yanek informed his sister, "But Zhenny wouldn't let me wear them because I wore them yesterday when I played the drum."

This led to an enthusiastic telling of the events of the day before. Yanek confided that he had had beer and herb-liqueur the day before, and he relayed some of the more puzzling things he had seen and heard as if he had understood any of it. Ludmilla countered with some of the grander events at the palace, and Sasha announced that he also had breeches and he wore them all the time, and he had a drum, too, which had little rooster soldiers painted on it.

This is the best I can do if I consider the chapter I'm on: it hasn't gotten to 7 pages yet, so these lines are from page 6:

"It's just coincidence. It'll all go away when this is over," Yanek said. "A week or two from now I'll be back at work at the glass factory." If I live, he thought.

"You think you're getting back to Boem in two weeks?" Krenek asked. "Well," he added to Honza, "I can certainly understand why you don't want to come with us. Garlo stayed behind for similar reasons. But we'd better go now, the sun keeps moving even when we don't."

The other workers in the field had already started loading the wheat into the wagon, so after embraces for all the soldiers, Honza turned back to join them. Yulaida lingered a little longer.

The strikeout words are going away because thanks to heleninwales I now know I did all the harvests in the book wrong and I have to go back and correct them. I didn't realize about stooking: I thought it was just hay that got that treatment. Definitely not "writing what I know" here. Just "learning about what I write." Also, the second passage looks boring to me on its own like this.

There's not much point in this report. I'm still reading Reamde in bed and The Hundred Thousand Fools of God in the bathtub. It will take me forever to read these.

- for some reason it delights me to discover that I will be in Prague on Jan Hus Day (July 6)

- it's premature to say more, but it's really likely I'll be working by the end of next week

- they built some really cool minimalist statuary at the Highway Nine end of the levee: they are exercise equipment. Some of them have moving parts and others are various kinds of bars to pull yourself around on. They are beautiful to look at and fun to use. I tried a couple of them today (as many as Truffle had patience for) and I got a little light-headed (motion sickness?) but they were actually quite fun and only hcallenging enough.

- I filled out the Army of Women questionnaire for breast cancer research and I am not happy with how I answered some of the questions. I answered that my health limits various activies "a little" but what I wanted to say was "my health doesn't really limit my acitivities but it makes me think about them really hard and it sometimes makes things uncomfortable"  Also sometimes they gave you radio buttons when ticky boxes would have been better -- as to why I'm not using birth control, for example. And it was surprisingly moving to fill out the consequences of all my pregnancies.

- I skipped two weeks of reading report, but I like doing it, so here it is again:

Recently read: Madeleine Kamman's Savoie which is a travelogue and cookbook, and some book about Rebetika which was sitting in my dad's stuff in xeroxed form

Reading: (continuing the dad's bookshelf project): Francisco Garcia Lorca, In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico: Hanif Kureishi, The Balck Album: Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (another instance of how Making Up Improbable Culture is the New Guinea national sport), and re-reading The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginsburg.  Why yes, I am reading four books at once. I thought I'd stopped that nonsense. But none of these have grabbed me in a way that makes me want to just read page after page until it's finished.

Will be reading: I don't know, some random books or other.

- - writing: it's getting there. Really, really getting there. The war is over, Yanek's getting reunited with people one by one, he;s going to meet the trees soon. But I'm going to have so much work to do in the revision to get this set up better, because I look at it now and it's not set up properly at all. This is because when I started this story it was going to be a different thing entirely. It was kind of a romance at first and now it's not at all.

1. What are you reading? Periodic Tales by Hugh Addersley (bedroom) and A Simple Habana Melody by Oscar Hijuelos (bathroom)

2. What did you recently finish reading? Hallucinations by Oliver Sachs and The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell.

3. What will you be reading in the future? What is the What? By David Eggers and something ethnomusicological from my dad's library

It's not that I have such fine literary tastes, but that these are the books I brought home from my father's stash, plus two books Emma gave me for Christmas.

also, I am as always, reading several million words of amateur online fiction every few days.  My mother used to read murder mysteries and thrillers when she was depressed. I read mensch romance when I can find it.

So personhead julesjones did this and I want to also, so, simply, here it is. I adjusted some of the questions, comparing her version and Justin Bog's original.
1. What is the working title of your book? Drummer Boy.  There's no reason to change it that I could imagine. Though in my head I refer to it as not-Poland.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book? Several sources.
(1) There's an unfinished story on fictionpress called "Unrelated Royalty," which has the situation of a king marrying a pregnant widow who subsequently dies, leaving her son growing up in the royal household without any actual status. I used a duke, and then because I have a realistic bent I started thinking about why the kid wouldn't have the status he should get from his father, and so on.
(2) Landscape and Memory, which is about Greater Lithuania, which greatly overlaps Greater Poland: Language Hat's running discussion of the polyglot nature of Eastern Europe, The Golden Bough, and everything by Carlo Ginzburg.
(3) All the military history discussions I'll never have anymore with the nice fellow I married, and especially certain bits I recalled from things he told me when he was alive: the Polish cavalry meeting the tanks in battle, the general perfuckedness of the World War One eastern front, the persistence of the use of drummers in battlefield communications well after the advent of telegraphy . . . the earworm phrase the law of uneven development.
(4) My own family background is four ways not-Polish, so there is a certain symmetry to me writing a book that is not-Polish.  -- Do you want to know the ways?  a. Though my father's father's family identified as German Americans, my surname is Sorbian, which is a Western Slavic language that overlaps Poland,Germany, and the Czechoslovakian region. b. My great-grandmother's mother was from the Amber Coast, which is sometimes Poland and sometimes other countries in history, but was apparently German at the time she left it to be a hurdy-gurdy girl in the California Gold Fields (she didn't get that far because of --)c. My great-grandmother's father, the ship's carpenter the mother eloped with instead of going on to the gold fields, was from Gdansk during a period when it was called Danzig, so therefore not Polish. And d.My mother's family was all Jews from Vilnius, which they pronounced Vilno and spelled Wilnow, and which was supposedly in Russia at the time they left there, but they always said it was in Poland (glances at historical atlases leave me with a headache and more questions than answers).
(5) When I figure out why I suddenly discovered that my protagonist has green markings on his skin in the shape of a willow tree, and that he is special to the trees, I will be surprised, or something.  Honestly, I don't know where that came from.  I wasn't thinking about The Lorax at all.
(6) Everything I write is influenced by Jakobowski and the Colonel, so.
(&) Friday night folkdance class, especially monthly live music night where I just stare at the drummers all night.

3. What is the one-sentence synopsis for the book?
The son of a prince, sold by his foster brother the Duke's son to be a drummer in the imperial army, survives the trenches against all likelihood, to become an urban Lorax according to his true familial destiny.

4. What genre does your book fall under? Either it's a fantasy or magical realism. Is it steampunk? When you read about the mobile telegraph transmitter on a crudely self-propelled wagon, you might think so.  Despite the prevalence of dukes and princes, it is not at all a silver fork novel.

5. What other books would you compare this to (inside your genre)? Well, it's nothing like Ash or Grunts -- other fantasies with archaic warfare in them --  and it's nothing like The Lorax. It owes a little revulsion-effect "I want to write the opposite of that" to The Painted Bird.
Well, none of that is inside the genre except the Mary Gentle books.

6. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  There's a bit of a romance, though it is not central: talking animal earth dieties (a sow, a cow, and perhaps a bear! Triple Goddess!) -- a pile of scary folklore, class interactions, some upstairs-downstairs stuff, a couple battlefields, culture class, juvenile misunderstandings, plague, delayed industrial revolution, a fading empire, many different kinds of music, and of course drums and drummers. Also fiddles and the occasional bagpipe.
And also pirogies and an appalling local liqueur.

I left out questions about actors to play the characters, publishing plans, and other things that apply to finished work. I do plan to submit it through traditional channels, because I do think of it as a regular print book.

1. Climb a tree.

2. Roll down a really big hill At UC Berkeley on a lawn that I think doesn't exist anymore.

3. Camp out in the wild

4. Build a den

5. Skim a stone   -- you do mean skip a stone, don't you?

6. Run around in the rain

7. Fly a kite

8. Catch a fish with a net

9. Eat an apple straight from a tree

10. Play conkers -No, but we made candles out of sky lupines, and dolls out of flowers,

11. Throw some snow -- I think so. I don't remember for sure, but my experiences with snow before my 12th birthday wer few until we went to Philadelphia, where we arrived with mostly worn-out California clothes in the coldest winter in many years. I was eleven,

12. Hunt for treasure on the beach

13. Make a mud pie

14. Dam a stream

15. Go sledging -  what is this?  We made sleds and raced them on dry grass hills.

16. Bury someone in the sand

17. Set up a snail race - We made snail hotels instead

18. Balance on a fallen tree - Or, perhaps, climb all over it and pretend it is a spaceship?

19. Swing on a rope swing

20. Make a mud slide -- but we made dry grass slides all the time

21. Eat blackberries growing in the wild -- well, wildly growing on the roadside, anyway

22. Take a look inside a tree and make a little house in it

23. Visit an island -- Brooks Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, where my father was a worker on an archaeological dig.

24. Feel like you’re flying in the wind

25. Make a grass trumpet -- does this mean a grass harmonica?

26. Hunt for fossils and bones

27. Watch the sun wake up

28. Climb a huge hill

29. Get behind a waterfall -- how about float down a river instead?

30. Feed a bird from your hand

31. Hunt for bugs

32. Find some frogspawn

33. Catch a butterfly in a net

34. Track wild animals -- I had a kit to track wild animals but I mostly did dogs and one or two raccoons

35. Discover what’s in a pond

36. Call an owl

37. Check out the crazy creatures in a rock pool

38. Bring up a butterfly

39. - Catch a crab

40. Go on a nature walk at night

41. Plant it, grow it, eat it

42. Go wild swimming

43. Go rafting. on inflatable rafts, on a calm river. Okay?

44. Light a fire without matches -- it was a feeble little fire.  But I made pretty good chert and obsidian tools.

45. Find your way with a map and compass  -- and I made maps too, showing rocks my best friend and I were finding in the wild part of neighborhood.

46. Try bouldering (rock climbing outdoors but with safety mats and short drops) -No safety mats, though, just my adult cousin Lynn.

47. Cook on a campfire

48. Try abseiling -What the hell is this?

49. Find a geocache (use GPS and other navigational aides to locate hidden containers.) -  I couldn't because there was no GPS.

50. Canoe down a river -- I rafted in a river and canoed in a lake.  Good enough?

This is by way of personheadmadwriter and ultimately from the National Trust which I assume is in England.

Given the fact that so many of the things are directly related to the English countryside and wilderness, I am surprised that I was able to say I did so many.

Mine's pretty boring.

2011. Me, a dog and a cat, in a two-bedroom house in the "South of Laurel" neighborhood in Santa Cruz.
2001. Me, the nice fellow, a 22-year-old son, a 14 year-old daughter, a dog and a two cats (different dog, but one of the cats was the same), in a three-bedroom house in Santa Cruz. The same house.
1991. Me, the nice fellow, a 12-year-old son, a 4 year-old daughter, a cat(the older of those same two cats), in the same house. One of the bedrooms is in a different part of the house than in 1981.
1981. Me, the nice fellow, two year-old child, a roommate I couldn't stand and her wonderful three year-old daughter, in the same house.
1971. Me, the nice fellow, and a shifting collection of roommates one to three at a time, in a three-bedroom house on the East Side of Santa Cruz.
1961. Before or after September? Before: Me, my father, my mother, my brother, two dogs, in a three-bedroom house on the downhill side of a weird little street in El Sobrante, California. After: Me, my father, my mother, my brother, one dog, in an eleven-room house in Powellton Village, a transitional neighborhood between University City and Mantua, in Philadelphia.
1951: not born for two more years.

What doesn't show, of course is the years I lived in San Francisco, the summer I lived in Pine Ridge, the year on campus, or any of the houses I lived in in Santa Cruz before 1971 and between 1971 and 1977, or the first two years of my life which were mostly spent in an apartment in Berkeley.

I was tagged by personhead ocotillo_dawn  and that's the only reason I'm doing this.  It's that book sentence game again, this time with somewhat different instructions.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it's too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).
6. Tag five people.

It's a tossup between the phone book (boring) and <i>The Vegetable Bible</i> which I believe actually belongs to Emma's friend Kelley but she left it behind when she moved back to the City.   This book is nothing but sidebars strewn decoratively around the page in vague reference to brilliantly lit and probably heavily oiled gorgeous vegetables largely undergoing some kind of processing.

 Pull off the skin from top to bottom with a kitchen knife.  Cut the bell peppers in half lengthwise, taking care not to squash the soft flesh.  Remove the stalk, including the base, from the bell pepper halves, and cut out and discard the core and seeds, leaving just the flesh.  The prepared bell pepper halves may now be halved again, quartered, or cut into strips or cubes of any desired size, according to the recipe.

Signs of freshness in a bell pepper are smooth, firm skin and a crisp, green stalk.  At one time bell peppers were often broken off the plant, but they are now usually cut in order to avoid damaging them.

It's not a game if you don't tag people, so here are the personheads I am tagging (chosen by the expedience of their having posted today and by me seeing their names right now: there is no real criterion):
birdsedge 
thomasyan 
deborahjross 
fivemack 
pnkrokhockeymom 

That last one?  You have a really hard personhead name to spell correctly, pnkrokhockeymom .

They actually sing it pretty well. Emma sent this link to me so I'm sending it to you:
"There's no one as Irish as Barack Obama"