One of my dream jobs is to be a reader of audio books. I adore reading books aloud, doing the voices, the accents, the whole nine yards. I have been making audio books since around age 8 (I believe Ozma of Oz was my first oeuvre). The only stumbling block to my plans for glory reading books in funny voices to a rapt nation? Most of the companies want you to be an actor first (or even live in a nonexistent city).

Now, I understand the rationale here, but being a successful actor is a devastatingly difficult thing, requiring luck, persistence, luck, good looks, luck, good dramatic delivery, luck, connections, luck, luck, and good fortune. Reading an audio book well requires a mastery of voices and accents; a ready command of language and its nuances (the one area in which the readers are sometimes lacking); and good dramatic delivery. Note that only dramatic delivery is in common between the two; some actors have the voice/accent mastery, but certainly not all. The command of language is in many cases supplied by the director - not feasible in the reading of a 20 to 30-hour book.

In short, insisting that I be a professional actor to read an audio book is rather like insisting that I be a Navy SEAL in order to teach swimming classes - it may be a great asset, but it’s not really necessary and a hugely difficult first step.

Therefore, I am planning to wait until I am a famous novelist, and offer/insist on reading my books when they wish to make recorded versions. Yes, I know becoming a famous novelist is an equally difficult first step - but at least it’s one to which I’m already committed!

Yesterday we had planned to picnic - but the rain clouds glowering overhead, we directed our steps to the Zoo, where rain can not only be mitigated by structures of various types, but usually drives off the crowds and friskifies the critters. We had an enjoyable day - rain-free, but low on crowds due to the threatening skies. Pete the black rhino was more active and visible and less rock-like than on any previous occasion; the newish meerkat colony was charming and inquisitive; one of the wolves opened his eyes once. On our way out of the zoo, we came upon a peacock holding court in full array, and rotating slowly to accommodate both the gusting wind and his adoring public.

Now, when I was three or four, my pre-school ventured out on a field trip to the zoo. My little group came walking ‘round a corner and came face to face with a peacock in wide-stretched display, his many eyes approximately three feet from our staring ones. The shock of this confrontation producing, in us, nervousness; and in him, a scream like a man having his foot tendons severed with an acid-dripping serrated knife, we ran.

However, I am not afraid of peafowl. I hasten to make this point, because that would be silly in the extreme. I rather consider them slightly ill-omened. But as I watched the blue-bright bird strutting and turning, I thought, perhaps they aren’t such a nuisance after all. We moved on, and got in our car, noting on the way that a peahen had decided to investigate the parking lot. On our way out of the lot, this same peahen decided to cross in front of our car. Then, seeing as how we were stopped anyway, she decided that what she really wanted was a closer look at tires, and pranced over to stick her wee head into our wheel well. Being inured by years of shouting, crowds, and pursuit by small children, to surprise and fear, the peahen was not to be scared off by flapping car doors or imprecations.

As I was attempting to utilize these methods, and Matt was chafing at the inconvenience, there was a loudish sort of noise, and the car rocked suddenly. A mini-van directed by one of those people that think the rear-view mirror is just a convenient place to hang things had rolled happily out of its parking place and into our car. Matthew, already somewhat impatient due to peahen, stormed out of the car, and held a conversation with the woman in question, which concluded with him getting back into the car with the words “Drive carefully” spoken in his most dreadfully sarcastic and biting tones (the ones I try to keep him from using on incompetent retail workers all the time.) Apparently the car was only scratched. On the bright side, the peahen appeared to have been frightened off. Birds of ill omen, I tell ya.

Our rubbish is homeless. You see, when my parents arrived for a brief stay in the Family Hotel yesterday, there was a bit of outdoor milling around and carrying in odd pieces of furniture. During the course of the milling, my dad located a piece of paper that had flown into our gutter and, in a burst of cleanly industry, picked it up. The limp thing dripping from his fingers, he said, “Where is your garbage can?” I pointed to its usual abode, and, seeing it not in evidence, remembered it was garbage day, and pointed to the curb. Neither was it there. In consternation I scanned the area. My father traversed the street and surveyed the brook for signs that the can had taken up snorkeling. No can appeared.

Had it been abstracted by particularly refuse-bountiful neighbors? Had it been stolen by some unfriendly person trying to harass and dismay us? Had the automated machines of the garbage men destroyed the can, and its remains been taken into custody for future replacement? We knew not, but my mother insisted, rightly, that I call the garbage company at once so that they knew we hadn’t left the can out for three days before complaining of its putative peregrination. Call them I did—I could not find the number among my bill-paying husband’s effects, and therefore I read it off the yard debris container, which was, thankfully, still with us. I left a message, and was embarassed to discover this morning, when the call was returned, that an idea I had considered when the number was not immediately available in Matthew’s records, was more than an idea.

We have no account with the garbage company at present, they claim (tho’ Matt claims we have paid them for services rendered in the past.) We do not exist to them, nor does our address figure largely in their list of garbage removal to-dos. They have repossessed our garbage can. No more will our rubbish be gnomishly removed in the wee sma’s. Our offal has been rejected. Our cast-offs have been cast off. We shall be reduced to piling our garbage bags forlornly at the curb like Venetians during a garbage strike, or burying our waste at the dead of night in the park and shame-facedly watching the neighborhood dogs unearthing it next day. Or, of course, we could start paying the garbage company again.

I got a rejection letter the other day. It was my first. I’ve never actually just sent in a manuscript to a magazine before – I’ve entered contests, but never just submitted a story – and also, the contests were online. This was a honest-to-goodness rejection letter, in my very own self-addressed stamped envelope. So it was a landmark for me, in a way.

Of course I’m sorry I didn’t get published on my first try, but at the same time it makes me feel good that I’m trying. Every rejection letter I get is a reminder that I’m pursuing my dream. Every rejection letter I get will be another step towards publication. Every rejection letter reminds me to keep writing. After all, I can’t dream that each day’s post will bring the golden ticket if I don’t have manuscripts out….

In case you are wondering why I have not been in evidence, I feel moved to confess that I have once again been wandering the Mazes of Menace and indulging in the great joy of nethack. I’ve mostly been playing wizards, most named Esk, with the occasional Kethry, and some have done quite well before succumbing to tengus, food poisoning, or other dangers of the deep. So I am afraid my energies have been elsewhere—not with Carys and Eirian or any of my other creations, but rather with my little cat, Piwacket, and my god Anhur. So, if you’ll excuse me, I must go see if this pickaxe is cursed.

My work is having an ice cream social soon. I work for a very large organization, so it’s less of an ice cream social, and more of a network of ice cream socials scattered across the Portland Area, with isolated pockets of just handing out ice cream bars. The really funny part of this is that there will be drawings for door prizes! Namely…wait for it…HARD HATS from the construction company that is doing various projects at the various locations. And, to make these hard hats more appealing, they are…wait for it…SIGNED! By whom, I hear you ask, by whom are these hard hats signed to make them a tempting door prize? By what local celebrity have they been stamped with greatness?

By the construction workers. Uh-huh. Maybe if I’m good they’ll give me a pen signed by a bureaucrat for my birthday…

The Grey City I
The Grey City II
The Grey City III

Carys opened her eyes, hoisted the suitcase with one aching arm, and grasped Eirian’s hand, slighly moist from fingernail-biting, in her other hand.

“Come now,” she said sturdily, and marched forward to the bridge’s lip. She paused after the first step, hearing the metal ring under her boot and the quavering sound hum along the structure, out into the mist, as if to alert the monsters of their coming. But having made the attempt, she could hardly turn back, and so she forged on, parting the miasma with her dark bonnet and towing suitcase and sister like ship’s boats during an ocean battle. They were halfway across the bridge, then two thirds. Carys’s heartbeat now seemed quieter, and no longer kept time with the rapid ringing of their booted feet on the grating. She reminded herself, as the water gurgled hungrily, not to look down.

Eirian screamed, and Carys looked down. A seamed, yellow face, like a wax-headed doll left to crumple and run in the sun, peered up at them through milky eyes. The mouth spread in a rotting grin, and white hair stood out from it like a blowsy corona. Carys screamed herself, and took off down the bridge, Eirian and the suitcase flailing on either side, and the din of her own footsteps pursuing her with all the substance of fear. Once, Eirian cried out that she was caught, but with a great heave of her thin arm, Carys pulled her onward. The fog seemed to go on forever, and who knew what or whom might wait to catch them as they careened along — but run they did, and the fog did thin ahead, and they emerged from the ringing, rushing blankness of the bridge at last.

They caught their breath in the circle of light of a street lamp set in the center of a little square, amid drooping flowers. Carys eyed the bridge, but the swirling fog did not part, and no one and no thing emerged. Eirian was sobbing breathlessly, terrified and tired, and rubbing her wrenched shoulder. Her bonnet had been blown off her head and buffeted her as it hung by its dull ribbon ’round her throat, and her dark hair was falling into her eyes and standing out around her head.

“I’m sorry, pet,” Carys murmured, wiping the smaller girl’s tears with her handkerchief, “but we’re quite safe now.”

Eirian sobbed a little ascending scale, let out a sigh at the top, and opened her wet eyes to scowl at her sister. “You hurt my shoulder!”

“I’m so sorry, darling, I was frightened for you.”

“And my foot!”

Carys looked down, and saw Eirian’s right foot in a puddle of water, in a twice-darned stocking. “Deary, please step out of that horrid puddle. I’m sorry if we lost your boot…”

“Shan’t! My foot hurts, and the water is cool and nice.” She tossed her messy head, “What will we do about my boot?”

Carys bit her lip. They might have some long way to travel, and she could not in all conscience allow her little sister to walk stocking-footed in the puddles of the City. Besides the dreadfully unrespectable appearance it gave. They could not afford new boots — they could scarcely afford anything, she thought, jingling the little purse she carried under her outer skirts. She faced the white portal of the bridge. The little square, with its shut-up shops and small houses, the desultory prettiness of the flowers at the center, was comforting, but it only made the eery exposure and the unhealthy smell of the passing more dreadful by contrast.

“I will go back for your shoe,” she said at last. “Stand here by the lamp, and hold this hitching-post. I expect you not to have moved when I get back. Scream if… if anyone comes,” she shivered, and, leaving the suitcase underneath her bedraggled charge, she walked back to the bridge.

She took deep breaths as she approached it, for all the horrid stench. She would not run, this time, until she had to. The thunder of her own fleeing footsteps had not yet left her ears. She made her way, a lone dark shape, into the fog, and moved in it as quietly as she could, softly pinging her way along the span. The boot appeared only a few feet away, and she stole up to it, crouching to pull at it. She could not help but look through the grating, to the complex network of beams below that, with the icy flow of flotsam below, seemed to resolve into dark, moving figures. She wrenched at the boot. A thin, dirty hand reached through the grating and caught at hers.

Too terrified to scream, and sure her cry would bring the disobedient Eirian here to share her fate, she stared into the darkness, where a dirty child’s face appeared in blacks and greys before shimmering to the surface and smiling shyly at her.

“I fink we scared you, miss. You mussn’t be a City girl, then.”

Her fear subsiding slowly, Carys shook her head. “Alls the city people know the Ironbridge is flophouse to the strays — the Runners don’t mind us down here none, see, as long as we don’ mind the people and carts goin’ overheads.” Carys nodded dumbly. “When you’ve moved on as far as they can move you on,” he grinned, “here’s where you sleeps, in the iron tree…”

Carys cleared her throat and whispered, suddenly conscious there must be people sleeping all around, “Don’t you fall?”

“Sometimes,” the childish gargoyle admitted, “’specially the oldies, or them as sleeps too deep. But mostwise we clings well, unless someone throws us a coin as we want too much to heed ourselves…” he clucked his tongue, “many’s been moved on right into the river, an’ they do move on fast from there!” he cackled. “Sorry for the scare, miss…but you’d best find a place to sleep, or you’ll be moved on when the Runners come…” He gave the heel of the boot a wriggle and shove that set it loose, and clambered tinnily back into the darkness. Carys turned and made her way back to Eirian, her feet ringing hollowly on the Ironbridge.

The Grey City V

India and Africa
They both have elephants.

Cucumbers and zucchinis

Rhinoceros and hippopotamus
I knew what they were, just not which was which.

Australia and Austria
Not even the Von Trapps could clear up the similar names.

Rhododendrons and azaleas

The Grey City I
The Grey City II

Carys scuttled along the slick cobblestones, towing her sister and awkwardly waltzing the oversized suitcase. The lights seemed brighter now, or perhaps there were more than before, as the natural half-light of the city began to sink into evening. The district to which they’d been directed must not have been popular, at least in the night hours, for as they walked towards it the press of people thinned, and the sound of footsteps dwindled and merged with the dripping of the subsiding rain. The sound of a river running sluggish and sullen grew, until the street they followed opened onto another, and the slow river was visible as a deeper bank of fog behind the spear-tipped railings.

Eirian looked at the railings and sniffed unhappily at the rising river mist. “Which way, Carys,” she said, in that dangerous tone that makes a question an accusation.

Carys looked up the river and down, and saw a clutch of jaundiced lights strung across the water. “That way,” she said, with careful certainty, and they made their way along the foul-smelling river to the foot of a great bridge, where they plopped down their luggage and rested a moment.

The bridge was made of iron, criss-crossing beams like faint letters written on the funk. Where it joined the cobbles, its paving was also metal, a grating with each interstix nearly large enough for Eirian’s little boot, and as dark as the growing night more sensed than seen above. The dark metal faded into the fetid haze as her eyes strained to find the other bank.

Carys was terrified. The size of the bridge, the holes in the grating that might drop her – so it seemed – into the dark stream of offal, the smell of metal rising acrid and unfamiliar in her cold nostrils, the sound of the water, the dripping, the rustling and murmuring and breathing of a thousand dark things that lurked in the shadow and mist and under the bridge, waiting to clutch her through the grating and pull her into the icy filth below.

She breathed deep, and closed her eyes, and remembered. She remembered her mother’s dark eyes, and the soft voice that said, “When I am gone, you will be the little mother Eirian has lost, I know. You will be strong and patient and kind. You will be brave and stalwart and honest. I know you better, my lovely Carys, than you know yourself, and I know you will make me proud.”

The Grey City IV

I was perusing some stories at Etiquette Hell earlier, and it struck me at some point how many of the things that really rankle in people’s bosoms are oversights, thoughtlessness. After all, courtesy in general is a matter of thinking of other people and their feelings.

This terrified me. I try very hard to be a thoughtful person. But I also know, in my heart of hearts, that I am forgetful in the extreme, and occasionally oblivious. Forgetfulness breeds etiquette breaches - I am MORE than certain that there are thank-you notes I’ve forgotten over the years. I found out from my mother, who found out from my aunt, that I never sent a thank-you note to my cousin and his fiancée for their wedding present to us - despite the fact that I distinctly remembered writing it, and even struggling to find their address. Did I send it to an old address? Did I leave it somewhere awaiting a stamp? Did I (horror of horrors!) think about the phrasing, what to say in praise of the present…and never actually set pen to paper? The world may never know, and there are individual presents that I look at even now with a vague feeling of guilt. Is the nagging in the back of my mind that I failed to thank this woman for this present? Or is it that I forgot to respond to her halloween e-mail with the darling pictures of her kids? I don’t know…

As to obliviousness, I have a horrible tendency to take questions literally, even when they are quite likely matters of form. More than once I have caught myself answering someone’s ‘How are you?’ and continuing past them without reciprocating…how many other times have I done this? Not to mention the fact that I’m horribly talkative and many of my anecdotes touch on me. Do I natter on and on, going “blah blah MY plans blah blah MY weekend blah blah MY headaches” constantly? Eeeek!

In the end, it’s impossible to know how you come across to other people. I just rely on instinct, and try to fire off notes when I realize I’ve forgotten to do so—trying to make my frazzle-brainedness cute, or at least acceptable. In the end, your best is all you can do, and you have to trust that your good intentions will lead you somewhere rather better than tradition states…