This afternoon, I drove down to the Scholes twins’ 1st birthday party. In case you haven’t seen them, those are some cute, cute little girls. It was a great deal of fun and a nice break. I got to catch up with Harold Gross and Brenda Cooper, which was lovely.

I had to leave the party a little early because I got word that the FX for the Shades of Milk and Honey book trailer were on their way.   Currently I’m sitting in Hot Pepper studio, in Portland, watching Rob work on the final edits. It’s all finished except for laying in the special effects shots of the glamour. Those are coming from Hawaii and Remo, our FX supervisor, is uploading them as they finish rendering.

Each one is large enough that it takes about an hour and a half to upload and then download. Crazy, eh?

I’m getting a lot of writing done and occasionally watching the small muscles in Rob’s forearms while he works. My husband does a lot of manual labor when he’s working on wine so… well. The definition is lovely. I figure, since I can’t do much helpful, I might as well find the small pleasures of being here.

The fellow who is doing the special effects for the Shades of Milk and Honey book trailer is a BAFTA award winning special effects supervisor who I know from Lazytown. Remo Balcells has worked on films like The Fifth Element and Final Fantasy. He’s currently doing FX for Hawaii Five-0.

Tonight he emailed to say that he was “quacking off the renders.”

You know… I didn’t think there was a profession out there that made puppetry phrases look completely prosaic. “Quacking off?” I have no idea what it means, but it sounds fantastic.

Well, I had a lovely day today.

Konrad Walewski is in town and we’ve been hanging out doing things while he’s here.  He mentioned that he needed to interview a writer for the Polish edition of F&SF and I instantly volunteered to drive him there.

Why, you might ask, was I so eager to drive him to an interview.

Because he was interviewing Ursula K. Le Guin.

Yes, I thought you might understand my reasons. I’ve actually met her a couple of times before. Bizarrely, in my life as a puppeteer I was contacted to do the scenic design for a puppet production of her children’s book Ride the Red Mare. This was really the first time I’ve seen her since I started writing and was a bit nervous.

Which is silly, because I knew from prior experience that she’s lovely and a gracious hostess.

Konrad had a series of fascinating questions prepared for her and I just sat in the living room to listen. After the interview, we all chatted a bit. Then Konrad and I headed down the hill to have beers and let out our fan squees.

I’ve now taken Konrad to Powell’s City of Books, which he hadn’t realized was a brick and mortar store. The online store, yes. We walked in and he thought he’d need a half hour to browse. Bwahahahaha!  An hour and a half later, he staggered into the coffee shop looking appropriately dazed. Yes… Powell’s. City of Books.

He’s taking one more pass through, having fortified himself with coffee.  Very Portlandian.

I was talking with a friend of mine and he said that my blog read like “Mary’s Greatest Hits,” because I never talk about the things that go wrong. This surprised me since most of my best puppetry stories are of shows that go horribly, horribly wrong. But he’s right. When I talk about television I’ll say “Oh, this shot was really hard, but we got it in the end.”  And in fiction, the stuff that goes wrong usually gets fixed in private.  I realized that it’s because I never think about things in television or fiction as going as horribly wrong in the same way they do on stage. I mean, things in stage will go bad in rehearsal, but you rarely tell stories about it. That’s part of the process and the only things that matter are the things the audience sees. In television, I screw up and we do it again. In fiction, that’s what the delete key is for.  It never really seems to me like things go wrong.

So, I will now tell you the story of the Worst Show I Ever Did. Continue reading Things that go horribly, horribly wrong OR The worst show I ever did

I’ve just received word that Shades of Milk and Honey is turning up in some bookstores already. The official release date isn’t until next Tuesday. August 3rd. Five days.

But since they’ve shipped, some bookstores go ahead and stock them as soon as the box arrives.  Not that I’m eager to see it or anything, but… I will mail a hand fan and a signed book plate to the the first five people who spot the novel in the wild.

Just capture it with a camera, post the picture online via your electronic means of choice then come back to my website and drop the link in the comment thread.

Awesome! My friends at the Puppet Kitchen were on ABC news this week. Check it out.

See! Saying things like  ”Pass me an eyeball” is perfectly natural.

Today I headed over to my modiste’s to try on the muslin for the green spencer that I’m having made to wear at the Shades of Milk and Honey Launch Party in Raleigh. She had used the lining of the spencer to create the muslin.

The fit was pretty good right from the start, which is nice. V– is using the spencer/pelisse pattern from sensibility.com. The entire time she was fitting me she kept raving about how good the pattern was and how well it went together.

One of the first questions we came to was sleeve length.  This changes with the period. So while V–’s inclination today would be to have the sleeve end just above the wide part of my hand, the spencer is modeled on a man’s military jacket. For those, it comes down over the wide part of the hand. We checked original pieces and behold, the sleeves for a lady’s spencer came quite far down.

Once we had the sleeve length and V– could see how the garment lay, we turned it inside out so that she could adjust the fit.  The spencer is double-breasted and quite fitted.  You can see the multitude of pins V– employed to make it snug. She also decided to move the bottom of the spencer up so that it was closer to the waistline of the dress.  One of the interesting things about these is that the fashion changes constantly and since every garment was handmade for a specific person, there is no single “right” way to make something period correct.   It involves looking at a lot of pictures and interpreting the design principles of the Regency to come up with something that makes sense on the body of the person wearing it.

One of the things that is fairly consistent is the way the backs are constructed at this point. With the spencer on inside out, it’s easier to see the lines of the back.  The armscye of the spencer and my dress both much farther into the back than a modern garment. The result of this is that even though the bodice is quite snug I have a pretty full range of motion. I can cross my arms over my chest and lift them over my head.  This isn’t an option by the time you get to the Victorian era.

Now that the spencer is fitted, V– will true up the lines on the pattern, which basically means that she’ll adjust the paper pattern for my actual size and make sure everything is smooth.  Then she’ll cut the final fabric.

The outer fabric is a green silk sari that I brought back from India years ago.  We’re actually going to reverse the border, which has gold thread, because the reverse side is more delicate than the front.

Look! My author copies of Shades of Milk and Honey arrived today.

We are also eight days away from the release day of August 3rd. Not that I’m counting.

To celebrate, I’m going to give away two signed copies of Shades of Milk and Honey.

How do you win? Between now and August 1st post a caption in the comment thread on my website to go with this illustration from 1800.

On August 2nd, I’ll open a poll with the various captions listed and give a copy of the novel to the most popular caption AND to my personal favorite.

Edited to add: Yes, you may enter more than one. However, with this addition I’ll narrow them down to my top favorites before posting the poll.

For your amusement, here is one of my research tools for Shades of Milk and Honey. It’s very handy if you are doing anything set in the Regency. Also, I find it interesting how many vulgarities are just everyday speech now.

I have arrived safely home, with my luggage and the contents of my luggage intact. And only twenty-four hours after I’d planned to get here.

The cats are frantic with loneliness and Marlowe is doing a great deal of chasing invisible demons to prove his affection for me.  Rob is still away at IPNC so I’m just going to go to bed and let the cats hog his side.

While I’m in transit again, here’s an amusing comic about Miss Austen.

It’s a Large Book.

(Hat tip to Todd Sanders)

Lest you feel bad for me and my delayed flight yesterday, allow me to show you one of the views from my bedroom window at the lake cottage. The bedroom I was in had windows on three sides, all of which looked out on the lake. To say that it was relaxing doesn’t take into account the very kind generosity of Merrie Haskell‘s inlaws.  I got a lot of work done during my additional 24 hours with them.  I finished the first round of Glamour in Glass revisions and began revising a novella.

Dave Klecha gave me a ride to the airport and my flight is currently on time. I suspect that it will leave without problems because the alternative would be staying here another day and that would be very pleasant.

Due to the delayed flight, I am once again ensconced on the porch of Merrie Haskell’s lake house and working on revisions to Glamour in Glass. While I am thus engaged, allow me to present to you Emma Thompson’s speech at the Golden Globes when she pretended to be Jane Austen.

I’m at the airport in Grand Rapids and my flight is delayed by an hour and a half. This means that I’ll miss my connection in Minneapolis and there’s not another flight that will get me home tonight. Or rather, there is but it’s over-sold by seven people so they can’t book me on it. I’d have to go standby and hope that eight people didn’t show up so that I could get on.

I’m torn between going back to Merrie Haskell’s lake house to spend the night and getting on this plane to see if maybe I can get home.

Part of my dilemma is that the Oregon Regency Society is having a picnic tomorrow. I have managed to be out of town for every single event and was so excited that I’d finally get to go to one. I suspect that I will opt for staying here because that removes any uncertainty and the lake house is very nice.

Edited to add: Yes. I’m staying overnight here and flying home tomorrow.

In other news, it has been suggested that as a service to humanity I should post my flight itinerary so other people know what flights to avoid.

My most grateful thanks to Miss Ellis for sharing this video with me.