May 15-16, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Just like the title says. I did work all day yesterday, and the most part of today too. At this point, we're looking at definitely negative words -- I've sliced something like 2,000 or more, and added...okay, who even knows? It's all just a ball o' confusion over here.

Book proposals. It's a thing. Another skill to learn.

If I couldn't actively feel the thing getting better with each pass, each iteration? I'd probably be going out of my skin.

---

Otherwise? All work and no play makes Leah a dull girl. I did not go to a food security lecture today, and I am not going to that noon yoga class tomorrow, mostly because I want this finished by tomorrow evening, when I am most definitely going to one of the many spinoffs of the Trampoline Hall pub lecture/storytelling thing, because one of Dr. My Roommate's colleagues is giving a talk on Erdos.

Time not spent writing the past few days has been spent running errands or cooking food. Time spent not doing those things has been spent curled up in bed with my laptop, watching Samurai Champloo episodes, in an attempt to cool my brain off. All very boring.

The one unboring thing? Ideomancer has made the longlist for the British Fantasy Awards this year. Yeah, it's the longlist, not the shortlist. Yeah, it's a small thing. But we're a volunteer-staffed webzine that pays all of $40 a story, and inside? I am dying with pride. :)

May 14, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

This is less a formal issuance of metrics than a post to say that today I did not so much write words as perform some serious overhaul revising on the words I already have, and so work happened, but I didn't really count it up. I don't know if I'm up or down words, really, because I wasn't paying attention. But yes. Work happened.

(Yes, this is mostly a work diary for me. So I know where I've been, and what I was thinking when I was there.)

---

So, here's a thing:

I was going to write a post to say that tonight I went to my first hot yoga class,* where I learned that hot yoga does not mess around and got my ass handed to me so hard it probably came with a giant novelty cheque and a press conference. But either that and the resultant post-workout happy place, or the good music coming through my headphones as I walked up to King Street, or the sweet, quiet, breezy warm night weather put me straight into my best peaceful happy place, and I ended up walking 5km home afterward just 'cause the air smelled so good outside, so flowers-and-green, and I wanted to. So.

I'm already feeling that particular combination: the tingly sort of pre-soreness you get when you know tomorrow is going to be The Asskicking Strikes Back. I think I'm going to take to my bed and stay there like some sort of Austenian mother character, and wail piteously until someone brings me tea and laptops.

(I am so going back for another class on Thursday.)

But, the thing:

I started writing that stuff, about my yoga class and my gleeful pending suffering,** and stopped to go look for an appropriate tag to stick on the post.*** And I have a tag for climbing, when I was climbing, and a tag for bellydance, which will hopefully get dusted off inside the next month or so depending on what my budget does. But the only tag I had that was remotely close to a thing about general bodily stuff says stupid fucking meatpuppet.

I...kind of recoiled.

I've had this LJ for nine years now. Stuff accumulates; it silts, and sticks around in the corners. So I remember when I made that tag, and why I used it so often, once. It was the tag for all the things my body did that betrayed me, and that I hated: anxiety attacks, depression, blood sugar ridiculousness, sinus infections, illness, injury, general drama. I am realizing there were years where my main relationship with my body was that it betrayed me. It really was this evil, recalcitrant suit the real me had to wear. I did not like it. It wasn't me.

I am a little appalled right now at how much I hated myself, and how casually.

#

A friend of long standing said something last week (while very kindly talking me up from a pretty justifiable blue funk) that's been kicking around my head just about constantly since: that she and another mutual friend consider me stabler, and better at being good to myself than a lot of the rest of that circle, because I seek out little joys -- her words. Because things like the smell of the air in Trinity Bellwoods Park tonight, or the right song kicking up to the right rhythm of my feet, are really genuinely enough to make me happy.****

She's right. I've been thinking about that nonstop because it's true: It's so easy for a thing to turn my head these days. It's so easy to let the way the light falls through a white-and-red tulip petal nudge breakup gloom or worry about other people or worry about my own life right out of my head. Because I don't want to be unhappy. The world's so big and bright, and I'm just not all that interested in my own hurt anymore. It's boring and it wastes my time.

I am realizing: Holy shit. I'm stable, and sane.

I have no idea how I got here, or when, but it must be true. Because I have written evidence of that girl who despised herself so offhandedly and thoroughly, and I don't even remember what it was like to be her anymore.

I still don't think of myself as stable or sane. My base assumption about myself is that I'm a volatile substance which requires self-monitoring and compensation for the daily little wobbles.

Maybe how I think about myself ought to change.

Huh.


*Whole revolutions in my health, fitness, and appearance are going to go down for no better reason than that I started actually buying stuff off Groupon this spring. There's very little I won't try if it's only $20. I can't decide if this is awesome or a terrible indictment of my character.

**I don't like pain, but I like accomplishment just fine.

***You should see my filing system.

****Also carrot cake. I made a carrot cake last night. S'good.

May 11, 2012 Progress Notes:

"Werewolves of Parkdale"

Words today: 400.
Words total: 400.
Reason for stopping: We want ice cream and it is almost midnight, and we want ice cream. So.

Darling du Jour: "Which one?" she said, not a little archly. Yes; ha ha. Guys with plaid shirts and facial hair were to Parkdale what sports cars are to Monaco. Or golden retrievers to Roncy. Or flatness to Saskatchewan.
Mean Things: Nothing so far, but I smell incipient ha ha only serious. Only I can take a story built on this much sheer ridiculous jokey shit and make it serious. :p

Research Roundup: Supermoon! The music schedule at the Gladstone Melody Bar on Sunday mornings, and an image reference, since I'm not there right now. The lyrics to Cat Power's "Werewolf Song". Damian Abraham's beard.
Books in progress: China Mieville, Railsea.

---

This story actually started, finally started after almost a year of talking shit about it, at One Hour Cafeteria over noodles and white gourd tea and dumplings. They have beanbag chairs here, and good wifi. It's like a tastier extension of the Robarts Library second-floor study room.

It is all, start to finish and the middle bits too, sora_blue's fault.

Okay, some of it's subject_zero's fault too.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with this. Maybe five people in the universe will actually get all the jokes. Totally unpublishable.

Yay!

May 11, 2012 Progress Notes:

"Shine a Light"

Words today: 300.
Words total: 1950.
Reason for stopping: Going out, ironically, for a work date.

Darling du Jour: When they find us this will look like a prison. When they find us it'll be a concrete shell, stripped of keepsakes, fabric, furniture; every cupboard empty. Our bodies will be curled up like Pompeii's sleeping children, blue skin frozen to ornamental pillows as clear as a summer sky.
Mean Things: The inevitability of death (just a little bit).

Research Roundup: A quick Fimbulwinter refresher. Hydronic forced-air heating systems. Catheterization in women. Practical sex tips for paraplegics.
Books in progress: China Mieville, Railsea.

---

And we're off to Chococrepe for food and tea. And working.

May 10, 2012 Progress Notes:

"Shine a Light"

Words today: 600.
Words total: 1650.
Reason for stopping: Out of steam.

Darling du Jour: That's supposed to be how it is: that eventually all of us, me and Aubrey and Basra and Ewa and Caridad and Alexei and Ismat and Zain, will die frozen in the dark. It is not supposed to get worse than that.
Mean Things: Bedsores. Something pretty weird with the body parts going on in the basement, but nobody really wants to talk about it.

Research Roundup: What commercial boilers look like. Regional variant spellings of Lucas. Diabetes, and then kidney failure, and then bedsores.
Books in progress: China Mieville, Railsea.

---

Sometimes you've got to do something else for a little bit. So, here we go. Something else.

Not feeling hugely communicative tonight -- and yes, I can write fiction and feel totally uncommunicative; they're two different things -- so cancelled the evening's plans and am parked on the couch with the laptop, alternating between adding a paragraph or two to this story and playing original Final Fantasy on the NES. There's a chicken in the oven and laundry on. Maybe time to make a carrot cake too.

I will not, I think, have to speak a word to another human being until tomorrow.

May 7, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 1,450.
Words total: 25,850.
Reason for stopping: I do not want to look at this anymore.

Darling du Jour: "When the recruiter came, saying, there's a Dark God in the southlands. He's turning the rivers to rock beds. He's spreading desert through our green fields. He's tearing us apart.
"So we went," he said, and his lanky, broad shoulders shrugged lightly in the nighttime breeze. "My cousins and I packed up anything that'd shed blood. We went."

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: unconvinced.
Mean Things: A secret actually lasts approximately five seconds around here, and then everyone's all up in everyone else's business.

Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: China Mieville, Railsea

---

That took too long, and it was too much. I'm going to send the requisite things to the requisite places, and then do something entirely else.

May 3, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 1,350.
Words total: 24,400.
Reason for stopping: My ears are bleeding vowels and random bits of punctuation. And besides, I am awaited by someone who has ice cream and gin drinks.

Darling du Jour: I snuck a glance over to the smokehouse, sitting empty in the distance. It looked the same as ever: thick-walled and solid, a deep-planted anchor 'round which the whole world could turn.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: One's secrets not being so secret at all. Being so paranoid in one's family relationships as to have insurance on your property rights.

Research Roundup: The lifespan of plastic objects, which is unfortunately not long enough for our purposes. Country dances.
Books in progress: China Mieville, Railsea

---

Another day of lots of words but not quite enough forward: Buckets more taking of the subtext and making it text, explaining why things are important, letting air into the prose, and so forth. Which makes for a clearer read and is important for people who like good writing (ie, me), but is not necessarily getting me forward. I would like to be forward soon. Where soon = tomorrow afternoon at the latest.

In other news: It is good to know that when I told myself, When I am a full-time writer I will totally eat all the tasty freezer soup in the freezer, I was not lying. Stuff I pre-cooked is at an all-time low. Since most if it's soup/chili/stuff I make because I have CSA vegetables that need using quicker than I can eat them, this is probably extremely healthy as well as economical.

Okay. This took all day. I'm heading out for my promised deconstructed gin floats.

May 1, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 400. (And 400 more in the evening.)
Words total: 22,650 23,050.
Reason for stopping: What I wanted out of myself today was to finish a particular scene, but sora_blue tempts me out of doors with the promise of grilled cheese sandwiches. Back to this when I get home. This scene's going down before bed.

Darling du Jour: The distant sound of arguing had fallen deadly quiet; everything was wind in branches, or the constant, faraway noises of river birds.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: A plot catalyst has been located, one Hallie really would have lived happier without finding.

Research Roundup: Fish of the Detroit River.
Books in progress: China Mieville, Railsea

---

Totally fell off the wagon for most of the back half of April. Totally off.

I had the very best of reasons and I regret nothing.

That said, it's really good to be back on it. I get kind of restless and crabby when I feel like I'm not getting good work done and Living Up To My Potential and stuff like that, and this week's already shaping up to be a good one for the general industry. I Did Stuff (tm) today. It felt awesome.

More words tonight, likely. That, or hot chocolate and the writing of guest posts, several of which are due to various good homes.

April 19, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 300.
Words total: 22,250.
Reason for stopping: This is not a day that has been cooperating with me, and I have to head out to a prior commmitment. Back to this when I get home, maybe.

Darling du Jour: N/A.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: The inability to get uninterrupted work done.

Research Roundup: Hydrangea, and whether it grows in Michigan.
Books in progress: Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

---

This afternoon's lunch: spinach salad, with slivered daikon, strawberries, mushrooms, horseradish cheddar, and mead vinaigrette; grapefruit eucalyptus tea; carrot cake; small sweet clementines. It was a ridiculously late lunch, but it made up for that by being good. I've had a frustrating couple of days, and I'm minded to talk about good things instead.

Okay, consider this a bit of a placeholder. I might add a couple hundred more sometime ridiculously late tonight.

April 17, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 700.
Words total: 21,950.
Reason for stopping: Been at this five or six hours, and I know what I have to do next, but no mental energy to get there. That means it's quittin' time.

Darling du Jour: Marthe's hand on her belly would be nothing to how they'd look at me, and then slowly choose each word as if the wrong one might blow me away.
That was the look on the hired man's face. That was the uncomfortableness: Him, choosing each word as if it was a storm wind.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: intensity, mercurial, ubiquitous, stoic.
Mean Things: Nobody being a help with one's mourning. Nobody being a help to me with finding the right hinges for an uncomfortable conversation, and putting them in there.

Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

---

It grows apparent that I'm going to have to rip open the floorboards on this whole chapter and restructure it from the ground up. Stupid plot motion! Stupid narrative tension! Stupid emotional stakes! You're for hacks, and you're not my real mom.

(New version is going to be a lot better. Already is a lot better.)

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of my evening, if it's not writing (feature of full-time writing: boredom leads to more writing). I think it's going to involve lavender tea, and raspberry lemon curd. Something like that.

April 16, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 500.
Words total: 21,250.
Reason for stopping: It's fragmenting on me. C'est fini.

Darling du Jour: But not I promise you; I swear. Said in his odd northern hum, as if shoveling manure was grounds for a sacred oath.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A, again!
Mean Things: More helplessness. But the practicality's kicking in, at least.

Research Roundup: How Canadian accents sound to northern US types.
Books in progress: Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

---

No work got done this weekend, only Ad Astra, and then a Sunday migraine which meant no work, conventionlike or otherwise, got done. This is not surprising. Conventions are work too.

And that one, despite some rather egregious and kind of worrying organizational issues, seemed to go well in the details: It says something that the people who come out to these things can and will work around, rather smoothly, whatever drama and ridiculousness goes on and pull out a good time. The measure of a community really is on the individual, personal level sometimes, and this one? Can be pretty damn cool.

--

As for today, the currently applicable early-chapter-revising lesson is burn plot. Burn it. Burn right through. All dithering is being ruthlessly sliced and replaced with doing stuff. The doing-stuff regime will deliver on its election promises of fiction that doesn't suck balls and counts on your support.

Yeah, it's a little annoying that one's writing issues crop up, the same, again and again and again. But it's also kind of nice, because then you know how to deal with them.

April 12, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 800.
Words total: 20,750.
Reason for stopping: The hour grows late. Wolves! Ghosts!

Darling du Jour: "Good morning, Miss," he said. A docile rumble. Thunder that'd promised just this once to behave.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A. She's getting better about this, actually.
Mean Things: Quite explicitly losing your privacy. Also, I finally found out what's at the root of Hallie's terrible prickly perfectionism, and it makes perfect sense. And I plan to use it against her. But also then it made me cry a bit, so I guess we're even.

Research Roundup: N/A.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl; Gina Damico, Croak

---

One of those days where it goes crack! like an egg and what you need to do flows right out your fingers. Today -- both this afternoon at the coffeeshop and tonight, past one in the morning, stretched out on the couch under a flowered fleece blanket, drinking tea and typing carefully while my nailpolish dries -- has been about looking at the chapters I had, and systematically cutting them open to add in explicit explanations, demonstrations, for everything. Bringing the subtext up into the text. Explaining why a thing makes Hallie feel how she feels. Putting all this stuff on the page, to make it real and not just oblique. It's reading miles better. I'm getting a suspicion my natural length really is short fiction, and that's why my early drafts of novels have that same dense, compressed, zip-file prose.

I can't take entire credit: I had good notes on this to identify the problem. But I can also see quite clearly how the editorial process for Above taught me the things I needed to figure this thing out, and that's a cool little feeling. Don't do drugs! Stay in writer school! and all that.

Ad Astra tomorrow. No idea if I'll get wordcount in the afternoon, beforehand. Or on the bus, perhaps, on the way up to the hotel. I've found some of the heartwood of this book, and I'm in a way where I want to try.

April 10, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 250.
Words total: 19,950.
Reason for stopping: Midnight!

Darling du Jour: N/A. I'm mostly revising again.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: Realizing you may, in fact, be in this one all alone.

Research Roundup: Preparing fields for winter.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl.

---

Filling out some already-written bits, today, and not a lot to say about it. It's putting in air, beats, breaths. It's pacing stuff. But, y'know, it's work. And this weekend is Ad Astra, so I don't expect to be getting much of that done while I'm at the con.

Otherwise, today was maximally quiet. There was sushi, and catchup with a friend, and some chores, and really that was it. No reporting to report.

April 9, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 600.
Words total: 19,700.
Reason for stopping: It's got late, and I'm actually trying to not wreck my sleep cycle.

Darling du Jour: It lay there like a chicken an hour after the wolves.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: That dream you get when you're in crisis mode due to overwork, and you dream you're at work, and you wake up feeling cheated of your six-to-eight hours of not being at work. Also: everyone being explicitly too busy to meet your emotional needs. Also: the specific betrayal of someone giving up a hope you're not yet ready to surrender.

Research Roundup: Pre-refrigeration milk storage.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl.

---

I have not been in a wonderful mood this evening. It's probably half caffeine comedown and half some of the headlines coming in around the world, but nothing I have to say about any of it is productive, so the best thing to say is nothing at all. The Internet has no shortage of impotent blatted outrage. It won't miss mine.

Instead, I read this and it put the peace back in my soul.

Read that instead of the things I would have said.

--

In other news, I have many, many long white radishes. Livejournal: What would you cook with a lot of white radishes? I can only pickle so much of it.

April 6, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 200.
Words total: 19,100.
Reason for stopping: It's really, really late.

Darling du Jour: N/A. Really, I'm mostly revising here.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: N/A.

Research Roundup: Barley ears, visual reference.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl.

---

Technically this is still my week off when I'm not supposed to be doing work. It's working: I can tell my brain is growing back, because I have the energy and drive again to do things like real, actual cooking, housecleaning, and coming up with ridiculous outsized ideas that are worthy of caper movie plots. More to the point, I'm doing all these things and not resenting them. The giant pot of chili I'm going to make tomorrow is making me happy already.

But even in a relatively collapsed state, I'm getting slowly used to this whole I Am A Full-Time Writer thing, and I think I like it very much.

Today, for example:

Slept until about 11:30, after being up late doing laundry and roasting a duck and whatnot. Fixed myself a salad for lunch (spinach and a bit of red onion from the CSA, white button mushrooms, sliced strawberries, homebrew balsamic dressing, cold roasted duck leftover from last night's escapade) and settled in to answer businessy e-mail and write up a guest post or two. After which I headed out to the ROM to meet a friend for previously scheduled half-price night museuming, and the rest was coffee in the sun and a really excessive examination of the South Asian/Middle Eastern/Egyptian galleries, dinner at Mother's Dumplings, tiny red velvet cupcakes, and wandering the laneways under bright chilly stars, looking for good artsy garages with interesting graffiti.

And then I came home, and stretched out on the couch with a pot of grapefruit eucalyptus tea, and made wordcount in the post-midnight quiet.

It won't be this all the time. Tonight was a little too expensive for that, even sticking to budget fun venues, and more work needs to get done in general than got done today, especially once deadlines come back into play. But I have a feeling I will fight like hell to keep days like this in my life. I will fight for them as cool and unstoppable as an avalanche.

---

Feet sore, and tea's cooling. G'night, Internet.

April 3, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 450.
Words total: 18,900.
Reason for stopping: That's combing back through the first chapter and adding the things that need adding. Also, it is cold in here and I can't feel my fingers. And I need to make some dinner.

Darling du Jour: There's a trick to seeing double: the thing you half-remember and the thing walking toward you, moving side by side against the sunset as if they were hand in hand.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: Taking all the emotional content I had lurking about in the subtext and slamming it right onto the page, fears and doubts and shudders and all. This is what people mean when they say you need a stronger emotional hook, sometimes. Blooood.

Research Roundup: Topography of Michigan.
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl.

---

I have told myself (and notably, cszego has told me with a certain degree of firmness) that I am to be taking this week off. I spent the last six weeks running so hard that I wasn't just burning the candle at both ends, I'd given up on that inefficient shit and just threw the whole thing in a volcano. And I need time to recover, and sleep, and get my laundry washed and dishes done and life centred again.

Except I went to pay the phone bill this afternoon, and there was money in my bank account: The first semi-monthly instalment of the Ontario Arts Council grant I'm going to be living on for the next six months.

And I was abruptly reminded why I'm here, in my pajama pants and a floppy Ideomancer tee-shirt, under a fleecy blanket on my living room couch (it's really, really cold in this apartment today), drinking a whole pot of rooibos at three in the afternoon. Why nobody's rushing me, and everything's quiet 'cept the washing machine. What I am here for.

It didn't feel like guilt, or pressure. It felt like mission. Like...vocation.

So, y'know. Words. Feels good.

April 1, 2012 Progress Notes:

Light (bad working title)

Words today: 200.
Words total: 3800.
Reason for stopping: That was all blood. And I'm getting hungry.

Darling du Jour: The worst of it, here, was how the wind smelled wrong. It came whistling between the buildings wet as a rag stuffed in your mouth and clogged your ears like strep throat, and even if she'd known the blossoms and smoke it carried, she couldn't have pronounced their names.
Mean Things: I am doing a horrible thing in the story I'm telling right now. I only hope the result vindicates, because otherwise, seriously, we'll need to pass a hat and buy me a new soul.

Research Roundup: The Don River system; flora and fauna of the Republic of Georgia; terrain at Yonge and the 401; a Georgian-language translator. Have I mentioned I'm doing a horrible thing?
Books in progress: Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl.

---

Things that happened this week:

So today, Above is out in the US. Pre-game show is officially over. Fly free, little book.

Friday was my last day at the Dayjob. I have been quiet about it, mostly because I've been too busy to blog (or think, or breathe, or sleep) for about six weeks now, but I got some arts grants this spring, for two different projects: this one and On Roadstead Farm. And so I am going to be a full-time writer for a year while I write those things.

And then? Who knows what happens?

The third thing: Friday night I was out for celebratory drinks with friends, and I came home utterly weaving drunk and wanted nothing but to write and write and write. And last night I was out at the movies and then dinner and rambling 'til two in the morning, and came home wanting nothing but to write and write, with the feel of close-passing trains rumbling around in my belly.

Finally I've had an edge of sleep, and all I want to do is write.

I'm going to ride this as long as I have it. Or as long as it takes. It's midafternoon and I'm possessed and addled with fiction like I haven't had a chance to be in months. Okay, fiction. Come on in. Hit me.

Happy April. Happy afternoon.

Because Above is starting to get them, and I've been neglecting.

Several reviews are appearing all over the internets.

There are also some official-like reviews:

VOYA (under Editorial Reviews) says, among other things, that it's "a challenging book, and much of the onus is placed on the reader, but teens willing to invest the time will find themselves rewarded with a multilayered tale that speaks to universal needs and desires."

I've read the Kirkus review, which will be available right over there on Thursday.

And a starred review from Publishers Weekly, calling it "heartbreaking, romantic, complex, and magical".

But so far, this one? Is my favourite, because of this bit here: "I took this as a commentary on how we treat the homeless and the mentally ill – or just anyone who doesn't fit into our idea of what a good society should look like. This story really moved me and it really made me want to do something!"

That is what a book should be able to do.

So yes. Now we're all caught up, and I can go have my lunch.

Yes, the Indie Rock Signal is in the sky. It's your occasional show report!

Tonight: The Darcys (!!!) and Bombay Bicycle Club (!). Sold out for centuries, moved to a bigger venue, and then sold out again, still centuries ago (okay, like end of December). I have had tickets for millenia (okay, since mid-December). And the logistics around this one have been ongoing and fraught. They only got more fraught when the friend I was supposed to go with, who had already paid for her ticket, told me she wasn't feeling well and couldn't go. An hour and a half before doors.

I have had a bit of a stressy day -- it was one of those at work where you feel like you're always relentlessly behind everything, and I had a freelance job to do over my lunch hour too, so. I did not take this happily. Everyone I could think who'd like said show was busy/working late/etc. when I called them, and so I went home to be pissy and sulk, because I was supposed! to see! the Darcys! dammit! and going to shows alone sucks in a special kind of way.

Luckily, Dr. My Roommate came home, said, "What's wrong?" and when I blatted what was wrong all over the floor, said, "Okay, y'know? If we don't stay for the whole thing? I will go with you." Even though she has exam questions to write.

So we were at the door and leaving 20 minutes later.

I have the best roommate.

---

Show was at the Phoenix, noted previously as the site of the Meanest Coat Check in the World (seriously, not my favourite venue), so I wore a hoodie instead of a jacket and we just waltzed right in. We made our way into the room just as The Darcys were taking the stage, putting down their beers, and picking up their instruments.

This felt a bit like we had just found Fluffy. Glee. Mood improved already!

Actual set: Kind of short, sadly; it was an second opener set at an all-ages show. But! Even a short Darcys set is better than five long sets from other bands. It was about half the self-title and half from Aja, if I was hearing right, and they opened with...gah. Okay, Don't Bleed Me was early in the set. It wasn't the actual first song.


This independently made Toronto music video contains apocalypses.

Watching them play is actually kind of an athletic thing. For people not familiar, the album I found this band on is actually their second. They used to be a five-piece. Then they had finished recording said album, and their singer left, and they had to rerecord, rearrange, redo everything as a four-piece. So there are points where the singer is hopping between keyboard and guitar, or down on the floor doing effects with the mic, singing crouched. It's not quite shoegazer, but there's an element of improv to it that you usually don't get with a rock band, and it...feels almost more like people making music. Making it physically.

Shaking Down the Old Bones was the second-last song, and it's gorgeous, gorgeous live. Edmonton to Purgatory was the last. I would have loved to hear When I Am New Again to close out the set, but if I can't have that, this will do; it's the song that got me into this band, after all.


I almost had my book launch where this was filmed.

The presentation wasn't perfect. But y'know? I like that. I like that Jason Couse does not have one of those polished, smooth, prepped-up voices, and he goes for all his notes with both hands and his teeth anyways. It makes the things that come out of his mouth raw and real and beautiful.

So I danced a lot, and bounced, and was cheery, and then that was the end of the set. So I honoured my end of the deal and we booked it homewards.

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Morals:

1) Whoever made two trainfuls of west end hipsters go all the way to Sherbourne for a show is a bad, bad man. I've never seen so much plaid and black-framed glasses east of Yonge in my life.
-- a) This did feel a little good in that That's right, old neighbourhood. I have returned to pillage and destroy you, at the vanguard of a hipster army!yay west side sort of way.
2) I may need to get over my tendency to recreational musician crushes if I'm going to stay into local/indie bands. Stuff gets awkward when there's actually a real likelihood of finding myself in the same social circles as said people.
3) That said? I love this band's music and I want to marry it, and I think, like Broken Social Scene or Mark Lanegan, I am going to be there every damn time they play, giddy like I'm fourteen.

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Thus ends your show report.

So, this.

A blurry cameraphone picture, yeah. Of Above, on the shelving cart at the bookstore, taken tonight after work, as cszego e-mailed me this afternoon to let me know it is in. The Canadian release date is March 1, so that's par for the course, pretty much (Americans wait until April).



sandwichboy owns the first copy ever. dolphin__girl owns the second.

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This is the thing in my head right now.



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Officially: Guys, here's the thing I made. It has been, bar none, the beautifullest trial of my life.

I hope it speaks, if and when you listen.