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I should have mentioned this earlier, but it's been busy...

We've been doing an Irish recipe festival over at EuropeanCuisines.com: a new traditional Irish recipe every day until March 17th. If you're looking for something to make for the upcoming holiday, stop by and see if there's something that suits you. (Check the top of the left-hand column: the day-by-day list is there.)

Also, the rant about corned beef and cabbage not being the Irish national dish at all now has its own home over there, so I can stop posting about it here every year.

Now back to work...

So you're moving from San Francisco to New York. You liked your cute neighborhood and tasty burritos and you hope to replicate this existence somewhere in the Big Apple. Well kiddo, that's impossible. Everyone knows there is no such thing as a good burrito in NYC.

This was the fate of a friend of mine a few weeks back. When she described her desires to a broker, this broker responded with, "you'll probably like Williamsburg." So this friend gets in the broker's car and heads over a bridge to another part of town. Her reaction, later over email: "I expected it to be cute. Williamsburg is not cute." Yes, Williamsburg is definitely not cute. It's sort of like the Mission, and I'm sure almost anyone from SF would agree that the Mission is also not cute....

The transfer to The Big Meow's new hosting provider at Lunarpages has gone smoothly, and the new installation of Drupal 5.0 is now up and running. Everything seems to be working OK, but if those of you who read this and venture over there should find anything strange going on, please register so that you can comment at this blog entry and tell us what's happening.  ...Otherwise, there's still a little grooming-out and adjusting to do -- rewriting of old legacy links to the old PHP-based site, fixing-up of graphics and tweaking of CSS, etc -- but that's a matter of a few days' work on and off.

Over the next few days I'm going to start making my (online) research materials for the book available via RSS feed through the website, so those of you who're interested in any of the base subjects of the book -- the LA of the 1940's, etc etc -- might want to run through some of the material. (And some of you will naturally start to indulge in the inevitable guessing games about where I'm going with some of the stuff you're going to find. Have yourselves a party: you can all get together and swap conspiracy theories over at the new TBM discussion forums.)

The only hitch in the transfer process, BTW, has been that I was not able to directly transfer the old Drupal database into the new installation (not Drupal's fault: something went wrong with the MySQL database export from the old server. Those of you who were registered at the old site, would you please just register again?

Thanks!

(BTW -- for those of you who may be seeking a new hosting provider -- let me just plug Lunarpages here. I'm already very impressed with their support, and the one-click website / database backup via cPanel X is just delightful.)

It's good to take a challenge every now and then. From over at Daily15, for today's challenge word, which is "solstice":

Invictus

In the dimness he woke and knew it was too late. Morning never came so late unless the world was ending.

Fortunately, he knew what to do about that.

He blinked and ruffled his feathers, looking around. This was his place. Surrounding a patch of grass were two holly trees, a pine, a cypress whose branches all went the wrong way, and much shrubbery, mostly beech and thorn. The shelter was good here, even on nights like last night. And in the holly, food appeared hung up: good food that tasted of fat and meat. It was all his. Later, when it was time for sex, there would be someone else who’d get some of it. But right now, he owned it.

This cold white stuff on the ground did complicate matters. It came and went without warning, and here it was again. Now, others who might have spent the morning scratching around the ground instead of stuffing themselves full up here would be turning up in his territory, eating his food. His feathers ruffled up again, this time with rage at the thought. Bastards. Bastards. Kill them all.

He hopped up onto the branch that had the best view across the patch of grass and into the bushes, and sang. Bastards! Who wants a piece of me? Come and get it! Because this was when it had to be said, no matter how much you might have preferred to sit quiet with your feathers fluffed up, conserving your heat. The dim sky was already paling toward that too-cold blue. It would be a bad day, cold, everybody and his family would turn up here trying to get at the tree food, which was what you needed this time of year if you meant to stay alive until dusk –

And suddenly he heard the harsh dark cawing coming from across the hardened path, across the wall, in the wood full of tall starved pines. He shivered. Not so early, he thought, what are you doing up at this hour? But he knew. That one wanted the tree-food too. It  had come for it before. Now, in the silence before the morning wind, he heard the flapping of the wings.

Hastily he turned to the food cage, ate a few mouthfuls, felt the fat melt down his throat like blood, like life. Almost before he finished, the darkness had landed with a noisy thrash of leaves and branches up in the holly. A huge expressionless black eye gazed down at him.

He sang. It was almost all he could do. It’s mine! Stay away, or I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! But the outcome was hardly so simple. The black-headed, white-backed shape with the axe-like beak bounced down another branch, and another, its eye on that tree food, that meat. It liked meat too. He’d once seen it zoom down onto the pond and simply pick up a baby duck and fly off with it. I’ll kill you if you get any closer! Don't push me! I will!

It came closer. It was winter, it was death, the shape now only one branch of holly away. He sang as if life depended on it: because it did. If he had enough to eat, the sun came up. If the sun came up, the world was safe. It was as simple as that. Go away! I have to eat the food or the world will end! I’ll kill you to keep that from happening! Monster, go away, don’t make me rip you up -- ! He fluttered at the monstrous gaping head, enraged, desperate.

A clacketing, rattling noise from behind. The black eye went wide, the death-pale bulk roused its wings and flapped clumsily out of the holly tree. Desperate with relief, he flung himself at the food-cage again, and ate with frantic speed as the sky paled brighter, toward day-blue: and between mouthfuls, he sang at the top of his lungs, shuddering with relief and triumph. Bastard! I warned you not to mess with me! Victory! Victory!

The sun peered up over the far hill. The shadows fled. He gorged himself as the black bird flew off, and stopped, and shouted again, Victory!

...She stood there with her teacup in one hand, looking out across the back yard snow at the dot of red breast deep in among the holly branches, pecking furiously at the suet in its little cage. “Boy,” she said to the husband, back in the kitchen, “listen to that little guy. You’d think he’d just won World War Three.”

“Yeah. Where’s the milk?”

The door closed. On the snow, the sun of the shortest day shone.

Victory!

Not about Jade. (Well, only peripherally.)

The inevitable comments are starting to come out of the British newspapers regarding the Big Brother bullying-and-racism flap. A few of the articles are making puns on Jade's last name, including a very specific one: Is it too late to be Goody Two-Shoes?, etc. And something about that brought my head up. What's with these references to the name of the main character in a children's book two hundred fifty years old... a book in which even the identity of the writer is in doubt, and which (I would be willing to lay down at least a ten-Euro note) almost nobody who uses the phrase has ever read?

It seems lots and lots of English-speaking people know the phrase, even after the source has been almost completely forgotten in (at least) popular culture. What kind of book remains so long alive in the language -- if only in title -- while no one knows much of anything about it? Why this strange etiolated fame? ...I'm as familiar with the phrase as anyone else, but had never given a moment's thought to the source. After seeing these news stories, though, suddenly I got curious and went hunting.

"Goody Two Shoes" (with or without the hyphen) turns out to be a shortened version of the proper title, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes one of several titles for a work first published in England in 1765. (The title page itself is worth mentioning, as it looks like this -- )

And you might be forgiven for thinking, Oh no, here comes another ghastly "improving" work of that period... if the author didn't immediately tip you the wink, giving himself/herself away:

...Uh huh.

I confess to having been suckered in, so I took the half an hour or so required (I was making dumplings at the same time) and read the book online at Gutenberg. It's not very long. Yes, it is moralistic, yes, sometimes the dated style and phrasing will nearly send you around the bend: but there's some funny stuff in it...and I can believe that in its time it may have seemed groundbreaking. It turns out to be a rags-to-riches story in which a poor little girl named Margery, made homeless and shortly orphaned by the connivance of a greedy farmer-estate manager and his boss (a thoughtless absentee landlord) manages to make something of herself. She does this -- and here she instantly wins my support -- by teaching other kids to read. And the book has some other surprises in it, among them possibly the earliest instance of product placement I've ever seen (medical preparations referred to in the text have ads at the end...), and some very serious discourse on animal rights, surely not something you'd routinely expect of a work produced in the mid-1700s. Margery has a lively time of it: some scary things happen to her, some amusing things: and at last she comes out on top.

Yes, the author does let you know that Margery's success is at least partially because she is Good and Behaves Like A Good Girl while those around her are behaving badly. (There is a certain Polyanna quality to her behavior: and there we have yet another character whose name remains famous though most people haven't read the book -- though certainly Disney has intervened on her behalf.) And the author also lets you know that Divine Providence is about, punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Whatever. I would need to do some research, but there are dangerous signs in this book of someone writing a children's book that is both (argh) improving, and (dangerous new idea) funny.

The book was much loved by five or six generations, and stayed in print for at least a hundred and twenty-five years or so, being published and republished in many editions on both sides of the Atlantic, ripped off, recast, and otherwise digested by its parent culture. Eventually, as happens, its interest for newer generations started to wane, and it fell out of the public consciousness, except for its title character's name.

Some people had strong opinions about this growing, general amnesia about what they felt was a good book that deserved to be remembered. Listen here to the great Andrew Lang getting tetchy about the decline of quality children's literature (he was writing to Coleridge in one of a series of letters to dead writers (there's another great one here, where he writes to Sir John Mandeville, Kt. But never mind that at the moment). To Coleridge, he says:

Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs Barbauld's stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and the shopman at Newbery's hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs Barbauld's and Mrs Trimmer's nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs Barbauld's books convey, it seems must come to a child in the shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of that beautiful interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

Hang them!--I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.

The tone of the complaint sounds kind of familiar... You can take a look at a little of "Mrs. Barbauld's stuff" over here and see why Lang was getting so riled. It looks to me like an early form of the Dick-and-Jane form of early-reader material, now with Extra Added Didacticism and Mommy holding your hand real tight. Yes, she too was groundbreaking in her way and her time -- see this longish article setting out reasons why -- but her stuff still sets my teeth far further on edge than Two-Shoes does.)

Anyway. The question I'm left with is: when did "Goody Two Shoes" turn into a pejorative? What happened? Are we just seeing an accretion of scorn, decades thick, for a discarded nursery book whose prose style has fallen out of fashion, and a heroine seen (in modern or pre-modern times) as literally too good to be true?

But also...this whole business makes me look ahead several centuries and wonder if there will come a time when somebody might be referred to as "such a Harry Potter..." ...and almost no one will have read the book, or have any idea why the phrase means what it does -- or realize that what it's come to mean may have nothing to do with the genuine trials or triumphs on paper and film of one young wizard. Two hundred fifty years is a long time: even print, eventually, becomes ephemera. Very few are the books still read even a century after they're published: how many people now know even the names of the superstar writers, let alone the superstar children's writers, of 1900? Yes, we have the mass media now, and many more ways to disseminate fame. But sometimes I wonder whether that will make the written word more likely to be forgotten, rather than less.

...Who knows. I'm going to go have some of that soup with the dumplings in it.

I thought I'd better do this now before things get out of hand.

Lots of people have mailed me over the years to say "There oughta be a movie..."  This has been a possibility I've had my eye on literally since the first book was published. Over the years, various independent producers have occasionally optioned the first book with an eye to shopping it around the studios. However, that's all that ever happened: shopping.

However, times change and the world shifts.

For the past six months or so I've been having discussions with a major Hollywood production entity. (I will not be naming them until the ink is dry on a contract: in fact, the first you guys will be hearing of it is when Variety publishes the story.) These are highly successful people who have a track record littered with hit films, and who have (I feel) the correct attitude toward this particular work.

The discussions have made it plain that the best way for this project to proceed is for there to be a screenplay of So You Want to Be a Wizard. Therefore (as a result of work done between last August and now) I've written one. I'm presently cutting and retooling the first draft, which is far too long, and will be sending the second draft out to our screen agents and the other interested parties within a week to ten days.

And, right now, that's all there is, so don't everybody get overexcited. We are a loooooooong way from a movie as yet. (I will say, though, that things look unusually promising.) But there are a million things that can still go wrong...so don't everybody get your hopes up.

My top ten nominees for Frequently Asked Questions so far:

(Q1) Can I be in it?

(A1) I have no idea. Even if in The Best of All Possible Situations (hereafter abbreviated as TBOAPS) I wound up with a productorial credit, this is not a department where I would be allowed a say. Film productions hire skilled casting directors whose job is to find the best person for any given part. Their suggestions then go to the director and executive producers, who have the actors read for the parts and make their choices.  The chances that I would be allowed anywhere near this process are vanishingly small, so please note: I am not the person to ask.

(Q2) Will there be open-call casting?

(A2) No idea. Much too soon to tell.

(Q3) Are you going to be in it?

(A3) I wouldn't mind doing a small Hitchcocky wander-through in the background of some busy scene (say one of the scenes in Grand Central). But there's no way to tell at this end of time whether that'll happen.

(Q4) Who would you like to see starring in it?

(A4) Two unknowns as Nita and Kit, Pierce Brosnan as the Lone Power, David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Fred. (Are we likely to get Brosnan?  [a] No. [b] You're kidding, right?)

(Q5) Can you get me on the set?

(A5) Highly unlikely. I'll be lucky if I can get me on the set. (And there is another side to this. When the producers/directors call the writer to the scene of the shooting, it is routinely a sign of Big Trouble. In this capacity, I absolutely do not want to be on the set.)

(Q6) When will it come out?

(A6) (Again: You're kidding, right?) In TBOAPS -- which in this case would mean that immediately after I turn the script in, everybody raves, the production entity or their associated studio instantly buys an option to produce the first novel, the studio greenlights the production on the basis of the script in hand, and pre-production starts immediately -- then, wildly optimistically, early 2009.  But this would never happen. Late 2009, a Christmas release perhaps, would be more realistic. And if there's a delay of any kind associated with any of these stages, then later still.  2010 possibly.  2011. Other possible causes of delay: extensive rewrites, disagreements with the producers, problems finding a director, disagreements with the director, California falling off into the ocean, Earth being hit by a giant meteor, etc etc. Anyway, it's much too soon to tell. It'll all be in the press release in Variety, some day. (Some day this year, I much hope.)

(Q7a) Can we see the script? (Q7b) Can you just email it to me privately?

(A7a) Sorry, no. I'm not above leaking the very, very occasional scene or scrap of dialogue in my weblogs. But when I sign the contract, further leaks will become impossible. Enjoy what you see when you see it:  a couple / few more bits may turn up without warning. I will blog about how things are going with the project, in a general sort of way. And when we start production, I'll be able to blog about that. But you all need to understand that once I climb into bed with a studio, the rules change drastically in terms of what can be revealed about the guts of the film itself. (A7b) Sorry, no.

(Q8) Where's the official website?

(A8) There isn't one as yet. The appearance of one will be an indication that things are getting serious -- ideally, that we're about to start pre-production. I want to press my producers to be more than usually forthcoming about making production logs and other similar material available on the Intarwebz, insofar as this doesn't interfere with other publicity and project security issues. Will this actually happen? Repeat after me: It's much too soon to tell.

(Q9) Will there be more than one movie?

(A9) That'd be my preference, but It's much much MUCH too soon to tell. So much depends on what happens to the first film. ...Look at Eragon, for example. You really think there's likely to be a film of Eldest, in view of the first film's lackluster box-office performance so far? (It has so far made twice as much overseas as it did in the US, whch was supposed to be its main market: it's nowhere near profit, and a long, long way from earning back its production costs and distributors' expenses.) I for one would be really surprised if Fox went out on the limb for a sequel in any format except direct-to-DVD, with the inevitably associated decrease in budget and production values. Looking strictly at the economics of the problem, it seems unlikely. But I could be completely wrong.

(Q10) Are you buzzed?

(A10)

• (version a) In a very quiet professional kind of way, because there's so much that can still go completely, astonishingly, ballistically wrong.
• (version b) OMG SQUEEEEE!!11!111!  (Wait a minute, I can't squeee at my own stuff. Something inherently wrong with the concept.)
• (version c) You're kidding, right?

EXT. SCHOOL -- AFTERNOON

The door into the playground cracks softly open. Kit peers out, 
looks around. Then he slips out, followed by Nita.

From around the corner of the building, Joanne and her crowd emerge. 
Nita and Kit pause, look at each other. Then, together, they head 
toward Joanne and her gang. 

A "High Noon" moment: the two factions move toward each other, Nita 
and Kit grim and determined, Joanne and her bunch furious and bent on 
revenge. As they close -- 

A REALLY BIG BANG of displaced air -- and, out on the playground, a 
LEAR JET (with its engines idling) APPEARS out of nothing and DROPS 
a couple of feet to the ground. Everyone stops right where they are, 
staring. 

                      KIT
              (astonished, impressed)
        What. The.

Joanne's gang, also astounded, do what everyone else in the area does: 
they run over to look at the jet. Joanne, angry, goes after her posse.

                      JOANNE
              (to Nita)
         Later. Believe me.

Nita and Kit glance at each other, then at the still-flickering Fred 
as he REAPPEARS between them. 

                      KIT
         Fred! Nice going.

                      FRED
               (sounds sick)
         I saw them, so I exerted myself a little. 
         Can we go now?

                      NITA
         Yeah.

They head off around the corner of the building. Kit glances back 
at the playground, full of the vast assortment of Fred's emissions.

                      KIT
         What're they gonna do with all that stuff?

                      NITA
               (shrugs)
         Ebay?

They hurry O.S.

Thanks to the various people who mailed me about this. I think. ;)

Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,

We've noticed that customers who have expressed interest in The Wizard's Dilemma (Young Wizards (Paperback)) by Diane Duane have also ordered The Collector's Edition of Victorian Erotic Discipline by Brooke Stern. For this reason, you might like to know that this book will be released on 18 January 2007....

Oooooooookay...

Now playing: Alan Menken & Howard Ashman - Jafar's Hour