NYC day 11

I still need to reread for class tomorrow, but it was a pretty good day. Tidied up the three "real" rooms plus the kitchen in preparation for full-on Zoom work mode and teaching tomorrow. The living-room table is where the work lives when I'm not doing it (the three main piles are for the Epic Histories class, the Clarissa class and Duchess of Angus stuff). I normally sit at my desk in my study with my back to the window, but that's not great for video (backlighting makes face invisible), so I've been sitting on the other side of the desk. Now I've cleared up the stuff in the background (including putting away the massive pile of clean laundry that normally lives on a little white plastic armchair) and set up a standing desk thing to elevate the computer slightly for a more flattering view! Finished reading Clarissa pages for Tuesday but still haven't been able to get to grips with returning emails: usually I'm quite good about this, but they've mounted up and they all seem to require an emotional commitment I can't quite muster.

Comfort reading rec #5 (the third in the trio with Eva Ibbotson and Diana Wynne Jones): Robin McKinley. If you haven't read her at all, Sunshine is a great one to start with (baking, vampires); I do love The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown although I agreed when I saw in some old interview that McKinley herself is a bit embarrassed by the first one especially (I think she said "it has a whiff of The Sheihk about it"!); her saddest and darkest book Deerskin might be my favorite of all. All of her books have very good animals in them....

"The night is for the dead"

Hilary Mantel on why she became a historical novelist (this is A Place of Greater Safety, her novel of Robespierre, which I remember reading at the recommendation of my brilliant teacher Simon Schama circa 1993):

I wasn’t after quick results. I was prepared to look at all the material I could find, even though I knew it would take years, but what I wasn’t prepared for were the gaps, the erasures, the silences where there should have been evidence.

These erasures and silences made me into a novelist, but at first I found them simply disconcerting. I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.

Because his thoughts can only be conjectured. Even if he was a diarist or a confessional writer, he might be self-censoring. But the wallpaper – someone, somewhere, might know the pattern and colour, and if I kept on pursuing it I might find out. Then – when my character comes home weary from a 24-hour debate in the National Convention and hurls his dispatch case into a corner, I would be able to look around at the room, through his eyes. When my book eventually came out, after many years, one snide critic – who was putting me in my place, as a woman writing about men doing serious politics – complained there was a lot in it about wallpaper. Believe me, I thought, hand on heart, that there was not nearly enough.

Pretty in pink

"The company introduced tufted headboards and tulle canopies two years ago, unicorn bedding last year, and this year has expanded these categories as well as the number of “sparkly chandeliers,” Ms. Terry said."

The obliteration room

This is amazing. (Via Josh; and more.)

1:12

Tiny modern miniatures.