fortunately, I quite like tentacles

So, indexing. Gawsh. Turns out indexing is a great, flubbery, tentacular, flailing brute of a process that has to be mastered, pinned to the mat with carefully alphabetised and sub-sectioned logical pins, and it grows and shrinks appendages even as you're wrestling it. I don't have the final page proofs yet, but I've spent the last weekend and quite a lot of the evenings of the last week inventing indexing terms, and I'm starting to dream in sub-entries. It's a surprisingly demanding and subtle art, as you end up having to assess quite stringently what you're actually doing at any point in the work - what the focus and nub of the argument is. It seems to be an organic, inter-related, intuitive sort of thing, which is pretty much how my mind works, so lucky there. Even so, I can't help feeling that passing by my study at the moment runs the risk of being startled by a giant tentacle suddenly crashing through the window, with me trapped and flailing at the end of it, like that bit with Will Smith in Men In Black. If this book turns out to be a cute alien baby who throws up on me, I'm going to be a bit miffed. Also, intrigued.

Not watching much Farscape at the moment, being as how me and the Evil Landlord are locked into some kind of stupid cold war in which neither of us will be the first to suggest it. He's ahead on points by virtue of the fact that he's spending his evenings sitting in the living room so I can't watch X-Files either. On the upside, lots of indexing. Also, I may be able to grab him with a flailing tentacle next time he wanders past my study and beat his bloody uncommunicative head against the wall.

Last Night I Dreamed: I'd just moved into a huge old Victorian house with my family, and had an amazing bedroom with attached library and door into the garden, plus enormous bathroom occupied by some sort of hob or brownie who nicked the soap. My sister was annoyed because I had the bigger room. There was also a lift going down to the basement, which contained a giant room knee-deep in water, hosting a knitting convention.

dreams, 16-19; floods, 21-22; house-moving, 16; invasion, 18, 19; knitting, 19; sibling rivalry, 17.
home, 16-19; anxiety about, 18-19; dream about, 16; flooding of, 19; space for books in, 17; invasion by fey, 18; invasion by knitters, 19; theft from, 18.

bright the hawk's flight in the empty sky

Bugger, forgot to do the September Kiddielit entry for today. Hmmm. Let's have us some Peter Dickinson.

Peter Dickinson is a great children's writer - his work is tough, chewy, vivid, intense, often emotionally difficult, and grittily real even when he's dealing with magical themes. He has an interestingly twisty mind which never quite goes where you expect it to. His best-known works are probably the Changes trilogy, The Weathermongers, The Devil's Children and Heartsease, which describe a Britain overtaken by a ferocious fear of technology, and its consequent reversion to pre-industrial culture and nastily closed-minded fanaticism. He's very good at contemporary stories with a subtle, slightly dark, magical element - telepathy, haunting, etc. I'm particularly fond of his younger children's story A Box of Nothing, which is quite the most entertainingly off-the-wall version of Big Bang theory I've ever encountered. I also love the complex, interesting, logical high-fantasy world and magic of The Ropemaker and its sequel, Angel Isle. But the one I first encountered when still at school, and which still tends to haunt me, is The Blue Hawk. Part of the appeal of this is because the central relationship is between a boy and the hawk he is training, and I'm horribly imprinted with my father's fantatical falconry hobby. But the book offers a fascinating world, a rigidly priest-ruled and hierarchical system which is rotten to the core, and ultimately destroyed by the boy's one innocent act of rebellion. The feel is ancient Egyptian, and the narrative has a dry, hot, prickling, spicy flavour all of its own. Amazing gods, too. One of Dickinson's huge strengths as a writer is that he doesn't over-explain.

Bonus interesting fact: he's married to Robin McKinley, the fantasy writer and another of my favourite authors.