Aspirin . . . aspirin . . .

The first HP Education Fanon board meeting (for hp_orlando), presided over by the lovely and talented johnwalton via Yahoo messenger, was terrific fun, but lasted three and a half hours, and we barely got through half our agenda. I suspect poor Steve Vander Ark was asleep on the floor by the end, as he was an hour ahead of us.

Whanger headache this morning. Am not accustomed to making decisions involving tens of thousands of dollars two and a half hours after my bedtime.

Oh, and I've dodged the bullet on being treasurer, pleading a new book starting up. For the time being.

Cheers,
Peg

Another try: Characters from The Wild Swans

Okay, we'll try this again. (I'm going to embed most of the pictures as hyperlinks this time; hopefully that will allow the entry to load more quickly.)

Elias: Here's the picture I took of the waiter who served me a meal, about six months after I started working on the book. Here's another one.

Patience/Patty here. She was a secretary who worked in my office. Great singing voice, wonderful ribald laugh, and a huge heart.

William/Bill. This man, Vince, was the voice mail technician my law firm hired. Note the long hair, and imagine it, flowing from beneath a Puritan minister's hat. He became my William. I think he also looks like an uncharacteristically cheerful Snape. He had a fascinating build, sort of rangy, and a disconnected, loping walk. Bad teeth, too--good period detail. Six months later he came in with a buzz cut and earring, and I thought--now he's Bill! Here's another one.

And Eliza. Below is the picture that started the whole novel. I had decided to write my next (second) novel based on a fairy tale and was mulling over which one to pick. I had the dream described in the author's afterward, about a woman in black sitting on a park bench, watching swans swim on a gray November day. She seemed so beautiful to me, but didn't speak. The swans made me think that maybe I might retell Andersen's "The Wild Swans." The next day, I found this picture in the newspaper:

.

I had never even heard of Loreena McKennitt, but I thought, hmm, she looks like the woman in my dream.

A couple of days later, I heard this gorgeous soprano voice singing "The Bonny Swans." Since swans were on my mind, I turned it up to listen. The announcer said, "That was Loreena McKennitt, who will be appearing in concert this week." Loreena McKennitt? Wasn't that the woman in that newspaper picture? I checked; sure enough it was. I went to the phone and ordered the tickets. At the concert, I bought every single one of her CDs and listened to them the entire time I was writing the book.

Here was another picture that hung on my wall as I was writing it, that reminded me of Eliza. It's a Pre-Raphelite painting called "Flora" done by Evelyn de Morgan. kijjohnson sent it to me. It has that look-that-pierces-right-through-you, that was also described in that key scene in The French Lieutenant's Woman.

A poster made from the left half of this painting (girl on rock and swans only) hung on my wall during the time I wrote the book, too, and was another strong influence on my mental image of Eliza. (Patricia C. Wrede gave it to me when I started writing it.) Mysterious and beautiful, although in my copy the girl's hair isn't quite so brilliantly red. The swans are perfect, too.

Peg

Ice Palaces Book

Here's the Ice Palaces book I'm looking for:

Anderes, Fred and Agranoff, Ann, Ice Palaces, Abbeville Press (1983). There were several different editions. Here's the cover:



Anyone (particularly in Mpls/St. Paul) know where I can get a copy?

Peg