Various

[lenora_rose]

This has been rather a full weekend, especially today. Shortly after church, my mom's choir had a concert, which was pleasant in spite of an insistance of doing Let it Snow and Jingle Bells (All four verses, of which I've only every heard three before, which kind of made up for the sheer tediousness of one of my least favourite overdone choruses of all time.) According to her, the sing-along part was actually all good familiar sacred pieces, but my throat, which was good enough to sing in choir but not to lead this morning, was going by then, so I went home with Colin and Jeff.

After which, Colin and I went to the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Some bits were less convincing than they ought to have been -- for example, Tilda's first appearance as the White Witch wasn't as persuasive and sweet as it might have been, though she did everything else following excellent well. It didn't follow the Harry Potter Expensive Illustration effect as much as I feared from matociquala's description, but was indeed its own rather rich fantasy film. It got the darkness right, and much to the light, too (Though I did miss the lack of reference to the Christmas gift to the beavers -- which is a story point so minor as to not be a spoiler). Oh, yes, it was lovely.

(And if the media would hammer a little less hard on the whole Christian thing, it would be easier to point out to people that the Christian undertones can be more easily passed by than you think. Yes, even in this one with its blatant sacrifice.)

And now, thanks to one of the choir members, I'm listening to Handel's Messiah -- which wouldn't sound so impressive, sicne it's the kind of thing everyone does in this season. Except that I haven't heard it opening to end since I was a child in Edmonton. If then. Most of it I don't know at all. And we're singing one of the early choral bits Christmas Eve ("And the Glory of the Lord", for those who do know the thing.) I was lost behind the rest of the choir as they've done it before, or at least heard the piece. Thus, Bev's generous loan.

Of course, it just adds to a problem I already have. Which is that I think I'm actually going to have to burn myself two Christmas CDs to actually get a best of. Even if I trim out the albums I feel i can listen to start to end without hitting a song I don't like (Heather Dale's This Endris Night and to a lesser degree Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band's a Tapestry of Carols), I STILL have enough music to make one classical/choral, and one contemporary folk/country/etc., though I may have to fudge and move a couple of the more formal folk performers (Loreena McKennitt or the Blind Boys of Alabama) to the classical one. (By the way, forodwaith, it was definitely "God Rest Ye...", with its middle eastern drums, which I was thinking of, though mostly only because I have another fine version of Good King Wenceslas. And hey, nothing wrong with any of A Winter Garden for listening, besides the cassette issue.) I noted with amusement that the only songs that aren't religious are songs you might not even take as Christmas songs, though they're definitely winter-themed. It would have been so when I was as far from a Christian as I ever got, too.

Also:
We have a clean living room. No, you don't understand. CLEAN. No jackets on the chairs, everything swept and vaccuumed, the chair buried under tons of stuff unearthed, virtually nothing on the tables that ought not to be there, and some junk put away or set aside for donation to Value Village. It's not perfect, but that's mostly because we have a house that was pretty much full before the last two people and their apartment's worth of stuff moved in. Some bits can't be fixed, though there are fewer even of those than even I suspected. This is actually pretty incredible. I'm hoping to keep it up a while, ie, well past Christmas.

I've been trying to get myself in the habit of hanging up my jacket on the coatrack in the front hall, and I have to find a place for my backpack.

Anyhow, the reason for all this, is, of course, that the Christmas tree had to go somewhere, and as the room was, there was no place to go.

Okay. I concede. At this second, the decorations are sitting all over the place making it look messy. That's because it's my plan to put on the lgihts and then the garlands and pretty things tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Because I'm off work tomorrow, and due to the steady increase of this cold, it looks like I won't get to get out and do any of my needed in-person Christmas shopping. Those boxes will be gone by tomorrow evening.

Why not tonight?

Because last night I think I finally figured this damn book out. My complete rearrangement of scenes ran into one humungous snag yesterday, which is that I just couldn't get the pacing and combinations of the fast and slow scenes to balance with both plot necessity (This HAS to happen before this, or cause and effect are off kilter) and story drive. Yet I've become convinced that compacting the work was a good idea, better than the longer draft I was working on. I could see how to put the climaxes together. But getting everything to fit and flow between was a mess.

... until, as I was getting ready for bed, I figured out exactly which one event (and its fall-out) it was that was jamming things up. So one of my characters no longer gets to turn, Daphne-like, into a tree. Kind of a pity, because those scenes are so pretty, but her arc is busy enough.

So. To real writing!

Comments

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

"God Rest Ye...", with its middle eastern drums

On the radio yesterday, I heard a version of "O Come O Come Emanuel" with that kind of drum track. It worked much better than I'd have thought, but they edited the lyrics too much for my taste. (And really, if you don't want to do an explicitly Christian carol, why choose that one at all?)

Hope you feel better soon.

[jamesl1580.livejournal.com]

Cool that the story is unjammed. But I can't wrap my head around the part that has "Clean" and "living room" in the same sentence. Doesn't that disqualify it as a "living" room? That has to be a misprint, non?

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Grin. It is a rarity, isn't it? If it's any consolation, there still isn't room enough for all the DVDs without stacking them in funny places, and I didn't put the CDs on top of the TV into their racks, even thouh it looks like there would be room. But yes, it's almost frightening to see it like this. In a good way.

Of course, there's no hope for the bedroom or the study.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

The version of "O Come O Come / Veni Veni Emmanuel" I'm using is Camerata Nova's, which has overtone singing (Throat singing to us folkies) and conch shell playing, as well as pretty classical choral work. Editing lyrics within a verse irks me at the best of times, though I do understand why 90% of those who record, for example, the First Noel or, for a secular example, Tam Lin, skip a few verses wholesale.