The other day I was musing on the fact that this blog is titled “Inkblots in the Life of an Author,” yet I make very few posts about the authorial part of my life.  Probably most of you think I don’t actually do any authoring.  Rest assured, I do write, every day, from about 10 AM to 4 or 5 PM.  Respectable working hours, almost as if I had a real job!  (And I do generally take my meals at my desk while I work, so I think it’s okay that I don’t start at 8 or 9 like most working people.)

Anyway, all that to say, I actually have something from my writing to blog about today.

When you are a writer, you learn many fascinating things.  Usually these are nuggets of trivia gleaned from researching, but occasionally, they come from your own head.  For example, today I was tweaking the end of chapter thirteen, which I finished last week, and skimmed through to discover that Cupid doesn’t just stick to his day job.  Apparently, he also moonlights as a composer of piano music.

(Consider yourselves very fortunate to get the first ever sneak-peek of Songs for Piano and Voice, hopefully coming to a bookstore near you sometime this decade.)

“Have you ever considered that maybe I’m with a woman who’s so stunningly beautiful that I can’t think about what any other woman looks like?”

Laura blinked, twice.  “Good line,” she said, breathily.  Possibly experiencing the same fluttering sensations as John was, as if someone were using his organs as a keyboard to play Cupid’s “Minute Waltz.”

Eleven years of piano lessons, and I had no idea that anyone but Frédéric Chopin had written a Minute Waltz.  But lo, there is another one — and by Cupid, no less!

Okay, the jig’s up.  That was supposed to say Chopin’s Minute Waltz, but somehow my fingers took leave of my brain and typed Cupid’s.  This is so much worse than the time I was editing my work and found a completely made-up word.  Where did that come from?!

Really, I worry about myself sometimes, and about my future publication endeavors.  How will anyone ever be able to edit my work if they don’t know what the heck I’m trying to say?!

Does it count for anything that I know the above punctuation (?!) is properly called an interrobang?    No?  Okay then.  Back to work.  I’ve got to torture a pianist, recently struck by Cupid’s arrow, with the return of his ex-wife.

I’m not really big into spring cleaning.  Working from home, on my own schedule (which includes most Fridays off for grocery shopping and housework), I have time to clean my house pretty thoroughly on a regular basis.  Back in December I did a major purge of stuff, so I don’t really need to do that now.  Probably I could stand to wash windows and dust blinds and baseboards and vacuum under beds, but I’m not going to do it this spring.  I have six weeks to write four chapters, so any major cleaning projects will have to wait till May.  If not later.

Except for cleaning projects that involve the tools of my trade.  Today, in the midst of re-writing a scene I wrote yesterday but decided was crap, I couldn’t take the filth in my keyboard anymore: dust caked on the edges of the keys, bits of things that had dropped down inside showing between them. Since blasts of canned air didn’t do any good, I took an hour (that’s how bad this was) to take a tweezers to it and pop off all the keys and give it a good spring cleaning.

I laid out my keys carefully in QWERTY order so I wouldn’t get them all mixed up. Though I did think about putting them all back wrong to test my typing skills. My L, M, and N keys are all rubbed off anyway, so it’s not like I’m relying on them to guide me.

Anyway…I was in no way prepared for what lurked beneath the keys.  (Scroll no further if you are weak of stomach.)

If that didn’t make you throw up, why don’t you play that game where you stare at a picture and see how many things you can spot?  Can you find the:

- bits of paper
- Tostitos
- grated cheese
- Bacos
- fingernail clipping
- sticky goop that I vaguely recall being marmalade or jam that fell off an English muffin I was eating (and, presumably, some of those crumbs are English muffin)

Obviously the hair isn’t hard to find. But I’m slightly appalled to realize that apparently the work I do here is so stressful that a wig’s worth has managed to fall into my keyboard.  (I suppose it could be Dorrie’s fur…)  Of course, what really gets me is the combination of grated cheese, Bacos, and a sliver of fingernail.

Once the keyboard was all nice and clean (all the cruddies were kind of stuck on, too; I had to scrub it out with wet q-tips, and then vacuum the loose bits up), I resolved never ever to eat at my desk again…

…only to realize, a half an hour or so later, that I was munching on chocolate chip cookies while I worked.

The Walt Disney Company has opened the vault and released its animated classic, Pinocchio, on DVD and Blu-Ray for its 70th anniversary.  This special two-disc combo includes the digitally remastered film, and a recently discovered alternate ending.

What? An alternate ending to Pinocchio?  What happens?  Does the Blue Fairy decide that Pinocchio really was a stupid little punk and didn’t deserve to be a real boy?  If so, I am going right out and buying this set, even though I don’t have a Blu-Ray player, because I think that would be totally awesome.  I’ll hijack my parents’ Blu-Ray just for the occasion.

What other warped alternate endings would you like to see for Pinocchio?

Last August I read John Boyne’s novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and while I appreciated the unique perspective through which the book depicted the Holocaust (that of an eight year-old boy who doesn’t understand what’s being done to the Jews), I was underwhelmed.

However, I just watched the movie, and for the first time in my life I think I can actually say I prefer a film to the original source.

(Wait.  Scratch that.  I also like the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility better than the book, but I’ll let Jane Austen off the hook because it was her first novel and I’m sure if she’d had a little more experience, her version would have been just as good as Emma Thompson’s.)

Anyway…while the film version of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas remains doggedly faithful to the novel, it omitted what I now realize to be my key irritation with the book, which is the author’s device of depicting Bruno’s naïveté through his consistent mispronunciation of key words (fury for Führer and outwith for Auschwitz).  Also, the movie never named the concentration camp, which I thought lent a great deal more plausibilty to the premise of A) a free boy being able to observe the workings of a concentration camp from beyond the fence without being noticed by guards (not that other camps weren’t as horrific as Auschwitz, but its being the most notorious one, made it, in my opinion, perhaps not the best choice for the novel’s setting) and B) a young Jewish boy not having been immediately gassed upon entering the camp along with his grandparents.

So while the premise may still require an overall suspension of disbelief, the movie erases the flaws of the book so that this glimpse into the way we perceive good people and evil people (or, more accurately, people who are both good and evil — or have the capacity for both good and evil, which is all of us) stands out in a deeply profound way.  It’s a story that lingers with you after you’ve turned the final page (or turned off the DVD player), particularly after viewing it and having such clear visuals.

For me, even more than the utterly disturbing last scene, is the prominence of Nazi propaganda throughout the film.  Which was one other aspect of the book that bugged me; a boy Bruno’s age surely would have been indoctrinated against Jews in school — especially a boy who’s father ranks high enough to be made kommandant of a major concentration camp.  But this is not so in the book for the sake of Bruno’s absolute ignorance when he meets a young concentration camp inmate.  While the movie does stay true to this on Bruno’s part, it makes excellent use of his older sister, Gretel, who, after developing a crush on a young soldier, becomes enamored with The Hitler Youth and hangs on to the children’s Nazi tutor’s every word.  When Gretel is first introduced to us in the film, her arms are full of dolls; later, the dolls are relegated to the cellar while she plasters her bedroom walls with posters of Hitler and the League of German Girls.  The transformation is disturbing, to say the least; I’m not sure which is more so:  the image of a 12-year-old girl being so given over to a dangerous political movement, or of her mother being stunned speechless to see it.

Here I must comment that I particularly liked the way the film fleshes out Bruno’s mother.  The book focuses more on his father, and while the father remains at the heart of the film, I felt that, again, the plausibility of the premise was strengthened by the film’s omniscient point of view, which allowed us to see her dawning realization of just how final “The Final Solution” was.

Which brings me back to the other propaganda image that lingers with me almost an hour after I finished the movie.  At a crucial juncture in the story, Bruno stumbles upon his father, grandfather, and other Nazi officials viewing a propaganda film that depicts Jewish prisoners happily enjoying the “comforts” of the “work camp” after their day’s labor is complete:  they play organized sports, attend concerts, socialize at a cafe.  Bruno sees these images and believes his friend in the concentration camp is okay — that he is, in fact, happier than Bruno, who is not allowed to play in his own back garden and has no friends.  Despite having seen some Nazi propaganda, I’d never seen this, and was astonished and appalled that they could even have dressed up the concentration camps.  I almost didn’t believe it, thought it might have been an invention of the film-makers, so I googled.  Sure enough, a propaganda film was made at Theresienstadt in the now Czech Republic.

I really must get around to reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and watching Schindler’s List, which I keep putting off because I’m never in the mood.  When is one in the mood for the Holocaust?  One must look at it anyway.

Three times this week we’ve received phone calls from Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty.  It’s the same woman every time, and every time she asks for Mr. Burt, who has either been A) at work, B) in the middle of a computer game and unwilling unable to talk, or C) sleeping.  The latter occurring on Saturday at a little before 10:30 AM.  Which is a perfectly reasonable time to be asleep on Saturday morning, isn’t it?  And a perfectly reasonable time to be annoyed at someone for calling and interrupting the pursuit of laziness happiness.  Which this call did; as I told the caller for the third time this week that Mr. Burt was unavailable, I heard the tell-tale thumps and creaks upstairs of my husband being startled awake and out of bed by the jarring ring of the phone.

The caller, of course, said she’d call back at a more convenient time (though of course she didn’t ask when that more convenient time might be), so I mentioned — politely — that it was kind of early to be calling people on Saturday morning.

She replied, “Well, I’m at work.”

For a moment I sputtered, casting about my sluggish brain (it was 10:30 on a Saturday morning, after all, and I’d only been up for about an hour myself) for an equally snotty reply, something to the effect of, “Someone’s bitter that she’s calling people who don’t want to talk while other people are sleeping in on Saturday.”  Only I couldn’t get it out before she spat, “Bye,” and hung up on me.

I don’t know if this woman was a paid employee of Ron Paul, or if she was a volunteer for the campaign.  If she was a volunteer and then got crabby about having to work on Saturday morning, then shame on her lack of spirit of volunteerism.  But I don’t really want to rag on her so much as rail against the whole idea of telemarketing.

It’s universally annoying to be interrupted in the midst of whatever you’re doing by an impersonal phone call that puts you on the spot about buying something or committing to some cause.  How is annoying people a remotely effective means of selling your product or cause?  And as if three calls this week from the Ron Paul Campaign For Liberty weren’t enough to annoy me against supporting them in the future, now they’ve been rude to me.  Not a good tactic for a political party struggling to gain followers!

All it makes me want to do is ask to be taken off their calling list.