Sometimes words don't come.

My characters are currently in a boat approaching Alderney, and I find that just now I don't have the words to describe what Alderney looks like. I don't mean that it's so overwhelmingly beautiful that I lack vocab, or anything like that: I mean that Alderney is a real place, and suddenly I find that my mental image of it is too vague to move me on to the next bit of the story. I don't think it helps that the weather in the land-locked town where I really live is absolutely horrible at the moment: constant rain and bitterly cold with intermittent sleet, so that even when it does accidently become sunny, one's so busy waiting for rain to come back that it's wasted. So I think I may go back to the adult fantasy for a bit, the river one, which I find, to my horror, I've been writing (on and off, but very much mostly off) since 1995. At least I can't get bogged down in geographical accuracy for that one, since I'm inventing its world. And since we're meant to be sailing to Alderney in May, I can sort out the details then. After all, it's very unlikely that someone is going to request a publishable sequel to my first novel before then, so there's no pressure to get on with "Pearls".

I'm typing this on the children's PC keyboard, which is totally crappy suddenly, whether because of overuse for Neopets messaging, or dust, or some other cause. But maybe we can invest in a new one soon, or at least clean this one. It's horrible.

Went and saw the second part of "His Dark Materials" at the National yesterday. Absolutely superb, and the effects as the characters moved through the world of the dead were wonderful. Certainly it was the best adaptation of a novel that I've seen, and well worth its amazingly complicated staging. I was an emotional wreck when Lyra is parted from Pan and then, later and for ever, from Will. I think I'll have to go back and read the books again - inevitably they had to cut enough subtleties from the staged version that I'd like to remind myself how all the bits fit together.
One of the thought-provoking things about the production was the colour-blind casting. I mean that it was not just a racially mixed cast, but one totally blind to colour in its selection, in that Lord Asriel was a very handsome black actor, Mrs Coulter an elegant brunette, while Lyra was a blonde actress who could not possibly biologically have been the child of her two supposed parents. I have to admit that my anthropological training made me baulk at this for a moment, just because it was obviously physically impossible. Then I thought about it, and realised that it was very stupid of me to let my credulity be strained on this point when I had no difficulties with accepting magic, daemons, alternative universes, and so on - or indeed that the children in the play were played by adults. And the actor who played Lord Asriel was beautifully cast, with exactly the right blend of arrogance, comedy and swashbuckling-ness, while the actress who played Lyra couldn't have been better - she was exactly like Lyra on the printed page to me, and to everyone else I talked to. I presume they chose the best actor for each role, entirely regardless of colour. I don't know how usual this is.
The reason I noticed this is that I recently came across a blog written by an African-American author of romance novels, who says that there are huge problems for black authors in the US because they don't get displayed on bookshop shelves with mainstream white romance authors, and, if they do, white readers won't buy them anyway. I have no idea if this applies in the UK too. Personally, I'd read a story I liked whatever colour the protagonists were, and I'd never really thought about the market being so rigidly divided. On the other hand, I wouldn't even know what the booksellers aren't stocking, would I? How much pre-sale censorship goes on, I wonder?
I love surfing through blogs. You end up being exposed to ideas that just wouldn't necessarily occur to you otherwise, which surely has to be a good thing.