Tra la, Tra Blah

My, how time does fly when you’re...well, it’s the run-up to Christmas, so it’s hard to have fun, but there’s certainly enough to get done.

My mother and I have made a pact: only homemade gifts this year. My dad makes awesome fudge. I’ve got the jams I made this fall to distribute. There will be cookies, of course. Probably I should get baking them this weekend....

I mailed one of my gifts already, a packet of seeds of the Cosmos sulphureus I grew in the garden this year to someone who will make good use of them. I notice that the Cosmos seeds on offer in the various catalogs I’ve seen all have the orange and red variants of the plant I’ve grown for years. I’m smugly congratulating myself on having the yellow variant in my plants, as well. This is one I intend to sow in the long meadow for color next year – let’s hope it takes!

***

One of the things consuming my “free” time is the continuing round of novel_in_90. We’re not quite at the halfway point, but I’ve managed to accumulate something over 33K words (by Word’s count, not SMF; I’m at 147 pages SMF, which works out to nearly 37K words). It’s gonna be a drafty draft, with lots of episodes of characters talking to the author, but you can’t edit it if it’s not on the page, right?

So far I’ve managed to be really mean to my characters (where being mean = conflict, which is a good thing). I have a feeling the story is about to become really mean to me, however; there’s an element of magical realism I intend to interject, but I’m not sure why my subconscious, when I was coming up with the idea for the story, decided I had to have this particular element. I still don’t know why. And I’m about to put a character on screen with no idea why she’s there.

I’ve done this novel thing often enough to know not knowing is a really big invitation to lots of rewriting...and I hate rewriting. Under the rules for Nin90, I could just plow ahead and write the parts I do know and worry about this character’s Why later. I am, however and much to my occasional regret, a linear writer, and this will not work.

Maybe it’s a good thing it’s a discovery draft, as well. I’ve got a lot to discover.

***

For those following along on farm news, the egg production is up far enough that I’ve begun letting my former clientele know that I can now begin selling them eggs again. (One of the people who have gotten eggs have not yet used one of the blue ones because they’re so pretty. Awwww....) (Yes, blue. Ameraucana blue. Like these:
)

And I sold my first dozen that very same day. >:-)