Climbing Plot Mountain

It's too damned hot to be outside working on any of the dozen things that need doing. August is just about my least favorite month of the year. Well, if you discount all the lovely things my garden (and others') is producing. I've got enough tomatoes and peppers stashed in the freezer that I'm seriously contemplating seizing the next halfway cool morning to make sauce and can it. Time to hunt up and compare recipes (talk about displacement activity!) so I'm prepared when the right moment arrives.

And, in between research on canning recipes and methods, I'm writing. Really. >:-)

New words: 855
Total words: 11848
Mean things: a dozen little girls all interested in the cat on his lap, and him with nowhere to go except maybe out the window.
Research: more trolley details (what the heck does an electric trolley sound like when it is operating?). Clothing and hairstyles of the day.

I'd meant to hit the library on my round of errands this morning, but it was just too hot already at 8AM and I did not want to wait another hour for the library to open. I'll try to get over there one of the evenings this week. Hopefully the reference librarians will be able to point me at newspapers for 1909, so I can check my internal voices for these characters against what people really talked like.

A newspaper collection for Lynchburg of 1908-09 would be perfect, but I'm not sure that exists. The librarian will know. Librarians are the writing profession's superheroes.

With Tocara off to my agent, I’m freed to begin working on the next book. I have in mind something involving coal mines and railroads, Serpents and dragons, and the folklore of the southern Appalachians. I have a very tentative outline to help frame the research and an even more uncertain setting: the mining community of Switchback, WV. So: working title, Switchback. I’m sure that will change once I figure out what the story’s really about.

The research itself is off to a good start. I have three books waiting for me via InterLibrary Loan, to be picked up on Friday, and two more on my table at home. All are pretty much cultural grounding; as I told the librarians helping me round the books up, I need to understand what’s already there before I change it. I need to do justice to the stories already on that ground and to the people whose stories they are.

Time to break in a new research notebook.

***

My radish and collard and kale seedlings are coming up very nicely, but something seems to think the beets taste good already. I’ll have to plant more seeds and this time put a barrier up over the seedbed.

The seed garlic arrived in the mail yesterday! I’d ordered from Filaree Farm (http://www.filareefarm.com/) years ago and been very satisfied with the quality of the product. The garden I’d been planting them in finally got too shady, however, and I’ve been resorting to store-bought garlic for the better part of a decade. Now I have space and sunshine, and next year I’ll have my own garlic crop again!

This weekend I have a lot more planting in mind. Beets, maybe carrots, the garlic. Prep for the new raspberry bushes my dad will be bringing our way in October. Spinach, as much as I can fit in the two rows which are not going to be reworked this fall. Up by the house, I have mint in pots which need to be sunk into the ground, pots and all, so I don’t have to worry about them this winter (or water them next year).

***

I got the most lovely surprise harvest this week: braconid wasp cocoons on three of the massive tomato/tobacco hornworms I’ve been noticing lately on my tomatoes! Take that, Monsanto; I don’t need your help eliminating pests in my garden. The cosmos planted in the garden and the wild Queen Anne’s Lace at the wood’s edges have done their work, drawing and feeding the adult wasps which parasitize the hornworms. Next year, there will be more hornworms...and even more wasps. Huzzah!

(This is a great site talking about the war between worm and wasp: http://www.gardengrapevine.com/TomatoWorm.html. Great photos.)

People digging out their driveways for the second damned time in eight days, of course.

Okay, New Englanders, who wished for less snow this winter? I want you to take it back right now. Snowpocalypse is fun once a year. We've gotten more snow this year than New York, for dog's sake, and enough is enough.

***

Would you believe I've lately been trying to research the species of birds that might have migrated across Spain in the early 1700s in such numbers that a colonial-born Spaniard would know about the migration and be able to reference it? (I don't have an answer yet, so if you do, please feel free to chime in.) This is further research for the Bells book, of course.

The other thing I've been doing, writing-wise, is ponder the impact I want this book to have, emotionally, on the reader, and figuring out what to do to make that happen. It occurred to me last night that this is the first book I've written where I really know, in actual words and phrases, what the book is about. That's kind of startling - not that it's the first, but that I actually know what it's about. I'm not a writer who writes from outlines; what hits the page is what occurred to me when I got to that point on the page, not before.

Now, whether I manage to pull off the stunt of getting the book to resemble what I want it to say is anyone's guess. Let's just say I intend to work really hard to push it in that direction.

***

And what is it with this habit of writing winter scenes in summer and vice versa? Anyone else find themselves falling into this?

***

Thanks to snowpocalypses #1 and #2, my freezer's full of baked goods. There's at least four different loaves of bread out there: lemon poppyseed (what else are you going to do when your lovely little lemon tree gives you five lemons in a single year?) and cranberry orange batter breads and the second of the two white sandwich loaves I baked up yesterday. I had plans to work up another batch of yeast dough to make cinnamon rolls if work had turned out to be off today. Alas, my mixer is saved for the moment.

There'll be no starving during a snowpocalypse on my watch. *g*

***

In case you have not yet discovered it, there's a magical, novel experiment in progress over at http://www.shadowunit.org/. On Saturday, they posted the first episode for 2010 - an entire freaking novel, folks - and it's awesome. Slip over there, read some of the back episodes from the previous two years, and sink into the alternate reality that is Shadow Unit.

And it's back to work tomorrow, for the first full week in something like a month. I'm pretty sure that I'll be wanting another day off before we hit Friday. *g*

I did manage to get into the rewrite of Bells at long last this weekend. And I got some baking done - the house smells of lemon poppyseed bread, regular white yeast bread, roast chicken. Two loaves to the freezer, one to toast for the rest of this week, the fourth to work to share there (or I shall look like a blimp).

Kay will no doubt give me sad eyes all morning as I go through the familiar routine of getting ready for work. Little does she know I'd really rather be home with her. I expect a rough, deadline-packed day.

***

Looks like I have another spate of research ahead of me. I left a lot of blanks in Bells on that first hurried draft via novel_in_90 that now have to be filled in. I want the details for this one to be right so, as I did with the pirate novel, Satisfaction, I'll be headed for the reference librarian to engage the InterLibrary Loan program. A lot of the books I have on my current want list are university publications. I suspect the only way to get them will be via ILL.

I get to keep Canum socking Kale! You don't know how happy realizing that made me. *g*

Yes, I'm still slogging along through Kith and Kin. Following a fairly detailed critique of the novel earlier this year, I spent some time thinking about the shortcomings that had been pointed out. I concluded that there were three major changes I wanted to make, and it's those changes and the seismic ripples spreading out from them that I've been working on ever since. I doubt I'm unique in the level to which a single event is intertwined and affects other events in my work. Catching all those little changes, and smoothing over the patched parts, is taking so much more time than I'd hoped, but I think what comes out the other side will be a stronger book, so go me. (And thank you, Critiquer.)

As I managed to push my way through the second of the two major scene-changes, however, I figured out how to keep Canum finally giving Kale what he deserved. It had to be rewritten, yes, because its venue and timing changed, but as of earlier this morning Kale is sporting a lovely bruised face and Canum got some of his own back.

***

jonquil linked to a post by oliviacirce about a divide in SFF fandom that, amongst other things, talks about how discussions proliferate across the internet, occurring at many different levels and with potentially thousands of users all commenting on a single post that then cross-indexes in new and interesting non-linear ways. One can hardly read all the posts on a given topic - certainly not in real time, and even with significant delays sometimes those of us more heavily scheduled often have to prioritize what we read and what we have to hope someone else will summarize. Nevertheless, there's this fascinating (to me) way in which the original conversation so often reappears in references three or six or a dozen links down the chain, thus perpetuating and deepening the discussion. I - admittedly one of the more heavily scheduled people I know - am delighted that this is so, given that there's no chance in hell I'd catch up with the conversation if this didn't happen!

***

One of the things I am getting to do with this rewrite is deepen the universe of the books. I spent one entire half-braindead evening looking at pictures of horses. (I swear, it was pertinent research. It didn't hurt that they were really beautiful horses: http://lusitano-interagro.com/collection/verdugoOR.htm.) Places I hadn't described before are getting mortar and floorboards. This makes me happy...but it also is giving my continuity awareness brain cell fits, because more detail means more potential screw-ups.

Is it any wonder I keep lists of people and horse and place descriptions?

**

Oh: for those who may remember last winter's and the previous winter's posts about ginger shortbread, let me take a quick moment to say this: Five Spice Powder, in shortbread, is intriguing. To me, at least. I'm taking some to work tomorrow, so we'll see just how widely that opinion might be held. *g* (The recipe originally was orange-spice shortbread. I didn't have any oranges to get peel from. Then it occurred to me that Five Spice Powder has both orange peel and cinnamon, as well as some other really cool spice flavors, so....)

Remember earlier this summer when I was so worried about word count in Break? When the novel stood at 275 pages?

It's now at just over 400 pages, and I am working on page 313, approaching (finally!) the end of the second act and the big second turning point. I have nearly managed to claw my way out of the Dreaded Middle of the Book. Huzzah!

A lot of that new page count came from three new scenes written in the past week. Canum's bad days grow worse. Plus, he's now seen his first bola tournament (that would be polo, adapted to the Canumverse), witnessed horse racing and tent pegging, and fended off an assassin. I repaired the flaw in my reconfiguration of the dateline in this novel that I'd been thrashing over, and I think I've done it with a modicum of style. Chasm bridged!

All in all, November's been a productive month for me.

***

Polo's an interesting sport. There is a wealth of information on the 'net about polo, as you might expect, but most instructive to a visual learner like me are the videos of polo matches on YouTube, like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro4MoOLixG4. (Just be careful if you try to find any more of those videos; girl-and-horse sexual innuendo videos far outnumber the actual clips of polo matches.) My intention is to have my depiction of several matches vetted by a friend who rides, who has friends who play polo.

***

Less than a month until solstice, when the days begin to grow longer once more. I'm not aware that I suffer from any of the truly debilitating emotional and mental issues related to a shortage of daylight, thankfully, but I do know that I fall victim (like most of humanity) to the desire for extra calories and more sleep. Come the solstice, I, like my plants, will begin to perk up. I look forward to that day like very few others throughout the year.

***

Four-day weekend ends tonight. Back to the day job tomorrow. Bah!

Canum is rarely snarky; he's serious and so full of his sense of urgency that funny doesn't occur to him. And yet, he's capable of comments that stop me in my tracks for pure situational hilarity. Given what other people think of my own sense of humor, I doubt the following will really be funny to anyone else - especially out of (much) context, but I had to share this one he dropped on me today:

[he's just been insinuated to have been so dangerous as a youth that his family/brother locked him up...an allegation that is, like the best rumors, at least partly true]

[A's] smile was pinched at the edges. “You deny these accusations of instability?”

“My brother’s paranoia is not at issue."

If Kale had heard that exchange, he'd have frothed at the mouth. *g*

***

Once upon a time, back when I'd just started seriously considering the rewrite of this third Canum novel (Break), I despaired. The book topped out at about 275 pages, whereas the first and second books were each right around 375. Today, while continuing my slow-motion push through the (all but white paper) rewrite, I hit page 218 and am firmly in the middle of the book. In other words, Break has grown about 100 pages since I started this process.

::whew::

***

There's been some research, more desultory than serious; there are times at the day job when I really lack the brain to do any serious work but I can't really just close my eyes and recharge. Knowing what is in store at the end of this book, I've been googling PTSD. I need some more serious research reading on this subject, however, because what I'm finding addresses the recovery and I'm more interested in the wreckage that precedes said recovery. If anyone reading this has a favorite source for those sorts of anecdotes/info, relating preferably to physical torture, I'd love to hear about them.

Not that I'm mean to my characters or anything.

::grins with teeth::

Last night's word count was something like 1952, which is excellent for me. Took two sittings to accomplish, but the scene just would not quit talking to me, and in the end I was pleased that I'd persevered.

I'm on the ledge about using "my voice scraping my throat like teeth on a bone," but for the moment it's staying.

Thus far today I have 556 new words for the transition into the next chapter. Dunno if there will be more.

***

Courtesy of the Henrico County Public Library system, I have access to a number of databases of primarily scholarly journals and magazines. I've been using that access today to research karst landscapes. I'm going to have fun with this one; setting is very important to me, and this particular imagined setting is coming clearer in my mind's eye with every photo I see of dolines, ponors, poljes, and karren.

If, when you read this book, you feel like you're in one of these poljes and are checking underfoot for ponors, I've done my job. *g*

1258 is a nice number for the first writing session of the day, and I've errands to run, so we stop here. Hopefully, there will be a second writing session.

I'm happy to say I got past yesterday's flailing. I had a good, long think about why we should care if Canum meets his goal, and did some tweaking of the pages that came before, and I think I'm okay. I don't know that the problem is resolved - it certainly might crop up again later in this revision - but I think for the moment we're good.

And I got to introduce, in today's new words, the germ of a title that's going to dog Canum for a good long while to come, and I am happy. *g*

***

Hmm. I have to go out anyway, so perhaps I will save gas and stop by the library to see what the reference librarians can come up with on caves in limestone/karst. Ideally, caves in the landmass that's doubling as the setting for this book. I'm not looking to get very deep into the geology of caves or karst, but you never know what sort of little detail might turn up in research that jogs something new into being. And there might be a book with photos, which are always helpful.

Onward!

Did you--you iPod user, you--know that iTunes has a feature called iTunes U that collects free lectures and movies and podcasts on many different subjects? You can pick a category - like history, fine arts, language, science, mathematics - or an educational program - like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, or the New York Public Library, or the Museum of Modern Art - and choose amongst hundreds of productions. I now have something to add to my usual googling of research topics. Go! Learn!