Rambling Chicken

The Novel: Cutting

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 17:52:00 +0000

I continue to cut the novel. The goal for the first draft was to have a coherent continuous narrative. The goal for the second draft is, primarily, a shorter coherent continuous narrative. I think it's best if I already have the size under control before I go after other problems. I may discover that I'm wrong, but, hey, learning experience.

I've been tracking its size. When I finished the first draft, in late April, it was 155.5K. This was after removing probably a good 80K of scenes already. (All in a "scrap bucket" project. I'm not deleting anything.) I want it down to 90K, but for this round I'm aiming for 110-120, after which I will Evaluate.

After a few downs and a few ups, it's at 129.9K. A fair bit of that was removed from just the first quarter--first quarter, plot-wise; the novel divides itself into pretty clear quarters in my head. That seems optimistic, except the first quarter has always been the flabbiest, with meandering scenes that just have a few essential points, so they're easy to either pare down to those points, or kill entirely and assign their jobs to other scenes. I'm under the delusion that the remaining three quarters are already fairly tight. I hope I find out I'm wrong.

I realize that this post's title implies that it's about cutting, and, really, it's just communicating the score so far. I will hopefully engage in some more detailed burbling later (Cutting subplots! Cutting scenes! Removing words from existing sentences with tweezers!) but I'm trying to maintain the goal of keeping this blog awake, so I will be posting this soon.

Speaking of goals, I have written two pieces of fairly useless flash fiction in the three days since I posted my plan to write one a day. That's pretty good, compared to my usual record for writing resolutions.

Actually, that wasn't the resolution, was it? The resolution was half an hour a day. Somehow the idea that I have to finish a first draft crept in. I think an either/or resolution works. If I finish a first draft of a scene or tiny story in less than half an hour, I'm done. If I spend half an hour working on any piece of fiction of short story or shorter length, I'm done. Then I can go cut more from the novel, or even write a scene with my two main characters arguing over a meal and dump it directly in the scrap bucket, if I want to. I love writing those scenes.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Mmmm?

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:01:00 +0000

So will I resume blogging? Hmmm?

I’m realizing that I got that “Hmmm” from the “Mmmm?” that Mary Robinette Kowal uses to indicate the end of a question when she’s talking to her cat. Her cat talks. With a button board thing. Go look her up on Instagram; you’ll see.

And it becomes clear that this post is going to be me burbling from topic to topic. And I’m going to let it stay that way, because right now the goal will be to Post Something.

Now, I could pretend that the post has a theme—for example, communication. Me restarting my blog. A science fiction writer (Mary Robinette Kowal) trying to introduce language to her cat. (Introduce her cat to language? “English, Elsie. Elsie, English.” Oh, my, it’s clear that my brain is in full incoherent whimsy mode.) That’s two pieces of a theme.

And, actually, yes, the third piece is that I seem to be starting two writing resolutions at once.

The first-draft-complete status of the novel means that now I’m in editing and cutting mode, and still potentially years away from so much as submitting the thing to anything like an agent, and nobody ever gets their first novel published anyway, right?

But I seem to be unable to start my second novel now, while I’m buried in editing the first one. Brain won’t go there. So I formed the resolution of spending half an hour a day on flash fiction writing. I wrote some flash-length fiction a few years ago (Aieee, more than ten years ago!)—the one about the cat and the marmalade, the one about the pink flamingo, the one with the royal barista—and I kind of liked them, despite seeing the flaws. ("Did I use that breathless-child voice on purpose? Um...let's say I did.") I’d like to write more.

I’m not sure why I’m combining this with resuming the blog. Because I’m not going to put them on the blog. I don’t think I’ll be putting any more fiction on the blog. If I hope to get published someday somehow, I must stop giving away everything that I could be using as rejection fodder.

It occurs to me that since finishing that first draft, I also resumed reading new-to-me books. This suggests that the drafting was fully occupying certain parts of my brain.

Did I mention that I’m just going to post this? Here we go.

Image: By Alvesgaspar. Wikimedia Commons.

I used to blog

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:26:00 +0000

I used to blog.

I kind of enjoyed it. No, I did enjoy it.

Now, my writing mostly goes into fiction. Probably a quarter of a million words in the quest to write a 100K word novel. I finally finished the first draft. (155K. Cut to 130K. There will be much more cutting.)

I feel faintly sad realizing that I could have burbled on about the novel here and celebrated that first-draft-finishing here.

But I suspect nobody's "here" any more--that is, I suspect that the lovely people who read and commented on my very intermittent posts long ago removed me from their Follow lists, because, well that blog is dead. Was dead. Maybe no longer dead?

Anybody there?

Howdy?

Now I go to Wikimedia Commons and find a cat picture. Because that is how I blog.

Image: fox kiyo, Wikimedia Commons

Decluttering: And Again

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 15:46:00 +0000

So. The decluttering continues. This post is basically a list. So, bonus cat picture. (No, not taken by me--credit below.)

Quite a bit of perfume has been given away. (No, I'm not getting rid of the collection, just thinning it.) I realize that perfume isn't that much volume, but I want to get the whole collection (plus decanting supplies) down to one specific shelf, with no stray bits anywhere else.
Also hand cream and unused notebooks. Given away, I mean.
And I ruthlessly dumped half-used notebooks. That was kind of painful. I went through a high-stress (work related) period a couple of years ago where I was buying pretty notebooks like they were mood-altering drugs. Roughly the same period as the Bead Doodles. But in the end, I do not write on paper. Just doesn't happen.
I went ahead with my wash-sweaters-on-the-wool-cycle plan, and have not yet destroyed anything. So some sweaters will be added to the donate boxes.
Those donate boxes are waiting for us to investigate the social distancing policies at Goodwill.
Similarly, some boxes of books are waiting for us to have the courage to enter the used bookstore. I would just donate them, but no telling when the library will resume collecting for book sales. And apparently I just can't throw books out. (Oh. Ack. In that case, what do I do with the ones that the bookstore rejects? We usually take those to the library.)
So the tower of "on its way out" stuff in the garage is growing. As is the huddle of trash bags. I don't remember what's in those trash bags, but I seem to be getting rid of a fair bit of stuff.
Five container-type things that I didn't want to get rid of, and five categories of things that had no home, have been nicely married. I don't approve, in general, of keeping containers that have no current use, but I'll take the win.
That leaves me with a bunch of Oxo "Pop" food containers that I should get rid of, despite the moderate likelihood that I would have some use for them someday. Right now, they're empty and taking up space. We don't have spare space.
Two bread boxes were successfully Driveway Free Piled.
I should do the same thing with the Oxo containers. Maybe I will, by the next time I post. Oh, and the miscellaneous canning jars.
My den closet has some empty space. There's more empty space than there is stuff in the trashcan that I used while cleaning it out. This is always weird.
A kitchen cabinet shelf is empty. This doesn't mean that there's nothing to store there--it means that some stuff can move in from the laundry room or the garage-based Zombie Apocalypse Food Storage area. It's been empty for two weeks, and I can't seem to make up my mind what to move. One empty shelf seems like both too much and too little space.
I moved the cleaners from the laundry room to join the cleaners in the garage, and of course found lots of duplicates. Not sure what to do about those.
There is, of course, the Toxic Day at the dump for the cleaners, but I feel like they skipped that this past year and might skip it again this coming year. Do my local friends want half-used bottles of Bona hardwood floor cleaner and environmentally correct stainless steel spray? Maybe.
I keep being mildly surprised to find that I'm perfectly willing to get rid of series of books that I quite enjoyed while reading them. What, exactly, is it that makes one want to re-read a book?

That sounds like a different post.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Decluttering: Decluttering Again

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 05:36:00 +0000

Hey, look. I'm back.

I'm still decluttering. I'm trying to work up some ongoing decluttering momentum, so that every time I look at a cabinet or a drawer or a shelf I think, "What can I get rid of?"

And I'm trying to change rules.

No keeping "sets." This is a lesson I learned with books--the fact that I'm keeping the Tuppence and Tommy books doesn't mean that I have to keep ALL the Agatha Christies. But it applies to other things. For example, I have some shirts in an odd loose weave, some in brown and some in black--I think I bought three of each at deep discount, a year or three ago. Since I wear the black ones, I didn't even consider getting rid of the brown ones. But I don't wear the brown ones. So, off to the donate stack. I bought a set of dishwasher-safe water bottles that work beautifully and came with a weird little holder to put in the fridge. It took me way too long to realize that since I'll never use the holder, I should throw it away.
Not everything I give away has to be perfect. For a couple of years, I've put off giving away two water bottles, because even though they've been washed, they have some tea stains in the bottom, and I'm not sure how to get them out. Time to put them in the driveway giveaway pile and see if anyone wants them. Time to wash those sweaters on the "wool" cycle and hope they come out worthy of being donated, because I'm not going to dry clean to donate, and I'm not going to donate something that isn't clean.
And if something is too imperfect for me to be comfortable giving it away, that's what the trash bag is for.
The fact that I bought something recently doesn't mean that I have to keep it. I'm about to give away several unopened, will-never-use, tubes of hand cream before they expire and go rancid. They were a mistake. Move on.
And sometimes it's not even a mistake. I'm reading my way through a glob of Patricia Wentworth novels, with the knowledge that I'm going to sell them to the used bookstore or give the to the library book sale. I'm essentially renting them.
Sometimes a sample is enough. I had dozens and dozens of old Threads magazines; I narrowed it down to, I believe, three. When I want a Threads dose, those will be enough.
Donation is all fine and dandy, but there's a lot of stuff that nobody actually needs. The example that I've used now and then is souvenir drink cups--bulky and with no real function. (Yeah, you can drink out of them, but is the world short on glasses?) That is, again, what the trash bag is for. I can't think of an immediate example right now, of something in this category that's in my house. I'd like that to be because I've cleared out all that kind of stuff, but, no chance. I just, apparently, can't see the current layer for what it is.

So. Decluttering thoughts end. For now.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: Decluttering: Rambling

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 18:33:00 +0000

So, it looks like the goal of resuming blogging didn't "take". But let's post again, just because.

I'm decluttering. This means that I'm decluttering perfume again. I could have sworn that I last did this, oh, maybe eighteen months ago. But it appears that it was ten years ago, as described in my post about The Ziploc.

That post has a lot of gnashing and near-lamenting. This time it's a lot easier to give away the perfumes that just didn't work--at least, the first group of them. I've learned that I'm never going to like aldehydes or musk--looking at the latest list of perfumes I'm offering to local friends, I see that fourteen out of seventeen have one or the other in their Fragrantica notes list, and several have both. The remaining three are Sand & Sable, Miss Dior Originale, and Boss Woman. And looking at my own blog, I see that I did like all three of these. Just not enough to continue to give them space in the Perfume Containers.

(I also see that I was trying to give away Sand & Sable then. Did I pull it back? Looking through my reviews yesterday did result in my pulling back Cuir de Lancome from the giveaway list, because even though I haven't worn it for years, apparently when I did I really liked it.)

(Yes, I could sell the perfume, but, Postal Regulation Phobia.)

Arguably, this is a whole lot of decluttering effort for an itty bitty bit of space reduced. I chose a big Rubbermaid bin of clothes to donate in less time than it took me to write the email offering the perfume. I don't usually believe in putting in the effort to give things a good home. Except, apparently, for perfume.

(And if you're one of my perfume recipients, reading this and feel that I've now assigned you to feed and walk a bottle of perfume like a puppy, until the end of time--no. If you don't like it, pass it on or throw it out and accept my gratitude for saving me from having to throw it out.)

So. Perfume Containers. I may or may not have mentioned the "container concept" as a guideline for decluttering, a concept that comes from A Slob Comes Clean, a set of decluttering resources (Blog! Podcast! Books! Audiobooks! Private Patreon group!) by Dana K. White, who has to be referred to as Dana K. White because if you Google plain old Dana White, all your hits are about a wrestler.

The idea of the container concept is that you don't get a bunch of containers to stuff your stuff into. You choose a container, and that container is your limit for how much stuff you keep. There are containers within containers--your house is also regarded as a container. Yes, this--the idea that you keep only what you have room for in a specified space--is no doubt obvious to those that Dana K. White refers to as "normal people".

So my container for my perfume is supposed to be two bread boxes with hinged lids. Those are full to an extent that means that getting a bottle out is Jenga, but in addition, there are three more shoebox-ish-sized boxes of bottles, one more filled with samples, and one large and one small glass jar of minis and naturals.

Well, there were that many. When I hand out the brown paper lunchbags of perfume I'm giving away, that will eliminate about a shoebox. Those were the easy kills; it's going to be much harder to get rid of enough to allow the rest to fit the containers.

I'm also changing the containers. I recently did a Scary Thing for which my reward to myself is usually a bottle of perfume, but that seems to defeat the purpose right now. So, instead, I ordered some insanely overpriced Pretty Boxes to replace the bread boxes. In theory, that should reduce the Jenga. I should be able to--for example--take down the Serge Lutens And Parfumerie Generale box, tilt back the hinged lid, and fish out the desired bottle from above.

Then I'll need to declutter the bread boxes. Will anyone want bread boxes that have spent perhaps fifteen years absorbing perfume fumes?

OK. Off to declutter more. If I post again any time soon, it'll probably be about that.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Books: Pandemic Reading: Patricia Wentworth

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 04:15:00 +0000

So. Let's write something.

A pandemic calls for easy, friendly reading. If that easy, friendly reading caters to one of my prejudices, yay!

So. Patricia Wentworth. Patricia Wentworth is a British author who wrote a whole lot of mysteries and some romances and a fair bit of novels in between, most of them in the first half of the twentieth century. The protagonists and the detectives and all their friends are nice. Sweet. Amusing. With only friendly little flaws. The villains are, well, villains. They rarely have any good points that make you regret their eventual doom. But they're also not the creepy Hannibal Lecter type that keeps you up at night. They lose, and they flutter away with the breeze.

And in between, there's usually a passive-aggressive, narcissistic manipulative woman, or a few of them. And all the characters that you care about see right through them.

I enjoy that.

The other plot that comes up over and over again is what's called, I'm told, a "second chance" romance. A couple who were separated--often by a passive-aggressive, narcissistic manipulative woman--find each other again. It's always pleasing to watch them untangle whatever it was that went wrong however many years ago (sometimes five, sometimes twenty) and go on to their happy ending.

Patricia Wentworth always serves up a happy ending.

There are some bits that make me tilt my head a bit--like a lot of stuff that seems to be about taste, in both dress and home decor. I don't fully understand it. Patricia Wentworth's equivalent of Miss Marple is Miss Maud Silver. In almost every book, there's a detailed description of Miss Silver's home and clothes, with a thread of...contempt? Amusement? Contemptuous amusement? We always hear about yellow maple and prints of Victorian pictures--Hope, The Black Brunswicker, The Stag at Bay, and I think Bubbles. I suspect that if I were a British mid-century citizen, I would completely understand the message. Maybe you can look at those links and translate it for me.

If you want to know where to start, I recommend The Gazebo. You get the passive-aggressive, narcissistic manipulative woman on the very first page, so you know where you are.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Hey.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 18 Jan 2021 05:15:00 +0000

Hey.

Look.

I have a blog.

I've been writing. The first draft of the novel is close to done. It's going asymptotic--the closer it gets to done, the slower my progress. That's partly, I suspect because I foolishly abandoned the strategy that got me to nearly-done.

But meanwhile, as the world falls apart, I feel the urge for less goal-oriented writing. I realize that for many people, blogging is immensely goal-oriented. Not for me.

So much "not for me" that I'm abandoning the thing that kept me from publishing the last few posts that I tried to type: The idea that when a person walks away from a blog for two years, that person's first post when they return should really be something.

But...those posts didn't get published.

So, if anybody's out there, hi! I hope I'll have something worth reading next time.

Image: Mine.

Still Typing

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 04:12:00 +0000

Hey, look! I have a blog! Who knew?

I've been working on the novel. It's still in first draft. After...eighteen months since I started? Is that right? But it's getting closer to done--that is, closer to the first draft being done. Picture it, for a moment, as a patchwork quilt. For a long time, it was like a bunch of patches laid out on a table, a few here, a few there, but with no particular form. Now I can see the form of the quilt; it has big holes, but I can see them as holes, and holes mean there's a structure. So I'm progressing to the end of the first draft.

I may have already used that metaphor.

Anyway! I'm not sure how many drafts I'm going to go through, because I have discovered that my writing habits are weird. I like polishing. I know that many people hate editing--I love editing. I get no satisfaction from a piece of writing until it has a certain level of smooth readability.

So my "unit" of writing is the polished scene. I start a scene, write, delete, write, delete, figure out what the scene wants to be, finish writing it, polish it once, twice, probably three times, maybe five times, until it's as polished as my current level of skill can make it. Then I put it away, take a breath, and a day or so later start another scene. In theory, I write one scene every three days. In practice, it's more like every five days. But that's OK; as long as the progress is steady, it's OK if it's slower than the goal.

So when I go to the second draft of this novel, I'm not going to have a slimy mishmash of incoherent writing. I'm going to have a bunch of polished scenes that may, combined, make up a slimy mishmash of incoherent plot.

Woo!

So. First draft not done.

That is all.

(Oh, and I sent off for fourteen perfume samples. So I may also be blogging about perfume. More woo!)

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Blogging: Still alive

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 16:35:00 +0000

Well, that took a while.

I'm now about 130,000 words into a 100,000 word novel. And only eighty percent done. There will be cutting, lots of cutting, but that will wait for a later draft.

The novel is filling my brain. When the novel briefly retreats, the Farm fills my brain. So, logically, if I want this blog to be alive, I should be writing about those things.

Except, I put my arms around the novel like a suspicious eater protects their plate--I have some beta (alpha?) readers, but I hesitate to put even a hint on the blog.

But I could write about writing, yes? And, of course, also about the Farm. I have no particular expertise for writing about writing, but I didn't have any particular expertise for writing about perfume or gardening, either. So why not?

So that might happen. Or you might not see me for another six months. Or you may have all deleted this blog as being idle.

Let's see.

Whoah. Been a while.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 19:31:00 +0000

I'm not dead, nor do I intend to abandon the blog forever.

The novel is up to 53,000 words. Actually, the scrap heap also has 87,000 words, but that's not a reliable count; some scenes are represented by four or five scrap heap versions. I'd say that there are about 30,000 words of scrap that may or may not re-enter the main timeline of the novel.

So I've been writing.

Just not here.

Eat turkey!

That is all.

Rambling: Huh.

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 01:58:00 +0000

It's been a while.

The novel is up to 25,000 words.

Woo!

Apparently that's where my writing time is going.

Um.

I'll be back eventually. Hopefully it won't be seven weeks again.

(Woo!)

SOTD: Parfum d'Empire Tabac Tabou

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 24 Jun 2017 08:32:00 +0000

Tabac Tabou. Good name.

I dug through the subset of samples that live in the Tightly Sealed Metal Canister, and this one had by far the most interesting name. I tried to find something else, because it was in one of those pop-top 1ml vials, but nothing else intrigued.

So, after struggling with thumb and fingertips and fingernails and a butterknife over the sink, I finally got it open. By then the excitement had faded, because the wet traces on the edge of the cap and on my fingernails didn't really smell all that interesting. But I smeared just a little on my wrist, and...

Ooh.

The opening was a civet-forward "what have I done?" moment, a shout of "I'm going to be really dirty!" A blast of animalic and dark-spicy notes that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then the civet apparently shrugged and wandered off, and for the next few minutes I smelled moderately aggressive leather, progressing from well-worn and slightly sweaty to new and clean, a new belt emerging from tissue paper. It was accompanied by a little tobacco, quiet and retiring.

Then...

What is that? There's still an echo of leather and pipe smoke, but the main body of the scent has a powdery and faintly creamy vibe. It makes me think tea, not tobacco, but tea with a texture like buttercream cupcake frosting, with a faint crunch of sugar crystals now and then.

And now I finally look at the notes--I try to force myself to experience at least a few minutes of a scent without looking. Luckyscent says "immortelle, tobacco, narcissus, honey, grass, musk". I'm guessing that the tobacco-tea-cupcake is coming from the honey and immortelle. The honey grows as time passes, with no hint of that urinous thing. I love beeswax, and this is close enough to be pleasing.

By the way, I'm not getting narcissus. At all. Not a hint.

At this point, the scent also feels vintage. Some scents do a sort of deja vu thing on me, where a new scent announces itself as familiar. My brain is trying to say, "Oh, that smells just like Aunt Amelia always used to smell..." even though there never was an Aunt Amelia.

I like it. So far I like it a lot. I actually tried it yesterday (SOTY?) but I can still smell it on my wrist if I put my nose up to the skin. I want to buy some, but a bottle would be madness--based on the projection and longevity I got just from that tiny smear, I suspect that the 1ml vial alone would last me a dozen or more wearings. So, a decant. I think. Though we might be at Scent Bar later this year...

(Temptation!)

That is all.

Review Roundup: Fragrantica and Now Smell This (from whom I realize that, yes! that scent I can't put my finger on does have a vibe of horse) and Kafkaesque and colognoisseur and Scent For Thought and memoryofscent and FragranceGeek and A Bottled Rose.

Image: By Dino Giordano. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: More Perennials!

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 05:02:00 +0000

I may have mentioned that The Farm has 120 four-foot-by-six-foot beds.

Prepping and planting a bed--lifting the weed barrier, digging or forking, adding fertilizer, adding compost, possibly swapping the weed barrier with a piece that has suitable holes for the new crop, re-attaching the weed barrier, making a watering apparatus or moving in an apparatus suitable for the new crop, manicuring the soil of the holes or drills, possibly adding sand or vermiculite or compost to accept the seeds, possibly mixing seeds with sand, planting seeds or plants, possibly adding a layer of compost, watering the planting in...

Whew!

...takes at least a couple of hours per bed. Planting a line of several beds--like the 24-by-4-foot garlic bed or last year's 36-by-4-foot bean bed--doesn't really reduce it that much.

120 beds, two or three plantings per bed per year, takes us to, oh, maybe 300 hours of prep-and-plant per year. On weekends, when the weather is suitable and we're in town and I have time. So this explains why I have yet to get the whole farm in production at one time.

Therefore?

Perennials. Edible perennials. Preferably what I'm calling "soft" perennials--the kind that are easy to move or eat or give away if I want a bed back for annuals, someday when I have more gardening time.

Currently, the perennial list is:

Six (seven?) beds of strawberries.
Three of black currants.
Two and a half of chives.
Half a bed of garlic chives.
One bed of thyme and oregano and tarragon.
One of sage.
One of rosemary.
One of perennial scallions.
Two of Jerusalem artichokes.
One of artichokes.

So, nineteen or twenty. I'll probably remember one or two more. So that's a little under twenty percent perennials.

My plans for more include:

Another bed of chives.
Another five beds of strawberries.
Two beds of garlic chives.
Ten beds (one full row) of blueberries.
Probably six beds of raspberries.
A sweet bay.
At least one more bed of herbs.
Ten roses along the left-hand fence. Probably rugosas, for lots of rose hips, so that they count as food. See the picture up top? Fruity!
Ten of something along the right-hand fence, where the ground is painfully gravel-filled from the parking lot next door. Something tough, like maybe butterfly bushes to bring in pollinators for the rest of the stuff.
Five evergreen shrubs of some kind, preferably edible or edible-themed, along the front of the five right-hand rows.
Another five at the back of those same rows.

What's that add up to? Seventy-six total, leaving twenty-four beds for annuals. Three-quarters perennials. I'm not sure if that's too many or two few annuals. And I'm a little worried about the high number of un-soft ones--for example, you can't peacefully pull a blueberry bush out of the ground and replant it or give it away the way you can a raspberry or a clump of chives. But it's going to take me plenty of time to plant the extra fifty-six (fifty six!) bed of perennials, so, I have some time to decide how much those things worry me.

Oh, hey, I forgot asparagus. And I keep thinking about breaking the edible theme and planting some peonies.

Anyway, it's a plan.

That is all.

Image: By 4028mdk09. Wikimedia Commons.

Writing: Highly Flavored Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 21:46:00 +0000

As usual: Wow, it's been a long time since I posted.

So I've actually been writing fiction. A couple of weeks ago, I started a new strategy: the highly flavored strategy. I'm...

OK, let's just paste in what I wrote on a writing forum at the time.

So after talking about flow over in the writer's block thread, I did some thinking about what used to be rewarding back when I spun daydreams in my head. Some of the appeal, I realize, is that in my own head I embrace any situation that I find emotionally satisfying, even if it seems foolishly angsty or sentimental, and even if it doesn't necessarily fit a neatly coherent and likely plot. I go for immediate emotional reward. For the fictional equivalent of salt and fat and sugar. (Isn't there a Yiddish criticism that translates to "without salt or fat"? Or am I misremembering?)

So I sat down to write a scene in a fictional/fantasy world, with the deliberate determination that when something feels a little too salty or buttery or sugary, I'll embrace that something rather than back off. I'll embrace, in fact pursue, the overflavored first draft.

One goal, I realize a while after writing the above, is to have a period where I enjoy writing fiction. I usually enjoy having written fiction; I don't usually enjoy doing it. I'm enjoying doing this. I've written five thousand words since the third, which is admittedly not a lot, but it's (1) more than my official allotment of 300 a day (446 a day on average), (2) got written during a high-stress time when I'd probably write nothing, and (3) I enjoyed almost every minute of it. I say "almost" because the first couple of sentences, each time I sat down to write, had to fight against resistance, but then I was into enjoyment. Oh, and (4) The plot is surprisingly close to coherent.

The flaw with this as far as the blog is concerned is that highly flavored scenes give me stage fright, so I'm not willing to post them to the blog. We'll see if that changes.

That is all.

Rambling: Farm Rambling

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 13 May 2017 05:44:00 +0000

Wow. A month since I posted.

I've been writing scraps of one of my book ideas. Not all that reliably, but more reliably than usual.

The farm is progressing nicely. Much of the following was already discussed, but, hey, I'll re-list!

Onions! All the onions! Garlic, potato onions, shallots, French grey shallots, perennial scallions. Oh, and I divided one big clump of chives into 21 sub-clumps. There will be a lot of chives. Later on, I'll do the same thing with a big clump of garlic chives.
The Oregon Giant peas are nice big plants and there's a flower or three in the bed; it shouldn't be too long for peas.
This past weekend I planted some potatoes--German Butterball, Purple Majesty, and Yukon Gem. Only three beds, instead of the planned six, but I did plant them mostly right. In a later post, I'll probably show pictures. If they, well, grow.
Sadly, the raspberries that I planted a few weeks ago didn't grow; six out of nine died. I'm not good with bare root plants. I'm going to prep another set of beds, get more raspberries from either the back yard or the grange, and fill those beds with the new ones and the survivors.
I'm moving the survivors because I really wanted to get some beans planted, and the spaces that the dead raspberries vacated were all ready for me to just poke some seeds into the ground. I planted some Blue Lake bush beans in part of it. In the other part, I planted Russian Mammoth sunflowers, with the plan of growing Fortex up them. I had very few of both means; I'll be ordering more.
Oh, and herbs. A few weeks ago I planted a new bed of oregano, tarragon, and two kinds of thyme. Soon I'll plant sage and marjoram in another bed.

Oh! And the overwintering cauliflower overwintered! I thought that it had "buttoned" (made an itty bitty head) but I ended up with three perfectly nice heads out of, I think, four plants. (If it was six plants that's obviously rather less successful.)

I'm extra pleased with this year's spring garden, due to the fall and winter planted crops; it doesn't have that sad desolate look. I'm going to try to plant more this coming year. Let's make another list:

Again, the garlic, shallots, French shallots, potato onions.
Lots more overwintering cauliflower.
A much bigger late summer crop of carrots.
Late winter peas again.
More potatoes--if they work this year.

But I'm also discovering that I simply won't do all the work required to plant every bed every year. So, I'm thinking about some added perennials:

If those perennial scallions take hold well, a couple of beds of them.
Another multi-bed block of strawberries.
Hedgy perennials that are kinda food: Rosemary, sweet bay, roses known to produce lots of hips.
Maybe daylilies. People eat the flowers, after all.
We've been planning a row of blueberries forever. Someday it might happen.
Probably some perennial flowers.

I look at the annual beds that that leaves, and I get nervous. But I've left a number of beds unplanted every single year; it would be a lot more fun to see things growing everywhere. I need to remind myself that if I have more time, I can always give some things away and go back to annuals.

And so. That is all.

IttyBittyFictionScraps: In which people think

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 12 Apr 2017 04:11:00 +0000

(The conversation continued, leading me to observe that I tend to do all-dialogue, or no-dialogue. This one is no-dialogue.)

Jane peered into the bakery case as she sipped her coffee. Buttercream. Candied violets. Crunchy sugar. Marzipan. Meringues. The cup was half gone by the time she finally ordered. A plate of a few things, please. A mini cupcake. And one of those little layered things. (And the counter girl showed no amusement or disapproval when she ordered it in exactly those words.) And a slice of yellow layer cake with pale chocolate buttercream.

She sat at the table by the window, the one with the cracked marble top. She finished her sugary lunch, then took out her notebook. Now. Get to work.

Who to kill?

And how?

Losing the museum director would throw the operation nicely into chaos, but he was management, and management was always distinctly replaceable. A temporary fill-in would be hired, and he might be, well, competent. That wouldn’t do.

So the key was to find those with irreplaceable skills. That might not even require killing anyone. She preferred that, in a mild way, just as she preferred to eat a salad once in a while. The climate control system, for example, was limping along, tended by a head janitor whose primary purpose was to serve as its nanny. Arrange for that man to retire, and the system would break down within weeks, requiring an evacuation of the more delicate bits of art.

IttyBittyFictionScraps: In which people move

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 02:00:00 +0000

So I posted an all-dialogue bit on the writing forum where I hang out, and there was a feeling from some people that occasionally a dialogue tag or even an action or a scrap of setting might be nice. So I wrote this. And once written, let's blog!

Joe ordered his third Howards End, drank it rapidly, and resumed drumming his fingers on the table. How could this have happened? What would they say? Would they ever forgive him?

“Wow, that’s a lot of glasses.”

Joe jolted out of his reverie and looked up at Alice. When did she get here? “Huh?”

She blinked. “A lot of… Nothing. What’s wrong?” She pulled out a chair and sat on the edge.

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Why?”

He took a deep breath. He grabbed the near-empty glass and slurped the last drops of ice-diluted blackberry vodka from the bottom. He kept on slurping long after the liquid was gone, and was reminded of those scenes in the movies where the traumatized character keeps on pulling the trigger on an empty gun. Click. Slurp. Slurp. Click.

“Joe!” Alice grabbed his shoulder and shook it slightly.

He put the glass down. “I lost the map.”

“Oh!” She released his shoulder. “Is that all?”

He stared. Wait. She wasn’t going to kill him? She always carried those knitting needles; he’d imagined himself being impaled, nailed to the chair. “What?”

“Well, it’s not as if I really believed that it led to treasure.” She air-quoted ‘treasure’. “It was just a fun thing.” She settled into her chair, hung her monstrous purse on its arm, and extracted her knitting. “No big deal.”

He kept on staring, and automatically reached for the glass again, but found to his surprise that he didn’t need its comfort. “Really?”

“Really.” She loosened a length of chartreuse angora. “Not a problem.”

“Is that how Stan is going to feel?”

“Oh.” She looked up, halting in the act of winding the yarn around the needle. “Oh.” The second ‘Oh’ was far deeper.

“He’s going to kill me, isn’t he?” He clutched the glass and started slurping again.

“Maybe you’d better run along. I’ll tell him.”

IttyBittyFictionScraps: Invasion

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 02:35:00 +0000

(A scrap written in response to the question of, how do you insert description of the narrator a first-person piece?)

Oh, dear God. It was Mom. I plastered on a smile and opened the door.

Mom tilted her head. "New haircut?"

The smile wavered. "Yes. I told you, I like it short."

"No, dear." She shook her head as she swept past. "It won't do. If you had a chin, that...mass of frizzy blonde might be all right. But with your little round baby face? No. But we can fix the damage. I'm going to make you an appointment with my stylist on Thursday."

"No, you're not." I chased her, glancing frantically around the apartment for evidence of...well, anything. Life. All life must be hidden from Mom.

"You're right." She turned back. "My mistake. Not Thursday. That's the appointment with the dietician."

"I don't need a dietician, Mom."

"Of course you do, dear. I know that you're not technically overweight, but people age. Ten excess pounds today leads to diabetes at fifty."

"That's insane!"

"It would be different if you had the height to carry the weight. Darling, you know the surveys; women five foot six or over are the ones with the good careers. Why aren't you wearing those heels I sent you?"

Daily Drafts: Turnpike

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 17:25:00 +0000

I'm trying, once again, to write 300 words of fiction a day. I don't know why I'm posting this one. But I am.

What the hell?

Jane stopped at the end of the alley. What was that? There was movement, just barely, in the darkness. An alley and movement would make a person think of rats, or cats, or raccoons, or some similar unpleasantry—well, not that cats are unpleasantries, but alley cats often are—but anyway, that’s not what the movement looked like. It looked upright. It looked like people. Tiny tiny people.

What the hell?

After another moment of peering, she dug into her purse and extracted her phone. After some fumbling she had the flashlight-whatsit working, and she aimed it at the alley. It barely illuminated ahead of her feet, so she cautiously entered the alley for a better view.

The movement all but stopped as soon as she cleared the pool of light from the streetlight. As she moved forward, she heard the occasional skitter and caught a flash of movement in her peripheral, but her light illuminated nothing. Step, skitter, nothing. Step, skitter, nothing. She was halfway down the alley when she became suddenly aware of skittering behind her. Her heart thumped and she sped up, fast-walking to the other end of the alley, emerging rather quickly into a startled-looking post-theater crowd.

The man that she bumped touched her shoulder briefly and gingerly, saying, “You all right?” He glanced past her to the alley, then looked back to her eyes.

“Yeah.” She looked back too. “Yeah. Fine. Just fleeing the elves.” She smiled at him to make it clear that she was joking. She wasn’t.

“Sure.” He grinned, looking relieved. “Did you leave them a gift?”

“A gift?” She frowned and she smiled and she still shook a little.

“Yeah.” The grin weakened. Maybe he could see the shaking. “That’s what my granny said, anyway. It’s like a toll road; you go through the little people’s country, you leave a gift, or they’ll come get one, and you won’t like it.”

“Oh.” She still looked at him, her banter failing her.

Disconcerted, he offered, “They love tobacco, Granny always said. I could leave them a cigarette on your behalf.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. I’d appreciate that.”

Farming: Potato Grand Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 06:19:00 +0000

OK, so I'm making a battle plan for planting the potatoes. I write up this sort of thing because I can't get at the farm right now and I want to do something!

Cut the seed potatoes if they need cutting. Do this the night before, to allow the cut edges to dry.
Buy 36 feet of 4 foot wide weed barrier.
Buy enough insect netting to cover 36 feet by roughly 8 feet.
Buy three bags of...uh...whatever the brand name of my preferred compost is.
Make sure I have a box of my preferred brand of dry organic fertilizer.

I pause here to note that this infrastructure will quite likely cost more than the resulting potatoes will be worth.

This is alleviated by the fact that the weed barrier can, judging from my past weed barrier experiments, probably be reused for five years or more. (The warranty should tell me how long I can use it, but the warranty requires me to cover it with mulch, and, no.) I'm hoping that leaving it out to freeze will kill any disease that might pass from year to year; if research tells me that it won't, I have other uses for the weed barrier, though that does hamper this as an ongoing technique.

I don't yet know how long the insect barrier can be reused, but I also don't know if I'll need it or not in future years, so it might be a one-time experimental expense. It's not really insect barrier in this application, but cat barrier.

Anyway, this time I just want to see if I can create a "patient garden" method for growing potatoes without having all that loose soil to weed. Later, I'll focus more on making it a cost-effective method.

OK, moving on. Keep in mind that all the extra work is intended to prevent weeds once, rather than fight them all year.

Lift one side of the existing weed barrier on a continuous strip of six beds. Fold the barrier to one side of the bed, exposing the planting soil.
Ground-staple one side of the four-foot weed barrier to the other side of the beds, and one side of the insect netting over that. Fold that back so that the bed is still exposed.
Yank any stray weeds in the six beds.
Sprinkle fertilizer over the beds. One source says that since I grew beans in those beds last year, I should go lightish on the fertilizer.
Spread the compost over the beds.
Broadfork two beds.
Attack the two beds with a hand fork to mix in the fertilizer and compost a little better, especially in the center.
Dig a trench down the center of the two beds, 8 inches wide by 8 inches deep by 12 feet long, dumping the dirt to the two sides of the beds.
Place the potatoes in the bottom of the trench at a 9 inch spacing.
Cover the potatoes to a depth of four inches.
Collapse. If the collapse involves staggering home and groaning on the couch, put the weed barrier back over the bed to keep the cats from using it as a litter box, and pull it back again when returning.
Repeat the whole process from "broadfork" for the next two beds.
Repeat the collapse.
Repeat both again. Separating the work into two-bed sprints reduces the odds that I'll collapse prematurely and fail to plant anything.
Yay! All six beds will be planted.
Pull the four-foot weed barrier to its edge of the trench, and lightly staple it down here and there. It will be lumpy over the dumped dirt from the still-empty four inches of the trench.
Do the same for the existing six-foot barrier on the other side. This will have so much excess that I may need to formally fold it and staple down the fold in a few places.
Pull the insect netting over the whole thing and staple it down on the other side.
Done!
Collapse for a very long time, with extensive use of ibuprofen.

A few weeks later, when the potato plants are above the trench, hill up:

Fold all that insect barrier and weed barrier back again.
Yank any weeds from the tench that are too big to bury when I fill it in.
Fill in the trench and, if the potatoes are tall enough, hill up above it, leaving the little potato tops looking half-drowned.
If research suggests that it's a good idea, scratch in a little more fertilizer.
Pull the weed barrier up to the edge of the potato stems and lightly staple it down. This is the reason for the extra weed barrier width--it has to cover the hilled-up soil.
Cover with insect barrier again.

At this point, in theory, almost all of the soil is covered with weed barrier, and the potatoes are growing away underneath.

A few weeks later, try to find a chance to do a second hilling. This may involve stealing soil from another bed.

Then just wait. It occurs to me that when it's time to harvest the potatoes, I can follow the traditional advice of leaving them to dry on the ground for a few hours, because I can once again pull the insect netting over them.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

IttyBittyFictionScraps: Mildew

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 23:51:00 +0000

(A scrap that I wrote as part of a discussion of that "show, don't tell" thing, in the writing forum where I hang out.)

Henry opened the fridge and studied the sticky, empty shelves. Half an inch in the milk jug. Broccoli browning on the edges. And that nervous-making smell that signals bad happenings in the depths of the crisper. If Jane were here, this would be the signal for "Grocery time!" in that terrible chirpy Scarlett O'Hara voice. He'd never have to hear that chirp again. Thank God.

But he really wouldn't mind a slice of her meatloaf.

Feh. Who needs meatloaf with a restaurant on every block? He shut the fridge and studied the window, watching as the rain ran down behind the...yeah, yeah, fine, so the glass was dusty, so what? A man has better things to do than chirp "Cleaning time!" and bustle around with lemon oil and a feather duster.

Feh.

Feh.

Don't you dare cry.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Fiction: Food Safety

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:59:00 +0000

I miss posting fiction. The theory was to stop posting and maybe I'd eventually write something that I could, y'know, submit somewhere, because you can't submit it after you've blogged it. But then I stopped writing fiction much at all. So, here we are. This one is from July, but I don't think I ever posted it.

The teacher told the second grade, "For tomorrow's art project, bring the shells from two hard-boiled eggs."

"Large or extra-large?" asked Josh.

"It doesn't matter."

"But it has to matter. Extra-large eggs are twenty percent bigger. That's more eggshell."

The teacher studied Josh, then sighed. "If you have extra-large eggs, bring two. If you have large, bring three. Then there will be extra."

"Okay." Josh nodded, content.

Josh's mother boiled three eggs before dinner and taught Josh to peel them, but the pieces came out too small. She boiled more after dinner, but the pieces came out with egg on them. She boiled more right before Johnny Carson, and made him promise to take them to school whole.

"Miss Othmar will show you how she wants them peeled."

"But peeling them is homework! You do homework at home!"

Josh's mother studied Josh, then sighed. "You can bring the eggshells in, too, to show your work."

"Okay." Josh nodded, content.

The next morning, Josh was horrified to learn that his father had thrown the eggshells into the compost heap.

"They're filthy! I can't bring those in!"

"I'm sorry, Josh. That's what I always do with eggshells. I didn't know."

Josh packed up the whole eggs and took them to class, where he told the teacher, "I wasn't too lazy to peel them. I peeled some others, but my father threw them away."

"It's all right, Josh," assured the teacher. "These are very nice."

"I've got three."

"Yes."

"They're extra-large, but I wasn't sure about the twenty percent."

"Yes."

"So I brought three."

"Yes."

"Is that enough?"

"It's plenty. You have extra. Don't worry."

Halfway through making the eggshell picture, Melinda Conner edged over to Josh. "Teacher says you have extra. Can I have some?"

Josh frowned at her. "Why didn't you bring your own?"

"My brother ate my eggs and put the shells in the trash. I would have gotten them back, but they touched the chicken package."

Josh's eyes widened, and they both said it at once. Like an a cappella choir. "Salmonella."

They blinked at each other, and both of them smiled.

Fourteen years later, they were married. With two prenuptial agreements, and a spray bottle of diluted bleach in the kitchen. They were very happy.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Running to keep up

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 02:10:00 +0000

I'm planning the next garden work session. Gardening time is in very, very short supply this year. The next session will be some weeks from now (long story), and ideally would include:

Planting six beds of potatoes.
Planting four Jerusalem artichoke tubers....somewhere.
Planting four beds of onion sets.
Planting four beds of cosmos.
Planting two beds of strawberries.
Planting two blueberry plants.

And some other things that I've probably forgotten. This is not a realistic amount of work (18 beds?! Are you mad?) so I need to set priorities.

I ordered three types of potatoes; the "six beds" is based on using up the minimum amount that you can order per variety. So I could narrow the six beds down to three, if my primary goal is trying all three, rather than maximizing the volume of potatoes produced. I could also do some research--could I plant the others much more closely, on the theory of harvesting them as new potatoes?

I think that I'm just going to insert the Jerusalem artichokes in the ground, any bit of ground, with no particular prep. Hopefully they'll sprout there rather than rot, and maybe I can transplant them later. That's assuming that they survive in the wait, in the fridge.

The onion sets can produce scallions or be left alone to produce bulb onions. Can I plant them fairly thickly, thin out the scallions, and expect the remaining onions to make bulb onions? Or will that involve too much competition or root disturbance for the bulb onions to happen? Research.

The cosmos tolerate quite poor soil, but...well, I should forget the "but". I could cut some drills in the weed barrier, scratch the soil, plant the cosmos. By the time I would have time to prepare those beds thoroughly, either the cosmos will be up and I won't have to, or they'll have failed and I'll prepare them nicely for, say, zinnias.

We're running out of time for bare root strawberry plants, but not for plants in pots. And, I can transplant some of the excess from the existing strawberry beds. So I don't think that any strawberries will be going in this time.

And I think that blueberries are going to wait Yet Another Year. In the unlikely event that I have some spare time before the ground dries out, I could till in some peat and sulfur, for next year.

So...hurriedly insert the Jerusalem artichokes, get three beds of potatoes planted properly, and then see what I have time for. That's the plan. Oh, and I've got about thirty-six feet of drills that I think could support one more planting of some light feeder, so I should get seeds of something in there.

I reassure myself with what's already in and growing:

Five beds, plus enough spare drills to count as a sixth, planted with an assortment of garlic, shallots, French grey shallots, and potato onions.
Two beds of snap peas.
Four (four?) beds of raspberries.
Three existing black currant bushes.
Six or seven beds of existing strawberry plants.
A couple dozen little nubs of lettuce that will hopefully expand into heads when the weather warms up.
Six feet of growing carrots and six feet of just-seeded carrots.
Twelve feet of golden beets.
Six chives, six garlic chives, a nice big rosemary bush, and we'll see if the sage, oregano, and tarragon come back.
An artichoke that will, again, hopefully be back. (The one in front. The one in back was a gopher dinner.)

That's food, yes? Yes!

That is all.

Farm Diary: Seeds!

noreply@blogger.com (Martha) — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 04:19:00 +0000

I planted Touchstone golden beets and Oxheart carrots, in the front bed of the currant row. Last time, I planted the carrots ever so carefully--I finely pulverized the soil, pressed a very shallow furrow, mixed a pinch of carrot seed with some compost, sprinkled it into the furrow, firmed it, and watered it veeeeeery gently.

This time I broke up the soil, threw some seed on it, and watered it.

The first time was a success. We'll see how this time goes.

That appears to be all.