This was going to be an update about my chickens.
I was going to tell you all about the Chicken Palace.
I was going to tell you about all of these things, but then we found these paw prints in the Forest.
So BH baited a Havaheart trap. Lo and behold…
We found a critter, a young raccoon who had hoped to put chicken on the menu.
Want to see what happens next? Let’s go to the video….
That’s a key question in The Forest. When my husband or I start out a conversation with "You know what would be cool?" it generally means that something fairly cool is about to happen.
Like…. a writing cottage will be built.
Or we take up chicken farming. You get the picture.
So when we were planning for our son’s graduation celebration and my husband said "You know what would be cool?" I knew the fun was about to begin.
He took a deep breath.
"It would be cool to have a real pig roast," he said. "In the backyard."
"With a pig," I said.
"That’s sort of the point," he said.
"How do we do that?" I asked.
"I have no idea," he said, "but we’ll figure it out."
("We’ll figure it out" is our family motto.)
***NOTE – Vegetarians and vegans probably want to stop reading now. ***
**** Vegetarians – I TOLD you to stop reading!!***
(I TOLD you!!)
And then, of course, came the moment that, with hindsight, might have been the reason BH cooked up this scheme in the first place.
A bunch of you have written asking for chicken update pictures. Earlier this week, BH and I took a couple of the girls out to help us weed the flower beds.
Along with the garden (we’ve been eating the first peas this week) and the chickens, we’ve been busy in the Forest preparing for ALA and this fall’s book tour. I’ll post my ALA schedule early next week. I’m not sure when I’ll have the tour details… certainly by August. I’ll be on the road a LOT, so I will probably be showing up wherever you live. If you bring your chickens to my booksigning, I will pet them.
On Monday night, we enjoyed a special book event, courtesy of the river’s end bookstore. Author Michael Perry is on tour promoting his new book, COOP, as well as his other titles.
Michael is posting on Shelf Awareness every day on his tour. His blog entry about Oswego gives his take on the evening.
See you on Monday!
Sorry to have been so absent this week, friends. Beloved Husband had shoulder surgery and has needed some tending; mostly to make sure that he sort-of, kind-of follows doctor’s orders. I’m happy to report he is mending well.
I’ll be posting two videos very soon: one will show examples of how I took historical fact and turned them into a chapter of CHAINS. In the other I will rave about the maple syrup being boiled a stone’s throw from my house and I will attempt to read in Norwegian.
But the most exciting thing?? We have a pair of red-tailed hawks building a nest in the Forest near the writing cottage!
My plan to keep my sunflowers safe from the squirrels this year suddenly seems possible!!
All work in the Forest today will grind to a halt as we enjoy the ceremonial viewing of Elf. And we might even make spaghetti with maple syrup.
I got to thinking about my family’s tradition of setting out rice pudding for the julenisse. Nisse have been around long before Christmas celebrations. English words that describe them as elves, or gnomes; I’ve seen "pixie," too. If properly cared for, nisse will watch out for your farm animals, your house, and your barn. If you don’t take care of them, they will cause all kinds of mischief on your property.
Nisse are low-maintenance creatures. All they require is a bowl of rice pudding (risengrød) set outside your door or in your barn on Christmas Eve. We’ve always done this faithfully and I think our nisse appreciate it.
But as the sun was setting yesterday and I was lighting candles in honor of the solstice I realized that the nisse have been around a lot longer than Christmas celebrations. Ack! Have I been disrespecting the nisse all these years? They are ancient creatures… do they wait, forlorn, on the night of the winter solstice, their tummies grumbling, while the Big People go about their ignorant business? And when the pudding FINALLY shows up on Christmas Eve, do they call up the other nisse and complain?
So last night I put out rice pudding for them. And I will again on Christmas Eve. You can’t be too careful with nisse.
Revision Tip #22
Are you sure that you’ve chosen the right point of view for your novel?
Take your favorite chapter and rewrite from a different POV; shift from third to first, or first to third, or if you are bold and way smarter than me, experiment with the second person POV.
Or…. (and…..) fool around with the tense structure. If your story is told in present tense, rewrite that favorite chapter in past tense. If you’ve written the whole thing in past tense, try out that chapter in present tense.
What’s the point of all this mucking around? It helps you see your characters and the Story from a slightly altered perspective.
