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a sea of musket balls and gunpowder

I am neck deep in 18th century lists of military stores; things like powder horns, bayonet belts, grapeshot, and bear skins. It is heavenly!

I spent the weekend on the road. On Saturday I went to the Fort Plain Museum in Fort Plain, NY for a small (but wonderful) Revolutionary War encampment/reenactment.

Sunday was a long, fantastic day at the RevWar encampment/reenactment at Old Sturbridge Village. Nearly one thousand reenactors were there: soldiers, artisans, women, and lots of their children. All of these people are passionate about understanding the Revolutionary War and have made it their hobby. They go to these encampments to live as people did in the period. They dress, cook, work crafts, relax, have military drills and mock battles all as close to the original thing as possible.

This is a Patriot militia unit.

The British had fancy-pants uniforms and they still lost.

There were plenty of women with General Washington’s army. They were not ladies of the night. They were hired to cook, clean, sew, and help the sick soldiers. Many of them were married to soldiers. Some had their children with them.

The reenactors could not have been more generous with the time. I asked a bazillion pesky questions about the tiny stuff – how does one fire a flintlock musket in the air (answer: one usually doesn’t), the finer points of cooking in a dutch oven, and the art of rolling paper gunpowder cartridges.

Back to work on my story now. Remind to tell you about the guy who let me taste gunpowder…

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Ahhhhhgust

Not only have I worked on books every single day this year, but I posted to the blog every day in July, too. That’s so much blogging, I think it qualifies as blahhhhging. I have no idea how people do this regularly.

I will not be posting as much in August. The new book is whining for more attention and the tomato harvest is beginning to roll in which means I’ll be canning. (Yes – photos – I promise!) I welcome any and all salsa and zucchini recipes!

(One food preservation question – has anyone frozen zucchini?)

So blogging will be sporadic this month. Come September I’ll revert back to my obsessive ways, I promise. CHAINS will be published on October 21st and there will be lots of tour madness to share.

But now, serenity.

The first sunflower out back just bloomed.

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Happy August, all. Good Lammas, too.

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It’s Over? Already? Last WFMAD for 2008

Dang, that was fast!

Today is the last day of July, the last day of my Write for Fifteen Minutes A Day challenge. Congratulations to all of you who participated!!!

If you missed the beginning, or you’d like to see all the entries I made about the challenge this month, then the tag function provides a short-cut to them.

If you’ll grant me a moment on the soapbox, I want to explain why my focus is on time spent writing, rather than word counts, like NaNoWriMo.

Don’t get me wrong; I love word counts. I track my own in a first or second draft because it gives me a sense of accomplishment when the characters and story are still primodial slime oozing from page to page.

But I worry that word counts can give writers the wrong impression. Just because you’ve written 50,000 or 100,000 words doesn’t mean you’re done with your novel. It might mean you’ve completed a draft. It’s the quality of the words and the structure of the story and those etheral things like voice and theme that really count. When/if you weave all of those threads into a coherent world, then your story is ready. How long that takes varies dramatically from writer to writer and book to book.

(For those of you who want a score card, it usually takes me seven drafts to write a novel.)

Some days I can hammer out words, crank out page after page after page. Other days, I’ll spend on one scene, sometimes one stretch of dialog. If I were to measure those against each other, it would be easy to see the day in which I wrote fewer pages as a “bad” day. Which is nonsense.

I believe the critical component of writing is the daily commitment to the task. If you touch base with your story every day – even for fifteen minutes – you are mulling it over somewhere in your mind. That’s why I structured WFMAD the way I did.

I’d love a little feedback from those blog readers who participated in WFMAD. What was it like for you?

WFMAD 31

Today’s goal: Write 15 minutes.

Today’s mindset: proud and relieved.

Today’s prompt: Write about what this month’s challenge did or didn’t do for your writing. Write about what made it hard to carve out fifteen minutes a day. Or was it easier than you thought? Do you want to maintain this habit? If so, what changes do you need to make to your non-summer schedule?

Scribblescribble….

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down to the wire pesto recipe & WFMAD 30

The Goddess of YA Literature ventured into picture book territory yesterday and reviewed a number of recent picture books, including INDEPENDENT DAMES. It is an honor and a hoot to have the book compared to the MAGIC SCHOOL BUS books, which I love.

A couple of you have asked for my pesto recipe. I mostly wing it, but here is how I made yesterday’s batch:

6 cups basil leaves (I stuff the cups, cram the basil in, so it’s a lot) washed and destemmed.
1 generous cup chopped pine nuts
1 and one-fourth cup grated Romano cheese (you can use Parmesan – it’s worth buying the good stuff)
10 cloves of garlic. Maybe 12.
Somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and one cup of good olive oil

I don’t have a food processor so it takes a while to chop all the basil into a mush, but the smell is worth it. Once the basil is chopped, stir in the other ingredients. Add a dash of salt and two dashes pepper. Make sure everything is well mixed.

Last night I tossed the fresh green beans with pesto. I think I could eat it with anything, including oatmeal. Might experiment with making pesto bread….

Making it fresh in the summer is fun, but I wanted to have some to enjoy when the snow piles up into 15-foot drifts come February.

Step One – freeze small portions of pesto in glass jars.

Thaw slightly to remove from jars.

Stick in vacuum sealer bag.

Suck out all the air and seal (this is really fun to watch).

Voila! Let it snow! Yesterday’s batch was enough to fill seven small jars worth of pesto, plus eat at dinner, plus have enough to munch on for a couple day’s snacking.

How do you make your pesto?

WFMAD 30

Today’s goal: write for 15 minutes.

Today’s mindset: fantastical

Today’s prompt: Start out with the magic words “Once upon a time….” and write a fairy tale about the upcoming presidential election. Use common devices like villains, enchanted objects, interventions by fairies, etc.

Scribblescribble….

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Already Lost in Time & WFMAD 29

Sorry about the lateness of this post. I dove into a few research books early and forgot to come up for air. They need to go back to the library tomorrow, so I’ll not be nattering or ranting today.

Did you do anything about your writing space yesterday?

WFMAD 29

Today’s goal: write for 20 minutes (Think you can do it? Come on! It’s art! We’re supposed to break rules!)

Today’s mindset: yoga-stretching your brain

Today’s prompt: Write down the type of music that you hate the most, the stuff that raises your blood pressure. Now turn your radio to a station that plays that kind of music and listen to it while you write whatever images that fill your head. Try not to blather on about your feeling, i.e. I hate this crap, etc. Try to allow concrete images that represent the feelings bubble to the surface and write them down.

The point of this is to take you out of your comfort zone. So it’s OK to be uncomfortable.

Scribblescribble….