Lifescapes

Drought Notes #8: Resurrection

 
  
I've never before seen this clematis bloom in the fall. In fact, I thought I'd lost the whole vine in the drought--until two weeks ago, when it suddenly greened up, put out tendrils, then a tentative blossom or two, and now it's covered with these lovely purple blooms. We're still in what the weather folks call a "severe" drought (28" deficit for the past 24 months), but we've had enough rain to make some of the plants think that spring has come around again. The cypress trees along the creek are putting out new green leaves, roses are blooming, and the meadow is bright with blackfoot daisy and even a few out-of-season penstemmon. There's some water in the lake, a little in the creek (it's not flowing yet). I saw a heron fishing in Turtle Pool, so the crayfish must be reappearing. And a few days ago, I spotted this guy (or gal, as the case may be):

 
The perfect picture of a self-satisifed toad in a hole in a delightfully dampish place, enjoying a bit of rain for the first time in months.

I don't know which I like better: starting a new book or finishing one. This week, I finished The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree. If you've been following along on this one, you might remember that I started it at the end of July and have worked pretty steadily ever since, with 4-5 days out here and there for book travel and the other ordinary business of life. Starting a book, I'm always nearly overwhelmed by the immensity of choices to be made; ending one, I'm struck by the apparent inevitability of the book's events--which says something about the miracle of plotting, I suppose. Monday, this one goes to NY via the magic of cyber-travel.

Snap beans, snow peas, carrots, zuchinni--fresh from the fall garden to the table. We're also eating kale, collards, chard, spinach, and a few sweet potatoes. Looking forward to various squash, and I'll dig the rest of the sweet potato crop next week. The tomatoes I direct-seeded in the garden are beginning to bloom: don't think they'll have time to set fruit. But those I cut back in July are producing nicely, so I count that a success. Next year, I need to put the fall garden in a little earlier: I was so daunted and disheartened by the drought this year that I waited a little too long.

Now that the book is done: housecleaning (especially my office, which is a horrible mess), catching up on the mail and the email, reading/reviewing a couple of new books, knitting, checking the page proofs for Holly Blues (due to arrive on Monday) and pondering China #19, which is the next book on the schedule. Also, working with Peggy on the upcoming Story Circle memoir conference, which she and I are co-chairing. I'm sure I won't be bored.

Reading note. The only reward I look forward to is seeing the finished piece of writing in hand. And if I should find myself in a lazy spell, all I have to do to get active again is to remember how miserable life was for me when I was trying to get published.--Erskine Caldwell

Mesquite muffins, rain, & other pleasures

These are the mesquite muffins I made for Bill yesterday, to go with a big pot of chili. They're made with the mesquite meal I made last week, from the beans on our trees. The recipe is here. These are savory muffins (with chopped onions and green chiles), and could have a bit more bite if you used habanero powder instead of the mild ancho I used. If you have a favorite cornbread or cornmeal muffin recipe, you could easily substitute 1/2 cup mesquite meal for 1/2 cup of flour--and cut the sweetener in half. Mesquite meal is sweet. Commercial mesquite meal is probably finer and less gritty than my home-ground meal, made in a metate. Baked the muffins in my toaster oven, to keep the kitchen cooler. We liked them!

Garden update. The ridge of high pressure that's been keeping us dry moved off to the west this weekend, allowing a cold front to dip down and trigger some isolated showers. We got lucky twice, both Friday and Saturday, for a total of about an inch of blessed, blessed rain. The fall garden is up and growing: beans, peas, soybeans, zukes, winter squash, turnips, carrots, collard, kale, Irish potatoes. Summer's sweet potatoes, melons, and eggplant are doing okay (a bit heat-stressed). The tomatoes I held over from early summer are blooming, but iffy.

Book report. I took a couple of days to pack/ship Applebeck Orchard and Together, Alone. If you haven't seen the trailer for Together, Alone, you'll find it on the book's webpage. Please take a minute to check it out. I love the music and the photographs are very special to me. After the orgy of packing/shipping, I went back to the beginning of the Darling Dahlias and have done a substantial revision of the first half of the book. Not quite done with that: more today, then on to the next chapter. I'd like to finish by mid-October. I have some book travel at the end of next month, and would love to send the book off before I need to go zipping around Texas

Reading and reviewing. I've been posting reviews of some of my reading on Abouthyme.com. The latest: a review of Fresh: A Perishable History, by Susanne Freidberg. Great book, highly readable, informative. Check out the other reviews while you're there. I was significantly unimpressed by James McWilliams' Just Food, although I certainly agree with his position on industrial meat production and on fishing. He makes a few valid points about the locovore issue (it is impossible for cities in arid and semi-arid climates to feed themselves locally), but his writing is marred by his scornful rhetoric and his "straw man" style of argument.

Yesterday, I happened on Wendell Berry's very fine article in the September issue of The Progressive, "Inverting the Economic Order." I love Berry's phrase, "cultures of husbandry," by which he means sustainable communities of people who have at the center of their concerns a truly "human affection and care" for the land, other people, the earth. This is something we ought to have at the center of our health care debate, as well--and is lost in the midst of all the shouting.

Reading note. The fate of the land is finally not separable from the fate of the people of the land (and the fate of country people is finally not differnt from the fate of city people). Industrial technology does not and cannot adequately replace human affection and care. Industrial and financial procedures cannot replace stable rural communities and their cultures of husbandry.--Wendell Berry, "Inverting the Economic Order."

Book review site relaunched

The big "secret" project I've been telling you about just went public!

We (Paula, Peggy, Linda, and I) have relaunched the Story Circle Book Review site, with a fresh new look and lots of new features. This is a site that Peggy and I put together for Story Circle five or six years ago. Paula took it over and expanded it to over 400 reviews, making it the largest women's book review site on the Internet. Now, we're expanding even further, with added categories for women's non-fiction and fiction (including mysteries, historical and mainstream novels, and Christian fiction), a new look, and lots of new features--and more on the way!

To handle this expansion, we're looking for reviewers to supplement our existing team of 20-plus reviewers. Reviewers may receive free advance reading copies and new books--and of course writing reviews is a great way to add to your portfolio of publications. We're featuring our most active reviewers by giving each one a webpage of her own, and will soon be launching an eletter with more opportunities to showcase our reviewers. Interested? You'll find all the info here. If you've just read a book that you've enjoyed and want to share, we'd like to read your review.

Also, stay tuned here for another big announcement, coming up in a few days--something I've been plotting for a couple of months is about to happen, finally!

Best intentions. I'm knitting the second sock in a mystery pair. You know about this, right? You knit the first sock in a pattern you were wild about at the time, but you fail to note the name/location of the pattern, and you can't find it when you start the second sock. I'm doing my best to duplicate it, but I'm afraid that this pair will end up on my personal feet (rather than those of the planned recipient), because the patterns don't quite match. When will I learn to not only keep the needles with the yarn and Sock #1, but also leave a trail of breadcrumbs to the PATTERN!! Oh, hiss, boo, and grrrr....

Reading note. If it is true, and I really believe that it is, that knitting is a soothing force in the world and that the liberal application of yarn can ease any day, then today would be a time when I tested it.

Finished!

The Tale of Briar Bank is finished and has flown off to New York, via dragon courier. No, just kidding. (You didn't really believe that, did you?) I sent an e-copy via email for the production gang and a print manuscript via snails to my editor. She likes to read books she can hold in her hands and mark up with a pen, the old-fashioned way. When she's read it, it goes to England to be read by an editor at Frederick Warne, Beatrix Potter's copyright holder. Then back here to the copyeditor, then back to me, then back to the copyeditor, then back to me as "first-pass" pages, then to the printer and the binder, and finally (in September 2008) to you, so you can find all the errors the copyeditor and I have cleverly hidden just for you. In the meantime, as a librarian friend of mine said once, you'll have to contain your soul in patience. While you're waiting, The Tale of Hawthorn House (Book 4) will be out this September (having gone the same route last year). And if you haven't read the third book, The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood, now's the time.

I took a day for a felting project, a day for reading (Robert Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River), and now I'm back at work--this time on the memoir that I set aside late last winter. I don't like what I felted (a mustard-colored scarf), but even when felt doesn't turn out the way you imagined, it still turns out. I mean, there's the felt itself, which can be turned into something else. The process went like this.

First I carded the fiber, which is a blend of dyed merino. This is a laminated felt, so the fiber is felted on both sides of the laminating fabric, which in this case is a scarf-sized piece of dyed cheesecloth--you can see it in the second photo. In the third, I've laid out the fiber on bubblewrap and placed the cheesecloth on top of it. Another layer of fiber goes on top of that. The result is the scarf in the fourth photo, which turned out about the right size and weight (cozy on a cold winter's night in Alasak). Below that is a closeup--the felted fabric is rather more interesting than the scarf, which encourages me to think that maybe I can use it as part of the vest that's lurking in a dark corner of my mind.

The memoir looks better than I remembered--the first half of it, anyway. It's lovely to get back to it and actually enjoy reading what I wrote, which is not always the case. But like the felted fabric, writing can be recycled--recycled endlessly, actually. So even if I didn't like it, all is not lost. More later about that.

Before you go, please take a look at a couple of other pages. My son Michael wrote a nice piece for the Junea Empire about back-roads traveling, including photos of the grandkids. Encourage him so he'll keep on writing. And Linda Peterson wrote about her cat, Grace Blanket, on our Wildness blog. Her post reminds us that we don't need to make a trip to the wilderness to reach the deepest, truest heart of the wild. Thank you, Linda.

Reading note, from Linda's post: I’ve known wildness, defining it, when I came to define it at all, as something remarkable and exotic, something “out there” attainable only in rare, dramatic moments.   But here in the quiet of my living room with a domestic cat, I felt my own wild nature at its deepest in the space we created around us.

Stay-at-home dad

My son Michael has just published the second in a series of columns he's writing for the Juneau Empire. This one is about an important decision that he and his wife Sheryl made a couple of years ago: that he would stay at home with the kids until they went to school. I'm glad he's been able to do that--it's good for Michael, good for Sheryl, and especially good for the children.

And it's always interesting (sometimes comfortable, sometimes un-) to see my children's perspective on the life we shared when they were still at home. It's also interesting to see him write so honestly about his relationship to his first family. I have the feeling that many of us find ourselves being more transparent (less self-protective? less defensive?) in print and online, than we used to be. I can't help but think that's good.

Blooms

If you've never seen an aloe in bloom, look closely--here it is. My aloe spent the winter in a makeshift greenhouse where it gets plenty of light but not much attention (which means that it rarely gets watered). When I went to fetch it, to tell it that spring had arrived and it was time to wake up and get growing, I found that it had anticipated me. It was already in bloom, for the very first time in its life. This is a six- or seven-year-old plant, growing happily in a large terra cotta frog. Ribbit.

And here's something else that's just starting to bloom: a new writing project. Well, sort of. I haven't actually started it just yet. I've only just begun to start it, if you get my meaning. And since I don't usually go through all this rigamarole when I'm beginning a new project, I thought I'd tell you about it, so you'll be in on it from the word go. Or almost.

Last summer, when Linda Lear and I were discussing her in-progress biography of Beatrix Potter, I suggested that she might want to write a junior biography. The ones I had seen were pretty woeful, incomplete and uninformed by any recent research. And she had a gazillion tons of research material, and interviews, and all that good stuff about Beatrix that could easily translate into a biography for young readers. Linda thought about this for, oh, about 30 seconds, and declined. (I think she felt, understandably, that eight years invested in Beatrix was enough.)

So I told her I'd give some thought to the idea of doing it myself. I did, and kept on thinking, while I finished the Cottage Tale I was working on, and then Nightshade, which was next on the to-do list. And then I got a very good start on the memoir (half-baked now and ripening on the shelf), and went back to thinking about the junior biography. And thinking. And finally I got to the point (when I got back from New Mexico) of writing a three-page proposal for a book called Beatrix Potter: A Magical Life.

But Bill and I haven't had an agent for seven or eight years, and in order to sell this new project, I'd need a new agent, which is much easier said than done. Agents--particularly children's nonfiction agents--don't grow on trees. And you need a specialty agent for something like this: somebody who knows the current market, who has looked at lots of projects like A Magical Life and can judge its marketability, and who understand it and feels enthusiastic. This week, with a referral from Linda Lear to her agent, and a referral from Linda's agent to one of the larger agencies in New York, I've found an agent, a very good one, who's as excited about the project as I am.

I have to tell you that this has happened at a very good time. I'll be gone all next month and won't have a moment to sit around and chew my fingernails and wonder what's happening in New York--I'll be on the road with Spanish Dagger. And maybe, with luck, some discerning editor who is hungry for just this project will snap it right up, so that when I get back, I'll have the delicious pleasure of telling you that the proposal is about to bloom into a book. Ribbit.

Or maybe it won't. Maybe it'll be like that aloe, and sit around for six or seven years before it decides to bloom. You never know in this business. That's part of the excitement. I guess. But I think I'll pass on excitement tonight, and pour myself a glass of celebratory wine and sit down with the rest of the galleys of Hawthorn House (I've got 100 pages to go). And my spinning. Feels right.

Reading note. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation. --Jorge Luis Borges

Multi-tasking

                                                                                                    I've had a very lovely day, reading galleys for Hawthorn House and spinning Jane's alpaca/wool/silk. I'm probably slower at doing each task, since I'm doing both at the same time, but it's a relaxing division of attention--read a bit, spin a bit, then read again. I'm far enough away from this book (it was finished last summer) to be reading it with a fresh eye, and appreciating it with a fresh mind. It's my favorite so far of the Cottage Tales--enough good lines to make me smile, even make me laugh, especially in the animal scenes. Fun for me, and I hope for you, when you get to read it.

Also today, a nice review from Booklist of What Wildness is This, posted on Amazon's page. It's good to see some of the review journals taking an interest in the book. Plus some garden work, a bit of Internet mapping (the last of the maps for the tour), and some negotiation on a new writing project--something different--that I hope to be able to tell you about before too long. Not sure where it's going, and it's certainly had its ups and downs and ins and outs and moments of "what the hell am I doing THIS for?" I finally have the feeling it's going somewhere. But not yet. Not just yet.

Back to Hawthorn House and my spindle.

Reading note. My students assume that when well-respected writers sit down to write their books, they know pretty much what is going to happen . . . and this is why their books turn out so beautifully and why their lives are so easy and joyful, their self-esteem so great, their childlike senses of trust and wonder so intact. Well. I do not know anyone fitting this description at all. Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work. You are welcome to join the club.--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Robin Paige Series

Quite a few readers have written in the last couple of months, asking why Bill and I decided to discontinue the Robin Paige series. Here's an answer to that question--now, when people ask, I can just give them the permanent link to this post!

Bill and I started work on that series in 1992, right after the first China Bayles book came out. We'd been writing young adult books together since 1985, and both of us enjoyed the process of writing together. So we came up with several ideas for a co-authored series. After much energetic back-and-forth, considering various options, we decided to set the series in England in the late Victorian-early Edwardian period. There was so much going on at that time, politically, socially--and especially forensically. Fingerprint identification was just becoming available, and there was forensic photography, ballistics, toxicology, serology, and so on. So it was an ideal setting for an investigative series.

We also decided to use real people in the series. The second book, for instance, featured Beatrix Potter. The sixth, Jennie and Winston Churchill. The twelfth, Guiglielmo Marconi. This proved to be a very good idea, and really kept us interested in the series. Readers have liked it, too, for each book introduces them to a new segment of English society, to a new set of issues, and new points of view. But it also proved to be exceedingly difficult, for each book required not only the usual background research, but also specific biographical research about the person we chose as our "featured" character.

The series originally went as paperback original to Avon, but they were having troubles at the time (the mid-90s) and didn't do a very good job getting the books out there. We moved the series to Berkley, where it has been ever since, very happily. We've loved working with our editor, Natalee Rosenstein. The series went into hardcover with the seventh book. We've discontinued it with the twelfth--Lizard (originally in hardcover in 2006) will be out in paperback in July. When we started, we thought we might do ten books. The series went to twelve because we enjoyed the collaboration so much.

I say "discontinued," because it's always possible that something will come along that will make us change our minds. We left some plot threads hanging, just in case we want to pick it up again. But there's no "next book" in this series on our horizon. The reason: the research load is very heavy. It wasn't so much the background research in the period--that was entirely manageable. It was the biographical research on the individual characters and their world that made it difficult. For Marconi, for instance, we worked our way through all the available biographies, plus books about the telegraph, the wireless telegraph, and radio. And believe me, there's a LOT of stuff out there. Bill spent a couple of months on the research and we each put in three person-months on the writing. By the time all was said and done, we'd put a full year into the book.

Yes, we probably overdid it. We might have gotten by without doing so much. But we loved the learning (that's one of the reasons we're writers). Readers, too, have appreciated that level of specificity, and once we began creating these richly-detailed worlds, we really couldn't go back to a more general, non-specific kind of writing that so often passes for "historical" fiction. Readers would have been disappointed, and we wouldn't have enjoyed the work nearly as much.

That's it, gang. That's why we decided to discontinue the series. I'll continue the China Bayles books indefinitely (as long as you keep reading), and hope to do a short story collection and a cookbook in the series. There will be four more books (eight altogether) in the Beatrix Potter series, and maybe a junior biography. I'm working on a memoir project now, and have a novel in mind, to be written sometime in the next couple of years. Bill and I miss the Robin Paige collaboration, but now we have time for other things we want to do together, so it all balances out.

If you've been a reader of this series, thanks for your support. Please know that you belong to a relatively small and select group: there are many fewer readers of historical fiction (particularly the non-bodice-rippers), and they don't network the way readers of other mysteries or romances do. So it's harder for an author to reach you, or to develop an effective "marketing program." Also, as a group, you are demanding: you know your history and you want your history done right. Bill and I hope we managed to do that.

Miss Potter and Mr. Warne

Amy wondered about Ewan McGregor's role in the "biopic", Miss Potter: since Norman (McGregor's character) dies, is he going to play an important role in the film? I haven't seen the script and my "spy sources" have seen only promo clips, so I can only speculate. But my guess is yes (especially since McGregor is a Star)--much will be made of the romantic tension between Beatrix and Norman. And somehow I have the feeling that this film won't any more true-to-life than the other productions about Beatrix, which have pictured the pair in huggy-face kissy-poo scenes that are delightfully romantic but probably not factual.

So far as we know from the extant letters (Norman's to Beatrix have not survived--hers to him are all on business matters, and she addresses him as "Mr. Warne"), Beatrix and Norman were never alone together. Mrs. Potter insisted that her daughter (in her late 30s!) be chaperoned every time she went to the Warne offices, and Norman sent his marriage proposal via letter. So whatever romantic encounters you see in the film are fictional. This is not a bad thing (as the author of a fictional series about Beatrix,I would have to say that, wouldn't I?). We just need to remember that biopics, while based in fact, are 99.9% fictional, and are designed for entertainment value. If you want the truth, read Judy Taylor's biography of Beatrix, or the new (and truly comprehensive) biography by Linda Lear that will come out in February 2007. (Linda tells me that her book is finished and she's reading the copy-edited manuscript now. I've put it at the top of my must-have list)

Reading note, from Beatrix's journal, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 1896, after she left Sawrey, where she and her parents were on holiday. They were staying at Lakefield, now called "Ees Wyke" and open as an inn. I love these lines, which show both her skill as a writer and her love for animals:

Perhaps my most sentimental leave-taking was with Don, the great farm collie. He came up and muddied me as I was packing up Peter Rabbit at the edge of dark. I accompanied him to the stable-gate, where he turned, holding it open with his side, and gravely shook hands. Afterwards, putting his paws solemnly on my shoulder, he licked my face and then went away into the farm.

A great review! and other book stuff

The big news at our house: The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood (the third book in the Cottage Tales series, due out next month) earned a great review in Publisher's Weekly, which is almost the best you can get in this business. (The best being a great review in the New York Times, but of course, that's not going to happen, not for a mere mystery, and especially a mystery with--gasp!--talking animals.) I'm thrilled. Delighted. Ecstatic. And very, very proud of Miss Potter and the rats in her attic and all the other characters in the book.

And while I'm celebrating, I'm reading first-pass pages of the Book of Days. There's a lot of work to be done here, I must say, because I definitely over-wrote this book. This is a calendar book, and each day gets only one page, and there is waaay too much stuff to fit on most of the pages, so I'm going through with my red pencil, cutting madly. It's hard, though. Like pruning roses. It's all good stuff. I loved writing it and I love reading it. But there's much too much of a muchness, and some of it has to go. Quite a lot of it has to go, actually. It'll probably take another two days to cut this baby down to size.

While I'm celebrating a terrific review and pruning an overwritten book, I'm also resting up. I drove down to Victoria TX on Friday. Talked at the library there on Friday afternoon (a book talk) and at EarthWorks' Herb Fest yesterday (an herb talk). It was hot (yep, that's South Texas for you, nothing new about that), but it didn't rain and I had lots of fun. Patsy Asher, of Remember the Alibi in San Antonio, went with me to sell books, and we had a great time. Met lots of people, saw some old friends (a gang of Yo-Yos from Corpus: you know who you are, gals!), and met a great many of China's and Ruby's friends. So today is a go-slow day, here at my desk, cutting a book down to size and and feeling happy about life in general and books in particular.

Reading Note, by novelist Henry Miller:

I commenced quietly on my own, to prune it down, to mutilate it, to reduce it to skeletal strength. I'm getting a masochistic pleasure out of it. I wipe out whole pages--without even shedding a tear. Out with the balderdash, out with the slush and drivel, out with the apostrophes, the mythologic mythies, the sly innuendos, the vast and pompous learning (which I haven't got!). Out--out--damned fly-spots . . .