A Million Words

I haven't gotten around to doing anything in the past few weeks. Ever since Thanksgiving, it's been one unfocused, vaguely hectic day after another. Nova has been struggling along with her teeth. She has horrible decay in her front top teeth because of my tooth-cleaning negligence combined with night nursing, and her bottom back molars were coming in. Nova had her 2nd birthday, and I made two cakes for two separate celebrations of the occasion. The first, a Chocolate Brownie Torte with White Chocolate Mousse and Caramelized Bananas was a bit of a flop, but tasted good. Nova enjoyed blowing out the candles and eating it. The second cake was equally mediocre, but held together better. It was a basic chocolate cake with orange frosting and chocolate-frosting decorations. I tried to decorate it with the traditional pastry bag and tips. Nova ate the bits of chocolate off the top. Obviously her diet is not as tooth-friendly as a dentist would wish for, either. We have been doing ...

I don't remember when I first heard about The Artist's Way , by Julia Cameron. It must have been over a decade ago, but I never felt the urge to try out the program until a few days ago. It's just not my style, not what I really needed. I was pretty confident about my creative direction and the work I was doing. I was writing novels, revising them, sending them out, getting rejections, and starting the whole process over and over again. The accumulation of rejections, without a single expression of interest in my fiction writing, was moderately discouraging, but not unusual. I was prepared for it. I kept going, knowing that persistence was the key to success. I could have kept going like that, but since our return to the US almost three months ago, I just can't find the time. You might think that with all the other adults around to entertain Nova, I should have more time to write than I had in Galway, but it doesn't work out that way. There, I could write while she...

Somehow, a month has slipped by without a blog post here. I suppose I must have been busy. I certainly haven't been working on my novel, or exercising, or getting a real job. I have, however, landed a pretty regular (so far) paid writing gig, doing short articles for the Martha's Vineyard Times , Calendar section. It's been kind of fun. I've written one or two assigned articles a week for the past three or four weeks. They've been on a range of different subjects, but the substance of most of them is doing a few interviews and setting people's quotes, and the information they give me, into a sensible, readable narrative. I have to say it's a lot easier than writing fiction. At least, I find it easier. However, as I remember from last time I did this, I have a really hard time switching gears. In order to make good progress on a novel, I need a solid 1.5 - 2 hours, at least five days a week, to work on it. A reliable 1.5-2 hours, that is, not a half hou...

When I was about Nova's age, my parents built a house in the woods. We lived there summers and weekends while I was growing up, and later, when we moved further away, other people rented it in the winter. The place has housed quite a menagerie over the years, and it's held up OK, but decades of wear and tear and sweating slate floors have left it almost uninhabitable. When I arrived home in late July, the house smelled of mold and abandonment, so much so that it was difficult to breathe inside. Some of the mold was the result of recent water damage, but it had been growing over the years, especially during winters when the house was unoccupied. In any case, the work was already well underway. In the photo bellow, you can see the new dormer: In the former upstairs, there were three small bedrooms, a nice library nook, and a virtually windowless storage nook. The dormer creates a whole bunch more space in two of those bedrooms, and gives them closets. My parents also wanted ...

Late Thursday night I came down with a bout of mastitis, aches and pains all over, chills and general malliase.  I had a pretty good idea what was happening, so I went in to see the doctor right away. That kept me from writing on Friday, I was still pretty tired on Saturday, and by the time Sunday rolled around Nova had a fever, too.  We took her to the doctor yesterday afternoon. Now she and I are both on antibiotics and I haven't done any actual writing in days.   According to the doctor, Nova has an ear and throat infection resulting from her recent runny nose and cough. Also, her two top eye teeth are on the verge of breaking through the gum.  The result of all this is that she's nursing almost non-stop, more than she has since she was a newborn, I think.   Now, this is the first time in Nova's 17 months that she's had to take antibiotics, and it isn't pretty.  Toddler antibiotics come in a sticky yellow liquid form, and are supposed to be dosed out by the teasp...

The Cuirt festival is on this week in Galway, and I'm thrilled that this year I'll be here and able to attend at least a few events.  I started off this morning with a workshop, which was a lot of fun but left me wondering: Am I getting old?  I am terribly ageist when it comes to writing workshops.  I can take each writer as an individual, but generally there are two groups in any class; those who aspire to careers as professional writers, and those who write primarily for their own amusement.  The career-oriented writers are generally younger, in their 20s and 30s, while most of the hobbyists have long since gone grey and retired from their day jobs.  I know that some of the older people will go on to write actual books while the younger ones lose heart in their creative endeavors, but I still felt more than a little discouraged when I looked around the table today.   The trouble was that the instructor, Nuala Ni Chonchuir (and yes, I'm too lazy to figure out how to put t...

I have never been an especially fast reader, but I used to be able to get through a book in a week or so, most of the time.  So, when I made my new year's resolution to read one good novel a month, I thought I should be able to manage it.  Three and a half months into the year, I'm starting to slip. Well, my book for March wasn't a novel, and I didn't get properly started on it until well into the month.  I finished reading White Mughals around midnight last night, and I must say it was worth the effort and more. I picked it up as research for the historical romance that I'm supposedly working on. I wanted to learn a bit more about the East India Company around the beginning of the 19th century, as background for the male lead in my story.  It gave me what I was looking for and greatly broadened my perspective on that period in history.  In addition, it had a compelling plot and was excellently written.   I had checked the book out of the library, but made such slo...

For the past month, I've been keeping track of my grocery spending by keeping receipts and writing down any miscellaneous expenses like market purchases and take-away meals. Yesterday, I tallied it all up and found that we've been spending a bit less than €150/week.  I'd hoped it would be more like €100. Oh well.  I wondered how this compared to what other people spend, so I posted a poll on one of the Irish forums.  44% of the respondents (over 100 so far!) claim to spend in the 100-150 range.23% spend less and 30% spend more.  I don't know the demographics of the respondents, but I'd guess that most of them are stay-at-home mums, and because they're looking at the finance forum they're probably more budget-conscious than average.  In the discussion of the poll, I learned that some women with six or more children spend less than we do, while I'm sure some couples with only one child spend even more.   Am I over-spending, or are we doing just fine?  I do...

I have been sinking altogether too much creative energy into cooking lately.  The past week featured pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, a re-heated lasagne, a not-very-good aloo gobi, and finally a " Shortcut Pork Cassoulet " which we brought up to my mother-in-law's for dinner on Friday night. Cassoulet is a big project, even the shortcut version.  I would really like to do a full old-fashioned version, but I wasn't sure where to get duck confit and I wasn't ready to make it without being assured of a very appreciative audience at the end of the process. I would make it again, but only in cold weather, with a lot of guests, and using a slightly bigger casserole dish.  It didn't make me homesick, exactly, but it did make me wish for a better-equipped kitchen.   Last night I made Irish Beef Stew and One Hour Shrimp Paella .  The paella was a bit of a disappointment.  I used basmati rice instead of arborio, which didn't do the texture any favors, and got the cook...

Last night, Mike came home thinking that it was Pancake Tuesday, which is what they have in Ireland instead of Mardi Gras.  He asked if we could have pancakes for dinner just as I was rolling out the pizza dough (I tried to spin and stretch it out the first few times, but I've switched to rolling lately).  I felt bad about missing the opportunity to participate in an important cultural observance. The good news is, yesterday wasn't  Shrove Tuesday.  The big day is next week, so I have plenty of time to prepare and stock up on eggs.   As a result of this pancake scare, I just spent about an hour looking at pancake recipes on epicurious.com.  I wonder, is this too obsessive?  Have I gone over into the dark side of competitive housewifery?  Will I suddenly take out a subscription to Martha Stewart Magazine ?  Shouldn't I be writing instead?   But just think of the food that could be made!  I want to make Turkish Zucchini Pancakes and Buckwheat Pancakes with Smoked Salmon in ...

I wouldn't say that I have writers' block, it's just that I'm having a hard time getting back into things.   November was a very intense and stressful month at our place, but I still managed to crank out just over 50,000 words of a rough draft of a novel in those thirty days, along with a grant application.  It was really too much. In December, I made myself unnecessarily busy with holiday baking and things, and I'd just begun to recover from all that when my hard drive died beyond hope of recovery on January 11th. I'd backed up most of my work, but not all of it, and not often enough.   I've had my computer back for two weeks now and have reconstructed what I could, but I still haven't gotten back to work in earnest. I had planned to finish the rough draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, but I lost my scene list and besides I've been away from it for too long to just pick up where I left off.  Instead, I decided to re-work what I have already. I've gotte...

I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.   At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.   For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps,  an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies .  The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling.  The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious. Then I ...

I have not been writing.  I should have known better than to expect an uninterrupted half hour a day at my computer while visiting my parents.  I'd had great hopes for getting through the next few of my new draft while here, but the constant social whirl has gotten in my way.  In the week and a half I've been here, there has been only one night that my parents haven't had guests or gone out to some social event or other, which I am also required to attend.   When I complained, my mother said, "It's only the evenings!"  You might think so, but it's amazing how a dinner party can cast its shadow over the entire day. Last night, for example, we had a few relatives around for dinner.  When all was said and done, that meant 11 adults and Nova.  My mother and I spent a good while in the middle of the day figuring out a menu, whether anyone else could be counted on to contribute, and going shopping, all the while speculating about whether certain people would or ...

A few weeks ago, I resolved to write during Nova's naptimes.  She often naps for an hour or two in the morning, and sometimes for an hour or two in the afternoon, as well.  If she did nap for three hours, that would theoretically be three working hours in a day -- a perfect amount of time. But today is like many other days.  I start off the day with my cup of tea and Nova amuses herself and practices standing and crawling for an hour or so while I make myself breakfast and perhaps check in with the world of the internet.  While she's nursing, I play scrabulous and surf around innumerable time-wasting sites devoted to the hippy fringe of parenting, or go off on a tangent and look at fabrics on-line. Sooner or later she nods off.  Some mornings it only takes 10 minutes of nursing until she nods off, this morning it was well over an hour (with a short interruption, when I thought she was asleep). The real problem, though, is me.  Once she's safely settled in her slumbers, I ge...

This week has been a total loss in terms of writing.  Not only were we moving, but we didn't have an internet connection until yesterday afternoon, and we've been dealing with the byzantine Irish bureaucracy so we can get married.  There has also been a stream of tradesmen coming and going from the apartment, fixing the hot water and the showers, the heaters and fans, etc.  I think I've spent half the week waiting to let them in and texting the landlord about what has or hasn't been done.   And then, there is the laundry.  It's not so bad, just a load or two every morning, but I think I had become accustomed to the help of Nova's grandmothers in that area, not to mention the convenience of having a dryer.  Here, we have lots of light and air and I've bought an enormous clothes drying rack which would hold probably three days worth of diapers at a stretch, but because there's always something else to wash and they do get stinky lying around, I've been...