Went out for a run after work today. Still a foot of snow on the ground. Thought about the story I'm working on at the moment, how to layer the plots so one frame, the abduction, fades out, as the survival frame takes over - the relationships among the various people who have been kidnapped by the terrorist, the unlikely heroism, etc. Need to include a character, maybe a woman who is a struggling artist dealing with issues of personal identity and authentic expression. Maybe she can be found at a gas station, an unlikely situation, while they are on their way north to Vermont.
I find that I have very clear ideas of plot and character development often while I'm running and then by the time I have a chance to write them down they have usually faded. Still, all it takes is a couple of notes usually jotted down at the top of the page I am working on to jog my memory later, sometimes weeks or months later while I am rereading or editing.
Ordered seven different types of scionwood, a total of eighty trees to be grafted and eventually planted out, our small apple orchard, from Fedco in Maine. They should arrive sometime in April, about the time I have a break from teaching for a week. By then the lambs will almost all be born also. Stay tuned for pictures. The Icelandic ewes we have, this is our fourth lambing season, are very self-reliant and have never had difficulties birthing, although our oldest ewe, Sadie, developed mastitis and had problems nursing last year and we had to put her down. A cruel business, but not as harsh as watching her lambs die two years in a row. We tried bottle feeding, but it was not enough to keep them healthy.
Promotion for French Pond Road continues. The print edition should be out sometime soon after some technical glitches with the cover and then available through the website and Amazon. Watch this space.
We got about six inches of snow, but not much here now. We've had some mild weather the last few days. There's a few inches of snow left on the ground, and Susan insists it's good for skiing, but I'm waiting for another big snowfall to go out again. We put out taps and buckets to collect some maple syrup this week, just three taps, not too much, from the maple trees in the front yard. It's running like crazy, though. We have about ten gallons of it bottled. Mostly we put a pot of it on the wood stove and drink it as a mildly sweetened tea. The yearling apple trees have not been hit by any deer, not yet anyway. I'm thinking of grafting some shoots from the old tree in the front yard, and so I ordered root stock, Antonovka, from the Fedco Tree catalog online. They are an amazing company, one of the strengths of any resurgent local food movement here in the Northeast. Our old tree is so rotten I don't know if it'll last more than another season, but it still produces hundreds of incredibly tasty apples. Have no idea what variety, probably some heirloom. Bring on more winter. Usually, I'm cutting from the wood lot this time of year to make up for depleted reserves, but not this year. Plenty left.
