On Our Way to Dixon, Illinois

This is an early morning post.  We are about to saddle up for our drive to Dixon, Illinois.

This time around we don't have a router or any other computer hookup at the old farmhouse.  Any posts will require a drive into either Dixon or Sterling to use the library  or have lunch somewhere with an Internet connection.

Life without hourly access to the Internet.  Wow, that is going cold turkey indeed!  And on Turkey Week, too!

The farmhouse is now mostly closed.  Who knows what critters will be lying in wait for us?  We know that squirrels have burrowed into the porch ceiling so a certain amount of skittering and chirping can be expected. We will try to look at this as a camping experience.

New Plans

Early tomorrow Gary and I will pack up and start our drive to Illinois. Tomorrow is also the opening of deer season.  We should be safe driving down the interstate, yet there is always a fear that some incompetent hunter will be shooting in our direction. It is another source of danger in our lives.

We will celebrate Thanksgiving there by stopping at a local restaurant but that's it for the day.  My Thanksgivings are never as bad as the one in my current short story at Black Coffee Fiction  http://blackcoffeefiction.blogspot.com/2013/11/thanksgiving.html   but I still like the idea of quiet at the holidays. 

In that farmhouse I will have days and days away from the Internet, away from writing, away from the busy life I have here.  I will be in town once in a while, but it is very possible that I will not be posting every day. 

My apologies but everyone needs a vacation. 

I will be reading.  These are the books I am taking along. 

Friend of My Youth, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro, who won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.  I am always looking for short story writers to study. 

Open Season, by C. J. Box, the first in the Joe Pickett murder mysteries.  I continue to read mysteries for pleasure but these days I also am looking for technique as I consider writing about violent death.

I saw Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook on a Wisconsin television University of the Air segment. I am thinking of using poison in my next mystery, so I need to read up on the subject.  Gary does not seem to find this upsetting. 

If reading those books seems like a busman's holiday, I have a few others:

A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick, written by a Wisconsin author.  In some ways, that is work related, too, because I want to write a novel about homesteading. 

A non-fiction choice is Thomas Jefferson, by Jon Meacham.  It's unlikely I will get that one finished by the end of the week.  

Farewell to the East End is a memoir by Jennifer Worth, whose tales led to the PBS series, Call the Midwives.  

Aging and Ailments

As the years pass, my body changes and not for the better.

Three weeks ago, I went to the doctor to have a growth of some kind removed from the back of my right arm.  It was in a place I couldn't see so I had no idea how long it had been there. It was hard so I didn't think it was a mole or at least a mole that was behaving as it should.

The nurse practitioner declared it to be a wart, but if so it was a wart that was not behaving as it was. Moles are a virus that usually appear on feet or hands.  How did this one wind up at the back of my arm. The nurse gave it a shot of something to freeze it and I thought that was that.

Then this morning, while taking a shower, I noticed that wart was back.  I was at the clinic office two hours later.  This time the doctor applied frozen nitrogen.  She told me to keep an eye on it, though that means a mirror.  I can't exactly see it otherwise. In another week, I'll have to call her because she said it wasn't acting like a wart.  So if the growth comes back, she'll do a biopsy.  

Just part of aging, I figure.

Besides the matter of a wart, I am drying up, inside and out. These days I have to apply lotion to my body every night to keep peeling skin at bay.  I have to apply ointment to my nose to keep bloody nose that put me in the emergency last year from happening again. My interior is not doing well either.  I drink lots and lots of hot water over the winter to aid digestion.

With all that, I am still healthy.  Everything is working.  I take no medications, over the counter or prescription ... except for an aspirin a day.  So other than warts and dry skin, I guess I am doing OK for a 69 year old woman.

Still, I figure I'd better keep on writing while I can.  

Flu, Insomnia and Christmas Car

Not much to report today.  With a stomach ailment, I was up all night in my office which is situated next to the bathroom.

My mother was an insomniac and spent the night worrying about it.  I try to avoid that, so when I have a very, very rare bad night, I try to get things done. Those tasks can be nothing too demanding, I certainly won't be writing the Great American Novel at 2:00 a.m.

Last night,  I re-did my Christmas card list, a job long overdue, last done in 2005.  I had to remove at least a quarter of the names from the list. Sadly most of those people are no longer alive.

In the old days, I sent between 70 and 80 cards each year.  I've lived so many places in my 69 years. Those once a year Christmas notes kept me in touch of old friends I left behind.

This year there are only 39 cards to make out.  The list will continue to dwindle, I'm afraid, as old friends die. I am making new friends, but the younger crowd send e-mail greetings at the holidays instead of snail mail. I am probably old fashioned but I still prefer getting those lovely cards out of the mailbox on cold and dark December days, putting them in the red ribbonned basket, while remembering with a smile the people who sent them.

Christmas is about memories. Last night's lack of sleep gave me those.

Finding Stories

One of my favorite stops downtown is Sissy's, a boutique on Main Street.  I can get a good bowl of chili, a delicious cup of apple tea, or an ice cream cone.  I also come away with gossip and ideas.

While drinking my tea today, I asked Francine and Sandy, as well as Bridget, one of the vendors,  about their worst Thanksgiving. Boy, did I get some interesting answers.  I heard about fights, about drunken binges, about guns being pulled.  I heard about burnt turkeys and other bad food. 

I shared some of my worst holidays, some of which have made their way into my stories.  There was the Thanksgiving that my son was sick and couldn't do his paper route. His substitute was out of town.  I had the route.  I had to prepare a dish to take to my mother's house, take care of a sick boy, and run around in slushy snow delivering 80 newspapers and not the usual Thursday newspapers.  These were the Black Friday sales ads and that meant they were heavy.

I used that experience in my short story "Shades of Green". 

My experiences with Christmas shopping came through in "Black Friday."  My years as a choir director inspired "The Pastor". 

The conclusion I always come to during talks with friends and strangers is that everyone has had a bad holiday.  Hence, the collection of depressing Christmas stories I am currently editing. 

Will anyone want to read them?

Book News

The Glen Valley Compact is done and published at Amazon.com.  All that is left on that book is the publicity.  I write daily in Facebook, Twitter, Good Reads and other social media to get the word out. Spreading the word is key.

I will be at Sissy's here in Seymour all day on Saturday, December 7 doing a book signing. I am trying to organize some book signings in various states I will be visiting in 2014.   I'll be in Hawaii in February, in Illinois on and off, and in the north woods of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan over the summer. In fall, 2014, I hope to go to New England so I can cross Rhode Island off my list of states to visit.  Perhaps I will be in South Carolina in winter, 2015 and finally Delaware. My books will be in libraries all over the United States.

And the books are beginning to sell.  I now get very small monthly royalty payments which could get bigger as time go on. It is a matter of one book "hitting" then the others will sell, too.  

Right now, I am working on a short story for Black Coffee Fiction. Following that, I want to put a Christmas e-book together with Wade and perhaps it get published by December 15.  

But first, I must get that story done then go for a week's "vacation" in Illinois as Gary works on the family farm to help get it in shape for eventual sale.  

Potato Salad

Everyone has a favorite potato salad recipe. When Gary and I first start cohabiting, he wasn't all that keen on mine but now he requests it. It has more "zip" than ordinary potato salad.  Today he made barbecued ribs and that meant I had to go to work to provide the salad.  

I don't have a recipe since I seldom use cookbooks, but I can give my readers a rough idea of the procedure. 

First thing of course is to boil potatoes and eggs.  While they are boiling, I chop up onions and celery.  These go into a microwaveable bowl with butter and Italian dressing in equal amounts to be microwaved for about a minute or until the butter is melted. By cooking the celery and onions a bit, they are less crunchy but that is the way I like them. 

While the peeled and sliced potatoes are still hot (so hot my fingers hurt), I add the onion/celery mixture. The hotter the potatoes , the more they absorb the buttery mix.  

Next I add the eggs and chopped up green olives with pimentos.  I add boiled salad dressing (like Miracle Whip), mustard, salt and pepper.  I grate carrots into the mix, mostly to add color.

It is the Italian dressing that makes the difference though it is really the vinegar that makes a difference. I've even used the "juice" from a jar of green olives, so when I use up the olives, I save the juice and the bright red pimentos, which add more color.  

My potato salad evolved from my mother's, though I've added the Italian dressing, butter, carrots and pimentos.