Big shift Monday

I managed to get a bunch of stuff done on Monday, including two chapters for a total of 5092 words. In between them I made my Thanksgiving food run and managed to score a present for my 3.75 year old niece. I was kind. It doesn’t make a lot of noise, and should give her years of enjoyment. It will also give her moms some relief and time savings.

The chapters today turned out fine, but there is a radical change in the book between one and the other. In fact, six months separates them in story time. Pretty much everyone in the story takes winter off because it’s a very nasty winter, with lots of snow, and when you’re dealing with a pre-industrial, agrarian economy, there isn’t a lot going on when days are short and the snow and cold can kill you. You’ll still have chores around the farm to do, and then you pretty much devote yourself to staying warm and eating up all the food you’d preserved for the winter. (Funny how that works.)

I actually agonized about how to deal with that time split, and finally decided to suck it up with about a thousand words worth of a character ruminating about what happened in the last six months. Sure, I could have gone and written all that material, but folks would wonder “Why did he do that?” We’re also in a situation where before anyone in the new world can act, they need old world approval. A report sent off at the first of November could have a reply, at the earliest, on the first of February. Couple months of debate, a month of raising troops and supplies, and all of a sudden it’s spring, when military campaigns can begin.

On the good side, the new world of digital publishing will give me the chance to write up some of the outtakes (provided they make good stories) and circulate them on the web. I also got another idea on how to provide content while waiting for the next book in the series to come out. I need to work up some material, but it will be fun for me and, I hope, for you.

Thanksgiving shopping wasn’t that tough. Folks appeared to be in a generally good mood. I’ll be putting a turkey in the smoker, along with a pork loin, so I’ll have food for Thursday and pretty much until I head off to New England for the holidays. At Trader Joe’s I snagged many things, including their Maple Roasted Sweet Potatoes. The woman checking me out of the store said they were great. I got thinking about them and got the idea for a variant recipe that I will try before heading to Vermont, and prepare a separate batch for the folks coming over which they can try if they are daring. (Maple roasted CHIPOTLE sweet potatoes. It will work, trust me, just have to balance the butter and the peppers.)

My Christmas list progresses. I keep finding things in catalogs I didn’t think I’d look at. Weird, eh?

November Word Count: Hard: 71836 Soft: 15063