Happy new year! Every year I keep track of what I read in a giant spreadsheet, and then on January 1 I add it all up and tell you about it. A few years ago I started separating out work reading from leisure reading (though the fact that I get PAID to READ BOOKS is […]

Thursday Notes: #18 All The Cookies We have always only ever been making cookies. Since the beginning of time, we have been softening butter, creaming it with sugar, measuring flour, shaping dough, baking, cooling, storing, starting another recipe… Our annual tree-decorating party is tomorrow…that’s the excuse for the cookies. (the REASON for the cookies, on

Thursday Notes: #17 And the Novel Is… “Done”! I hit 50,000 words on Orcas Investigation today! (52,046, to be precise; or 51,793 according to the NaNoWriMo counter.) And got my “winner” certificate and the laudatory emails and put stickers on my Progress Tracker and all that. Of course the book is not done, or even

Thursday Notes: #16 The Novel Continues Behold my shiny progress tracker, with stickers all the way to 25,000 words! Woohoo! “Halfway there,” though this novel is no way half-finished. For my non-writer friends, to whom 25,000 words may sound like a lot: It’s not, really. I mean, it’s not nothing–my document file currently stands at

Thursday Notes: #15 Novel In Process Just a quick note this morning! Because I have to get back to my novel. I’m doing NaNoWriMo–the National Novel Writing Month–and I got a late start because Reasons (the same Reasons why there wasn’t a note last week), but I hit 5,000 words yesterday, and I’m aiming to

Thursday Notes: #14 Beginning My Outbuilding Empire I know what you’re saying–you can’t believe we’ve lived here, on five acres in the middle of the woods on a remote island, for an entire year, without a storage shed. Without a SINGLE outbuilding, in fact! It’s a crime, a travesty, an absurdity. Why, Mark stacks the

Thursday Notes: #13 The Struggle Is Real I am writing again! Actual fiction! …but wait, you say: Didn’t you cheerfully announce this a week or two ago? Uh, yeah. And it was true then! But, in the way of such things, it didn’t continue. I moved forward on my current project, then stalled out again,

Thursday Notes: #12 Four Years And Counting Happy anniversary to my beloved Mark! Four years ago today, we gathered in a barn on the Mendocino coast with several hundred of our closest friends and relatives and began this journey–or, really, codified the journey that had already been underway since 2009. Here’s to many more years!

Thursday Notes: #11 The State of Things The pond is very pretty today, all reflective in the autumn sunshine. I caught a quiet moment between fish-jumps; we have a mysterious school of black fish who have suddenly taken up residence. Being black, they are hard to see and impossible to photograph…we’re hoping that also means

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