1. I had (minor) surgery not quite two weeks ago. Those who follow me on Twitter are already tired of hearing me kvetch, so let this be the last surgical kvetch of 2010: Ouch. (No, not going into detail. It was related to pregnancy/c-section, and had been dragging on all these months. Glad to soon be done with it and moving on.)

2. Now that I’m starting to feel better post-surgery, a spider bite I woke up with about three weeks ago has gone crazy on me, all swollen and infecty. Cellulitis. Lovely. Went to the doc today. Antibiotics.

3. Benny, the cat whom we love dearly but whom I never remember to photograph for the blog, didn’t come home last night. When we adopted him, we tried to convince him that he was an indoor-only cat, but he wasn’t having it. Daily escape attempts. Miserable crying and screaming at doors and windows. He’s an indoor-outdoor boy all the way. It’s who he is, and we had to embrace it. Better a happy life than a long one, right? Easily said until he went missing. Good thoughts for my furry guy, please. He’d better turn up soon. He hasn’t been gone long, but he’s never stayed out all night before, and I really expected him to turn up this morning.

(Yes, this is the same Cari who had previously cursed her neighbors for letting their cats go outside, where they would then shit in my garden. Well, now the only cat who shits in my garden is my own. What can I say. I’m a complex creature. I have many strengths. Consistency? Not one of them.)

4. The baby will be nine months old on 12/31. Old enough, and secure enough, that I feel comfortable leaving her with Billy for a couple hours at a time to get some writing time in. As it is now, I can only write after she is soundly asleep. She goes down around 8pm, but then wakes up every 20-30 minutes until usually around 10:30. I have no idea why she’s doing this now, when as a newborn she’d sleep six hours straight every night. But there it is. I work from 10:30pm to 12:30 or so, then get up in the morning with the kids, etc. And that’s only writing time when I don’t have a freelance job to work on. So, now…older baby. Billy’s going to start to take both kids for a couple of hours on Sunday so I can get just a bit more writing time squeezed in. I’m ridiculously excited about this. It’s easiest to deal with both kids at home, so I’ll be vacating the home office and reclaiming my table at my favorite cafe. After nine months, two hours on my own on a Sunday feels absolutely decadent.

5. We’re taking this step because the revisions on Adverse Possession are going well. Once I figured out what needed doing, it all started to flow. Gotta get it down while I can.

6. I’m currently obsessed with raw kale and red cabbage salads.

7. That fucking cat had better come home soon. I miss his furry face, and I’m starting to worry.

I’m starting to understand how it could take ten years to write a novel. I wrote Drowning Practice in two years, but it was a straightforward narrative with a single point-of-view character (told in extremely close third person). I followed the story as it came in first draft and then revisions were a matter of shaping, clarifying, etc.

Adverse Possession? Uh…yeah. I’m having a slightly different experience with this one. I started it in October 2005. Then I thought I’d finished it in June 2009. I was wrong. I worked through two more drafts. Recently I declared it finished to the best of my current abilities. Well, good thing those abilities are constantly growing and developing, because now I see clearly that it is far from finished, and luckily I know what needs doing. The book I set out to write in 2005 is much more complex than Drowning Practice, but I hadn’t shifted my approach much from the first book. I wrote it with two POV characters in close third person. As a result, the expansive novel I’d wanted to write that explored certain political, social, and economic realities of New York’s Lower East Side in the mid-nineties got constricted. It became about the relationship of those two POV characters, with the political, social, and economic as little more than backdrop and plot device. I did a damn good job exploring their relationship, if I do say so myself, but the resulting book was smaller, slighter, and way less resonant than what I’d envisioned. Our actual books never match up to the books in our head–or so my Dear Teacher assured me–but now that I see what needs doing to at least get closer to that ideal book in my head, I have to do it.

I realized it when I re-read Anna Karenina this summer, but I guess it took me a season to get up the guts to dive back in and DO it, rather than just wish I’d already done so. Tolstoy’s book is titled Anna Karenina, but it’s not just about her affair. It’s also (actually, MORE so) about Levin and Kitty, about Dolly and Anna’s brother whose name is escaping me at the moment (Stepan? Is that it). It’s about a certain strata of Russian society at the time. It’s about farming. It’s about the freeing of the serfs and all the implications of that… It’s about…everything. If Tolstoy had told the story just from the povs of Anna and Vronsky, that “everything” would have been lost.

The task now at hand: get into the heads of three more of the existing characters. Give them voice, let them explore their story arcs as directly as my two “main” characters got to. And through their arcs, their experiences in this world I’ve built for them, we will (hopefully) see that world much more fully and truly.

That’s the plan, anyway. And I’m kind of terrified. Excited, too, though. Excited and terrified. Sounds about right. Wish me luck!

The baby and I have been sick. We’re both feeling much better now, but the photos and intended blog posts have gotten kind of backed up. Will you indulge me in another random post/photo dump?

1. My dear friend Everette visited from Seattle. Everette and I first met at NJ Summer Arts Institute when we were fifteen. (I would link to SAI but it, sadly, no longer exists. A real loss. It’s rough to be a state-funded arts program in this day and age.) Everette took pictures of the kids and gave Thumper a quick photography lesson.

2. Rainy Rainy Portland Winter is upon us, which means finding ways to keep the kids occupied indoors. Thanks to the cover of the Halloween week issue of the New Yorker, Thumper has a new set of puppets. I cut out the figures and Thumper glued them to popsicle sticks. (As I was cutting them out for him, I edited out most of the martini glasses and beer bottles and the one gun.) He’s grouped them into Good Guys and Bad Guys. He’s very, very interested in Good Guys and Bad Guys right now.

The Good Guys:

The Bad Guys:

3. And this little girl?

She’s going to start crawling any minute now.

We got our half hog from Taylor-Made Farms a few weeks back, about 85lbs of pork. It’s maybe the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. So far I’ve used ground pork for meat sauce, served bacon a bunch of times, and made a roast. The roast? Oh my god. I used the Braised Pork Shoulder with Dried Chilis recipe from The Art of Simple Food. So, so good. In fact, so good that now I’m planning to grow hot peppers next year so I can dry my own. (Because dried chilis? Damn spendy, yeah?) Growing peppers in Portland is something of an effort–they’ll probably have to be cloched all summer, at least at night–but it’ll be worth it. We should be getting our 1/4-steer share in the next week or so, and I’m sure that will be just as good.

It’s working out well, this buying our meat in bulk. Or on the hoof. Or however you want to say it. We’re getting clean, sustainably and humanely raised, pastured meat at a very good price from a family farm. The farmers, Dustin and Lisalyn, have been wonderful to work with and they deliver (!). But there’s another benefit to it, one I didn’t anticipate.

Gratitude. That is, direct gratitude toward a specific being rather than the hazy, generalized gratitude toward any number of animals who died to feed us and who knows how many others in a year.

This year, all the pork we eat at home (which pretty much means all the pork we will eat) will come from just one pig. This pig got to live the way pigs are meant to live–free to amble about and root around. And then that pig died because we asked the farmer to kill it for us so we could feed our family. I remember this each time I unwrap a cut, each time I cook it, and especially when I sit down to eat it. I’m much more comfortable in my newly reclaimed place as an animal at the top of the food chain now that I can take direct responsibility for the death of the animals I am eating and feeding to my family.

So thank you, Pig. I hope your life was happy–whatever that might mean for a pig. You are delicious.

I’m finally writing up the baby hat and legwarmer pattern for release, and I’ve got a question for you. What size range would you want to see on this pattern?

I’ve already done the math and testing for a 0-6m size and a 6-12m size. The legwarmers have a lot of stretch, and once those babies start walking the legs slim down, so really the 6-12m size on the legwarmers would fit 6m-4 or 5T, with only the length needing to be tweaked. (And not even that, for ankle/calf-length warmers. They fit Kiddo quite well, though he’s not too fond of the color and I didn’t want to force him to pose for a photo in his sister’s legwarmers.)

If I sized the hat up for bigger kids, to go along with that flexibility in the legwarmer sizing, what size should I go up to? How old of a kid would you knit this set for?

He’s been asking to start studying kung fu for at least a year now. This past weekend we signed him up for classes at a fantastic school. He’s pretty psyched.

Pre-babies and pre-blog, I studied kung fu. I was a degree holder at a respected school in NYC (I guess technically I still am, though I left the temple in November 2001) and served as an assistant instructor in the children’s class and for beginner adults. When I left the temple I thought I would never want to study martial arts again. (Long story which I’ll gladly share over coffee but not over the internet.) Watching the adults practice at Kiddo’s new school, I kind of got the bug again. I think I could find the joy in it again. When the baby is old enough for me to leave her with Billy a couple evenings a week, I may very well give it a go. Mind you, that’s at least a year away. It feels good to be open to that possibility again.

Yeah…playing catch-up again with the photos. Behold the wonder that is our family:

1. Like 80% of Portlanders, we woke up to an unexpectedly warm and sunny Sunday a few weeks back and thought, “Pumpkins!” We went to Kruger’s Farm on Sauvie Island. Kiddo had his first pony ride (poor, sad things, but he enjoyed it and I was happy to see they rotated the ponies so they all got regular breaks). I ate a German (local! pastured!) sausage. Kiddo eyed a (local!) hot dog suspiciously and mostly just ate the bun and his roasted corn. (I know…kinda gross. It tasted good outside in the sun but I don’t plan to repeat that anytime soon.) There was tree-climbing, farm-frolicking, tractor-riding, and pumpkin choosing. A lovely day, despite the crowds. In fact, once you got past the 30-minute wait on the food lines there was plenty of space for everyone. Next year we’ll bring a picnic and skip the lines.

2. Kiddo was a football player for Halloween. The allegiance is not for Denver, but for Dark Blue. Dark Blue is the very most special and good of all colors, you see. Since we don’t have TV, he’s only seen football the handful of times it’s been playing at the pizza place, etc. This means he’s free to root for Dark Blue all he wants, thankyouverymuch. It also means he’s kind of confused by all the men who shout praises for his shirt when he wears it. The baby? She was a ladybug. We got one handmedown costume, and it turned out to be a ladybug. (What kind of irony is that? Billy insists there are seven kinds of irony, but he can’t name them.)

3. I’m usually the one taking the photos, which is why I appear in next to none of them. So the other day it occurred to Billy to take a picture of me while I was holding the baby. A candid photo. Without warning. When I couldn’t tell you when I’d last had the chance to wash my hair and I was wearing some pretty unfortunately paired layers. Warmth over fashion, you know? And he also had the nerve to catch me at a moment where I’d failed to lose the last 15 pregnancy lbs… But hell–I’ve got two young kids. My hair gets washed twice a week if I’m extremely lucky and I’m often seen in unfortunately paired layers. And the baby weight? Nine months on, nine months off. I’m okay with that. So you know what? This is what I look like these days. Here you go. Proof I still exist in corporeal form:

Last night I finished reading The Wilding. It was good, an enjoyable read—and a quick one. I read it in three nights while nursing the baby to sleep. It wasn’t quite as good as I’d wanted it to be, though, for two reasons, both of which seem useful to me as I dig in to my own next book:

The first: You can see the author working. You can see him stretch and sweat and sometimes miss his mark. In an essay published in Poets & Writers, which you can get to if you click on the link for “Revision as Renovation” on this page, he talks about the process of writing The Wilding, and how extreme his editor’s revision notes were. He more or less rewrote it to her specs, rather than his own vision for it, and that shows. You can see in the text (or so it seems, only he knows for sure), where his ideas end and hers begin. It hums and hums and hums along, then goes all clanky and hollow, then hums and hums and hums along again… So…yeah. Editors are good. They can be great. But I’m suspicious of a book rewritten so much to someone else’s idea of it. As a former boss liked to say, “A camel is a racehorse designed by committee.”

The second: He makes the stakes high–extremely high–and puts his characters in real danger, which is great, but…well…I don’t know how to say this without spoiling the ending of what is still a good read. Let’s just say I found he set those high stakes and then backed away from them. I don’t know if it was a question of nerves or marketability. If there was a darker ending that the editor or marketing department steered him away from? It rang false at the end, though. Unsatisfying.

And yet…I had a good time reading it. I wanted to finish, wanted to see what happened. I guess there’s a lesson in that, too.

I finished my first novel (Drowning Practice) in 2005, before I got pregnant with Thumper. I had the extreme good fortune to spend my first month of that pregnancy at Ragdale, where I had nothing to do but write all day and take naps. I started my second novel (Adverse Possession) at Ragdale, worked on it steadily through that first pregnancy, and then set it aside until Thumper was 18 months old and I was ready to leave him with Billy for a few hours at a time. (He was probably ready sooner, but I have a hard time being away from my babies when they’re babies.)

Drowning Practice is in the Drawer. Adverse Possession is in a weird limbo that I can’t talk about here just yet (no, not the good kind of limbo. No, not the “abandon hope, all ye who etc etc” kind of limbo, either. I’ll tell all when professionalism allows).

Those of you who’ve been around here a while may remember I started the next novel, Cold Black Stars (working title) last year. I got all of a chapter into it and had to set it aside because Adverse Possession wanted more revising. Those revisions led to revisions, as is often the case, and I ended up working on AP right up until Ladybug was born.

(I’m starting to get seriously tired of calling my kids Thumper and Ladybug online, but I don’t want to use their real names. Eh.)

Adverse Possession is now written and revised to the best of my (current) abilities. If the book and I make it out of that limbo it will be because someone else has an opinion about it, which will likely lead to more revisions, and I welcome that. But for now, Adverse Possession is off my desk. I find myself in the unfamiliar position of being ready to dive into the next book, but not having had much at all by way of time to do just that. I’ve spent the past six months thinking in and around Cold Black Stars in much the same way that I would have been writing in and around it, had my life not been trapped beneath the very sweet and welcome weight of a baby. And a funny thing’s been happening.

I’ve found my process is still my process, even if it’s not on paper (er…screen). I write blind, which is to say that I don’t plan ahead much at all. I sit down to write and I just write. I follow whatever comes out. I don’t think too much, not with my rational brain anyway. If I allow myself to think in first draft, it all goes dead on me. So I have to trick myself to turn that editor brain off, write in a sort of trance. It’s how I do my best work, and when it’s going well–when I’m really plugged in–it’s the very best feeling in the world. Or in my world, anyway. (Insert all appropriate noises about something to do with my kids being truly the best feeling in the world.) (Sorry, kids. I love you. I do. It must suck to have a writer as a mother, sometimes. I try to be as present as possible with you guys, but you know I’m always partially stuck in some other world, don’t you?) This kind of writing leads to wonderful surprises, but it also leads to a lot of rewriting. Dead ends, etc. For each of my 300-or-so pg manuscripts, I’ve thrown out easily twice that many pages. And then revised, and revised, and revised once I reached the end of that first draft. Drowning Practice took ten drafts. Adverse Possession has been through five and likely wants at least one more. It’s messy work. Impractical. But it’s how I work best.

Well, I haven’t been able to sit down and write, to let my fingers go and follow whatever comes. Rather than bang my head against the wall or down unholy quantities of Rescue Remedy, I started letting myself play around in the story in my head. I’ve dreamed my way through my original ideas for it, built on some, discarded most. Gone down false paths and doubled back. Gotten to know my characters, have heard their voices. I know what the ground feels like, what they smell when they step out of their houses. I know what they want. I know what they’re afraid of. I know a good deal of what they’re going to do and what is going to be done to them from where the novel will open up to around about the middle. I have some suspicions about how it will all end, though I’m trying not to cast my gaze that far forward, intentionally keeping it foggy.

In short, I’ve already written and discarded a few hundred pages in my head. It doesn’t feel like I’m spending the juice of the story at all. It feels like writing. I won’t be surprised if when I do get time to sit and write again, it goes more smoothly than the first two books and needs fewer drafts. Nor will I be surprised if it still takes many tossed pages and many, many drafts. We’ll see. And I think we’ll see soon! The baby is settling in to a predictable nighttime pattern. I think I can start writing outside of my head again soon. Maybe even this week. I can’t wait.

Guess who’s started eating solid food? She’s six months now, sitting up unassisted for a few weeks already, and had been trying to mooch food off my plate constantly. It was time. So far I’ve made her pureed apples, pureed oats, and pureed pumpkin. She liked the apples and oats but she LOVES pumpkin. All about the pumpkin.

I made about 12 cups of pureed pumpkin and stashed it in the freezer. I need to buy and puree at least a few more pumpkins to be sure there’s enough of the stuff this winter for the big eaters as well as the newest one. Mmmmm…pumpkin soup…pumpkin risotto…pumpkin bread… Oh man…pumpkin muffins. My love of pumpkin borders on the unseemly.

Next up, green beans. Our pole beans that had dwindled down to barely a handful of beans a day through all of September have perked back up again. This was yesterday’s harvest:

I didn’t pick any for three days and that’s what we got. The ginormous ones aren’t tough and stringy because they grew so quickly. We had a lot of rain, but it isn’t cold yet. I think we’ve got at least one or two more bean harvests ahead. We ate a bunch fresh with dinner last night. The rest I’m going to save for the baby so she can have good stuff from the garden through the winter even though she isn’t ready for kale and collards and the other bitter stuff. I’ll puree and freeze some, but most I’ll blanch and freeze so I can prepare them differently as she starts to eat more textured foods.

I think that’s the second-to-last cucumber of the year. They’ve been so, so good, but we’ve eaten a ton of them and we’re ready to move on to what the fall garden has to offer us. This week we’ve got three kinds of kale, collards, and broccolini ready. That’s probably the last tomato, too, but that is more than fine. I’m getting close to being sick of them. I think I’ll either freeze or can all the tomatoes we’ve got piled up on the countertop and in the fridge. Sauce, maybe.

Oh–and the shallots finally cured! Aren’t they pretty?

They took way longer than the garlic to dry out. Not sure why that would be.

Which reminds me, I need to get this year’s garlic and shallots in the ground this week. We’re supposed to have a few days of sun until Thursday, so I’ll plan to get them in on Thursday when the ground has had a chance to dry out a bit.

PS: I have discovered that, yes, I can bake bread with someone strapped to my chest. I wore Ladybug in the Ergo while kneading the dough and it went just fine. And then we had some damn good bread to show for it.

PPS: When it comes to bulk food, I listen to Tama. She suggested I store our bulk grains in these, so that’s what we’re doing.