Category: writing

A room with a view

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, writing
The view from my room this morning

I got to have an entire room of my own (with a view!) in which to work on editing my book.

This is big; you see, I’ve never had my own room before.

My husband, after realizing that I had an extra day off this week said, “Hey, get a room!”…Well, even though he didn’t mean what I thought he meant…it still turned out to be a great thing.

Here’s what he proposed: I get a room, pack up my laptop, book draft, notebooks, and anything else I thought I’d need, go there and work on my book. Alone. Away from the laundry. Away from the dishes. Away from the fam (I love them all, but I always stop what I’m doing because I want to do things for them, as my husband pointed out, instead of doing things for me).

I arrived at the (cheap! off-season! weekday rate!) room around 1:45pm, worked until 6pm, when my husband and daughter arrived with supper. It was one of my favorite meals:  sausage pizza from Spiller Farm (Jeannine Spiller makes an awesome pizza!) and a bottle of Diet Coke. We ate together, balancing pizza on napkins on our laps as we perched on the edge of the bed (Izzy got the chair). Life was good. Then they went home and I continued working until 10pm.

Having a great excuse (for the second week in a row) to skip the gym, I picked up some pre-dawn breakfast and got back to work by 6:45am. I worked until noon and managed to finish the first round of edits on my manuscript. While I was working, I set a timer, and every thirty  minutes I took a break, jumped up to do a minute or two of yoga, then got back to work.

Structure…it’s a beautiful thing. 🙂

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Snow day! Top ten (fun) things to do

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, italian, Karen's Kitchen, movies, recipes, writing

I have not had a snow day for quite a while  (the Christmas Blizzard doesn’t count because I was too worried about my husband and son driving home from work in it to enjoy it). I decided to plan ahead for the next one, so I was ready to dive into distraction at a moment’s notice.

Stuff to do:

  1. a.Crack out the crock pot. The big one. Make soup. Here’s a recipe for Minestrone using whatever you have in the pantry and fridge. Whatever is left over can be frozen to bring to work to eat for lunch during the week.  b.Pull out the frozen gravy, meatballs and sausage from the freezer; place in crock pot. Add whatever odds and ends of meat you have leftover. Supper is almost ready!
  2. No crock pot? Here’s a great recipe from Stephen Lanzalotta (author of The Diet Code, and baker extraordinaire at Micucci’s on India Street in Portland) that uses stuff (once again) that you have in the pantry right now. Really. I’ll wait while you go check. It’s for Tomato and Tuna Soup for one. Not alone (or just really hungry)? Just employ a little math to double or triple the recipe. Done.
  3. Got Netflix? Load up your instant queue so now that the flakes are flying, all you’ll have to do is hit the “play” button.
  4. Bake! You can mix up a bucket of bread dough (keeps in fridge for up to two weeks) so it’s ready when you are. Not much gets those endorphins going like the smell of fresh bread baking.
  5. Read! Got a stack of books by (or under) the bed? A stack of magazines you’ve had no time to read? A Kindle? Go for it.
  6. Write! Keep a file that you toss your little scraps of napkins, post its, notebook paper on which you’ve jotted down ideas that came to you while driving, watching TV, listening to a boring lecture at school so you will always have your own prompts and projects ready.
  7. Got kids? Play Wii! (or Uno, or checkers, or whatever!)
  8. Take a nap. You know you want to.
  9. Virtually  visit with friends and relatives via FB or email. In other words…DON”T DRIVE!
  10. Be grateful the fam is all safe and sound.

🙂

New Year’s Eve, tween style

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, books, friends, Holidays, local fun, movies, tweens, writing

Today was a “Girl’s only” day for me and my tween. We had originally planned to go shopping to spend gift cards received for Christmas (both for her and for me) but then changed the plan to include a movie with a friend. (We never did go shopping with the gift cards, come to think of it…)

She and her friend went back and forth for a few days about which movie to see, Yogi Bear or Gulliver’s Travels.  Neither movie received great reviews, from the critics nor from her older brother, so as far as I was concerned, it was a toss-up. In the end, they chose Gulliver. I braced myself and we settled in for the show.

Well, from a parental standpoint, it wasn’t too terrible (except for when Jack Black was showing his “plumber’s crack” in the beginning. Eeew.). There were a few laughs, and the cast was likeable. The tweens gave it “two thumbs up!”  however, and those are the opinions that really matter, right?

After that, we did a quick food shopping (hey, Hannaford’s was right next door; why  make a second trip?), then back to the house. The girls had a few laughs playing Wii sports, Zsu Zsu pets, and listening to CD’s while I put away the groceries, paid the bills that came in today’s mail (ugh), and wrote quick book blog post.

Then we brought her friend home and came back to make supper: linguini, turkey, roasted red peppers in garlic, butter, and olive oil…pea pods added to Mom’s. After supper, we played a quick building game with magnets, thenwe finished the day with a little couch time, watching iCarly. I promised to wake her up if I am awake at midnight, but the odds of that are VERY SLIM. 🙂

Linguini with roased red peppers and turkey
...and pea pods added for Mom

What I didn’t do today

by Karen, posted in books, writing

These are all of the things I didn’t do today on my day off from nursing, wife-ing, and  mothering.

  1. Read. Well, okay I did read a little, but only the local newspaper, briefly, while I was eating my minestrone soup, with a cup of coffee and a gingerbread muffin chaser.
  2. Knit. I have a hat that’s 3/4 of the way finished, calling to me from the jumble of bags in the Sterlite storage bucket in the entry.
  3. Visit the ocean. I didn’t go. I wanted to go, but every time the thought presented itself, I had to push it away, and concentrate on what I was doing.
  4. Bake. I have a perfectly good recipe for whoopie pies right there on my kitchen island; I can see it from where I’m sitting. “No! Focus! You can bake later!!”
  5. Shop. I have a (large) pile of newspaper clippings, coupons, flyers, and circulars for amazing, limited time only sales on the presents that I need for upcoming birthdays, not to mention Christmas. 

What did I do instead? I wrote 2,243 more words of my book.

(Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t have the day off from houseworking. Does anyone, ever? I did four loads of wash, made butternut squash soup and baked a loaf of bread to go with it, took care of the chickens, and boiled potatoes for home fries).

My book in progress!

Last year, I read about National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano) coming up in November, and thought, What a great idea! Maybe I’ll do that! Of course, I did not. Instead, I thought, next year…I’ll do it next year. Well, next year is now this year.

Oh-oh. Time to walk the talk. If I was going to do this, I needed a plan. NaNoWriMo waits for no woman. The premise is that you write a 50,000 word book during the month of November, beginning at 12:00AM November 1 and ending at 12 midnight on November 30. Somewhere in the world, the writing powers that be decided that 50,000 is the minimum number of words in a book for it to be considered a novel.

I figured out that if I wrote at least 2.000 words every day, I would finish my novel by month’s end (or at least 50,000 words of it). November would come and go either way. Last November came and went and I had no book to show for it.

This year will be different.

As of right this minute, I have written 42,139 words of my 50,000. I can see the finish line.

Since I’ve hit my 2,000 words for today already, hmmmm…maybe I’ll do a little shopping after all… 🙂