‘s entries about the weaselly creature that showed up at her house a few weeks ago and looked a lot like a wolverine. I think this may be a smaller, cuter, distant cousin. He spent the afternoon frolicking up and down the shore, climbing into drainage pipes, and then playing peek-a-boo before jumping out again. We’re trying to think of a name for him (or her). Any suggestions?
used it as an inspiration for his hilarious blog post this morning, and he’s prompted me to come clean with a quirky hobby. I save subject lines from spam emails and use them as titles for poems. This is great fun, as you can imagine. Here’s my favorite so far, and yes, the title really was the subject line of an email I received…
WAFFLE BUTT
I have been sitting on the plastic lawnchair all afternoon sipping lemonade in the sun and cannot possibly get up to make you dinner.
My cool glass needs me. Beads of condensation roll down its sides and my book has five more chapters. The forest green plastic is woven in and out like a first grade construction paper placemat to keep me from falling through the aluminum base to the warm prickly grass. The plastic and I are one.
If I stand to get the chicken from the fridge the chair will come along stuck to my sweaty thighs for all time or at least until I get to the door and it falls off onto the porch. Then I’d have those little squares on the backs of my legs for hours — maybe even until dinner and if we sit in these chairs to eat, well, it would start all over again.
No. We’d better order a pizza, and I’ll just stay put.
————————————- What’s in your email trash today? If you find inspiration for a poem, I’d love to read it!
I’ve been a bad blogger this week, but I’ll try to make up for it with an mega-post today. Here are many things on a Monday…
1. I had coffee this morning with Bonnie Shimko, a marvelous YA writer and, it turns out, a marvelous person. I’ve read her books but never met her until this morning, even though she lives in my area. Bonnie wrote the Lambda Award-winning LETTERS IN THE ATTIC and more recently, KAT’S PROMISE. It was wonderful to talk writing over an iced coffee and to laugh (and lament) about the agent search with someone who’s been through it.
2. My parents visited this weekend for E’s birthday, and we enjoyed the sunshine and the lake. They also brought me an unbelievable early book release gift — an antique powder horn from the 18th century. The gift came with a note from my main character…
Abigail, my MC in SPITFIRE carries her father’s powder horn. It’s an important symbol in the story and a part of my presentation for schools. Mom and Dad were at an antique show in the Finger Lakes and found this one, from the Kingston, NY area, dated 1787. Leave it to them to put the icing on the cake of this first book being published. These are the people who have believed in my writing since I could hold a pencil, and … (secret for LJ readers coming)… my mom is the artist who did the cover painting for SPITFIRE. You can visit her and see more of her work at her journal,
3. It’s finally stopped raining in the Champlain Valley, so we spent a few great days camping in the Adirondacks with family and boating on Lake Champlain. Spending time outside here makes me so thankful to live in a place where there are still so many special, forgotten places.
My husband’s brother and his family camp each summer in Wilmington, NY, so we spent a night with them and took a hike to Copperas Pond in the Adirondacks. (It’s one of the stops in Mystery Writer’s journal, but alas, the log book here also failed to go back as far as the date of her hike, so we’ll have to keep waiting to get the older logs we’ve requested from the Department of Environmental Conservation.)
Copperas Pond is a cool blue gem in the shadow of the mountains, perfect for frog-hunting and swimming. My son made a friend while he was resting on a log in the water…
Temperatures passed 90 degrees this week, so we were thankful for the cool mountain water. Copperas Pond has some terrific cliffs that drop off into deep water, which means you can do this…
(That’s me, when I finally got up the courage, after the 11-year-old had already done it five or six times.)
Yesterday, we took our little rowboat over to Valcour Island, the setting for SPITFIRE and a place I’ve always loved. There’s a perfect pebbly beach on the south end of the island where the stones are smooth and warm.
There’s also a rock wall on one side of the cove with a little cave in it, where we play Messner Rock Challenge.
Here are the rules, in case you go there some day and want to play. See those pieces of driftwood on the beach? You have to stand behind the back stick if you’re an adult and behind the front stick if you’re a kid. Toss rocks, one at a time, and try to get them to stay in the little cave. Take turns. The first person to have three rocks stay in the cave wins. If someone knocks your rock out of the cave, you don’t get credit for that rock. You have to have three rocks in there at the end to win. It’s harder than it sounds because they bounce out. My husband won yesterday’s game after about 15 minutes of rock tossing, and there were only this many rocks in the cave.
The ground next to the cave was another story…
I managed to get just one rock into the cave, which was promptly knocked out by someone (can’t remember who) who laughed a sinister laugh. Here’s hoping you have better luck if you get a chance to visit Valcour Island some day…
I gave my first presentation on SPITFIRE on Monday and couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant and receptive audience. Clinton Community College hosts a teachers’ historical workshop about Benedict Arnold in the Champlain Valley. Facilitators Tom Mandeville and John Mockry do a fantastic job sharing knowledge about Lake Champlain history and leading field trips around the region.
I was the after-lunch speaker on Monday. They had lasagna, and I worried about this, but only one person dozed off a little, and I think I woke him up with my bo’sun’s whistle. (It’s used to issue orders during battle…or to get attention during a presentation as the need arises…)
I presented my PowerPoint about the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain, the real 12-year-old boy who fought in that battle, and how I researched his life and life on board an 18th century gunboat to write SPITFIRE. I also gave teachers a sneak peak at my school presentation, showing some of the artifact replicas, articles of clothing, and other 18th century treats I’ll be sharing with students this fall.
I gave my first reading from SPITFIRE to people who don’t live with me, and that was a terrific feeling. The teachers were kind enough to laugh in all the right places, had nice things to say about my research and writing, and clapped when I was done.
It was a wonderful afternoon, and it was great to spend time with people who love Lake Champlain and its history as much as I do.
I took a long drive through the Adirondacks and along Lake Champlain this morning for a research trip to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. It was a perfect day — beautiful weather, fantastically helpful people, and great photographs for my Monday presentation to a teachers’ historical workshop. Excitement about the new Harry Potter book made me slam on the brakes for a photo op…
Doesn’t this sound like a place where the Dursleys would send Harry to get beat up? Camp Dudley is actually a beautiful YMCA camp on Lake Champlain, but really… who wants to be named after the mean, chubby cousin?
And how about this road? Do you suppose real estate values have gone down? I’d rather live on Dumbledore Drive any day.
Just three more days, by the way! We spent yesterday making our wands for the midnight release party. They sparkle, and they really work. When you flick your wand and shout, “Stupefy!” people go flying dramatically into walls. (At least at our house, they do…)
Yesterday was the first day in almost a week that we haven’t had storms in the Champlain Valley. This morning, I woke up to thunder again, went down to close the windows on the sun porch, and saw the sun coming up across the lake, through the pouring rain. I sat for half an hour and watched it rise, then disappear into the bank of clouds spreading east. I’ve lived here almost nine years and taken lots of pictures, but today was new. I’m a day late for Thankful Thursday, but I am always thankful for stolen moments like these…
Several people have sent me notes & comments asking about the progress in the Case of the Journal in the Woods. For now, it remains in the possession of a multi-generational group of Nancy Drew wannabes. We’ve been told that Kris at the DEC takes care of the old trail logs, where there might be evidence of who hiked the trails noted on particular dates in the journal, and we’ve emailed Kris a list of dates. He said he’d check it out and get back to us within a couple weeks. I’ll keep you posted!
As for the powder horns on the roof… they smell bad. Yesterday, the rain washed one of them down the roof slope almost to the gutter. I need to climb out and bring it back up tomorrow so it doesn’t fall onto the car in the driveway below. A broken windshield would be a crummy end to this experiment.
I boarded the Kings’ ship; now in the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement; sometime I’d divide And burn in many places; on the topmast The yards and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly Then meet and join.
—The Tempest (Act I, Scene 2) William Shakespeare
I just saw the coolest thing ever.
It was stormy again on Lake Champlain, so even though I should have been working on my new MG historical after the kids went to bed tonight, I was out on my sun porch trying to take pictures of lightning.
About two minutes after I took this picture (in which I caught the cool purple glow but missed the bolt), a distinct glow appeared at the top of the mast of my neighbor’s sailboat. About two seconds later, a huge, zig-zaggity bolt of lightning came down and, if it didn’t hit the sailboat directly, came awfully close.
The glow was what sailors used to call St. Elmo’s Fire. It was plasma — gas whose molecules were ripped apart by high voltage to create a glowing soup of protons and electrons. It’s basically the same thing that happens inside the tube of a neon sign to make it light up. But tonight, it happened at the tip of my neighbor’s sailboat mast. While I was sitting on the porch watching.
I’ve seen this phenomenon before at the Boston Museum of Science Lightning Show. They have a Van de Graaff generator there that produces an indoor lightning storm, and sure enough, we saw that static-like, sparky glow before the lightning zapped in the Hall of Electricity.
To see it in the museum was fascinating and thought-provoking.
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