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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,

gailschirmer

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…

My editor just emailed me the current cover for SPITFIRE to get my feedback, and he gave me permission to share, so…..

I’m thrilled with the way it turned out and have suggested just a few minor tweaks (like a slightly bolder title). 

Comments & suggestions are welcome!

Meanwhile…I keep coming back to my computer to look at it.  My book has a COVER!

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. 

To see it in nature was awesome and humbling. 

And just so darn cool.

Today, J and his friend raided the recycling bin and made boats out of milk jugs, water bottles, aluminum cans, fan parts, batteries, paper sails, wooden dowels, small motors removed from broken remote control vehicles, and duct tape.  Lots of duct tape.  They took them down to the lake to race.

E and I perched on the big rock on our beach and pretended to be mermaids and sirens.  We sang songs to lure the boats onto the rocks to be dashed to pieces.  One of them did, in fact, end up dashed to pieces, but I’m not sure it had anything to do with us.  Do you think Homer’s sirens sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow?”

Then we had s’mores. 

I love s’mores.  I love recycled, duct tape boats. I love being a mermaid (though it was tough holding my legs still and together for so long) and being a mom. 

Signing off now, to go wash the marshmallow out of my hair….

It was one of those rainy, sunny, rainy, cloudy, sunny, rainy-again days on Lake Champlain.  Which means perfect weather for this:

I love rainbow pictures.  I’ve rushed into the house for my camera so many times that I have a permanent bruise where my shin always slams into the last step on the deck.  We have a little gallery of lake-rainbow pictures in the front hallway. 

And I have a thing for lightning, too.  If you’ve never tried to photograph lightning with a regular, pretty cheap digital camera, you should know that it’s not easy.  I’ll sit through an entire storm on the sun porch with my trigger finger on the camera, just waiting for that bolt that lasts a split second longer than the rest. 

Here’s a shot from a couple weeks ago…

I mentioned my penchant for photographing lovely, intangible things to my very funny and very wicked friend Nancy at an English teachers’ lunch, and she smirked at me.

 “What will you be photographing next week?  Hope?  Serendipity?  Nuance, perhaps?’ 

And that’s when I figured it out.  Capturing things that don’t last,  things that hang in the air but can’t be touched, is the reason so many of us write.  It’s a way to make hope and prisms and jagged flashes of light last forever,  a way to share them and take them home.