flowers, birds, and the bees

This morning at the farm, I got to spend some time making bouquets with the masters - Helen and Elizabeth. These red ones, in Elizabeth's hand, are called "Tassel" (maybe tassle, I'm not sure). They are my current favorite. I had to leave to pick up Gillen from his overnight camp, and then he came back with me to make a few more. He likes to work with flowers.

We missed him this week. He loved the camp. The best part? After he got all of his new friends' phone numbers and had gotten into our car, he said that he couldn't wait to hug Jesse hello. Sweet.

Back to the farm. Look at the beautiful bouquet that Helen made (many of them, in challengingly shaped ceramic bowls) for a wedding. She used the dill flowers as a base to hold up the other flowers. Genius.

Check out the garlic, when it goes to flower:Of course, a bee had to make an appearance, to remind me of what I should be doing (and have been, a bit, every day - rereading my bee book and being inspired again about bees, while counting on the rewriting inspiration to make an appearance next week). Here is the bird part of today's story:The Carolina Wrens have come back. Having found their outdoor annual nesting spot now turned into a snazzy room for the cat, they moved to our front porch and made themselves at home in a few bike helmets. So cool! We'll be able to see the babies much more easily.

To Bee or Not to Bee

I'm really pushing the Hamlet word play this week.

A year ago, while the boys were in day camps, I wrote the first draft of a novel. It is called The O'Riley Bees and is 50,000 words long. I mentioned here that after six months of letting it sit, I read it to the kids and they liked it. I marked this month, in my mind, as the time when I would write the second draft.

This morning would have been the beginning of that endeavor.

Last night, instead of preparing, I used many words becoming more transparent here on my blog. This morning, I took yet more pictures of flowers at the farm and visited with the many workers (Nicolas has four additional helpers today, so I can't use farming as a way to get out of this).

Procrastination may clean my house or inspire a dance (I am alone after all), or too much blogging.

I like my protagonist - fifteen year old Finn. I like the girl he falls for, Bea. The Irish ghosts are fun. It's just hard to cozy up to the bees. You know?

It's time to go clean or something. I definitely need to walk away from this blog.

A plug for Nanowrimo

I got so much help from this book, (No Plot, No Problem) written by the man behind the idea of Nonowrimo. I was wary of doing the challenge in November with everyone else as I wasn't sure how many hours I would have to myself in November. It would have been great to have had a huge pool of fellow writers who just experienced the same insanity for a month - to share the let-down and also congratulate each other. Maybe I'll do this again some November. The book was my support. His advice worked so well for me that I'm continuing to follow it now. He recommends leaving the writing alone for a few weeks before starting revisions. I am wanting to keep going. But I think my brain needs to look elsewhere for awhile - like to the real bees in my back yard. They are taking over the hummingbird feeders, drinking all of the sugar water within a day of filling it for the birds. It's time to go have a serious talk with them, though I may have to channel my favorite character, brave Beatrice.I learned a few things about myself doing this challenge:

• Sometimes I need structure (in this case - deadlines, word counts, daily routine) to get going. This realization has helped me to understand one of my sons better.
• I am a writer. I may not be a good writer but I'm not going to feel self-indulgent for doing it.
• I learned that you ought to be in shape before you sit at a computer for hours. It can be a dangerous thing to not move at all for hours and then jump up and dance as if you were still young and nimble when a good song emerges on your writing soundtrack.
  
• Until my kids are older, I will only write when they are happily occupied or asleep.
  

The book's bees did deliver their message last night and then landed, much more gracefully than I had hoped. The first draft is done. I'm waiting on the champagne for the revision, or until Nicolas and I are not too tired to enjoy the whole bottle - whichever comes first ; )

51,733 and counting...

I did it. The O'Riley Bees reached 50,000 words on Friday. So, I made the word count. But the story is not over. I would have added many more words over the weekend but I sensed that the youngest member of my family had reached his word-count limit for a while.

By the time the kids were asleep last night, I was spent and had no more energy to go finish the story. A giant swarm of Beatrice's benevolent bees are hanging out over the ocean waiting to finally make it to Block Island and give their message to the throngs of people who are there to gawk at the visiting President. Paddy is no longer a bee, but a ghost, and Finn has yet to meet his father.

It is farm day so we are off to the farm to see yet another set of new ducklings! There will be Monday Farm photos later.

This challenge (and possibly, this adrenaline writing rush) ends tonight. I have to finish the first draft by the time I break out the champagne after dinner. Even if it means a really bad B-movie climax, the bees have to have landed!

The O'Riley Bees - a few paragraphs

Yesterday I hit the maaaad (as in crazy) part of this month long writing challenge. As I had earlier in the week, I got sucked into the research. This time I was looking up a few bee breeding and island facts and google filled my head and a pad of paper with way more than I needed to know. The book that Chris Baty wrote about this challenge recommended not allowing yourself to go to more than a few pages for research at a time. I see why.

In trying to find a few paragraphs to post here, I also ignored another cardinal rule, which is - don't reread what you have written. It started to make me a bit crazy last night to see how many inconsistencies have developed as my plot twists and turns. So I stopped looking for good paragraphs and am just going to post a few of the first paragraphs.

On an unseasonably pleasant day in July, on their Western Massachusetts farm, dusk was falling. Finn was picking the Brandywines and whistling a Flogging Molly tune to himself. He started singing, “If I ever leave this world alive,” carefully piling the giant heirloom tomatoes into an old bushel basket. He paused to take a bite of an overly ripe Brandywine, using the back of his hand to sop up the juice on his chin.

“Oh you don’t leave it alive, boy, but you do leave it with a sense of humor, if you’re lucky.” This was followed by a deep and bouncing laugh. "What is he doing harvesting in that shirt? What a mighty strange looking fellow.” The accent was Irish.

Finn dropped the Brandywine and looked around. No one was there.
“What? Who? Hello?” he stammered.

“You hear me?” came the cracking, surprised voice. This time, Finn was sure that it had come from the tomatoes. He squatted down and tentatively started searching for the hidden body, suddenly remembering the time when he was very small and talked to the fairies, right here at what was then his grandmother’s farm. At least, that is how his grandmother had described it when she’d come upon him in conversation. He had never seen anyone back then and had assumed, in retrospect, that he’d had a really vivid imagination. But now, he found himself searching for a little person, wondering if the Irish brogue could be coming from.. no, could he even let himself think it - a leprechaun? He moved aside a few of the branches, peering between the tomato cages, his feet grounded and ready to spring back if anything should appear.

“I didn’t meant to scare ya. I’ve never had a living talk back to me.” came the voice again, this time from a tomato bed a few feet in front of the one where Finn was crawling.

Finn froze, starting to feel wary of actually finding someone. What did he mean, “a living”. A living what? He was living, so that meant the voice was not? Then it occurred to him. It was the tomatoes! The Brandywines were talking to him. He picked one up and held it for a bit before quietly saying, “hello?”

And alright, because I happen to love one of my characters, Beatrice, this is from much later:

Once Finn and Beatrice had exited the bus, Finn had no idea where they should go. When he had only had a bee in a box to take care of he had assumed that he and Paddy would simply sleep on the beach. It was Newport. There must be a beach, right? But now that Beatrice was his traveling companion he didn’t know what to think. Did she have a plan? Was he supposed to follow her? He couldn’t imagine being away from her, even for the night. He adjusted the straps on his red backpack and stood looking up at the stars, hoping that she would say something. For an agonizing minute she just stood next to him, quietly watching the sky as well. All of the other passengers had collected their luggage and walked off to the station or towards the line of taxis, before Beatrice softly broke the silence.

“I hope the weather stays this mild. Bees can’t travel through rain and they are also handicapped by extreme heat. I think the weather will stay with them.” Beatrice turned to Finn, smiling. “Shall we get something to eat? I could eat a whole bushel of my auntie’s corn, slathered in butter. But I’ll settle for whatever they’ve got here.”

Words

Shanna, an artist, created this silhouette of me and I created the background. This was a few weeks ago when I was first thinking about the novel writing challenge. I realized today that it is an accurate visual of who I am right now (including the horn at the top, which is also the curl on the top of my forehead). My head is filled with broad strokes, small moments, Irish music, the bees of my story and the somewhat neglected bees in my yard, exciting storms and passionate chemistry, too much chatter and not enough silence.

I've written ten chapters and over 18,000 words in the past 12 days but am still 2,000 words behind where I'd like to be by now. But that's O.K. While getting behind, I was discovering a wonderfully useful but horrifically true article about GMOs, about the Irish potato famine and about bees, all of which are in some way in my book. Doesn't it sound like light reading? The article is not, but I am hoping the book will be.

I met a really interesting columnist the other night at the GA Organics event. She is wonderful with words. She writes a column called woman to woman that compares a conservative woman's point of view on a topic to that of a liberal woman- the woman I met - Andrea Sarvady. We talked the other night about how unusual it is for women to get into it with other women about politics or religion. Men are much more likely, in person, to duke it out and try to convince the other guy that they are right. Women do it more anonymously I think, via blogs or email.

Lastly, I saw a film last night that was very quiet and moving called The Secret life of Words. Tim Robbins is in it and he is so different than in anything else I've ever seen him in. I liked it a lot.

Madnowrimo

That is the way in which my friend Helen referred to this crazy lone-wolf pursuit of mine to write a novel in thirty days. It isn't really nanowrimo, as I am not doing it in November with all of the good support of the usual national novel writing participants.

It is Madnowrimo - meaning one of several things, depending on the hour:

1. Madeline's novel writing month
2. Mad (as in utterly insane) for choosing to write a novel this month
3. Madly (as in obsessively, but with a joyful skipping-through-the -flower-fields-and-glens feeling) novel-writing this month
4. Mad for not writing in the same month as inspiring people like Alecto and Jessica.
   
5. Mad no wri' mo'!
   

So far, in the brief four and a half days I have been doing this, it has mostly felt like #3. But there have also been moments of #2.

I read that the first week is always a breeze compared to the rest of the month. Once I am in week three I can imagine being reduced to a blubbering, barely audible #5, all of the words I have heard of in my entire life having been used up in the previous days' word counts, my brain a warped, gray, plastic tub of sour grape jelly.

As for the story, I usually don't know what is going to happen next and that is exciting. So far, the book is about a fourteen year old, Flogging Molly-loving farmer-boy named Finn, a somewhat bewildered Irish ghost who starved to death in the potato famine of 1849, and a quest to find Finn's missing father who may have the answer to the bees' Colony Collapse Disorder, but could also be the reason that the African bees were released in Brazil, thus having caused the beginning of Aricanized killer bee colonies that have reached the United States.

I am writing while Jesse is in day camp, for several hours every day. Yesterday, with Gillen gone those hours as well, I stayed at the computer and forgot to eat anything but chocolate and was a depleted mess by dinner time.

The writing is so much fun that I could imagine doing it on a regular basis, even if just to then read it to my children. But with them around, the words don't make themselves heard so loudly. The words don't like interruptions. So I am enjoying this now for all it's worth.