NewBook Has an End

About 1:20 pm today, NewBook attempted the “trickling away” ending (which usually means the real ending is some pages back) and sure enough, the real ending was some pages back.   It’s found its end.   Now comes the chainsaw of correction, the gorilla glue of mending and patching, the jewelers’ rouge for polishing, and weeks more of work, BUT…I’m going to claim mental rehab success at the construction of a whole blinkin’ book following that concussion after which I couldn’t follow the storyline of a children’s book or write more than very short factual posts that made sense.   In rough, it’s 132,270 words, but that will shrink with revision.  I’m aiming for something well down in the 120s.

R-, bless him, has gone to pick up fried chicken for me to celebrate with.   My hand hurts, so I’m not typing more than this today.  YAY!

11 thoughts on “NewBook Has an End

  1. Very good for you. We will await publication eagerly, then complain that the book is too short and the next one is too late. Take your time, you have to do the work.

    Stay Safe and Stay Sane and enjoy your chicken – why not one of the annoying peacocks?

    Jonathan up here in cooling New Hampshire

  2. Why not peacocks? Never heard they were tender, juicy, and fried well. Also, the plucking. Yes, the feathers are lovely. But there are a lot of them and I am not enamored of plucking. (Also if I show up in this little town with peacock feathers adorning my hat, suspicion of peacockicide will definitely fall on me. )

    1. Ah the plucking. My father had a massive heart attack at the age of 56 and his doctor told him that the only meat he could have was chicken or fish. After a few weeks of that, Dad told Mom that the chicken he had eaten as a child was much better than what they were buying in the grocery store. They lived in a rural area and a friend of his bought geese, ducks, and chickens each spring. He gave Dad the catalog. They offered one dozen of various specific types of chicken for whatever the price was (this was in the 1980’s and I have no idea) But on the back cover was an advertisement for a mixed assortment of 100 baby chicks for less than the price of a dozen of of the others. So of course, my father, being a thrifty man ordered the 100 baby chicks. I got a phone call to go to the post office and pick up a package. I had no idea what I was picking up, so but being a dutiful, obedient daughter, I went to the post office and told them I was there to get a package for my dad. They were SO thrilled I was there and brought out a very noisy wooden box. I didn’t know how chickens were shipped before that. The saga of the chicks has many parts, but plucking adult chickens became part of my education that year.

      1. We benefited from a medical center’s error in ordering fertile eggs for experiments…they ordered too many. One of the medical students asked if he could have the extra fertile eggs, intending to incubate them, hatech them out, and then have eggs or meat, depending on sex & type. R- was a medical student, and we were in a small house with a yard in which we were gardening–a yard with a child’s playhouse in it. That became the chicken house, though we incubated the eggs in the bathroom. Out of our dozen eggs, we got 10 live chicks, and as soon as possible the playhouse became their home. We put up a run just outside the house (attached to it) and built a ramp from one of the playhouse windows into the run. Three roosters, seven hens. They were all white leghorns in type (egg-layers) but showed definite differences. When the roosters got big enough to tangle with each other, we killed and ate two, and kept one to fertilize the eggs. The hens were superb egg-layers. I kept records on them (having bought, years before, a government publication on small flock management) and every one was a 300+ egg/year hen. But the feathers…when we were moving (250 miles, and no place to keep chickens where we were going), we killed off the flock and I did not want to pluck 8 chickens. So I skinned them. And I’ve skinned every chicken I’ve killed since then (we never had as big a flock here, so not a lot, but some.) If you’ve got roosters with gorgeous feathers, you hang the skin on a fencepost or lay it on top of a fire ant bed, and ants will clean the skin amazingly…and people who tie their own flies for fishing will beg for the skins. (White chickens don’t have the beautiful rooster feathers, though the neck “streamers” may have a nice glisten and look silvery.) And best of all, you’ve got a chicken carcass with no pin-feathers.

  3. I am very excited to hear that New Book has revealed the ending! I have followed your descriptions of your writing process and journey with great interest and hope you will continue to share.

    1. I will be writing more about both the recovery process and my specific process in writing. But I kind of wore myself out today on barn chores. Did get in an in-hand lesson for both the boys, after rebuilding the pattern I’d laid out in sewer pipe from their careless wandering through it and a powerful windstorm last night when the front came through.

  4. I hope the chicken was delicious. Your story about using the play house for a chicken house reminded me of my sister. She got some chicks and had them in her basement and the cats were fascinated by the sounds until one of them got in the basement and saw all the chicks at once and fled for the hills. She kept the chickens for eggs even though she only uses eggs in cookies or cakes. She had a moveable mesh pen (in addition to the main house & run) and would rotate them through her garden eating all the bugs there. If you walked up to the pen, they would come running because most people who came to the pen had treats (favored grass, bugs, whatever).

    1. Our chickens were generally crop thieves, not bug-killers…as chicks/too young to lay chickens, they ate roly-polies (sowbugs) but typically as adult chickens they ate our Swiss chard (I didn’t it that much, so it was great greens for them), strawberries (esp. Shorty…Shorty loose in the back yard made a beeline for the strawberries), and tomatoes. They were especially fond of yellow pear tomatoes. They may have gone after cockroaches, but I saw that only once. Up here, our big gorgeous silver and black with green trim rooster (the very mean one, Savage Sam) killed snakes and attacked our dog. And us. Sam made delicious broth, but even boiled *forever* his flesh was solid rubber. The hens in San Antonio made decent chicken stew.

  5. I am so glad to hear this, ones brain not being what it was seems to me, from the experiences of relatives who have had head injuries, to be one of the most frustrating and frightening experiences one can have. Glad that you have finished the first draft of the book of course, but that is the proof of the pudding!

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