Slightly Domesticated. But Only Slightly.

Every so often, I take some time off from writing to do something homey and domestic and… well, things that make people say things like “You actually DO that?”

I make and can my own preserves. I think I’ve talked about The Peach Truck in the blog — where I can get 20 pounds of fresh Georgia peaches delivered to Central Florida. In July, which is not my favorite time for canning, to be honest. But I get my box, and I make peach butter and peach jam, and peach chutney and cobbler and all sorts of goodies.

Saturday I discovered the existence of The Apple Truck. Same deal, only I kinda went a little wild, and we now have 32 lbs of fresh Michigan apples (that were picked a week ago!).

Which means that yesterday, there was baking. (there was also an apple crisp and a very unphotogenic strudel. The picture of the crisp doesn’t want to load.)

The pies are now in the freezer for Thanksgiving.

Today, there is apple butter, and the race is on! Will the apple butter be done in the canner before I have to leave to go get into carline?

(The answer to that question, by the way, is yes. Right after I wrote it, I got up to check on the apple butter. Ten minutes later, it’s in the canner. It has to stay at a rolling boil for 15 minutes, which means I’ll be turning off the burner and leaving.)

There has been some writing this past week, but my focus really was on getting Children of Dreams wrapped up. Which… Children of Dreams is wrapped up, and it’s now available for pre-order almost everywhere!  (More places are being added daily — for some reason, some vendors are dragging their feet.) I’m still waiting on the final cover art for the print edition (because they needed the page count), so paperback preorders will be up sometime later this week.  For the record? 598 pages. It’s a BEAST.

It’s also oddly sad, in a way. I’ve been living with this particular set of voices in my head for four and a half years. Owyn especially — he tends to take over any scene he’s in, and when I say that the hardest part of writing this series was keeping it from becoming The Owyn Show? That’s the honest truth.

So now I need to clear my head and start looking at other characters. Lorcan is a good one, and telling the rest of his story is going to be fun. I had a good week on this book. And I mostly ignored The Sea Prince, and we’ll see if he’s got his nose out of joint over it when I look at the file again.

The White Raven: Morrigan’s Wrath
(The White Raven, Book 2)

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The Sea Prince
(The Sea Prince, Book 1)