I Fought The Fruit Flies (And The Fruit Flies Won)

The gnats have been upgraded to fruit flies. I wish they were vegetable flies, since I eat a lot more fruit than vegetables.

My garbage can (recently renamed Cujo) remains in exile on my patio. My cutting board, aka Fruit Fly Riviera, is on the patio as well. My fruit is in the currently uninfested refrigerator.



I gave in to the dark side and bought insecticide, some organic stuff that guarantees if it poisons me to death, I'll die green. The best I can say for it (and this is no small thing) is that it's not a fruit fly aphrodisiac. Although I do worry about its logo: Be Fruit Fly And Multiply. But since I can't be trusted with anything that sprays, my kitchen walls are now permanently discolored.



I'm never getting my security deposit back so what do I care.

Scooter is out of sorts because I held off giving him his canned cat food yesterday. Today I fed him but he's still out of sorts because the fruit flies like canned cat food almost as much as he does.

My mother is sort of in sorts. She seems to be accepting the nursing home fairly well. Yesterday (and I was there to witness it), a physical therapist came in just as she was being served lunch, to tell her he'd be in after she'd eaten to take her to exercise. My mother informed him it wasn't good to exercise after eating. I gather she convinced him and she was spared the ordeal of getting up out of her chair and walking.

As you can tell from my complete (and unusual) inability to answer any of your comments, I remain frazzled and unproductive. In theory I'm going to start writing again today. I also have some fantasies of throwing out the garbage bag and giving Cujo a massive scrubbing. I think I'll try to smuggle my cutting board into the dishwasher. Maybe the fruit flies will follow it there and get scrubbed out of existence.

The best thing about this July is tomorrow it will be August!

My Mother Sums It All Up

I got to the hospital just as my mother was being taken from her room to the nursing home. I hadn't realized it would happen quite as early as it did, and I'd spent a lot of time chatting with the gnats (who are still there and send their regards).

My mother was a bit peeved about the whole business, especially since I hadn't been there to explain what was going to happen. She looked at the men who were transporting her and said, "Well the first hundred years were nice!"

The Shade Of The Mother Trumps The Shade Of The Moon

But before I get to that, does anyone know a system for ridding a kitchen of gnats?

I don't know for sure they're gnats- that's my generic term for little nuisancy insects that have a particular fondness for fruit salad. They've been hanging out in my garbage can, so I moved my garbage can to my patio this morning, hoping they'd take the hint, but now there are scores of them hovering around in my kitchen. I suppose I could spray them to death with insecticide, but I'm reluctant to do that.

Hold on. I'm going to try spraying them with white vinegar. Worse comes to worst, I can eat them in a salad...

Well, that's not going to make it to Helpful Hints From Heloise, but I have to admit it was the best time I've had in a while.

In my book Kid Power, Janie has to get rid of Japanese beetles (has their name been changed to something less nation specific?), so she tries a trick I learned in Women's Day or Family Circle- taking some canned fruit and putting it in a bowl and then putting the bowl in a bigger bowl of water. The idea is the beetles get drunk on the fruit and keel over into the water and drown.

I actually tried it once, several years after the book was published. Not a single beetle fell for the trick (I guess they'd read Kid Power), but a number of wasps did. I have a live and let live attitude towards wasps and hornets, so I felt kind of bad about that.

It's lunchtime too, but I don't feel like making anything with dozens of gnats looking over my shoulder. Le hungry sigh.

It's been a difficult week even without the gnat invasion. My mother and I spent five relatively pleasant hours in the emergency room Monday night, and she's been in the hospital ever since. She's getting released this afternoon and will go to the nursing home where she spent some time this past fall. She likes it there a lot, so that's a good thing. As best we can figure out, her blood pressure spiked which started the problems and then the hospital made her sicker (as is their wont).

My brother spent Wednesday in the hospital with her so I could get some work done, but I didn't. There were too many phone call interruptions. So I've left all your comments unanswered, although believe me, I read each and every one of them and appreciated each and every one of them.

I did figure out a slightly new direction for The Shade Of The Moon, but I got an email from Princess Summerfallwinterspring last night saying she wasn't feeling well. If she doesn't make a miraculous recovery, I won't be able to consult with her, and might actually have to plot the book on my own. Which doesn't seem fair, all things considered.

On two very different subjects (intended to distract you from my confession that I haven't been working), Scooter makes a special guest star appearance over here, and The New York Times has an interesting article about the effect of e-books on paperbacks.

I suppose I should see what the gnats and my mother are up to. Maybe one or the other will take over writing my book for me!

The Shade Of The Moon Is Right On Schedule

I'm confident I'll meet the August 43rd deadline.

That's Aug. 43, 2011 for all you doubters out there.

There's been no end to the obstacles in my path. The Evil Murdoch Clan forced me to spend an entire day watching CNN International (Parliament committee meeting rooms remind me a lot of the local school board meeting rooms from the days when I used to watch local school board meetings on TV, albeit not on CNN International). My mother has entered the Misplacing Years, so I've had to make the occasional trip over to her apartment to locate her hearing aid and the suchlike. Even though my apartment has central air conditioning, I still had to take time off to ponder the sweltering heat outside. And I've had to nurse my modest one game winning streak on Free Cell solitaire.

Saturday evening, when I was pondering the inevitability of folding my laundry, I had one of those ZOWIE! realizations that force freelance children's book writers to rethink everything (or worse still, to fold their laundry). To use the term Shakespeare popularized in his memoirs (My Days And Nights With Queen Elizabeth The 1st, available only at Borders Bookstores), I've been plowing my way through this ding dong manuscript, occasionally leaving massive gaps when there's a scene to be written that might actually take energy and brain cells (both better spent on Free Cell Solitaire). There were (well, technically are, since I haven't written any of them yet) three of those scenes yet to be begun, except in my mind, where they're just about all written, and not for the first time I regret that no one's invented a way to get words directly from brain to book while skipping all the intermediary steps.

My ZOWIE! realization was that after those three big energy scenes are completed, there are no more big energy scenes left in the entire book as currently plotted, which means a handful of more discerning readers might find the final fifty or so pages a complete anti-climax.

Okay. More than a handful. More like everybody.

Now personally I have nothing against an anti-climax if I'm the one doing the writing, but I am sensitive to the wishes and needs of all humanity (except the Evil Murdoch Clan and maybe some members of a political party that shall remain nameless because the very thought of them gives me hives and I don't want them to have the satisfaction of seeing my skin all blotchy, although now that I think about it blotchy skin is probably an excellent reason not to get any work done), and all humanity writing reviews of my masterwork casually mentioning that the final fifty pages or so are completely, totally, and irrevocably anti-climactic might not be beneficial to my future royalty checks.

Fortunately for me, folding my laundry provided quite a wonderful distraction, and I didn't bother thinking about those final fifty pages for a happy day or so.

But last night I thought I really should solve this problem, because I only have so much laundry to do at any one time, and the Evil Murdoch Clan is laying low (and lying high). So I did what any sensible writer would do. I called in the reinforcements.

I happen to have a very close friend who I consult on occasion when a plot is giving me woe. Since I have enormous respect for her as a person, but not so much respect for her right to privacy, I'm going to call her by her actual name, Princess Summerfallwinterspring.

I called Princess Summerfallwinterspring and told her the basic idea of The Shade Of The Moon, leaving out only the witty repartee on Pages 12-13, so she'll have something to look forward to when she reads it. I explained the three big scenes and the ZOWIE! concerns. I told her of my inchoate whatevers (inchoate is such a fabulous word, but I have no idea how to use it in a sentence), and how I was willing (more than willing, maybe even salivating with willingness) to dump one of the three big scenes, in exchange for a super big scene at the very end of the book.

Princess Summerfallwinterspring (or Princess Summerfallwinter as she's known to her closest of closest friends) listened, pondered, and solved. She led me, kindly, patiently, and on her phone bill, to a final scene that has a lot of stuff happening in it, plus that emotional resonance I'm such a sucker for.

It's still not 100% formulated in my mind, but then again I probably won't write it until August 35th at the earliest.

And when I woke up this morning, I completely changed one of the remaining two big energy and brain cell draining scenes, so it's a good thing I never wrote a single word in either of them since I'd have to rewrite it anyway. I guess the Evil Murdoch Clan was good for something.

For those of you who are still interested in what I have to say (Hi Mom!), there's a new interview with me at The Gatekeepers Post, which is a very interesting place with or without interviews with me.

I'm off to play another round of Free Cell Solitaire, to see if I can keep my winning streak from falling into negative numbers. I promise to blog again before July 39th!

This Spoiler Solution Is Safe For Spoiler Avoiders To Read

Not perhaps the slickest of blog entry titles, but I wanted everyone to know it's safe.

I wasn't sure how to put spoilers for The Shade Of The Moon where folks who wanted to read them could and folks who didn't wouldn't run into them.

And then I remembered, I had an entire blog for This World We Live In that I haven't used since This World We Live In got published. Blogspot with its infinite generosity didn't care what became of it.

So if you follow this link you'll find a blog entry with 5 (count 'em 5)plot-explaining spoilers (really mostly about who the characters are), plus an explanation of how and why I wrote Chapter 28 of The Shade Of The Moon plus Chapter 28 itself.

And if you don't follow the link, you can remain pure and unspoiled.

Comments can be left over there, and I will be reading them. But I don't see using that blog for anything more than this single entry. It's time consuming enough writing The Shade Of The Moon, not to mention getting Scooter to pose for all those lovely pictures.

For those of you who go over and read, I hope you like the direction The Shade Of The Moon is taking. For those of you who don't, it's a pleasure and a joy to have you here anyway!

All The News That's Fit To Paw

I haven't gotten very much work done the past two days. Yesterday I watched Parliament hearings on the various Murdochs and their evil minions, and today, well I'm sure I have an equally good excuse why I didn't get much done today.

Meanwhile Scooter has taken to reading the New York Times. He thought this article was the cat's pajamas.

I'll be posting tomorrow with the brilliant spoiler solution. But now I must go back to not working!

Two Four Six Eight I Think I'll Hyperventilate

I'm taking the day off from writing The Shade Of The Moon, which isn't the same as taking the day off from thinking about The Shade Of The Moon, which is what I really need.

I am definitely overinvolved. It's pretty much all I think about, and when I'm not writing it, I actually want to be writing it. Yesterday I wrote in the morning with every intention of taking the rest of the day off, and then in the evening I wrote a short transitional scene. After supper. When I had no business working.

The book is about 200 pages, the about being significant, because roughly 160 pages are the first 160 pages, and the other 40 pages are out of sequence waiting to be put in place (after some already decided upon revisions). I still don't know how long the book will end up being, but I'm determined to have the first draft completed by August 7, then take a week off, and then do the rewrites/revisions until they're finished (more than 10 minutes, probably fewer than 10 days).

One thing I realized yesterday was because I'm hyperinvolved and working like a maniac, I'm going to really crash when the book is finished and sent off. Not that there won't be other work to do on it, after my editor works her magic. But I'll still be leaving the world of post-moon society, and more to the point, I'll be leaving the world of writing 6 days a week and thinking 7 days a week, and obsessing 8 or 9 days a week (some weeks I take a day off).

I'd say I'll never ever agree to such a tight deadline again and/or never ever agree to spending an entire summer writing a book again, but after this one is done I am absolutely determined to be retired, and will never ever write another book again, so there's no reason to make such firm and decisive resolutions.

Write/Crash/Retire. Except for the Crash part, it sounds good to me.

Meanwhile, here's a lovely blog review of Blood Wounds.

Hmm... Blood Wounds comes out in September. Maybe it'll keep me from crashing!

ETA: I put in a quick three day poll on whether I should do a blog entry with some spoilers. Majority rules.