I’m still confused by the autumn of it all. The kids are back in school, leaving me these vast quiet hours to work and write. True to form, it’s too quiet and I’m fighting to get anything done… until they come through the door and everything is back to normal. SIGH. Why is my brain like this?
It doesn’t help that I’m STUCK in my edits. The good news is that first draft of Care and Feeding of Your Little Banned Bookshop is complete! There’s just this one scene at the beginning that I need to add. I’m a firm believer that the beginning informs the ending, so it’s holding everything up. I have this vague sketch of what to write, but I can’t bring myself to pick up my pen and just write it. And I know myself enough to know that this means the idea hasn’t come yet and there’s no point in fighting it, but it’s frustrating. Editing is fun to do, but gosh, it’s awful when it’s just sitting there, waiting.
In the meantime, I’m teasing out my next project, the Binding of Story and Spellwork novel I received an artsnb grant to write. It’s still in the early plotting stages, but it’s surprising me with how it wants to be told and I find myself rushing for my notebook to write down the ideas as they come with a grin on my face.
That probably sounds strange, so I’ll explain myself. Somewhere over the summer, my hearing still a major issue and just feeling very punchy in general, I stopped listening to the voice that tells me what a story should be, and I started listening to what the story wanted to be. To what I wanted the story to be. This probably sounds like common sense to a non-writer, but it’s not. Writers’ heads get filled with every rejection letter they’ve ever received, internet sages doling out lessons about markets and do you want to be an artist or do you want to make money, and you end up spinning around like a spider on a broken web. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t hear the stories anymore. Then, when my actual hearing went and I couldn’t do anything about it, I fixed the one hearing I could: the stories. I’m not even sure I knew I’d stopped listening, but something that was missing feels like it has returned.
Anyways. Oh, look! A moth shadow:
It’s oak gall season! I tried collecting these too late last year, so I started while the leaves are still on the trees this year. These little balls are created by gall wasps on oak leaves. They’re meant to be nurseries for the wasp larvae, but once they’ve left, some clever medieval folks figured out that you can turn the galls into ink.
(I wonder about that a lot.)
If you see a hole in the oak gall, you know the wasp has vacated the gall and it’s time to collect.
For now, I’ve only collected the galls, so I won’t pretend I have the expertise to teach you the recipe, but if you’d like to try this yourself, you can find plenty of oak gall ink recipes online. Basically you make a sort of tea with the galls, which reacts with iron (so be careful if you’re secretly Fae) to create a rich black ink for painting, for your non-metal dipping pens, or for keeping stories alive in that horrible dystopian future without ink that keeps plaguing your nightmares.
Ahem.
That’s it for this month, Side Questers, the leaves are just starting to change but I’m sure the fall colours will be almost over by the time I begin writing you about my October Side Quests.
I do enjoy fall. The crispy leaves, the colours, the mushrooms, the smell of coming frost. The first few fires in the woodstove that seem more cozy than the chore they’ll soon become. Sweaters. Wearing socks again! What’s your favourite part? Hit reply and let me know, I’d love to hear from you.
Until then,
Jennifer Shelby 