spring « Robin Writes

If I don’t talk about the weather, the bitter cold won’t actually exist, right? So I won’t discuss how, this morning INSIDE the house, the temp was 55 . . . which is fine for some reason if you’re outside. I won’t talk about how it took FOREVER for the furnace to kick on or how GODAWFUL it felt when I was breaking ice in the water trough at a totally miserable 3 degrees.

If my feet ever thaw out, I’m sure I’ll be able to ignore the weather . . .

I haven’t been to the greenhouse since Missouri became the new Arctic, but I imagine that, in spite of heat lamps, everything is dead. No biggie, we’ll start over—lesson learned!

The horses had ice on their muzzles too—and Cody had a little snow on her back. Must have been rolling, because we didn’t get any precip last night. Of course, Cav is often spotted SLEEPING in the snow. Guess here is still better than South Dakota! They do have a nice shed to go into, but since they’ve never seen one before, that might take a little more time to get used to.

I’ve also learned that Cody can be a little hard to spot; no pun intended. She blends into the leaves and snow covering the pasture . . . sometimes I have to look twice!

It’s not so bad out there—the only thing freezing are my eyeballs.

Well, enough about the weather; I’m ignoring it, right? Besides, in a couple days it’ll be 50.J

So they say . . .

In the meantime, prepping in on hold, so to speak. We’re getting ready for Christmas! The stockings are hung, but often have to be removed so we get more heat from the fireplace . . . Finally found a spot for a tiny tree—the one we had at the bookstore—but half the lights went out. Que sera, sera! And of course, no space on it for all my antique ornaments . . . seems odd after all these years . . . decades . . .

And no, we aren’t actually putting prepping on hold—see, here’s the thing: once you’re prepared, you go into maintenance mode. We restock whatever supplies we use and we make repairs when needed. Like the water pumps in the pasture, for instance. Good thing we caught that before the temps dropped. It seems little Cav was rubbing his head on the top and a half-assed fix from the previous owner came apart.

But my husband had experience replacing the one by the house a few weeks ago, so it all worked out. And, he bought extra parts for the other pumps, just in case!

We’re also making adjustments as we go, such as laying in a larger supply of firewood—which means cutting down more dead trees. Such a challenge as soon it warms up a bit—we’ll need to find dead trees. In winter. Yikes!

Also, we’re gonna need more hay—the challenge here is not finding it or buying it, but storing it. You’d think, with a 40×60 barn, we’d have plenty of room. You’d think . . .

Well, time to go break ice in the water trough again. Merry Christmas and happy prepping! Only 90 days until spring!

I spent a good portion of the month of February writing. Nearly every day, in fact, and at the end of the month I had around 30K words. Not too shabby! And then life got in the way.

For those of you who don’t know, we own a bookstore. I really nice one, if I do say so myself, but we just opened last October. I do the marketing, advertising, accounting – although I have a real one on retainer for the tricky stuff, like when I have to do math – and booking events, writing the store blog and bi-weekly newsletter, etc., etc. We do still have a kid at home too, and the spring of 8th grade year is always busy with things like graduation and confirmation and getting the high school paperwork ready. Plus we had company come in, and a houseguest for a month – although it’s my stepmom and she is a GREAT help at the bookstore!

So, I got busy…with all that and a few other things besides. But I still wrote, just not as much or as often. I also have a tendency to go back through the WIP quite often, adding and deleting but mostly correcting. By the end of June, and a bit into July, I’d added another 20K words.

Now, it was crunch time. I was getting tired of procrastinating and I told the fam: okay, this is IT. I’m going to finish this book! And I did. I set the date of July 28 and, at 10:00 p.m. that night, I finished. 30K words in two weeks.

Someone told me that Stephen King once said that if one writes 2K words a day, that’s a good day. On one of those last days I wrote 6K. Took my hands a full day to recover!

So, just a tad over 80K (okay, 83,202) in six months. Not too shabby.

How often do you write? How many words per day, or do you not keep track? Do you write every day? Most days? Whenever the mood strikes (or the muse insists)?