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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2gk8pe2:
so I’m writing part of the climax of Never Wrote A Letter and it’s too sad so I have to keep stopping. I don’t mean to hurt myself like this. It’s not– maybe it won’t work, it’s not anything that was hinted at, I surprised myself by coming up with it in the car on the way to work the other day, and I have to write it down and then go back and read and make sure it works. Don’t worry, it’s not a sad ending. But there’s– this part, right here, this part is hard.
So I’m taking breaks and thinking about other things, but not other writing things, because I can’t get distracted– I have to finish this, it came out of nowhere and if I don’t get it down on the page I’ll forget what tiny nebulous connection it ever had to the rest of the story, and I’ll just wonder what the fuck I was thinking.
Oh, I hope it works. I just don’t know. I’m not– doubting myself, precisely, but I don’t know that I have the confidence to match my ability, you know? How like, you can do a thing and believe in it, but you have to believe in it to do it? Anyway. I always fall short on that kind of shit. Not whether I can do it, but whether it’s worth doing. That kind of thing.
So. As a side project, my non-writing activity is that I’m rendering three pounds of raw leaf lard that came out of the quarter-pig share I bought from my sister. So it turns out that if you get the leaf lard out of a pig it’s this sort of blobby unstructured thing, and if you put it in a pyrex casserole and heat it to about 200F in the oven for like, four hours, you can just pour the lard off. I think with the tissue left, you can then pan-fry it and make cracklins or pork rinds, but I don’t know if I can handle that.
However. So far I have like… Two pints of beautiful clear lard, which I’ve poured off into one of those snap-on plastic/rubber topped pyrex tupperware things and set in the fridge.
I feel like I ought to make a pie crust or some pastries or something. It’s really nice lard.
Sometimes when all the political stuff gets to be too much I think about my homesteading skills and I think about how, if everything goes to shit, I can continue my career of making basically no money and spending basically no money. Let’s just start up the barter economy, since all the higher economical models are so saturated with corruption. They have a combine harvester on the farm now, and it can handle corn, grain, wheat, and soy. Get me some flax seeds and I’ll start to learn how to spin. (I already know how to scutch and hetchel.) Get some sheep, they can’t be harder than pigs. Get some horses, wean ourselves off the tractors a little; they’re already switching to no-till on the herb garden, building in perennial beds instead of lawns, trying to save some of their own seeds, and we can continue that.
Adapt the still to use wood heat, wean ourselves off the propane burner. I can ferment anything. Wild yeast is trendy right now, I can learn all about that. I don’t need fossil fuels for it, we don’t need fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen to fertilize our corn, we can use composted chicken blood, we can pasture the chickens on the fields in rotation to work their manure in, we can use pigs to root out the weed seeds. Sheep will fit in there somewhere, that could work. It’s harder if the electric goes down, the electromesh fences are so effective against coyotes when they’re working; can we get those to work on solar? Can we find someone skilled enough to repair them?
Print out hard copies of my ebooks. Restore the broken old spinning wheel. Sharpen the sickle and the knives, get the grinding stone wet. I’m ready. I’m ready.
But who else can I save? I don’t want to go into isolation.
so I’m writing part of the climax of Never Wrote A Letter and it’s too sad so I have to keep stopping. I don’t mean to hurt myself like this. It’s not– maybe it won’t work, it’s not anything that was hinted at, I surprised myself by coming up with it in the car on the way to work the other day, and I have to write it down and then go back and read and make sure it works. Don’t worry, it’s not a sad ending. But there’s– this part, right here, this part is hard.
So I’m taking breaks and thinking about other things, but not other writing things, because I can’t get distracted– I have to finish this, it came out of nowhere and if I don’t get it down on the page I’ll forget what tiny nebulous connection it ever had to the rest of the story, and I’ll just wonder what the fuck I was thinking.
Oh, I hope it works. I just don’t know. I’m not– doubting myself, precisely, but I don’t know that I have the confidence to match my ability, you know? How like, you can do a thing and believe in it, but you have to believe in it to do it? Anyway. I always fall short on that kind of shit. Not whether I can do it, but whether it’s worth doing. That kind of thing.
So. As a side project, my non-writing activity is that I’m rendering three pounds of raw leaf lard that came out of the quarter-pig share I bought from my sister. So it turns out that if you get the leaf lard out of a pig it’s this sort of blobby unstructured thing, and if you put it in a pyrex casserole and heat it to about 200F in the oven for like, four hours, you can just pour the lard off. I think with the tissue left, you can then pan-fry it and make cracklins or pork rinds, but I don’t know if I can handle that.
However. So far I have like… Two pints of beautiful clear lard, which I’ve poured off into one of those snap-on plastic/rubber topped pyrex tupperware things and set in the fridge.
I feel like I ought to make a pie crust or some pastries or something. It’s really nice lard.
Sometimes when all the political stuff gets to be too much I think about my homesteading skills and I think about how, if everything goes to shit, I can continue my career of making basically no money and spending basically no money. Let’s just start up the barter economy, since all the higher economical models are so saturated with corruption. They have a combine harvester on the farm now, and it can handle corn, grain, wheat, and soy. Get me some flax seeds and I’ll start to learn how to spin. (I already know how to scutch and hetchel.) Get some sheep, they can’t be harder than pigs. Get some horses, wean ourselves off the tractors a little; they’re already switching to no-till on the herb garden, building in perennial beds instead of lawns, trying to save some of their own seeds, and we can continue that.
Adapt the still to use wood heat, wean ourselves off the propane burner. I can ferment anything. Wild yeast is trendy right now, I can learn all about that. I don’t need fossil fuels for it, we don’t need fossil-fuel-derived nitrogen to fertilize our corn, we can use composted chicken blood, we can pasture the chickens on the fields in rotation to work their manure in, we can use pigs to root out the weed seeds. Sheep will fit in there somewhere, that could work. It’s harder if the electric goes down, the electromesh fences are so effective against coyotes when they’re working; can we get those to work on solar? Can we find someone skilled enough to repair them?
Print out hard copies of my ebooks. Restore the broken old spinning wheel. Sharpen the sickle and the knives, get the grinding stone wet. I’m ready. I’m ready.
But who else can I save? I don’t want to go into isolation.
