Weather Has a COVER!

Isn't it GLORIOUS?

I'm just going to sit here and squee a little. Terribly unprofessional, probably, but I can't help it. 

Weather releases May 1st!

Sponge cakes and cranky cars

I got my last round of edits for Weather in on Wednesday and then got the next few days off, which meant I finally had time to do the thing I had intended to at the beginning of spring break--work on getting my driver's license. (This endeavor is one that has spanned several years. I am clumsy and get right and left mixed up and the family car has a manual transmission...you can see where this is going, can't you?)

So I went and ran errands with Mom. Now, this would have turned out all fine and dandy, but our car, an aging pickup truck ten years my senior, decided to develop an issue. Namely, every time I put her into neutral, she stalled and the engine died. To those unfamiliar with cars, every time you come to a complete stop, you put the car in neutral by depressing the clutch. Otherwise, you guessed it, the engine dies.

The solution in this case was to race the engine while stopped. So I got a bit of a workout, and doubtless puzzled my fellow drivers. Long story short, the car is going to the mechanic on Monday, and I am looking forward to NEVER having to do that again! I hope.

And then I came home and made a sponge cake. I share this with you because there is nothing sillier than a cooling sponge cake. Observe:

Things for inspiration

For everything I write, I have a small collection of items that I relate to the book. For one novel, a medieval fantasy, I made a mockup of my main character's sword, collected rocks similar to the ones another character needed for his magic, and drew map after map of the world. When I get stuck on something while writing, I go and handle the things I've collected to remind me of the book. It often helps a lot. 

The advantage to writing something historical was that I didn't have to make much of what I needed. I just needed to get creative with scavenging for things in the family attic. Here are the things for Weather. 

The books in the background are two volumes of Wood's Household Medicine. It's from the 1870s, about twenty years too late for the events of Weather, but it was enormously helpful in getting an idea of the approach people would take toward medicine in the period. My main character, Julian, is...well, accident prone. Very accident prone. 

Next down is an inkwell my aunt gave to me several Christmasses ago. Writing with a fountain pen is, I still think, the only acceptable way to write a letter, and I feel rather ill-behaved if I send a letter to one of my pen pals written in boring, everyday pen. 

The fan at the bottom right was from my grandmother. It is perhaps the most useful of all of these things, as the main character uses a fan extensively in the novel. This fan is by far my favorite, and lives at home. I have a few other fans in my apartment at school, so I can stomp around and figure out exactly what the main character would do with his fan to cast various spells (I'd be more specific, but spoilers!). I have yet to alarm the housemates, which says more flattering things about the housemates than about me. 

The pair of golden spectacles I picked up at an antique store in Maine while visiting the same aunt who was responsible for the inkwell. I found them after I had written the first draft of the novel and was absolutely enchanted because they perfectly fit my mental image of another character's spectacles. They also fit me, which was even better. Even if they made me look like someone's grandmother. 

The fat watch in the corner is a turnip watch. Though a bit later in make than the events of the novel, it gave me a good idea of how heavy a gentleman's watch would have been (seriously it weighs more than my cell phone. I can check email on my cell phone. It really puts modern technology in perspective!). 

Cream Puffs and Hobbits

Today, my mother (the estimable Robin Winter) decided to teach me how to make cream puffs. Unfortunately, no photographs remain of this endeavor  as we were much too preoccupied with chucking the flour into the boiling water and butter and stirring it madly to take pictures. 

The first batch turned out terribly. Due to my father's long running battle against cholesterol, we have used a sort of egg that consists only of egg whites in a box, and this and the dough for cream puffs do not coexist. As a result, we wound up with flat cream puffs the first time around and had to run down to the corner store (a rather funky little place full of foods labeled in Cyrillic and German) and get a dozen eggs.

These did the trick, and we've now got a whole bunch of cream puffs, though three fewer than we made. The first two of these we ate. The third...

"He did it!"

Yeah, we should have learned not to do that by now. 

And while we were doing this, we were watching The Hobbit. Now, I'd seen it in theaters  but my mother hadn't, so I fear her recollection of the film will be broken up by timings for cream puffs (Wargs! "oh wait no time to turn the oven down to 350!") It's a lot of fun, but I have rather mixed feelings about it. 

As a Lord of the Rings fan since about the age of ten, I'm very fond of all the books and the appendices, and oh boy did the writers do their research. It's lovely to be so immersed in that world. But...well, I don't like cliffhanging scenes and sometimes it seems that practicality was sacrificed for the sake of the Wow-Factor--some of the action scenes grew tedious because it was all about people swinging on bridges and falling improbable distances. My impulse with those was to sit there and look at the shiny world that'd been created and wait for the plot to reappear. 

As per my earlier remark, the bad parts outweigh the good, and I'll happily line up for the next premier anyway. But there were a few points where the baking was a nice break from the movie! 

The Unintentional Hiatus

Well, that was rather longer than I planned to go without updating! Unfortunately, school had other ideas. I wound up working in another lab, and it's been spectacular fun. The housemates and I had many nice breakfasts (must upload pictures at some point!) and had many panicked evenings of studying. I also got that nasty coughing cold that's been going around and gave it to the Tolerant Housemate, who has cursed me many times as a result. Said coughing cold has refused to move out, which has done just wonders for my productivity. (Sarcastic? Me?)

But now I'm finished with finals, have bade farewell to the housemates, and am relaxing at home with good food and a lot of cats. 

By a lot of cats, I mean three. But they're all rather high-maintenance and very people-oriented (read, demanding) and so sometimes it seems like we have even more cats than we do. 

The cats. 

After living elsewhere for several months, it's rather an adjustment not to be able to leave food out on the counter! Even peapods aren't safe. Neither is cilantro or anything green and leafy. The black cat will even eat cake, and last New Years, got into someone's spilled champagne, and drank enough he was sick under the table. We've had to be very careful with him and alcohol since.

In novel-related news, I'm just about done with the first round of edits. Release date still seems to be May 1st, so here's hoping that doesn't change!