The above photo comes from the public domain abyss of Facebook, and I think it’s hilarious. Of all the 4th of July stuff slathered across the internet this weekend, this one made me laugh, out loud, that is.

I spent the long weekend hunkered down at home. I used the Monday holiday to get some work done (the bill paying work) since I have some out of town travel coming on this Friday, but mostly I spent the weekend at home to write. The target right now is to wrap up the 5th book for release by early December. That’s this coming December, so I have to stay at it and this coming weekend I will be doing zip for writing due to playing with friends instead.

As I’ve mentioned before, the 5th book is called Burnt Mountain When Heroes Fall. I spent the weekend making those heroes fall, and it was a more difficult process than I realized. After writing with some of the same characters, to kill them off in the last book, well, I’d gotten a bit attached it seems. I’d write for an hour or so and have to take a break. Come back to it for another hour, then break again.

So while I’ve had a massively productive writing weekend on the 5th installment, I’m also spent. I’m looking forward to work tomorrow for a change of pace!

So happy indie day/treason day to folks. Have a safe weekend and don’t blow off any digits. If you have pets frightened by fireworks, I’m sorry. I have been blessed with an idiot dog that is oblivious to the sounds of exploding things, but don’t come knock on my door. He will certainly crap himself over that.

Did something this weekend I’d been trying to do for 12 years. While working on my master’s degree, it was both one of the coolest times of my life and the worst. How did I get so lucky to land that double whammy? Well, it happens when your advisers are gigantic assholes. and the field research is the most amazing, fun, and rewarding  time.

My advisers were manipulative and often gave me conflicting information while telling me my thesis was crap. “Add that to your thesis. No, take that out. Put that back in.” It was a hellish game that had me eating an entire bottle of tums each month I was in the program. Not kidding!

Once I started my field season, I was on my own. Out from under their psychotic games, I ran my research, data gathering, and field surveys on my own. I lived in a tent, bathed and did laundry in a balmy 55 degree ocean once a week, conducted business in an outhouse, and stunk of garter snake musk for four months (it was a 3 month field season but the snake musk sticks around a bit longer). It was beautiful.

Convinced that my thesis was crap, though good enough to get the degree, I presented and defended it in front of the college’s folks and other researchers that turned out to hear it. Everyone there, excluding my advisers who were also present, told me I did a good job and found my work interesting. My advisers had more criticisms while confirming I’d basically passed muster to graduate. They gave me the impression I’d eked by.

One week before graduation, one of my advisers gave me the first and only compliment any of them had ever given me over the span of two years…, and it had nothing to do with my research. I was baffled. I was his TA for two rounds of Anatomy and Physiology courses, and I taught in his place when college policy was to NOT let TA’s teach classes. He made the exception since I was actively working as an RN and had access to the hospital’s training equipment to bring to the classroom. Access he didn’t have.

When I presented my work to the college’s board and a large group of students and parents in town for graduation weekend, many had questions and found my work fascinating. My presentation ran over because of all the questions and crowd engagement in my work. But I still believed my 3 idiot advisers.

I always hung on to copies of my work with the thought that one day I would re-write said garbage, just for me, no one else. Make it something good so I could say I wrote a good thesis, again just for me. But I wouldn’t read the damn thing for fear that it really would be crap. I have pulled my three hard bound copies out multiple times to bring to the burn pile, but I’d ultimately put them back in the box where they lived.

Yesterday, I pulled them out with the steely resolve those suckers would burn that same night. Then I did what I’d always been afraid to do. I flipped open a copy and started remembering my time in the field, and I smiled. Some of the stuff I’d done, I’d forgotten. Much of it I remembered. Then I flipped to the front of the work and started reading.

It was GOOD. The writing was clear, interesting (OK, maybe normal people don’t find stuff about snakes interesting, but I do), and flowed well. I expected to find a horrible mess of clunky sentences and non-flowing paragraphs, but I was already 10 pages into the thing when I stopped reading. Maybe early drafts were less than stellar, but my final copy was a well-written thesis.

I don’t know why my advisers acted like shits and played their mind games with me. They were wrong about everything. I graduated in 2004, and over the last 12 years I have steadily realized that they had been wrong about a lot of things, but for some reason I believed them when it came to my writing. Obviously I got over that enough when I started writing fiction, but the thesis was always in the back of my mind.

After reading and realizing what I’d worked on for two years was a good end product, I put one bound copy of my thesis back in the box for me to keep, not out of fear but out of pride. The other two copies went on the burn pile at my friends’ bonfire to say goodbye to the fear I’d been dragging with me since graduation. They burned well and were reduced to ashes along with the final bit of doubt my advisers had poured into me for two years.

They decided to be asses, and they can be what they want. They abused a student-adviser relationship. Maybe they perceived me as a threat for whatever reason. Maybe they were just idiots who opted to manipulate others instead of being humane. I’ve learned volumes from the entire experience that stays with me forever. I am not angry. I am not resentful. Their self-imposed doubt is forever gone. They did not win.

Photo by me of my crispy thesis. June 2016. 🙂

Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan because of a million different reasons.

Vacation and grand plans to write and do some other projects around the house washed out big time because I didn’t expect to be so sore after an outpatient procedure in the middle of the week. Zero writing and only a few other things accomplished during the week instead.

I still can’t drink my well water because Mother Earth is hell bent that all her coliform bacteria live in MY well. Third water test off to the health department today. Third time’s the charm, right? I bloody hope so.

My cat has opted to move on because, well, it’s a cat. Who the hell knows why. He’s a barn cat and grew up outside, so he could turn back up at some point (like when the snow flies). He’s neutered, vaccinated, and has a collar with my number on it. We’ll see what happens.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. Except with the well, I really am sick of that ordeal since it started in March. Crap happens. So do curve balls and wrenches. Oh well. If things weren’t going sideways and keeping us on our toes, we wouldn’t be living.

So with vacation a big strike out in the writing department and working from home this week, I’m looking forward to this weekend to do some catching up. Why? Because I can.

Picture by me – Yellowstone wildflower. 2014.

I knew it had been a while since my last post, but I hadn’t realized almost a month had passed. Oops.

I’ve just been a busy gal. My week of vacation started 2 minutes ago. No, I wasn’t counting down or anything, but I have been rather looking forward to a much needed break from travel and work mayhem. I have big plans to stay home and chill out. Reading is on the agenda. Turning into a vegetable on the deck is also on the agenda.

I’ve been spending large chunks of my weekends writing on the 5th book, and the first draft is around 2/3rd’s done. So with all of that going on, I kinda forgot about doing a post here. Writing is of course part of the plans for my week off work.

Both the cat and dog are enjoying being outside, except of course on days where the black flies try to carry them off to become part of a buffet. Louisiana has gnats. Maine has black flies, the larger version of gnats. I’m no entomologist, but I’d bet they both belong to the same genus and species of Bloodlettingus tillyoudropiens. Tis the season. In May the black flies arrive in the wake of the first tourists to cross the state line or perhaps clinging to the bumper of their camper. Maybe the black flies just carry the camper to expedite the process.

At my house, I grow black flies big and healthy. They love the taste of the dog and will swarm around a human head in a thick enough cloud to visually impair you. It’s impressive, though you can’t stand around and admire it too much without getting a blood letting.

So you may be wondering why I have big plans to be on my deck while in the midst of black fly season. In short, I never said I was smart. 🙂

Photo by me. Scotland. 2013.

I’m always fascinated when I stop and think about things and how they came to be. For example, the path I was on that I had NO idea would eventually land me in Maine. The path that took me to herpetology, to writing, to IT, etc. When people ask what I expect to be doing in five years my answer is always: “I don’t have a freakin clue. That’s too far out for me to know what will happen.” Maybe I’m not a good planner. Maybe I’ve just learned to wing it and see what happens. Do our long term plans ever really work out the way we expect? Mine never have.

So, what’s up with the pie? That pie has its own story or path to development. Several years ago I had Thanksgiving dinner with some Maine friends and was introduced to a walnut molasses pie. It was amazing, but I had misunderstood it to be a walnut maple syrup pie, and since moving to Maine, I will admit I may have a wee addiction to maple syrup. I got the original recipe from my friend and realized my molasses/maple syrup error. But I’d had my heart set on making walnut maple syrup pies.

Side bar: Our annual southern family reunions, everyone has a signature dish. I didn’t have one, but I wanted to bring something from the north to the south. This pie was my ticket, except I suck at baking and I had the recipe mixed up with the actual pie ingredients. Let the shenanigans begin!

Before I go further, you may want to review my prior cooking posts here and here about how savvy (or not) I am in the kitchen. I mean, molasses and maple syrup are practically the same, right? It’s just a simple ingredient swap. Right?

My first pie erupted like a volcano in the oven. Fortunately I’d used a pizza pan to put the pie crust on so the damage was minimal, except for the pizza pan which took an eternity to clean and may have involved a hammer and chisel. The pie tasted marvelous, but it looked, well, like an alien ripped its way out of the center of the pie’s chest.

I tweaked the recipe, and the second pie exploded in a slightly less dramatic manner (a smaller alien escaped that time). I made more attempts after more tweaks, bringing in pieces and parts from recipes for pecan pie and other pies (never did find a maple syrup pie online that didn’t end in some sort of disaster).

I started tweaking the amounts of stuff I used. More maple syrup vs less maple syrup? Can this be made without corn syrup at all? How important is the egg yolk in baking? Can I get away with using more egg whites instead? What about flour? Aunt Nancy never uses flour in her pecan pies, but my pies keep releasing aliens. Maybe flour will make a difference? Let’s give it a try and see what happens. What’s the worst that could happen anyway? Another alien gets loose? OK. I can live with that. Done it before.

I also messed with baking temperatures and times. Oh, that one came out looking like a briquette, maybe bake at a lower temp next time or lower temp and longer time. What will that do? I kept notes on everything. Do THIS next time, but don’t do THAT. Use more of A and less of B next round. See if that makes a difference. It was a true science experiment (and with a few aliens!).

I now get grilled at family reunions if I show up without these pies. The first year I made these pies for the reunion, I made two and they got obliterated in record time, even with one being burnt because the oven at the campground was wonky to use. The second year I made four pies. Three were gone and one of my cousins commandeered the fourth. The third year was a repeat of the second year. I haven’t been able to bring them to recent reunions because I’m typically flying in and staying at a hotel instead of somewhere that has an oven.

So as I did some baking yesterday, pictured above, and made two more pies today for friends, I started recalling all the iterations of this recipe and how it ended up where it is today over an amazing molasses pie and a misunderstanding about maple syrup with a side of stubbornness of: Dammit, I’m going to make a walnut maple syrup pie!

Below is the recipe that has been years in the tweaking:

Walnut Maple Syrup Pie

• 4 eggs (3 whites, 1 whole)
• 2 tbsp butter
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup maple syrup, dark or extra dark amber
• 1/4 cup corn syrup with vanilla
• 2 tbsp all purpose flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
• 9″ deep dish pie crust

Image above, photo by me, 2016.