Amy Kane

World's smallest office with the world's best views

Sometimes my husband flies with Kent Wien, a pilot and avid blogger/ Tweeter. Here is a short Tweetreel from Kent:

Clear view of Greenland ice cap

What a hero looks like

How about a Presidential Medal of Freedom for Sgt. Kimberly Munley?

Novel ways to write

Notebook, pen, and seaglass necklace. Photo by Laura.

Writing as an act of creation, a discipline, a trick, a ritual. Great novelists share ways they get the story on the page in a Wall Street Journal article today: How to Write a Great Novel.

Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m.

Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.

Hilary Mantel carries a notebook everywhere.

Odd phrases, bits of dialogue and descriptions that come to her get tacked to a 7-foot-tall bulletin board in her kitchen; they remain there until Ms. Mantel finds a place for them in her narrative.

Kazuo Ishiguro researches for two years and writes for one.

Before he begins a draft, he compiles folders of notes and flow charts that lay out not just the plot but also more subtle aspects of the narrative, such as a character's emotions or memories.

Plots come to Michael Ondaatje as "a glimpse of a small situation."

His 1992 novel "The English Patient" started out as two images: one of a patient lying in bed talking to a nurse, and another of a thief stealing a photograph of himself.

Richard Powers wrote his last three novels lying in bed, speaking into a laptop computer with voice-recognition hardware, then using a stylus pen to edit on a touch screen.

"It's recovering storytelling by voice and recovering the use of the hand and all that tactile immediacy," Mr. Powers says of the process. "I like to use different parts of my brain."

Edwige Danticat creates a collage of photos and magazine images on a bulletin board.

She adapted the technique from story boarding, which filmmakers use to map out scenes. "I like the tactile process. There's something old-fashioned about it, but what we do is kind of old-fashioned," she says.

She writes her first draft in school notebooks, then types the draft into the computer and revises.

Finally, she makes a tape recording of herself reading the entire novel aloud—a trick she learned from Walter Mosley—and revises passages that cause her to stumble.

Junot Diaz researches obsessively.

When writing "Oscar Wao," he read J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy half a dozen times to get inside the head of his protagonist, an overweight Dominican teenager who's obsessed with fantasy and science fiction.

John Wray rode subway trains all over New York City with his laptop.

He mainly rode the F, C and B trains, though "there was a time when I was really into the G," he says. He often sat in a corner near the conductor's booth with his headphones on. He worked like this, often for six hours a day, for nearly a year.

Laura Lippman creates color-coded plot charts with index cards, sketchbook pages,  colored ribbon and magic marker.

Ms. Lipmann says she becomes "somewhat obsessive" about her charts."Every time I show people these things they seem to find them mildly disturbing," she says.

More authors spill their novel-writing secrets here.

Cutting flowers

Soft gone hard. Sunflower in our garden.

November always seemed to me the Norway of the year. - Emily Dickinson

Are you my mother?

"I view my work in politics and government as an extension of my role as a mom." - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (link)

Coddling

Woman with a mortar.

This morning I thought swine flu was finally here, in our home, and we could get it over with. (It's rampant in the local high school. To the best of anyone's ability to know, since they aren't testing in NH.) There was fatigue, nausea, a cough, some aches and pains, but ultimately no fever for youngest daughter or me. And I think there has to be fever.

Anyway, while she slept I made chicken soup with organic chicken broth, lean organic chicken breasts, wild and whole grain brown rice, onions, lots of garlic, carrots, one hot red pepper chopped fine, a couple leaves of sage and a small handful of parsley from the herb garden, salt and black pepper, two dashes of curry powder, and a thimbleful of fresh ginger.

Mm, nourishment. Also, the process of concocting the soup and slow cooking it was very calming and focusing. And the house smelled homey. Soup fumigation. It was a warding spell to keep away the plague. Oh, and it tasted very good too.

I've been watching the lush, pop-historical costume drama The Tudors, Season 1, streaming on Netflix.

Last night in Episode 7, "the sweating sickness" is killing people all over London. King Henry VIII - a hot young monarch still on Wife # 1 but lusting for that Boleyn girl - believes that anything that works up a serious sweat, especially in the bedchamber or out hunting, may keep away the sweating sickness, protect against the contagion and death. And so he strenuously applies himself to life.

We all have our chicken soups for the soul.

From The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchen, published in London in 1594

To boyle Chickens with a Cawdel.
TAke your chickens when they are fair
scalded, and trussed and stuffed with Parslie
in their bellies, and put them in a potte with
faire water and a litle salte, and put to them
twentie Prunes, halfe a handfull of corrans
and Raisons, and let them boyle altogether
till your chickens bee tender, then take sixe
yolkes, and a pynte of Uinegar, and straine
them together, and put thereto a quartern of
Sugar, or as yee thinke meete, and so let it
boyle, but ye must stirre it stil, els it wil curd:
and when it boyleth, take it from the fire: then
take your chickens, and put them in a colender,
that the broth may goe cleane away, and
so put your chickens and the fruite into the
cawdell, and make soppes, and lay on your
chickens and the fruite, and powre on the
cawdell.

Medieval cookery etexts online

Also: Gode Cookery

UPDATE Wednesday: Fever today. Waiting for a call back from the doctor.

Intelligence with the earth

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.  - Henry David Thoreau

It was a dark and stormy month

November is National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

Cool. But instead this month I'm going to bake 50,000 cupcakes that probably won't taste very good. Who wants one?

Soft weather

Sun shining today on flowers I bought yesterday.

We've been having a climate reprieve. Rules of New England weather temporarily suspended.

Yesterday on Halloween a warm south wind blew the airy balm of South Florida autumn to us. I grew nostalgic for those three years of trick-or-treating on SW 63rd St. in Boca Raton, in the princess years. "Here is your crown, don't forget the bugspray."

Adults would sit in beach chairs on the front yard lawns, under live oak and palm trees, having a beer, passing out candy. On the street, the clatter of plastic shoes and the firefly illumination of magic wands.

Cooler today after nighttime rain. The thermometer said upper 50's, but all I needed outdoors for a couple of hours was a flannel shirt and jeans because the sun still has heat. I wandered around taking pictures. The dog wandered around finding new sticks to chew. I didn't feel the need to do much because I was such a wizard of housework and hostessing yesterday.

It feels like a Sunday in the nicest way.

A beautiful photo. Another. Another. From photos of Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights.

. . .

UPDATE Monday morning: My brother and sister-in-law had a baby last night and they named her JUNE. Welcome to the world, little niece.