Gifts of Spring by Alison Meyer
May, 2010
Find Me Online Whirl & Gigs Global Weirding Writes of Spring Plant Tomatoes, Cook Asparagus	Low-Fat and Luscious Monsters and Fireballs Squeezing in Revision Writes and Resources Site News

Dear Cowgirls and Friends,

Pat McArdle, my friend, fellow board member, Express subscriber, and finalist for the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, in the photo I shot that Pat is currently using for promotion, so my name is actually up on Amazon, too.

Wow, in late-breaking news, my friend from the SCI board, Pat McArdle, who is also an Express subscriber, is a 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Finalist for her novel Farishta! Three of the five thousand entries are finalists for General Fiction, and you can vote on the outcome. I did read part of all three entries, and Pat's novel, Farishta, got my vote because she had the strongest opening hook for me, not just because she is my friend. I really want to read the rest of this saga of an American diplomat taking on a cowgirl-up year with the British Army in northern Afghanistan! Check it out soon if you can and vote before the June 2, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. (U.S. Eastern Daylight Savings Time) deadline, if you do want to cast a vote, and you can check out the YA category and vote there, too, if you like (though you must be an Amazon customer to vote, but you can probably register free if you aren't already one).

I hope this is not the only novel Pat has in her, because her entry shows so much promise. Go Pat! Best of luck in the vote.

A great cowgirl-up shot of Pat on a buzkashi stallion, from the Facebook page for Farishta, where you can see more great photos from Pat's own time of service in Afghanistan.

Find Me Online

You can now find me on Facebook and She Writes, if you spend time in either one and want to connect there, too. Please mention that you are from Cowgirls, if I don't know you well and you want to be friends. I'd love to meet more of you, but I will warn you all that I categorically do not do chat. It would just turn into too much of a time sink, so I have never even learned how. That is in the "just say no" category for me, at least until our financial situation improves measurably.

Whirl & Gigs

April went by in a whirl, traveling to California, juggling time between my good friend, Laura, my two grandsons who live across the bay, a few other good friends I've made over my years of visits, and my growing list of solar activities. Nik and Elliot are both shooting up like cornstalks in July. Laura and I had a great time taking them and their mom, Heather, to my favorite beach (north of Santa Cruz and not quite visible from the road, but there is a small parking area and a trail), among other fun family activities. It was a good trip for beach time. Laura and I also drove up to Marin and visited Muir Beach and Drakes Beach (on Point Reyes).

Photo by Sharon Cousins

Drake's Beach on Point Reyes, California.

Here I am with part of my solar cooking display — including my new 4-brick demo set-up to show how solar cooking works — at Google Earth Day, 2010.

I did a fun solar cooking gig with fellow SCI board member, Gini Mitchem, at the Children's Discovery Museum in downtown San Jose. Skies could have been better, but we eventually got enough sun to make mini-s'mores for some of our young visitors, and it turns out that it takes very little sun to make my new four-brick hands-on "how solar cooking works" display run enough to do the job. The Google gig (some of the planning might have been better handled) and the Solar Cookers International board meeting were even more grueling than I thought they might be. Some of it was great, but I experienced all of it through such a haze of exhaustion, and even when I could be in bed I had trouble sleeping in Sacramento.

My good friend Melody (Mary) Cryns, enjoying a well-deserved celebration after her splendid Master's reading.

Then the last whirl of a fast trip to my favorite stores on Castro in Mountain View, more or less on my way to my IWWG friend and Express subscriber Melody/Mary Cryns's Master's reading and celebratory party. I am so proud of her for pulling off her Master's in Creative Writing while also working full time and raising the youngest of her four children, and she deserved the great pizza party after a superb reading—one piece she read was one of my favorites, and Ive never seen her do better a better job on it… she had them almost rolling in the aisles. Congratulations on both the degree and the reading! And thanks for that fun Sunday night at Woodham's, too. Melody writes and rocks!

After that is was time to begin frantically packing and organizing what to take and what to leave (Laura lets me keep some things in the guest closet, to save me flying them). I managed — forewarned during online check-in — to volunteer to skip my flight and take one the next morning, which earned me a good chunk of airline credit to defray another trip and help pay for my grandsons to fly up this summer.

Global Weirding

Most of the weather since I returned has been more like February than May. There were scattered snowflakes when I walked out to the trailer just now (written in early May). People are quibbling about what we should call what we are doing to our weather and climate, because "global warming" implies that it's just getting warmer, not the terrific mish-mash of interacting systems we really have. Maybe we should just call it "global weirding", because that is what the weather has been doing in recent years. Scary stuff. My "what-if" writer-brain keeps sinking into what the results of just one year of world-wide crop failures would be (who else on this list has read All Flesh is Grass?). A lot of people seem to have the attitude that there will always be food available from somewhere for those who can pay, but really all we have is what is on this planet.

Writes of Spring

Still, spring flowers are tough. The tulips that started opening in April are still coming on strong, bright spots on the cold, gray days — promises, one hopes, of brighter spring weather to come. Lilacs are coming on, filling the air with their purple fragrance, and peonies will start popping open soon. The grass is up and growing. People are tuning and firing up their tillers and mowers, getting ready for the new season of yard and garden chores. Folks with gardens or planter boxes are buying and starting seeds, looking for just the right bedding plants. People without gardens of their own visit parks and public gardens, to enjoy the ever-changing displays of color and form.

Garden Stair by Sherry Chen

Write a garden you love and make something happen in it.

What kinds of gardens do you like? Formal gardens, with plantings arranged in neat patterns? Cottage gardens, with a more informal look? Bold, arty gardens, with unusual plants or striking architectural features? Naturalized gardens with a wilder look? Creation's own garden of a favorite forest or dell or meadow in bloom? Write a garden you could love, or a garden that stands out in your memory, and then make something happen in it.

May is (usually) a month of improving weather and garden planning. In many folk traditions, flowers are given as gifts at the beginning of the month (May Day) and people dance around the Maypole. In the USA, the end of the month brings Memorial Day, when we honor and remember fallen heros and loved ones (those who have gone on ahead, my Nez Perce friends would say). Here are some words to take for May Writes:

Once you've warmed up with one or two words, think of some seasonal conflicts or complications. Even gardening, bucolic enough from a distance, can have its share, with couples or families arguing about what to plant or how much planting to do or what planting method to go by or what chemicals or soil supplements to use or not use in the process. May blizzards or snow enough to notice are rare where I live, but they can really complicate things when they occur, simply because people are not expecting it and have put away their winter things and consciousness. A blizzard that blows along past the legal date for snow tires can provide deadly complications, while being caught in an unexpected snow shower at, say, a picnic, with people cuddling close under the few blankets for warmth because no one brought heavy jackets but they're still having too much fun around the fire to pack up and go home, could go in a humorous direction.

Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall by Terri R.

Memorial Day, a day for honoring fallen heroes and loved ones, can trigger terrible memories as well as fond ones.

The old May Day custom of hanging a basket of flowers on a loved one's door is another scenario that could go to serious horror or suspense (a creepy note in the flowers, for one example) or in funnier directions (someone has more than one sweetheart and gets notes confused). The start up of spring sports and gardening comes hand in hand with sore muscles and sunburn, bees and wasps are out and stinging, and the whine of the mosquito begins to make an appearance. Memorial day can bring fond remembrances, but for many people it also brings memories of terrible times. So think up a May conflict or complication or two, add a sprinkle of words, and take it out for a spin.

Plant Tomatoes, Cook Asparagus

Chock Full of Color by Ann Horn

If you don't have any garden space, plant something in a tub or pot if you can, to put a little more seasonal color in your life and get a little real dirt under your fingernails.

Farmer's Market has started up in Moscow, though this early in the season the offerings are mostly crafts and plant starts. I got a great deal on some tall tomato plants. Now if the weather and machines will just cooperate for once, maybe we'll have earlier tomatoes than recent years. If you plant tomatoes, always plant part of the stem (pinch off a few bottom leaves if needed). Angle it, rather than going straight down, and lay it along the east-west axis, with the top of the plant on the east side. That way maximum heat will work in to that buried stem, which will just burst out with roots to help support a strong plant, especially if you give it a couple handfuls of nice compost or planting mix to grow into at first and water it well when setting out.

Asparagus Sign with Red Barn by Carol Groenen

Right now though, one of the choice crops in the Northwest is asparagus. One thing I like to do with asparagus is snap off the tough parts (they are great for making soup stock), cut the good parts into bite-size lengths, and sauté them in butter and/or olive oil with some mushrooms, garlic or shallots or green onions, and maybe a little red bell pepper for color, then season with a little soy sauce or Bragg's, tarragon, some sea salt, and a shake of pepper or Mrs. Dash or lemon pepper or Tabasco, and maybe a little splash of white wine or sherry at the end. Tarragon is really good with asparagus, unless you don't like tarragon in anything.

Another great thing to do with asparagus (and without tarragon) is make:

Low-Fat and Luscious

Three Walnuts by Kristen Fox

Recent research has shown that walnuts, in moderation, are even better for your heart than olive oil.

Now that you've eaten your vegetables, it's time for a treat. This recipe for Chewy Walnut Bars is very easy—a good one to teach to kids who like to cook. These cookie bars are very good, despite the recipe having no added fat beyond what is in the one egg and the walnuts (which have a kind of fat that is very good for your heart). I thought maybe it was a misprint, but I went ahead and tried it and it worked! This pan of cookie bars has at least 800 calories less than a typical pan of cookie bars using, say 1/2 cup of oil or butter! It is very important not to overbake them. I suspect they would turn into rock bars if overbaked, but they are deliciously chewy if not overbaked.

The Scream by Edvard Munch

Monsters and Fireballs

May turned out to be tougher than I'd hoped, making me (yet again) later than I'd hoped getting this newsletter out. Seems as if it's that kind of year, ever since the earthquake in Haiti. Liz, a dear friend who (as some of you know) has lived with my husband and me since 1997, has spent the last 5+ years battling to live with an increasingly painful and largely untreatable back condition — a combination of inoperable cysts and several older injuries. This month, she developed a horrific and sudden allergy (horrible raised welts, covering much of her body) to the last strong pain medication they could give her. She had to go right off it, which even with medical support is not an easy thing to do. Now there is no medicine for her pain, which was running way too much of the time at 7's and 8's and hit a lot of 9's on her 1–10 pain scale last month, even with the help of the strongest pain medicine they had, as her inoperable cysts press into nerves, erode the bone, combine with the pain of other old injuries….

There will now be nothing much in the way of pain relief for hospice care, if such a time should come, or for serious injuries or post-op pain if she ever needs surgery. There doesn't seem to be anything stronger than aspirin or acetaminophen or willow bark that they dare to give her — her allergies to some of the family have become so severe that they don't dare give her any opiate derivative, real or synthesized. She has to face a pain-monster of nightmare proportions and decide whether or not she has the will to keep on keeping on.

Hanging Tough by John Keaton

To go on living, which Liz so far intends to do, she is facing living with much more pain than not, with terrible spikes (she passed out in the dining room from one of them a week or so ago), day in and day out, or trying to find some mind-over-flesh method or alternative remedy that will help her take enough of the edge off of the pain. Pain itself can kill, and that is the kind of pain levels we will be facing now. Josh and I have to watch her hurt. We help how we can, but all too often there is little we can do. These are not easy times at our house.

A lot of people are having a hard time this month. A darling friend from my writing group who is also on this list lost her father to a hit and run accident. One of my sister's sisters-in-law, a sweet gal who has had many health challenges, was just diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, the whole situation worsened by inappropriate hospital care because she doesn't have insurance. Another friend just had a lumpectomy, came through that just fine, and is now coping with an infection due to an allergic response to dye used in testing her. Life is a real bear sometimes.

Fireball by Rolf Veh

A week ago Friday, Liz managed to talk a ball of fire up her spine and out through the top of her head. It left her with an awful headache, but her back got a break for a little while. Maybe she can find a way to do it without the headache. She invites prayers of all denominations as she struggles to find new ways to battle her pain-monster and we try to get her weight back up.

Have you had to battle one or more monsters in your life? There are monsters of pain, of memory, of fear, of grief, of rage, of loss…. What monster do you stand against? Or what monster has someone you love tried to stand against? What keeps you standing? What weapons help the most? How can you use them? Take your monster for a monstrous write.

Squeezing in Revision

Through all of it, my novel proceeds, even though some of it in the last couple weeks has been in five and ten minute blips, but I keep squeezing them in. I am through my revision pass with the paper manuscript (used up all of one red Profile pen and part of another). I love my thick, rainbow pile of revision cards! I've got my framework for the type-in set up in Scrivener, and have one chapter just about finished. It is very exciting. I still like the story, and what is coming out of revision is markedly better than what went in. So far this particular revision is the most fascinating piece of work I have ever done.

Favorite Holly Shop Resources

It's fun and exhilarating, taking that rough framework and breathing life and color into it and carving away bits (or chunks, as the case may be) of fluff and flab. I love working on novels more than any other writing work I have ever done. I still remain very partial to techniques and ideas from Holly Lisle's Create A Plot Clinic, her Create A Character Clinic, her Create a Culture Clinic, and How to Write Page-Turning Scenes. If this nestling of mine does fly, I will have Holly to thank for so much of it. Get them all if you can is my advice, but Create A Plot Clinic remains my top pick if your budget is so tight you can only afford one. I still think the 20 creativity tools that are the heart of that book are priceless. Not every tip will work for every person, but there are so many good ones that there should be something good for just about everyone. For practical help with novelling, you just can't beat the best of the Holly Shop products. I continue to love Holly's practical approach and the examples she works out as the books go along.

Writes and Resources

I hope that some of you are among those hitting my Free Weekly Take-a-Write Prompt page and the corresponding page with my write for the weekly prompt. It is challenging for me to stay ahead on the writes with everything else I am doing, but that way you all know I am practicing what I preach, and so far I am managing. If you come up with a write you would really like to share with someone, you are welcome to email it to me. I promise to read it (also to not steal it), and I will send you a brief comment (that is not critical) if I can.

Another resource I discovered recently is Grammar Girl, whose Quick and Dirty Tips stand ready to assist you. The next time you get confused about apostrophes or semi-colons or "lay" vs. "lie", "who"/"whom", "like"/"as if", or any other puzzling questions of grammar, punctuation, etc., you can go visit Grammar Girl for her take on the subject. I liked her style; maybe you will, too.

I've also been meaning to tell you all about The Fineline Editorial Consultancy, "an Edinburgh-based Editorial Consultancy, committed to helping new, burgeoning, and established writers realise their literary potential." This might be of particular interest to UK list members—I know I have at least a few—because it's closer to home for you and Fineline understands Brit spelling (LOL… my American spell-checker wants me to correct the 'realise' that I copied from Fineline's website), but really there are enough writing tips and prompts and the occasional small contest that it is well worth checking out the site wherever you live, and I believe Kate knows how to spell American, too, if you are interested in her services. Kate Gould, the primary force and editor for Fineline and an Express subscriber, is very friendly and approachable if you have questions about her services. So check out Fineline and sign up for the free newsletter while you are there.

Evolve by Elena Ray

Site News

I haven't gotten to some updating I wanted to do on Write 'em Cowgirls!, but there is a chance that the "Other Favorite Links" page will go live sometime in June. I do have it started, and I keep telling myself it wouldn't take long to finish. For May though, Liz's crisis on top of the newsletter, novel work, SCI work, and trip aftermath took all the time there was and then some. I need to get some garden time in, too, though right now the weather is not cooperating. Life is tough, but I don't know any way to go but to keep trying to forge onward. I hope you will keep finding ways forward, too.

Whatever challenges you are facing, keep writing through all of them. I don't know how the new changes in Liz's life are going to affect my life, but I will do my best to forge ahead with my writing and maintain Write 'em Cowgirls! and the Express for as long as I can, even if issues keep coming out late in the month instead of the middle I keep hoping to hit. Until next time, take lots of care and write on. Your vision is depending on you.

Best Regards, Sharon

P.S. This month's creativity kudos go out to Holly Lisle, for her World Gates trilogy (scroll down). I have always liked science fiction more than fantasy, I think in large part because even the realm of unlikely possibility (faster-than-light drives, for example) has more appeal to me than realms that are so fantastical that I cannot see them as ever coming to pass. Holly, however, with her hierarchy of above/below/sideways realities in this series, managed to blur the boundaries with a line of reasoning that made cross-dimensional (for lack of a better term) visitors more logical in terms of things like happenings in Roswell NM than interplanetary visitors. Holly also, near the end of the first book, Memory of Fire, wrote one of the best, most heart-and-gut-wrenching and inspiring stand-offs I have ever read. Anyone who has been on this list for long knows how much I love Holly as a writer's resource, and I am delighted to be able to give her the extra kudos this month for her amazing creativity when it comes to fiction.