The Cookbook is Finished!

It is such a wonderful feeling to have this cookbook in my hands! Two years of work went into this and I think the book is superb, considering I had no experience making a photo book/cookbook/history book. It ended up being over $50 once you pay for taxes and shipping, but I had no control over how the site prices their books. I chose not to add any profit for myself, since I didn't expect to sell many books and I wanted to keep the price as low as I could for family and friends.

As of today, 3 people have bought my book and a few more intend to do so soon. I'm happy just knowing my creation is bringing other people pleasure. Profit would be nice, but not for this book. I'll make oodles of profit from my fiction novels.

Now I can head into National Novel Writing Month without the cookbook distracting me. Just 7 more days until I write 50,000 words in one month!

Adding More to the Cookbook

My mom was a big help with the editing of my cookbook, but now I need to add more pages to it to make it worth the higher price point it fell into. So far I've added seven pages, but I think I can add at least five more, possibly ten more. I guess this is draft number 2, which I will hopefully have finished before September. I need to come up with a few more anecdotes, photograph a few more of the recipe results (if only this heat wave will end so I can use the oven!), and revise the Recipe Index and Table of Contents to accommodate my new pages. I can't wait to have this book published!

I did start editing my novel - I got up to page 77. But then I got the cookbook back and all other projects had to pause while I finish this. I was so into reading my novel that I didn't want to stop to go to bed - that means something good, right?

Memories and Recipes

Working through Blurb dot com, I am creating a book I hope will be passed down through the generations. It could even be a series of books, but I have to finish this one first. I have quite a few photos going back through the 1950s and further, even some as far back as the early 1900s, of my mother’s side of the family. I also have many handwritten recipes from my grandmother and her mother. And then there are those stories that family members have shared over the kitchen table. I am combing all of these into a book tentatively titled, Memories and Recipes.

Over the weekend I finally figured out a layout that will work for just about all of the recipe/story pages. Creating those pages will go much quicker now. The time-consuming part will be in testing the recipes and photographing the results. So far, I have only photographed one outcome. Winter is the best time to get all this cooking done, though. My goal is to have the rough draft completed by April. If I do at least one page a day, that will be no problem.

I’ve been trying to find a book similar to mine that has already been published, but they aren’t set up just like mine. Most focus on much more of the storytelling than mine does, only throwing in a recipe every few pages. None of them combine a family photo, recipe, and story all on one page as I’m doing. Most of the stories I have are just anecdotes, slices of life, not fully fleshed stories, which I think is more indicative of what people know of their families anyway. But my book will be something my daughters can hold in their hands and say, wow, I would have loved to have known my great-grandmother - she seemed feisty, like me.

Trying to Google My Name

Because of these three women, you will never find me if you Google my name: Laura Knight:

Photographer

Dame/Painter

Genealogist

Therefore, I must develop a different name - L.K. Knight (The "K" is actually from my maiden name, not my middle name, cuz my middle initial is a "B" and I just don't want to be known as LB, or "pound" Knight. Besides, "K" is a cooler letter than "B".)

If you Google "LKKnight", this blog comes up 9th on the list. That's not too bad.

Tarot as a Writing Tool

Only 3 more days until National Novel Writing Month and I only have a vague notion as to what my novel will be about. I had thought about using Tarot cards to help me and then I came across this post of how specifically one could use the Tarot to help write a novel:

Write to Done

I liked the simple method of drawing 6 cards to represent the protagonist, antagonist, theme, beginning, middle, and end of the novel. Here's what I came up with when I used the Faeries' Oracle:

The protagonist is a person who recognizes her/his own good qualities and stands on her/his own feet. The antagonists are the faeries who bring the light back to the dark sky, or in this case, they will destroy the machines that are polluting their homes. The theme is freedom and self-expression. The Beginning shows us one of the oak men, a wise, old, wild man in the woods and he's gnawing on a root. He knows things are changing and he wonders if he'll fight or step aside. The middle shows us the faery waters that are less and less pure as they run through the stressful, civilized towns of the humans and the faeries who are trying to purify that water, whose jobs are becoming more and more difficult. The end shows us that by giving and receiving love, we heal. (Not sure how we get from the humans destroying their homes to love, but that's the joy of the noveling journey.)

The really interesting thing will be in seeing if any of the above actually makes it to the final version of the novel.

Steampunk Inspiration

More Steampunk research:

This has a few ideas of note - I might stop here if I get stuck.
Steampunk Random Story Generator

These cakes are cool:
Steampunk Cakes

Always looking for some cool jewelry to inspire me:
Steampunk Jewelry

Need a name for your Steampunk characters?
Steampunk Name Generator

My Steampunk name came up as Baroness Bethany Spencer - interesting.

Finding a Soundtrack for NaNo

I just found a couple of bands that might do the trick.

Bat For Lashes

The Birthday Masssacre

Of course, Abney Park is still cool, too.

Abney Park


And Tor is having a Steampunk month in October!

Tor

It seems Steampunk is gaining steam! Hopefully I can do it justice in the novel I will write for National Novel Writing Month! November 1st is almost here!

Steampunk Research

I've been researching Steampunk and came across a very cool magazine called, oddly enough, SteamPunk Magazine. You can even download issues for free here:

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

I also came across a fictional e-zine of steampunk erotica, which has some well-written stories:

SteamyPunk

After reading these publications, as well as some short stories from H.G. Wells, I am convinced I will be able to write a Steampunk romance novel for National Novel Writing Month this November. I still want to do a bit more research, find a few more movies I haven't seen, re-watch some favorites, and do more research on the Victorian Era, but this delve into a new genre won't be as intimidating as I thought it might be.

One of my favorite romance writers is even working on a Steampunk novel now, too.

Steamed

And, as I work my way through this new novel, I'll be thinking of the first Steampunk costume I will be creating for myself for the convention in April!!!

The Emotional Truth

I’m de-cluttering my binders, the ones that hold interesting articles I’ve ripped from magazines. I tackled the writing articles first. Re-reading those articles made me want to write again, really write, not just blog or e-mail. But I’m currently working on creating a book with old family photos, recipes, and anecdotes. The anecdotes will only require fluffing to make them more readable. With a few of the anecdotes, I’ve written down the story from two different people - two people who remember the event just slightly differently. My job has been to meld the two together to reveal the emotional truth, only I didn’t realize that’s what I had been doing.

I just read an article on writing the emotional truth of your own memories. We each remember things through our own filters so that none of us remembers any event in exactly the same way. One person will even remember snow while a friend remembers rain. When dealing with personal stories, the factual truth matters only a little. The emotional truth is the whole reason for revealing the story. If you weren’t emotionally affected by an event, then there would be no point in sharing it.

Realizing that emotional truth is the only truth I need to remember has freed me to start work on my own memoir. I don’t need to be bogged down with remembering if the weather had been hot or just warm, if the event had come before or after the 4th of July party, or even if some people had truly attended. It’s how my memory has processed my life that shapes who I am today, and who I am today is the real truth of my life.

Steampunk

I just added a new blog to my list - it's on steampunk! This is the newest interest of my husband and myself. There's a steampunk convention coming to St. Louis in April of 2010 and we're on the search for costume pieces! This is such a change from my Renaissance Faire hobby - it should be really cool! I'm even thinking of new plot lines for new stories - delving into a world I've only skimmed before. I did love the series Firefly and Dark Angel, both dealing with a sort of post-apocalyptic-like setting, but in very different ways. And I love the movie Howl's Moving Castle.

Disney's site for Howl's Moving Castle
You Tube Trailer

Castle in the Sky is cool, too.
You Tube Trailer of Castle in the Sky

And there are so many sites on the web to visit that I've only just begun.