Winter Beginning, With New Books
Kickstarter over, there's some housekeeping to wrap up - while I look forward to my next set of non-fiction writing
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Farming News - Setting out hay for February.
Writing News - Kickstarter over, time to publish commercially. Then line up my next books.
Fiction News - The Hooman Saga continues its serial.
Expectancy Factor - Persistence is Faith. You need both.
Farming News
Another gorgeous evening found this picture waiting as I walked up the path back to the home place. That’s our new shed, and you can see the cow path I’m following as it winds up the hill.
That gimping cow is now walking pretty good these days. Still a limp, but she snuck up on me the other day to find out if I had corn in a spare pocket. Mostly I know her by that black heifer of hers. And that orphan calf isn’t usually too far away, either.
Those chickens sold well at the auction. Mother said it was twice what she expected. But since the feed was going into making them fat instead of producing eggs, someone got some nice “stewers.”
She’s still getting at least a dozen eggs daily out of the former-pullets. And now at least half of them are full sized. She’s opened up the old chicken pens so that the peafowls and peacocks can clean up what they can, as well as get shelter if they want.
Yesterday, I got the tractor running and put out 36 bales for next February.
These are staggered, on rows of three and two in a column running across the slope to help collect runoff and avoid making new gullies.
These bales are at least four years old now, and we work to use our oldest first, since the nutrient value goes down and the netwrap covering starts decaying. (That front one is what happens about that point.) Netwrap helps preserve the hay better than string-tied, which lets in a lot of moisture.
My herd generally goes through about a bale each day, so I can figure that if I can keep them on pasture until the snow covers everything (even though they will try to paw through) then I can last that many days - or from Feb 15th to about March (does math…) um - 23rd. If I make them clean it up and they don’t waste any by laying on a partial bale some how.
The bales are set out to be about a cow-and-1/2 away from each other. Bale rings go around each to keep them only eating what they can reach. And I can keep them eating on usually three at a time by letting them into the next two or three once I have that many empty rings ready to move. This way I never have more than five being eaten on at any one time. And five bales generally ensure that the calves can get hay while the cows are busy being bossy ovoer the other bales.
Our worst snow storms happen about Feb 15th, but sometimes sooner. And I quit feeding bales when they start refusing to each them, which is about the 15th of March.
Some graziers work to feed grass all year round. But I’ve got some fairly worn-out land which needs to those minerals and mulch added to restore the organic matter over that clay base. By grazing bales, I can leave about 3-5 inches of mulch on the ground (along with their manure) in a single season. Then we’ll go through about 4-5 years of various edible weeds showing up, due to the richness of that manure-mulch-mix, and then we have some nice grass reseeding itself after that. (Nature on its own will only add about a half-inch in 100 years.)
Since we had a bit of a drought this fall, I want to set out another 30+ bales just in case. Yesterday, the wind was bitter cold, so I quit once I had that many out. (Generally, the guy who provides our hay has a special wagon that loads 9 bales at a time, and unloads by rolling them off, so we’ve been getting 36 bales in an order.)
I have another two orders, last year’s and the year before, just sitting there waiting. Again, I want to use the oldest up first. If I can hold off the cattle until February, then I’ll just keep the rest of those fenced-in hay bales until next year. Still, I’ll need some warmish weather to pull that tractor out and do that.
Needless to say, I generally only get that tractor out 2 or 3 days of the year - this being one of them.
The roofer is busy with other projects, but will be coming soon to see how he can fit us into his queue.
Meanwhile, we got another 3/4 inch of rain. Not too many leaks - but now I know why there are any at all - and that there never should be any. Something I’d gotten used to, but now their importance is more vital.
Finally picked up another bucket of apples ready for making cider vinegar out of. With the apple scraps I got my Mother to save from her apple butter canning, this makes about four buckets of vinegar I can produce. Since they take about a month to ferment, if I can get these done this week, they’ll be mid-December before they are ready.
To keep them from freezing, they’ll go onto the sunroom where mother overwinters her more delicate plants.
Behind them is a rack for cut and split wood. Yes, I’m a bit behind on this. I have a tree we had to take down this summer as it was literally falling down onto the small building below it. Ash borers did their trick on it. A nephew came out with a rented high-lift and was able to cut the higher branches off and drop them. Ever since, it’s been a “round to it” which will be this week. Because of all our visitors coming for Thanksgiving.
What they don’t see, they can’t comment on.
Oh - Mother still has that partial bucket of persimmons to process and freeze. I’m a bit torn as to which tastes best - persimmon cookies or pawpaw cookies.
Tiny Home News
Still working over finances. Our biggest problem is that we don’t want to mortgage our land in these economic/political times.
With no collateral, that means personal line of credit, which are much smaller, or personal loans. All on a pair of retired people’s budgets.
Which means I need to ramp up my book sales. And that, of course, comes back to why I started my huge project two years ago. And those books that resulted.
(There’s an idea of starting a Gofundme project for this - but that is a lot of homework to do in all my spare time…)
Writing News
While the results of that Kickstarter essentially a monetary failure, there was a lot of benefits gained. So the next one, this coming Spring will be better and more successful.
Thanks again to all our backers.
One upside to this is that I’ll be spending time finding out about every reader to this newsletter - yes, that’s you. Not that I need to find out much, but things like what you want to read and hear about. (See a survey below.)
Also, this means cleaning up my backend library of books and probably reviewing these so you have more options. With 248 original fiction works, around 140 collected pulp fiction anthologies, and over 200 non-fiction of my own and re-published works - that’s nearly 600 books I can tell you all about. Of course in these reviews, I’ll be lining them up into series and revamping them into new books as I get inspired - and can find time.
I’ll be coming out with an 8-lesson course and publishing each lesson here on the Writerpreneur section of this newsletter - Mondays. I hope you like these. They turned out to be a different style of writing from most non-fiction that's out there.
Right now, I have to get those four books (yes, I compiled and added a new book this week to that Writerpreneur series) - these need to be commercially published as paperbacks, and maybe hardbacks, so people can find them independently of my own promotion for them.
Next Project:
This is one I’ve been working forward on in my small snatches over the last three years - but the original work I found in 2015. This is Walter S. Campbell and his Professional Writing classes from 1938 to 1957. This last year, I was able to track down the other two instructors and their books.
Yesterday, as I was rearranging hay bales for winter, it came to me that their books really needed to be compiled into three books/courses that would revive and refresh these materials for our modern age. Because that original course was where they made their biggest breakthroughs. And that course was watered down later.
I knew when I got these brittle old hardbacks and OCR’d them into digital versions - that I had stumbled onto a gold mine from these long out of print classics.
There’s something that changes in any author when they really learn their professional chops. It’s an attitude and an ability to see the books they read differently. Every book they read then becomes an instructor. Pikc up your copy of Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande and you’ll find her talking about this. That attitude and skill can be learned, it can be taught.
And that is my duty.
WriterpreneurOS Posts
A nice sleuthing of my first Kickstarter, which is quite educational about areas which aren’t commonly discussed. This led to a new chapter in that course I’ll be releasing - but that was and is the point of all this material: to discover the holes in the fences where income is pouring out as you try to herd and corral it.
Fiction Posts
Sue, our heroine, is learning by sending and receiving thoughts from Tig, her wolf-rescuer - as they pick their way down a mountainside while chased by a pack of hunting, feral wolves. Of course, it ends in a cliffhanger…
Yes, you can get the book already. Even though I’ll be fixing and tweaking things slightly through out - and so come out with a revised version later. Here’s the book link to get your copy.
Expectancy Tips
Nightingale said that faith is the same as persistence. The more you push forward toward your goal, the more real that vision becomes - the one you know in your heart is just up ahead.
This is really the core of expectancy. You truly do create the world around you by what you expect out of it, what you expect you can improve. And why I call what you’ve been told to expect as Reality, while your own created expectancies are Actuality. Reality is a bit of soft clay to mold into what you want. It’s not all that solid. And it changes all the time - caused by people with vision expecting greater things of themselves and those around them.
All our great buildings and marvelous electronic gizmos have been developed this way - from a singular idea that people persisted in creating into existence.
(Yes, I have a Kickstarter on this book series coming up - either Summer or next Fall.)
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I hope your life is not too interesting to be overwhelming, but sufficiently engaging to keep you amused. (Like some of us here...)
Robert
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