Tales from the Raven

Today I swapped my daughter’s black Sunday shoes for white sandals and we checked on the status of everyone’s swimwear.  The garden is in, the trees are leafed out, and summer’s just around the corner.

I’m excited to dig in to the summer projects we have planned–but rushing to finish up the spring list.  Of highest [...]

You know what they say about out of the ashes, new life is formed?  Well, sometimes it’s after liberal use of the delete key.
Last week I sent the new and improved first chapter of 13 Demon Days to my readers, and waited for feedback.   I was a little nervous because I’ve never been as happy [...]

All day today I wanted to play an April Fool’s Day joke on someone, but never managed to.  First I was busy with writing, then I could only think of mean ones.  Sad, I know.
But at last my wish was granted.  As I drove back from picking up some research books at the Duke library, I [...]

Over this spring break, I need to:

Finalize the rules of magic for 13 Demon Days
Write the new and improved outline
Implement Critiques on the Query
Finish re-writes on the first five chapters

Of course, I can’t neglect my families plans to:

Get the garden beds filled with soil
Scrub down the turkey coop
Chick-proof the chicken coop
Plant the spring bulbs

Since the weather looks gorgeous [...]

Well, it’s official.  On the 26th of March I have my first sunburn of the summer.  I suppose I earned this one, given that I spent hours outside working on converting the kids playhouse into a chicken tractor, but I can’t say that makes it any more welcome.
Some members of my family rarely have to [...]

If I were the squeeing type, I’d be squeeing over here.  Impossible, you think?  Let me explain.
Since I wrote three novels over the last year plus, I’m doing a lot of revising of late.  When I’m writing a novel the first time through, I want everyone to go away, be quiet, leave me alone, and don’t [...]

No, not our little eggers.  They have more than two weeks to go.  These are the little peepers we had shipped from a hatchery.  We got the brood boxes ready for them Wednesday night and crossed our fingers they’d ship well.  Then the post office called early Thursday morning to say they were in.  We walked into [...]

Being that it’s St. Patty’s day and because I’m researching the meaning of symbols for 13 Demon Days, I decided to see what ‘green’ means to different people.  I liked this article on about.com, and there’s a great list here.  What was funny for me was how differently I’ve perceived green throughout my life.
As a [...]

These are the lovely little guinea eggs, ready to pop in the incubator.
      
They’re from a mixed flock, so we have high hopes that we’ll get a veritable rainbow of little guineas…just as soon as we can turn these babies into chicks!  The problem is that our not-so-lovely little square chicken,
 
aka incubator, has gone on [...]

One of my favorite things about living on the other side of nowhere is all the wildlife we see and the number of birds that drop by.  We’ve got one feeder in the garden that we recently loaded down with orange halves, a suet block, my homemade bread wreath, and of course, a traditional feeder [...]