Lea Wait's Blog, page 153

Who Is The Main Character In Your Story?

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Vaughn

Vaughn Hardacker here.By definition the main character of any story is the one through whose eyes the reader experiences the story. It is the one around whom the problem of the story revolves. It is through the main character that we most closely identify.

Protagonist and antagonist are not point of view characters but are character functions. The protagonist is the one who is the prime mover of the effort to achieve the goal. The antagonist is all about preventing the protagonist from achieving the goal. In our own minds, protagonist represents our initiative – the motivation to affect change. Antagonist is our reticence – the motivation to maintain the status quo, or at least to return to it.

In writing a mystery or thriller the main character is not necessarily the main character; I would argue that in many cases it is the antagonist. Without the antagonist the protagonist has no reason to exist. It is the villain who drives the action, not our knight in silver armor. One of the creeds in mystery writing is: Drop the body as soon as possible. This means that before the protagonist acts, the antagonist has already been active. I have recently been toying with an idea that has been bouncing around my head for a couple of years now. The scenario is this: After leaving the court house where he’s just been divorced for

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My Brother’s Keeper

the fourth time, a retired hitman learns that his financial manager has stolen his money, leaving him destitute. I’m still trying to decide which way to go. Does he remain retired and attempt to regain his financial worth? Does he do what he knows and return to his former trade? Is he the protagonist or the antagonist (maybe anti-hero is a better choice of words)? More importantly, who will be the main character? Of course there is also the marketing question: Will readers buy a novel in which the main character is a hired killer?

I have decided to go ahead and start writing, letting the story decide who is the main character. I have learned that when I select my protagonist as my main character, I end up with a stereotypical hero–a character who grapples with the moral issue, represents the reader/audience point of view, and is also leading the charge in the logistics of the plot. In most novels and movies it is the antagonist who drives the plot. But, the main character can be anyone. In Jeffrey Deaver’s Lincoln Rhymes novels, Rhymes is clearly the protagonist, however the main character is Amelia Sachs (who might be mistaken as being a supporting character) . Amelia is Rhymes eyes on site and it is through her eyes that the reader experiences the action as well as the character with whom the reader identifies.

In the course of writing I usually find that my characters will define their own roles. I have also been that I write better villains than I do heroes. Maybe because I am prone toward writing reluctant heroes (i. e. John Bear in WENDIGO) whereas my villains are in no way reluctant to commit their crimes.

Who is your main character? Do you have a single main character? Does your main character change from chapter to chapter?

It’s That Kind of Day

Dorothy Cannell: Today being a dreary day, I felt in the mood to bake.  I have always [image error]enjoyed Apple Strudel, but wasn’t keen on the amount of work involved.  Several years ago I came upon an easy version that used crescent rolls for the pastry.  It just so happened I had a tube of them in the fridge. My husband had bought them with the idea we could have them with soup for dinner as we often did when we were first married, and quick and cheap was the order of the day.  The other ingredients I also had on hand.

1 ½ cups of diced peeled apples

½ cup chopped toasted pecans

¼ cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Flour for dusting

1 can refrigerated crescent dinner rolls

2 tablespoons butter, softened

Additional softened butter

 

Heat oven to 375. In medium bowl, toss apples, pecans, brown sugar and cinnamon.  Set aside.
Dust work surface lightly with flour. Unroll dough on floured surface.  With fingers, press dough lightly into rectangle.  Press perforations to seal.  Using floured rolling pin, roll out dough as thin as possible.  With pastry brush, spread 2 tablespoons butter all over dough.
Spoon apple mixture onto one long side of dough. Gently lift apple-topped edge of dough and start rolling up strudel toward plain dough edge until filling is completely sealed.  If needed, turn log to place seam on bottom.  Brush strudel with additional butter.
Bake on parchment lined baking sheet for 25 minutes, or until golden brown.

 

This is good with a cup of tea and whatever book you happen to be reading as the rain spatters the windowpanes.

 

Happy reading,

Dorothy

How It All Began

Kate Flora: Crime writers sometimes engage in a competition that could be titled: Who [image error]has suffered most? This usually begins by comparing how many years each competitor spent in the unpublished writers corner. This is followed by stories of horrible book events, editors who leave while the book is in process, savage reviews, and other tales of woe, like sitting in Barnes & Noble at Christmas, wearing a ridiculous Santa hat and repeatedly being asked the way to the bathroom. It may sound strange, but we find comfort in knowing that our journey isn’t Job-like, or Sisyphean, even though it can often feel that way, but one that many share.

Usually, we keep these stories to ourselves, within the writing community. For readers, we like to present optimism, a bright smile, and project the image that our writing careers are all rainbows and unicorns and pots of gold at the end of those rainbows. We may tell the truth if asked, but usually those thoughts of giving up and moving on are not something we share.

Are you bracing yourself for bad things ahead?

Relax. I am not feeling dark, nor am I about to confess to an overwhelming desire to give up writing and go rain skipping instead. But it can be helpful to aspiring writers to know that “Yet she persisted,” is the mantra for many writers.

[image error]So, how did it begin? As I remember it, I was practicing law, had a child in daycare and another on the way, and I was sitting at a stop light, on my way to court to have a fight about blistered paint on a tennis court, when I had an epiphany: two reasonable adults should be able to work this out between themselves. I decided to leave work for a while and stay home with my boys. Then I immediately panicked. I had always had a job. What would I do? And I hit upon the naïve idea that since I’d always wanted to write, I might be able to fit it in around the times when the boys napped.

Foolish me. I bought a computer and set it up. I began to cook up a plot in my head, a semi-autobiographical mystery involving law students and trusts and estates, and realized my children rarely napped. Undeterred, I wrote in little bits of time, and nine months later I typed “The End” on a book that I put in a drawer.

That was the beginning of ten years of writing, four books in the drawer, and a whole box of rejection letters before I sold a book. But I am a stubborn Yankee. I said I wouldn’t stop submitting until I had enough letters to paper the bathroom. It was a small room, and I was eyeing the dining room when I found an ad in a magazine—either The Writer or Writer’s Digest—from a literary agent seeking manuscripts. Ha! I thought. There is no literary agent in the world who needs to look for clients. Having nothing to lose, though, I sent her the cover letter, synopsis, and first chapters of Chosen for Death.

A few weeks later, I got a message on the answering machine: “I’m very interested. If you haven’t signed up with someone else, can we talk?”

We talked. Later, when we met at a conference, she told me that she had had 2000 responses to the ad. She’d assembled a group of friends, ordered a lot of takeout, and they’d had a reading party. Out of that 2000, she’d found two she was interested in agenting, and I was one of those two.

Getting an agent was only the beginning. She moved to New York to be closer to [image error]publishers. And one slushy winter night, I was on the phone with a neighbor when the operator interrupted, said she had an emergency call for me, would my neighbor yield the line? She yielded. It was my agent. She had an offer on the book, but wanted to see if she could get a better one, was that all right with me? She ended up getting me a three-book, hard-soft deal. I was finally going to leave that unpublished writers corner behind.

The journey that followed was like an erratic EKG, but that beginning was lovely. I have stuck to writing despite those ups and downs, while I’ve seen many writers I started with back then (the early 1990’s) give up. I love the craft, and the emergence of stories far too much to quit. I long ago decided that however negative the world of publishing was—poor pay, unsupportive publishers, cruel reviews or no reviews at all—only I got to decide whether I was a writer. That stubborn decision has carried me through many dark moments, and it is one I pass on to my students.

I had three books published before I stopped writing “lawyer” on forms as my profession, rather than “writer.” Getting to call myself a writer seemed far too important to claim until I’d earned it. At this point, there are, I believe, six books in the drawer. Some of them may yet emerge. And I still have the beautiful painted Perrier-Jouet champagne bottle, now empty, that my husband trudged through slushy Boston to find when I told him I’d sold my first book.

Local newspaper gone? Be scared. Very scared.

Colleague and former journalistic rival Brenda Buchanan recently captured very well why everyone should care about the demise of a newspaper like Biddeford’s Journal-Tribune, which closed earlier this month after 135 years in business.

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I started my first fill-time job after college, at the Biddeford Journal-Tribune.

While it’s also the place I got my first full-time job after college, I’m not wallowing in nostalgia. I’d like to add my two cents to Brenda’s about how concerning it is that a vital cog in democracy is being eroded as newspapers shut down. It’s not the loss of the print and ink product — some accounts of newspapers shutting down get the delivery method confused with what it’s actually delivering.

Government and commerce need watchdogs — a voice that’s not controlled by the government, is independent and is guided by a code of ethics that include accuracy and critical thinking —  to keep things in check.

That lofty thought may not stir you, but does getting hit in the wallet?

A study reported on by the Pacific Standard last year by Kriston Capps found that cities that lost a newspaper had an increase in government costs because there was no one there to hold them accountable.

Here’s an excerpt:

According to a new working paper, local news deserts lose out financially too. Cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals, say researchers who tracked the decline of local news outlets between 1996 and 2015.

Disruptions in local news coverage are soon followed by higher long-term borrowing costs for cities. Costs for bonds can rise as much as 11 basis points after the closure of a local newspaper—a finding that can’t be attributed to other underlying economic conditions, the authors say. Those civic watchdogs make a difference to the bottom line.

If you live in a town the size of mine, like many in Maine do, you may think “No big deal. My town isn’t doing bond issues or other big-ticket items.” But the little things newspapers used to report on — RFPs for plowing or other town services, for instance — are just as vital, if not moreso.

Small town budgets are tighter, the money’s harder to come by, no one wants taxes to go up, and when town meeting time, comes, it’s generally the library or school that suffer. No one knows about the higher-than-it-should’ve-been contract that may have gone to someone’s cousin or buddy, because no one reported on it. Even towns that are ostensibly covered by newspapers, staffing cuts not only to reporters, but editors who assign and develop stories, means there’s less of an eye on covering day-to-day news.

The erosion of local coverage isn’t just newspaper owners’ fault. It’s allowed to happen by the huge majority of people who feel like they’re already well-informed because they’re inundated with information on TV and their devices. Local government is so, well, boring, right? And inconsequential. Most people don’t know or seem to care much about what’s going on in their own community.

Harsh assessment? Maybe, but true. One telling thing in a recent Boston Globe article about the Biddeford Journal-Tribune is that the local offcials who lamented the fact it was closing didn’t subscribe to the paper.

While some may argue that it’s always been the way, you may forget that when you got a local newspaper, you’d leaf through it and read things you wouldn’t necessarily search out. One image that’s traveled with me through my career is arriving home for lunch around the time the afternoon paper I worked for in Haverill, Mass. was delivered (another newspaper that no longer exists). I felt pride, as well as satisfaction, that people were sitting on the front steps of the triple-deckers in my neighborhood reading the paper as they enjoyed the afternoon sun with their neighbors.

That’s not just a quaint snapshot of the past — it was evidence to me that regular people in the community cared enough to pick up the paper and read it. It made an impression that I didn’t forget. Simple, obvious — and no longer the norm.

The loss of basic curiousity and the instinct to know what your local commuity is up to, the fact that people don’t understand — or maybe choose not to care about — how lack of local oversight affects their lives (and their wallets) is more disturbing to me that the demise of the ink and paper delivery system that supported my family for three generations.

The fact that independent sources of providing local news are being silenced goes farther than individuals simply not being informed about things that affect their lives. It’s also about the control of that information.

A 2017 documentary “Nobody Speaks: Trials of the Free Press,” shows disturbingly how those with a lot of money can shut down news sources, silencing the watchdogs. Keeping those informatoin channels isn’t just an issue on the local level, but the shutdown of quality journalism has an impact on the bigger picture information you consume.

Consumers of news, as well as those who keep it afloat financially (advertisers), and those who produce it, have to stop thinking of news in terms of print vs. digital.

It’s time to start thinking about quality content and how to produce it, rather than the single-mided focus on delivery methods of the past decade.

I know delivering journalism costs money and money rules the bottom line. That’s always been true.

I’m a third-generation journalist, grew up around journalists. Journalists sitting around our house having impassioned discussions about journalism were as normal in my childhood as discussions about the NFL or why had the best lawn in the neighborhood might’ve been in other homes. I’ve been in the business for nearly four decades. That doesn’t make me some old mildeweed geezer out of touch with today’s journalism, by the way. Rather, it gives me a context for understanding why journalism matters as much today as it did when I first worked at the Journal-Tribune and pounded out stories on an IBM Selectric.

I also know this, because I’ve seen it my entire life (though not often enough): When those in a position to make decisions understand journalism, why it exists, and care about quality journalism, quality journalism will follow.

Two of my former New Hampshire colleagues are great examples. Carol Robidoux, in Manchester, N.H., created Manchester Ink Link, which covers mostly city goings-on. Nancy West created InDepthNH, which covers the state. Both are individuals, good, experienced journalists who see a need and are attempting to fill a gap. They operate on a shoestring and good wishes, yet put out quality products. Just imagine what someone with money behind them could do.

I read an article today about how the University of Michigan’s student paper, The Michigan Daily because Ann Arbor — a city larger than Portland, Maine, or Manchester, N.H., — no longer has a daily newspaper. A grant that allows the newspaper to operate means there are plenty of college kids covering city boards, car accidents, and more five days a week. Lucky Ann Arbor. A lot of cities aren’t so lucky.

We’re dealing with a lot of issues these days — I won’t reel them all off, you’ve heard enough about them. The bottom line is that to solve those issues, there has to be a foundation of knowledge that starts at home.

On a lighter note: A bunch of us Maine Crime Writers and some friends will be at Fore River Brewing in South Portland Sunday, Oct. 27, giving brief readings from our books. Maybe I’ll read something about journalism. But there’ll be free pizza, too, so don’t let that stop you. For more info, see below. There’s also a Facebook page.

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Weekend Update: October 19-20, 2019

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by Maureen Milliken (Monday), Kate Flora (Tuesday), Dorothy Cannell (Thursday) and Vaughn Hardacker (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

A Cure for a Slow-Moving Plot: Add Conflict

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today writing about conflict. Most people aren’t crazy about encountering conflict in real life. It’s much more pleasant to avoid acrimonious clashes. But in fiction, especially mystery fiction, a plot without conflict is apt to be pretty darned dull.

[image error]I was reminded of this truth just recently, when I started work on the rough draft of the fourth Deadly Edits Mystery. I had a sketchy plot in mind, enough to get me started, but as I created the early scenes, in which my protagonist learns of an unexpected inheritance and the conditions she must fulfill to claim it, I realized that things were rolling along much too smoothly. Yes, she had a obstacle to overcome. She’d encountered mysterious elements. She’d even discovered that there was a murder, but it took place many years ago. Overall, not much was happening in the present. The story I was telling was, to be blunt, a little boring.

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First book in the Deadly Edits series

Since I never plot in detail in advance, this didn’t worry me too much. In fact, I already had an idea about where things would start to get more lively. Unfortunately, that point was not until halfway through the book.

I’m writing a cozy mystery, not a novel of suspense. Even so, it’s never a good idea to wait too long before something exciting or unexpected happens. Readers, especially readers who have already read the first books in a series and want to know what will happen next to the continuing characters, are patient, but not that patient. If I fail to hold their interest, they’ll put the book down. I don’t want to run that risk that they might not pick it up again.

[image error]What my plot needed was conflict. The problem was how to get it. I didn’t want my protagonist to alienate other characters by quarreling with them. Even without having worked out all the details, I have in mind a definite progression of discoveries to get me to the heart of the mystery. Then it dawned on me: aside from conflict, what was lacking in this novel was a subplot.

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Second book in the Deadly Edits series

Most mysteries have at least one and often two distinct subplots to keep the action moving along and provide the continuing characters with opportunities to grow and change. Sometimes one of the subplots is a romance, although not necessarily a romance between the amateur sleuth and another character. I already have an inkling of what I’ll use for a romance subplot in this novel, a developing relationship between two secondary characters. What I needed was a second subplot with real possibilities for conflict. Something to liven up the early chapters while allowing the mystery to unravel more slowly.

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Third book in the Deadly Edits series, in stores June 30, 2020

Here’s how ideas are born. My amateur detective is a freelance editor. I already established, in Crime & Punctuation, the first novel in the series, that before she retired she was a beta reader for a fellow teacher who writes romance novels. At the same time I was noodling ideas for this storyline, having just turned in the third book in the series (A Fatal Fiction, to be published in June 2020), I was listening to the audiobook of a mystery novel (Die for Love by Elizabeth Peters) about a murder at a romance writers’ conference. I’d also just received an email from a reader, complaining because she’d found two typos in my last book. I replied politely, as I usually do to such messages. I get a lot of them. People just love to point out errors. The audiobook and the email together inspired a character who accosts my heroine in the supermarket. She found Mikki’s name on the acknowledgments page of the romance writer’s latest book and erroneously blames Mikki for the typos she found in the novel. As things stand now (this is a work-in-progress, after all), this self-proclaimed “biggest fan” will keep popping up, to the point where it’s necessary for the local police to step in. Mikki will have good reasons to worry about the situation. She won’t be terribly concerned about her own safety, although perhaps she should be, but she will worry that the fan will somehow discover her idol’s secret—the glamorous “Illyria Dubonnet” is as much a fiction as any of her characters. The last thing the real writer wants is to be outed by one of her readers.

[image error]At this point, I have no idea how much this subplot with affect the main plot of the book. I’ll find that out as I go along. But no matter how it turns out, dreaming it up has certainly livened up my early chapters. Combined with that long-ago murder, the conflict between Mikki and “Illyria’s biggest fan” looks promising as a way to keep readers turning the pages, although I won’t know for certain if it works until I’ve finished the first draft of the book. And if it’s not enough? No worries. That’s what revisions are for. After all, I still have another seven and a half months before the manuscript is due on my editor’s desk.

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With the June 2019 publication of Clause & Effect, Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty books traditionally published. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Currently she writes the contemporary Liss MacCrimmon Mysteries and the “Deadly Edits” series as Kaitlyn. As Kathy, her most recent book is a collection of short stories, Different Times, Different Crimes. Her websites are www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com and she maintains a website about women who lived in England between 1485 and 1603 at A Who’s Who of Tudor Women.

When We Feel Alone, We Do Have Good Company

[image error]This fall has been a bit rough, salvaged by lots of walks with my dog Raven and visits with divine grandchildren. When I feel very alone with the writing process, or too much time spent with people who only talk about themselves (what happened to curiosity, anyway?) I turn to these trusted voices/quotes for hope, inspiration, energy, a good laugh, and sometimes …  just some gruff, angry energy. Enjoy![image error]

 

“Since we cannot expect truth from our institutions, we must expect it from our writers.” Edward Abbey

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been.” George Eliot

“Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.” Agatha Christie

“The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” Aldo Leopold[image error]

“I try to write the books I would love to come upon, that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness—and that can make me laugh. When I am reading a book like this, I feel rich and profoundly relieved to be in the presence of someone who will share the truth with me, and throw the lights on a little, and I try to write these kinds of books. Books, for me, are medicine.” Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird[image error]

“It is quite possible that an animal has spoken to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention.” E.B. White , Charlotte’s Web

“We could have saved the Earth, but we were too damned cheap.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr.[image error]

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” John Muir

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Dr. Seuss[image error]

“ You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt.[image error]

 

“No matter how little money and how few possessions you own, having a dog makes you rich.” Louis Sabin

“Pounding out a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn – you just keep your head down and concentrate on getting to the end. Revision is where fine art begins. It’s thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there. To plant resolution, like a seed, into chapter one. To create new scenes, investing a character with the necessary damage, the right kind of longing. To pitch out boldly and try again. To work every metaphor across the whole, back and forth, like weaving. I love that.” Barbara Kingsolver[image error]

“I thought, I just want it to be real. Like when I was writing Olive Kitteridge and she would do and say these awful things, and I would say, ‘Ouch! Ouch!’ And then I would say to myself, ‘Oh, come on, just let her rip, no point in being careful. You know that people say these things or you know that they think these—so just try to do this as truthfully as possible.’ ” Elizabeth Strout[image error]

 

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If women could sleep their way to the top, there’d be a lot more women at the top.” Gloria Steinhem[image error]

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Mary Oliver

“One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. [image error]Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”— Nora Ephron (‘96 Wellesley commencement address)[image error]

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” James Baldwin[image error]

[image error] “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…” Aldo Leopold

“To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River

Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.” Edward Abbey[image error]

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.” Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake …   Wendell Berry, https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/peace-wild-things-0/

I can’t quote the entire poem that has always given me grit. One that I print out and send to friends who need both a hug and a shove, but it starts, “One day you finally knew what you had to do/and began …”. (Find the rest of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Journey” here: https://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/maryoliver.html#anchor_1478

(And for anyone trying to wrestle slowpokes or toddlers into the car to make an appointment …)[image error]

 

 

 

 

 

Sandy’s novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine,” won a national Mystery Writers of America award, was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest, and she’s been a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. [image error]Find her novel at all Shermans Books and on Amazon . Find more info on the video trailer and Sandy’s website. The second Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Turn,” will be published in 2019.

https://www.yourtruenature.com/products/advice-from-a-bat-frameable-art-card

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Make Kombucha, Nectar of the Gods

Hi all, Jen Blood here. I’ve been happily buried in homesteading biz over the past several months, and thought I would take a moment here to talk about one of my favorite aspects of the Make-Your-Own lifestyle: fermentation, defined by the dictionary as “the chemical breakdown of a substance by bacteria, yeasts, or other microorganisms, typically involving effervescence and the giving off of heat.”

Yes, that’s right. It’s not just for old timers or hipsters anymore. Middle-aged white ladies have also jumped on the bandwagon. I eagerly devoured Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, and that got rid of a lot of my initial unease about the idea of rotting things on my sideboard in order to consume them later. At this point, we have homemade sauerkraut in the fridge, gallons of apple cider vinegar in the pantry, miso that’s been aging for a little over a year in the closet, homemade vanilla extract aged in an oak cask I got online for $30… Ben’s family mocked me relentlessly for that one, since my first batch of vanilla cost north of $100 between the organic vanilla beans, bottle of bourbon, and the cask. However, we’re now on our third batch of the extract and I’ll be tapping more shortly, so it’s becoming more cost effective. The extract makes a great gift, as well, and is kind of incredible in holiday baking.

My favorite fermentation project of all, however, continues to be my kombucha. Kombucha is made from something called a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), which is a big slimy terrifying thing you keep on your sideboard or in a dark corner somewhere pretty much in perpetuity. Here’s my girl, or one of them anyway:

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She’s not pretty, but she does pack a punch.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to make a batch of kombucha. The first step, of course, is to get yourself a SCOBY. I got mine from my good friend Sam, who rocks. She provided a very healthy SCOBY about a year and a half ago, and that is the great grandma of the SCOBYs I have today (I have two). If you don’t have a friend who has extra SCOBY, you can find them online pretty much anywhere now relatively cheaply, or you can make your own. Or, if you’re dying to try this, just hit me up – I always have SCOBY to spare.

At any rate…

You start with your slimy, pulsing culture of bacteria and yeast.

From there, you need to brew your sweet tea. I use 1 tablespoon of green tea and 1 tablespoon of black – herbal tea doesn’t work so well at this point, but black or green tea works wonders. You’ll also need 1 cup of sugar; I use raw cane sugar, but table sugar reportedly works just as well. Then you need a 1-gallon glass jug, which you can usually find at places like Goodwill… I got several at Reny’s for about $10 each, and they’ve more than paid for themselves since that time. Glass gallon jugs are excellent for the fermentation game.

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So… Making this thing.

Boil one quart of filtered water. Add the tea leaves, and let brew for 10 to 15 minutes.

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Then, strain out the tea leaves and add your sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

You now have your sweet tea brew. Add this to your gallon jug, followed by about two and a half quarts (10 cups) of cool filtered water. At this point, the sweet tea should be about room temperature. You don’t want it much hotter than that, because it could kill your SCOBY. A dead SCOBY is not what you’re after.

Once your sweet tea is, in fact, room temperature, wash your hands thoroughly and then gently add your SCOBY to the jug.

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Pour two cups of old SCOBY sweet tea (the stuff your SCOBY was living in, until you brewed the new) over the brew.

Cover with cheese cloth or, in the more active summer months, a lightweight, breathable cotton cloth – fruit flies love kombucha, and will invade if you don’t have a cover that adequately keeps them away.

The first ferment for your kombucha takes anywhere from three to ten days, depending on the time of year. In summer, I can usually get a good first ferment in three or four days; in winter, it usually takes about a week.

You can tell the ferment is working because you’re going to get a new SCOBY. Wahoo! Your existing SCOBY will float in the tea, usually (but not always) drifting down from the top after a couple of days. A tan or grayish film will form at the top of the liquid, gradually taking shape over the course of that first ferment. If you taste test the tea, you’ll find there’s some effervescence and it’s lost some of its sweetness in that time. This is when you move on to the second stage of the kombucha-making process.

I got a dozen swing-top glass bottles from a local brewer’s shop, which are awesome for bottling kombucha. Then, you decide what flavors you want to make. People use fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices, or any combination thereof, and there are a million recipes you can follow online. My favorite this summer was from a hibiscus-berry loose-leaf tea I get at Morning Glory in Brunswick.

I add a heaping teaspoon of the loose-leaf tea to the bottom of each of glass bottles (I usually get five to six bottles of kombucha per gallon jug of sweet tea).

Then comes the fun part… Trying to get the sweet tea from the gallon jug into the glass bottles. I use a siphon; if you’re smart, you’ll just start with a gallon jug that has a spout and be done with it. I kind of like the challenge of the siphon, however, and it’s worked just fine for me over the past many months I’ve been doing this.

Leave an inch to an inch and a half of space in your glass bottle, then seal. Put in a dark corner somewhere, and leave for another five to ten days.

Then… Voila. You have kombucha. A word of warning: These little suckers can pack a punch once the fermentation is complete, so be careful uncapping them. I always do it over a sink, releasing the pressure slowly so as to avoid staining my ceiling with rogue kombucha (which has happened to me, but so far only once. Okay, maybe twice). If it’s too fizzy and you’re sure it’s going to explode, release a little bit of pressure and then put it in the fridge. The cold temps stop the fermentation process and usually take a bit of the effervescence from your brew.

If you’re interested in learning more about kombucha, I highly recommend The Big Book of Kombucha, by Hannah Crum and Alex LaGory. You can find it at the Rising Tide Co-op in Damariscotta, or I’m sure you can order it pretty much anywhere. Most of what I know about kombucha, I learned from that book and online tutorials.

Do you do any home brewing of your own? I have a slew of things I still want to try, beginning with wine. Sourdough is also on my list. What about you?

Jen Blood is the USA Today-bestselling author of the Erin Solomon Mysteries and the Flint K-9 Search and Rescue Mysteries. You can learn more at her website, http://www.jenblood.com. 

 

Weekend Update: October 12-13, 2019

[image error]Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by Joe Souza (Monday), Jen Blood (Tuesday), Sandra Neily (Thursday) and Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

The “Where Would You Put the Body?” contest has winners! We have prizes for First, Second, and Third place—books of course and other Maine goodies. It was great fun to see where entrants wanted to park Evil Aunt Alice (or whomever.) Here are the three winning entries along with the folks who submitted them. We’ll contact each to arrange prize delivery.

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1st place Katherine Page. Gut the engine, keep the flowers going and in most rural areas you’d never have anyone give it a second thought until you died and some poor relative had to deal with the junker.

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2nd place Janet Murch. Think about it. If you hid a body in one of these tanks right after everything has been spread and add quick lime, by the time it gets used again, there won’t be much left to discover.

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3rd Place Bruce Harris Room 9, York Harbor Inn, York, ME Gotta love hiding a corpse in a room that everyone forgot.

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business. Contact Kate Flora

One Day in Pictures

John Clark sharing a road trip Beth and I took a few weeks ago. If you remember my last post, I talked about some of the roads in Maine where photo opportunities abounded. My eye tends to catch the smaller and more unusual things when we travel. These were the ten best of the day.

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Perfect sky, bright piece of farm equipment in Exeter.

We started from Waterville, following I-95 to Newport where we began following Rt. 11 north to Corinna, then through some of those places that are sometimes smaller than their names on the map. These included Morse Corners, Bonds Corner, Exeter Center, Exeter Corners, East Corinth and Rollins Mills (where we accidentally took Route 11A). Our first serious photo stop was in Exeter where some very beautiful farmland can be found.

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This irrigation system stretched a quarter mile and pivoted on one end. Note the house framed in the center crosspieces.

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This Japanese beetle was waving at me, so I took his/her picture.

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A vegetation buffer in a recently harvested potato field.

Then it was on to Charleston, North Bradford and into Milo, before stopping at a tiny town park in Brownville by the river. The walkway there hadn’t been trimmed in ages and, after Beth slid down a very muddy bank, we decided to turn around and eat our picnic lunch.

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Insects tend to catch my eye.

When we hit Prairie, we turned west on a dirt road and seven miles later, we stopped to admire Katahdin Iron Works. Two buildings remain and are quite impressive. If we had gotten there earlier, we probably would have paid the toll and continued on to Gulf Hagas, but we’ll save that for another trip.

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Iron smelted with Maine charcoal a hundred plus years ago.

The next stretch is pretty much through uninhabited territory, save for an abundance of seasonal camps and mysterious roads leading into the woods. It would make for a very interesting expedition some other time. We did stop by the causeway between Millinocket and East Millinocket where we’ve canoed in the past.

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Which will last longer, the graffiti or the romance?

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Fireweed loves water, but is nearly impossible to transplant.

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I almost missed this as it wasn’t eye-catching until I knelt down to take the picture.

The final leg took us from Medway through Grindstone Hay Brook, Stacyville, Siberia (no lie!), Sherman Station and Patten. It was getting toward dusk, so we left Rt. 11 at Knowles Corner (with another 70+ miles left before it terminates), looping back to I-95 for the return trip. It came to 380 miles round trip.

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The juxtaposition of the poles stretching down the hill with the oncoming cars was too tempting to ignore.