Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 53

A short update & this week’s freebies

I continue to be spending an above-average amount of time cooking (canning and freezing, that is), so the word count is down from normal. In the last week, I managed to get another 4,000 words on Chameleon in a Mirror written. Besides that, I did some more work with my daughter on covers, responding to suggestions on Beyond the Waters of the World and In the Middle of Nowhere with Company. Pickled some jalapenos and made more barbecue sauce, tomato consomme and stewed tomatoes. So despite the...

New Pendragon Chronicles page and another free book!

This evening, I finally got something off my to-do list and created a dedicated page for my Arthurian novels, The Pendragon Chronicles. I would be very grateful to anyone who would be inclined to check it out and let me know what you think!

If it’s at all effective, I guess that means I will have to make a page for the Looking Through Lace series (once I have more books out) and Tales From Far Beyond North (or whatever I end up calling the stories). Well, supposedly it will get easier if I do...

Cover for first Alaska story, etc.

Chameleon in a Mirror is coming along nicely, despite all the cooking and harvesting around here at the moment (see my last post). It’s presently at 71,000 words. I’m consistently getting about 1,000 words a day done on the new version, pretty good for this time of year, with a fairly typical August tomato glut. What isn’t as typical is all the chili peppers we have this year. I already made jalapeno jelly, and it’s a big hit.

Next I will have to try pickled jalapenos. I did that last year; t...

By popular demand: How to create the essence of tomato (tomato consomme)

This is not going to be a precise recipe, since I don’t have one. A friend told me how to do this, and his instructions were vague. I googled, but nothing I found gave me a recipe the way I wanted it, neither in English nor German. So I just gave it a shot.

First off, you need a personal tomato plantation.

Barring that, you need a lot of tomatoes. Very ripe, sweet, juicy tomatoes. I doubt if store-bought would work, but maybe farmers market.

Ok, maybe not that many tomatoes.

These are the lef...

Tomatoes, jalapenos, and writing: progress on diverse fronts

Despite the title of this post, I have made a lot of progress on my writing goals in the last week — but the amounts of tomatoes, zucchinis and various spicy peppers ripening in our garden at the moment (not just jalapenos *g*) have made it necessary for me to take some longer breaks from writing in order to ensure that the harvest does not go to waste.

Some of the things I’ve done besides writing in the last week:

- 8 jars / bottles of BBQ sauce (made with fresh tomatoes and garden chillies)...

Working on Chameleon and Covers

On the weekend, we took a short trip to the Mosel, which is why there hasn’t been an update from me for a while. I’m hoping to get some pics up soon so that I can give an illustrated report.

On the writing side, I’ve been making great progress on Chameleon in a Mirror, over 5000 words last week, and 3000 so far this week. Things are slowing down a bit now, though, because I’ve reached a section where I need to write completely new material — which I have not sufficiently brainstormed or resea...

SUMMER BOOK GIVEAWAY! Now until August 10th

I mam currently participating with five of my books in a big Summer Book Giveaway on Elle Casey’s site. Enter to win a copy of Yseult, Shadow of Stone, Looking Through Lace, Dragon Time, or Never Ever After — as well as dozens of other great books by indie writers, including Dave Farland, Patty Jansen, and Dalya Moon. Check it out!

In other news, I’m back to working on Chameleon in a Mirror again, and have managed to get about 2,000 words written so far this week. In just a bit, I will be pac...

Yseult free for Kindle today!

I’m having another freebie of Yseult, so if you don’t have the book yet, and you enjoy Arthurian fiction and / or High Mud Fantasy (the official genre), please grab yourself a copy!

Yseult was also featured on Free Kindle Books and Tips today, so you might want to head on over there and see what else Michael has to offer!

If you feel so inclined, please pass the word along. A great day to all!

Beyond the Waters of the World off to beta readers, new cover

The next installment of Looking Through Lace, Beyond the Waters of the World, is now off to beta readers. Yeah! Yesterday, my daughter also helped me with a cover:

At the same time, we also made a new version of the Looking Though Lace cover so that the fonts match. Although the images are very different, I’m hoping the style is similar enough that people will identify them as part of a series. I uploaded the new cover to Amazon today, but it usually takes a day before changes like that go li...

Of revisions, translations, gardening, and this elusive summer

Oh, dear, I’ve been horribly lax about my blog lately. But that has a couple of reasons:

1) Big translation project

2) The weather has finally turned better here in Central Europe

At the moment, #2 is probably the most important. We have a “garden” about a 25 minute walk away from our apartment, a plot of land in the vineyards between Bad Cannstatt, Fellbach, and Untertürkheim with seventeen apple trees, as well as pear, cherry, quince and plums. (A recent storm did a lot of damage, but that’s...