I posted back in May about my new writing project. I haven't posted about it since because I don't like posting word counts and I have all sorts of weird superstitions about talking about writing. First, if I say it's going really well, I'm afraid I'll jinx myself. If I say it's going poorly, I'm afraid I'll dig myself into my rut and stay there. If I talk about ideas I've had, I'm afraid they'll wither on the vine. (This last one is not a baseless superstition, FTR; if I talk too much about a project the creative energy just kind of leaks out. Excitement about the story helps to fuel the discipline to sit down and write, and if I can express my excitement by talking about something instead of sitting down and writing it, some of the excitement gets burned up. It makes talking just seems like a waste of drive.)

But, I've written 31,000 words on it so far, so obviously it's been going pretty well. My target word-count is in the neighborhood of 50,000 words; liike Castaways, this is intended as a middle-grade novel. (Middle-grade novel = traditional children's lit, not YA.)

Right before I went off on vacation, I hit the mid-point of the novel. The first part is set in Minneapolis; the protagonist, Cory (short for Coriander) realizes that there's a house on her block that only she can see. The house is a portal to another world -- an alternate world, not an alien planet, just to be clear. There was a bloody civil war on the other side of the portal, and the people on the losing side are slipping through and resettling in Minneapolis, secretly. Cory becomes close friends with Helena, a girl about her age who's come from the other side.

At the mid-point of the book, she and Helena go (separately) back through the portal, and the setting shifts from Minneapolis to this other world.

I was kind of stuck, right before the trip. I wanted the events on the other side to be exciting, but at the same time, they need to be understandable, and there's a lot Cory doesn't know or understand about this other world. I thought about giving Cory a convenient person to explain some things to her as she goes, but discarded this idea because I don't really want another trustworthy, likeable major character. I don't think it helps the story. And also, even beyond the opening step of integrating her (somewhat) into this other world, I didn't know what the hell was going to happen.

Just before we left on the trip, I figured out what Cory needed to find. (My solution isn't perfect, and I may change it, but it was something.) I thought about the details a bit while traveling, came home, and poked at the novel a bit. I'd made a very small amount of progress as of Thursday night. The next thing that was going to happen: Cory bears tangible physical evidence of her connection to Helena, who you'll recall was on the losing side. The evidence was going to be discovered, and Cory was going to suddenly be in danger of being killed.

I went to bed after writing the scene where the evidence is seen, and dreamed the next scene from Cory's viewpoint. This almost never happens. The dream was vivid and terrifying (even though, since I was still the author as well as being Cory, I knew that she would be okay) and extremely dramatic. I woke up fired up to write, but Kiera had no summer camp that day, so I had no time until evening. She wanted to go to the coffee shop, though, so I brought along my notebook, and brainstormed. And a TON of stuff fell into place. It was like I'd asked my subconscious to bake me some cookies, and instead it provided me with a five-course meal. (And the cookies.)

I even figured out how to deliver some explanations (it's going to involve a talking squirrel) (these people use a lot of animal-based magic, and they have squirrels that are bespelled to act as tasters for food, to see if it's poisoned). And I figured out what to do with Cory's mother; she's going to turn up at some point, but she's going to be seriously injured. This will serve a couple of purposes: it will let me play with the healing magic this world uses (which includes bespelled cats that keep you sedated when they sleep on your chest), it will keep Cory and Helena from getting back to Minneapolis right away (her mother will die if the healing magic is interrupted, so they have to wait for it to work), and it will keep Cory's mother from getting in the way (OMG parents in children's lit are such a pain in the ass. Depositing your juvenile protagonists on an alien planet that has no grownups except for a brain in a box that doesn't even give advice unless they ask for it? Totally the way to go. I don't want to kill her mother (her father is already dead, and yes, this matters in the story), but I definitely need to keep her sufficiently out of the way to let Cory protag.)

I've written about 3,000 words since figuring all this stuff out, 1,700 of them today. It's been a good writing weekend.

And thanks, papersky, for the fantasy name generator; on "our side," everyone uses a name they picked out to sound reasonably inconspicuous, but on the other side, they needed fantasy-world names, and I wanted the two ethnic groups needed to sound pretty distinct. I think the system is working pretty well, though if it turns out that one of my nifty fantasy-world names is actually the name of an obscure 1980s Heavy Metal band, I hope I find out sooner rather than later.

The sun can kill you! Avoid being in the sun between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm. Which is to say, pretty much all day, and certainly during all the hours that you might be able to find lessons at your local outdoor pool. If you must go outside, wear long sleeves and long pants to protect yourself, even though this will make you horribly hot and uncomfortable. Slather yourself with sunscreen.

West Nile Virus can kill you! Stay indoors early in the morning, late in the afternoon, and in the early evening, because that's when the mosquitoes are most active. If you must go outside, wear long sleeves and long pants to protect yourself, even though this will make you horribly hot and uncomfortable. Slather yourself with DEET.

While keeping your child inside, don't let them go near windows! Screens will not keep your children from falling out, and don't get complacent -- even a fall out of a first-floor window can seriously injure a child. Kids should be looking outside only with adult supervision. Eighteen children die every year from falling out of windows!

You know what? I think the risk of acting like the outdoors is a scary, dangerous place, and teaching kids that it's safer to stay inside (away from all windows!) outweighs the risk of just sending them out to play in the sun. With the mosquitoes.

I am not one of those freaky anti-bike-helmet people who rants about how WE never used carseats and WE all lived (because our generational peers who died in car wrecks aren't around to rant, duh). I was wearing a bike helmet in 1983 (I was the ONLY KID IN THE WORLD who had to wear a bike helmet in 1983, except for my younger sister, who also had to wear one). My kids ride in car seats. No one in my family swims unsupervised. I think it's good advice to use sunblock, and I'm pro-DEET simply because I hate mosquito bites, but telling people to stay inside from 10 to 4 during our short, beautiful Minnesotan summer is insane.

We headed for New England on July 3rd, and got back late on Saturday night. Ed's family lives in the Boston area, so the primary purpose for the trip was visiting relatives, but we also went up to the White Mountains to do a hut hike. The Appalachian Mountain Club maintains a series of mountain huts where you can hike in and stay overnight. The accomodations are both rustic and elaborate: during the summer and early fall, you can not only get a bed with three wool blankets (so you need to carry in sheets, but you can usually skip a sleeping bag), for an additional fee you can get dinner and breakfast, which is cooked by the "croo," the (mostly college-aged) staff of summer workers who maintain the huts, carry in the food, do the cooking, deliver evening educational programs, etc. The bathroom is equipped with clean running water so you can refill your water bottle, but the toilets are a composting outhouse. The bunk rooms are unlit and unheated. And there aren't any showers for the guests. So, not everyone's cup of vacation tea.

We went to Lonesome Lake Hut, which is the easiest one to hike to; it's less than two miles (mostly uphill) from the campground where you leave your car. We got to the trail later than we'd expected, and spent a lot of the hike up fretting that we'd miss dinner, since we weren't sure what time it was served. It took us a little under an hour and a half to get up to the hut, and we shouldn't have worried; dinner was a half hour after we arrived, and the croo would have fed us even if we'd been late. Our bunkroom had two bunk beds. Kiera climbed up to the top bunk (we didn't let her sleep there), looked down at me with wide-eyed bliss, and said, "This is the best vacation ever. Can we come here every year?"

Lonesome Lake is a tiny, beautiful lake with clear water and moderate temperatures. It's fabulous for swimming as long as you don't mind the leeches. Molly was un-bothered; I splashed and jumped away whenever I saw them coming towards me. The food was excellent, although Kiera liked it more than Molly did. We stayed at the hut for two nights; I think Ed had hoped to hike up to the top of Cannon Mountain (the hut is about halfway up) and the girls didn't go for it, but we swam and hiked and examined wildflowers and collected chipmunks. (Kiera collects chipmunks -- her word for it -- by pointing and saying "look, a chipmunk!" She collects convertibles the same way.)

The huts are along the Appalachian Trail, and thru-hikers can stop and do chores in exchange for dinner and a place to sleep. The south-to-north thru-hikers aren't in New Hampshire yet, but we met a couple of people going north to south. I overheard another girl who was staying with her family ask a thru-hiker, incredulously, "why can't you just get a car and drive to Georgia?"

After we came back down, we spent two more nights at a motel in the same area; we saw the Flume (Molly's favorite bit was a crawl-through cave formed by glacial boulders) and the Basin (it looks like this blogger went to some of the same places we did -- there are pictures of both the Basin and Lonesome Lake here) and we took the Cannon Mountain tramway (i.e. the really fancy gondola-type ski lift) up to the top and in all it was excellent.

Other miscellaneous observations:

* Ed's father lives near Plymouth. As a result, I have seen Plymouth Rock many, many times. It's really not worth seeing: it's just a rock, with 1620 carved on it, and a weird little Greek Temple sort of thing built over top. But if you're walking along the Plymouth harbor, and you're passing it, you stop and look, because it's THERE. Oh, and in the summer, there is an incredibly bored Park Service worker who stands next to it and periodically jumps down to retrieve a pinwheel or hat or water bottle dropped by accident. Anyway, this summer? it's under scaffolding. So if you were thinking of going to Plymouth to see the Rock, wait till next year.

* Kiera runs really fast. We discovered this at a playground we took them to. She wanted us to race her, and she beat me. Admittedly, I am not a very fast runner, but I have much longer legs. So then Ed raced her. Usually, when he races one of the girls, he gives the kid a head start, so he told Kiera he'd give her a count of seven. He counted like this: "one...two....three...fourfivesixseven" because he realized by four that if he didn't speed up, she was going to get to the fence before he finished counting. She refused to race with Molly, which is probably just as well for Molly's self-esteem, since Kiera would have beaten her handily.

If you're local to me and you like Indian food, there's a new Indian restaurant in my neighborhood. Ed and I ate there tonight and it's really, really good.

It's called Gandhi Mahal, and it's at 3009 27th Ave S. -- basically, if you know where the Center for the Americas used to be, it's across the street, down the block from the post office. Next door to Midori's Floating World. It just opened, about three weeks ago, and everyone there seems a little bit anxious and really eager to please. Did I mention the food is really good? Ed got the Kamal Ke Mango with lamb; I had a sampler platter. The thing that struck me as I was eating was that when Indian food is done right, there's an incredible complexity of flavor (plus they give you chutneys that can completely change the experience from bite to bite, if you're so inclined), and it has been a really long time since I've had food like this, done this well.

If you like Indian food, you should definitely go try it. (Alas for us, Indian food is one of the few kinds of food that Molly is really not fond of. Kiera likes curry as long as it's very mild, but Molly will complain. Though the naan might make up for it.)

We bought a bike trailer a few years ago -- more than a few, come to think of it. I think Kiera may have been an infant when we got it. We sprang for a Burley -- there are different brands out there, but I'm pretty sure it's still true that if you're serious about biking with a trailer, you go for that particular brand. When we first got it, I was the one who figured out how to clamp it to the bike, because as a former technical writer skilled at translating from "techie" to "English," I was able to decode the manual. What fascinated me at the time was that the engineering of the trailer was a beautiful thing to behold; the user interface design was terrible. I showed Ed how to do it and he's done it ever since.

I had never actually pulled this bike trailer before Saturday. But on Saturday, one of the girls suggested a trip to Liberty Frozen Custard. Ed has them convinced that the only way to get there is by bike (or at least, he's got them convinced that the only way THEY'RE ever getting there is by bike); it's just off Minnehaha Parkway. Molly doesn't fit into the trailer anymore, but she does have one of those tagalong bikes. Ed took the tagalong, because it makes it harder to balance and is in general more difficult to use than the trailer; I pulled Kiera.

It was a glorious June day: sunny, breezy, warm, crisp. The parkway bike path is lovely and I was impressed once again at the engineering that had gone into the trailer. It's not difficult at all to pull on a flat surface, though Ed suggested that I downshift early on hills, and this was excellent advice.

On Sunday, we went walking along the river, then to a friend's party. At the party, I ran into a friend who'd been at Fourth Street and was surprised that I hadn't been there. If you were hoping to run into me, I apologize for disappointing you. But -- our summers here are short and really, really beautiful, and June is frequently the nicest month of the entire year. Biking along Minnehaha Creek to go buy frozen custard sounded like a lot more fun this Saturday than going to a hotel, even if people I liked were going to be hanging out there.

Molly has now been on summer vacation for one week. This week and next week, the girls are taking swimming lessons at a pool about ten minutes from our house. We've had outings of one kind or another nearly every afternoon: the trip to Hidden Falls on Monday, a playground on Tuesday, the usual visit to my grandmother on Wednesday, and today was Kiera's last dance class.

The weather has been perfect, aside from being a little chilly in the mornings (I would sure as heck not want to hop into the swimming pool, but the girls have not complained). I've kept them busy in large part because the spring weather was mostly so horrible, I look at any sunny day as this rare and precious thing that must be SEIZED WITH FORCE before it gets away. At some point I may start taking good weather for granted, but so far, nope.

The thing I'm having the most trouble adjusting to is how insanely long it takes both girls to get ready any time we're going somewhere. Swimming lessons are at 10 a.m. and we need to be out the door by 9:45. This morning, I told them to go put on their swimming suits and their sunblock a little before 9. Today, I also had them get their own clothes for the day, though I followed them upstairs so all they had to do was hand them to me; I put them in a plastic bag and tucked them into the swim bag to put on after lessons. They also had to put on their cover-ups and sandals, and brush their hair so that I can put it in a braid to keep it out of their way during lessons. This does not seem like a monumental list of things to accomplish in 45 minutes. We just barely made it out the door in time.

After the lesson, they showered, and then I handed them their clothes and sent them into cubicles to change. Then I sat down and read a book because it takes them 15-20 minutes to do that. We are not only the last to be out of the locker room, we're the last by quite a lot. The lesson finished before 11, and we walked out at 11:30.

The dance class was at 4 p.m. The community center shares a space with a library, and normally, Molly and I drop Kiera off at her class and then go to the library. But today was the last class of the session, so parents and older siblings are invited to stay and watch. That meant we needed to arrive early to get in the library trip, and earlier still to get in some outdoor playground time. I think I started them on the process at 2. They needed to clean up the Play-Doh they'd taken out to play with. Kiera needed to put on her leotard. Molly needed a snack. Kiera needed a drink. We didn't get there until 3:15.

I will say I have been handling it well: telling them what they need to do with plenty of time to spare, and then just letting them do it. It only frustrates me when I stop to think about it, so I try not to. Maybe the sunblock will speed up as they get better at it; previous summers, we've done it for them. (I'm still willing to do it for them BUT if they want me to do it, I'm going to use the no-rub spray, and neither one of them likes the smell of the propellant.)

No swimming tomorrow; we've got plans for an adventure at a St. Paul park with lyda222 and Mason. I went to Target today, so now Kiera and I have water shoes. (Molly also wanted water shoes, but admitted she'd prefer to just wear her sandals, so I saw no reason to get them for her.)

The body of water Molly soaked herself in today was the creek below Hidden Falls.

We rendezvoused with friends after the girls' swimming lessons. We had a picnic in the park, then walked up the path to Hidden Falls -- or rather, the adults walked up the path while the kids mostly scrambled along rocks at the creek's edge. Hidden Falls is much less dramatic than Minnehaha Falls -- it's a splashy little waterfall that then pools and trickles downhill in a series of short cascades. The kids threw rocks in the water for a while, then we walked downstream to a spot where they could fall in without making us nervous and they tried to build a dam.

I ordered Molly a pair of water shorts and a quick-drying tank top from Cabela's, but they haven't come yet. Are there any significant advantages to those sneaker-shaped water shoes over a pair of rugged, water-friendly sandals? Molly clearly does not view an outdoor adventure as worthwhile unless it involves getting wet.

We got home a little while ago. Kiera changed while I hung up towels and bathing suits. I came into the living room to find Molly flopped on the couch, still in her soaking wet clothes, reading a book, and sent her up to change into something dry.

For Father's Day, we took my father out for dim sum. The dim sum place we go to is Jun Bo, which is in Richfield, right off of 494. (For the locals: enormous ugly yellow building right by the Menard's. All-day dim sum at an enormous restaurant that probably doesn't even fill during Chinese New Year.) Since it was a gorgeous day, and we were already going to be in the south suburbs, we headed south and west for some afternoon hiking.

We went to Carver Park Reserve, which is part of the Three Rivers Park District. We took the girls hiking. They really are rather more receptive to hikes when we call them adventures, although they were less fooled today than they were at Minnehaha Falls last week: they kept asking when it would be time to go to the plaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaygroooooooooooooooound that we'd acknowledged might be around this park somewhere. Also, the mosquitoes on some of the trails were extremely thick, and I'd neglected to pack repellent. (Which is less stupid than it probably seems because Minneapolis does an extremely good job at mosquito control. The mosquitoes created an additional problem: part of what makes a hike fun for the girls is our willingness to let them stop: to play in the lean-to someone built in the woods, or smell flowers, or flip logs over to check out the bugs, or watch birds, or whatever. But when a swarm of mosquitoes descends on you every time you slow down, we're a lot more reluctant.

Anyway, we did manage to see a toad, the lean-tos mentioned above, a bird that might have been a bald eagle (Kiera spotted it and called it a bald eagle, not that I'd necessarily rely on her for bird identification, but from the glimpse I had, it might have been), and a chipmunk.

The playground by Lowry Nature Center is designed to mimic various animal habitats, like a beaver lodge. We let the girls run around there until a little before 5, when we went in to the nature center. They had a book where you could write in the interesting things you saw: Kiera had me write that she saw butterflies and a chipmunk, and that there were a lot of mosquitoes.

It was late enough that driving all the way back to Minneapolis and then cooking was not appealing, so we drove up to Excelsior. This is a small, upscale suburb that bumps right up against the edge of Lake Minnetonka. We found a restaurant with outdoor tables in the cute little downtown, and had dinner there, then walked down to the edge of Lake Minnetonka. There's no beach at this spot -- they've lined the edge of the water with large rocks you can scramble over if you want, but it's a rocky bottom, not the sort of thing that's easy on bare feet. Molly initially asked if she could touch the water, then scrambled onto the rocks to get a better angle, and then, after we went for a walk through a little wooded bit, she scrambled out to a rock where she was guaranteed to get completely soaked once a boat went by fast enough to create a good wake. Since she's never minded having to walk around wringing wet until either she dried out naturally or got home to change, and since the water was all pretty shallow, I shrugged and let her soak herself. She wound up drenched to the skin. It was very clearly her favorite part of the entire expedition.

I read Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder last week. I'd probably have read it when it first came out except that the term "nature-deficit disorder" put me off. (Does everything have to be a disease? Good grief.) But I'd heard good things about it, and when I saw it at the library I checked it out.

Louv's point is pretty straightforward: kids need to spend a lot of time outside, they specifically need to have lots of opportunities for unstructured play in a natural setting (by which he means, woods and creeks and prairies rather than playgrounds and mowed playing fields), and when they don't get this, bad stuff happens. Both to the health of the kids (when they don't spend time outside, their risk of depression skyrockets, along with other mental and physical health problems), to their education (their understanding of science is hampered when they've never spent time staring at an anthill and then poking it with a stick to see what happens, or picking wildflowers, or climbing trees), and to society at large (why fight to preserve an environment you've barely interacted with?)

He's a forceful and compelling writer, but the thing that struck home the most was that I was vividly reminded of how much I loved to play in natural areas as a kid. On the playground at Wingra School, there were two enormously overgrown yew bushes, which became houses and forts and all sorts of other things when we played in them at recess. My yard included a tree I could climb, and my house backed up against a railroad embankment with a fabulous wild area beyond (which I wasn't allowed to wander around alone as a young child, but did explore fairly thoroughly as a teen). I'm pretty good at getting Molly and Kiera outside, at least during the summer, but we usually go to a playground. Which I'm sure Louv would say is better than staying inside, but is not quite what he's talking about.

I had already resolved to try to explore the wilder parks around town a lot more this summer, and then, for extra encouragement, I picked up some "Adventure Logs" from REI on Sunday. The outdoor gear store equivalent of a library's summer reading program, the Adventure Logs include blanks to fill in for ten "adventures," with details like the weather, the distance traveled, and the kid's favorite parts. After their first adventure, the kids can tear out a postcard and send it in to REI and they'll get a whistle with a built-in compass or something nifty like that.

It's been raining for about the last two weeks, but today was gorgeous: blue sky, light breezes, warm but moderate temperatures. I told Kiera that after we picked Molly up at the bus stop, we were going to have an adventure.

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The girls filled in details in their little REI Adventure Log booklets after we got home. Molly's favorite part was falling into the creek.

Buried under layers of closet detritus, I found the t-tunic I made for myself back in 1991, during my brief flirtation with the SCA. Like all t-tunics, it would fit a range of sizes. It's made of cotten flannel which I dyed a sort of periwinkle. I think I usually wore something fancier over top, but the fancier item was borrowed from a friend. Anyone want it? You probably have to be local; my follow-through is terrible if a trip to the post office is required.

Going back into the closet once I'm done will be my velvet ball gown. I have worn it once: to the WisCon fancy dress party a couple of years ago. I am unlikely to ever wear it again except, possibly, to the WisCon Fancy Dress Party. Although Kiera keeps pulling it out and asking me why I never wear it, so maybe I should throw a fancy ball sometime. The problem is, when you're the hostess for a party, you really do need the use of your arms, and the sleeves of this dress are so tight when fastened up that I pretty much can't bend my arms with it on. Impractical, bulky, but also sentimental and not something I can just replace if I find another occasion when I need it.