New working title

I'm nearly 20,000 words into a new project, and it occurs to me that I may not have mentioned it. The working title up until today was 'New Project'; not very descriptive, but it was an effective place holder until Walter offered up something more appropriate. Something like 'Still Gracie Mac.'

It's a (an?) historical fiction with a romance angle and a strong Christian theme. Grace accidentally steps through a time rift and goes from 2009 to 1789. On the plus side, she's a historical novel author who is very into living history. (No, I didn't base her on me. At least not any more than my other heroines!) On the minus side, she realizes quickly that knowing about a time period and living in it are very different things.

This project was inspired by Diana Gabaldon's 'Outlander' series, which are some of my very favorite books. The research to write this has been very interesting but very time intensive. I have begun to realize why the 'Outlander' books take so long to write. Well, that, and the fact that they're all, like, 900 pages long! "Still Gracie Mac" will not be that long!

Stubborn

My garden has apparently not gotten the memo that it's November. The cherry tomatoes are still clustered like grapes around the top of the compost pile and happily producing like we're far enough south to avoid a killing frost. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised, at this point, to see this surrounded by snow:


Do you see the little yellow flowers? Baby tomatoes, y'all. In November. I have them in all stages--flowers, green, almost ripe. I had ripe ones, but I picked them before I took pictures. They went right into the oven for roasting. I was going to can them next, but I think I'll just make soup.





This is the rest of the garden. The bushy green on the left is the feverfew that managed to self-seed somehow. Just beside it is a little patch of purplish green; that's lettuce. The basil seems to have given up, but the sage and chocolate mint are going strong. They're hiding the potatoes I stuck in the ground a month or so ago, and the onion I must have missed earlier but is still going strong.

On one hand, I'm shaking my head that it's still going. On a deeper level, I think I'm supposed to learn that I should keep working and not worry about the frost that will be along to kill me any night.