At the Market

15. November 2022 · Comments Off on At the Market · Categories: Book Event, Domestic

My daughter and I did a craft market last weekend – one of our regular markets of the season. This one was at the Senior Center in Bulverde, and I have lost track of how many of these that we have done, but I do remember doing the first one, where my daughter had to drive back home for our tables, which it turned out that we needed, and I only made enough to buy a set of regular china from a junk outlet on the way home. (Oh, yes – 2014, and we have only broken one of the small plates since then. Still love that china, still use it every day.)

So, my daughter is moving on from eking out a small paycheck in doing the gypsy markets, to doing real estate full time, so what with Covid and the cancellation of practically everything, we aren’t doing many of the markets that we used to do. She is selling off the last of her stock of tiny origami earrings, and the knitted beanies and stuff… but she did have a notion that we ought to try doing homemade soap and scented candles, along with all my American Girl doll clothes … and we were able to score a lot of raw materials for the soap and candle projects through my Vine participation.

I made a decent profit on the doll clothes (which are mostly made from scraps left over from other projects), although not so much that I will make any more until the inventory draws down – and our big seller was home–made, hand-made soaps. We found some basic recipes and had the required equipment on hand – digital scale, crock-pot, immersion blender – bought the olive and coconut oils from Costco, the powdered concoction to make the lye solution from Amazon and tried it out. The basic recipes worked very well; I think that the only reason that crafters shy off from making soap is that the lye solution is genuinely dangerous and a bit scary, when one reads all the warnings … but we went ahead, put on the rubber gloves and the eye protection, and followed all the measurements exactly. With the result that we had some very pleasant and usable soaps, which sold like the proverbial hotcakes, packaged in little mesh bags from the Dollar Tree (soon to be the Dollar-25-Cent Tree, I believe) and priced them to sell … which they did.

We took Wee Jamie with us, and he behaved magnificently, just as he did last year. We took along the folding wagon, padded with plenty of blankets, and all the baby stuff, of course. He simply charmed so many people at the market, including a tall skinny teenager who mimicked him making faces and blowing raspberries, offering high-fives for nearly ten minutes … it was really most endearing. He’s an outgoing and endearing small child and loves interacting with people. Not a shy or withdrawn bone in his body. Another woman, especially charmed, asked if we could stay in touch with her – she would like to be one of Wee Jamie’s honorary aunties. He took a good long nap in the wagon around midday and generally behaved so very well. He was not cross or cranky at all during the day. I have plans eventually to dress him as Little Lord Fauntleroy in black velveteen and a Battenberg lace collar, so he can help me flog books. Best to teach them the craft early, you know…

My daughter went around and talked to so many of the other vendors, gleaning some rather dispiriting intelligence regarding their sales … well, we weren’t the only ones who didn’t make much. Her conclusion is that almost everyone is holding on to their money this year. We made bank on the soaps because we priced them considerably below what we have paid for similar at other markets. We have another market this weekend, this one in Starzville, near Canyon Lake, and then on the first Saturday in December, the long haul down to Goliad for Miss Ruby’s Author Corral, and Christmas on the Square, with Santa arriving, mounted on a very, very tame (possibly heavily tranquilized) longhorn steer, to the great acclaim of the crowd. I hope to have the print version of the latest Luna City installment available for sale at that event, but everything about publishing and printing slows down at this time of year. The ebook/Kindle version should be available within days, though.

Color of the Year?

11. November 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

For some unfathomable reason, my daughter the working real estate agent scored an invite to a very posh event – the official San Antonio bash to announce the Benjamin Moore color of the year. Yes, it was a very post event, held at the very upscale and trendy Hotel Emma, which is an integral part of the Pearl Brewery development.

The honored color is something called Raspberry Blush, which to us looks more like a salmon-orange, a very bright, lively, cheerful color … er, well, the up-to-the-minute trendy and fashionable live for this kind of thing, even those of us old enough to remember the inexplicable fashion for avocado green and harvest gold, which made trendy kitchens of the 1970s so risibly ripe for redecoration as soon as those colors passed out of fashion.

I can’t help thinking that a whole room done in Raspberry Blush would be terribly overwhelming – unless it was something like a small powder room or bathroom, with white porcelain fixtures and neutral tile taking down some of the color impact. Otherwise, I can only see Raspberry Blush in a good-sized room under two circumstances:

As a pop of color contrast in a kitchen; the lower cabinets or kitchen island, with all else save the fabric potholders and kitchen towels being a cool neutral. That would be very pretty, especially if the potholders and towels were in Raspberry Blush. The other way that I could see it would be as trim – the doors, cabinetry, baseboards and cornice – to a room papered in a William Morris pattern, something with a vivid palette and an overall complicated pattern, with a color somewhere in it what would be close to Raspberry Blush – a Victorian-style library, parlor or dining room.

Your thoughts?

Yet Another Handicraft

09. November 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic

Just call us the modern pioneer women, if you want – my daughter and I are trying our hand at yet another home handicraft; making homemade soap. We have a couple of craft markets coming up, and my daughter had the notion of adding scented candles and soap to our range of offerings. Well, how hard could it be?

We’ve already done cheese-making, home-brewing and wine-making, we’ve messed about with bread-making, I’m a pretty accomplished seamstress and the Daughter Unit has fiddled around with origami and mechanical knitting. We had the basic tools recommended by a couple of soap-making enthusiast websites – a digital scale, a crock-pot, and an immersion blender, the last two of which we can dedicate entirely to soap-making, because the thought of using them to prepare food after doing soap is just … ugh. Various oils and a lye solution, simmered to perfection in the crock – what could be more difficult?

As it turns out, not much, although I did feel a bit like a chemical engineer, in apron, rubber gloves and eye-protection, measuring out in grams the various ingredients – most of them bought at Costco last weekend. Not much like Ma, in the Little House books, brewing together a concoction of rendered animal fat, and a lye solution made from wood-ash in a big pot over an open fire. Which concoction produced something called ‘soft soap’ – which likely did the job of cleaning, but wasn’t a patch on store-bought hard soap, or which came from our attempts today – a series of rather nice, fairly firm soaps, made from a combination of olive oil and coconut oil, and the Dreaded Lye Solution, with certain essential oil and dried lavender additions.

We did hot-process soaps, a basic recipe, which yields usable results in a day or so. I’m going to venture a classic cold-process Castile soap, make with the last of a jug of pure olive oil – which needs months to cure, before it works up a good lather. But honestly, I’ve been very pleased with the local hobbyist home-made soaps that we bought for sale at various markets and fairs, and if it gains a good product for us, with a minimum of harsh chemical ingredients, so much the better.

Cats, Luna City 11, and Things

08. November 2022 · Comments Off on Cats, Luna City 11, and Things · Categories: Domestic, Luna City

Now that I am done with the extended job for hire, I can turn my attention and energy back to the usual routine – like my own books, ‘n stuff, which projects have been in abeyance for months. On the good side, I polished off the last of Luna City #11 – which will rejoice in the title of “Luna City 11th Inning Stretch’ – the ebook version will be available for pre-order later this month, the print version shortly afterward. There will be a Luna City #12, which eventually will be collected into a single compendium volume with books 10 and eleven. I’ll probably pull the plug on the individual print books in a year or so, and just have them in print as part of the compendiums.

It feels good to have the extended job for hire done – it paid some substantial bills and allowed me to look at the close of this year and the starting off the next with a clean slate. In the meantime and if my daughter has real estate business to attend to, I walk the dogs in the early morning, and then walk with Wee Jamie the Wonder Grandson in his stroller. Up to the top of the neighborhood, across to the other side, saying good morning to the other regular walkers, joggers, dog-walkers, dogs and cats as we meet them. Most of the neighbors know us, and we know them; practically everyone who came to Wee Jamie’s baby shower was a neighbor, and all unite in admiring his charm, his happy and outgoing nature, and his rate of growth.

There are several cats of particular note in the neighborhood; there is a lovely and friendly Siamese about a block up from our house, whom we do not see very often, but she is more approachable than the usual run of Siamese. On one of the major cross streets lives a brindle cat with a white nose and white feet, whom we nicknamed “Socksie” as it looked as if he had ankle socks on his front feet and knee-socks on his hinder legs. Socksie is the king of his block, and always comes running to meet us, if he wasn’t off doing cat-things. His family recently adopted a bitty buddy for him – another brindle kitten with white feet – and we promptly named Socksie’s little brother “Underpantsie”. They are both very happy to see us, in any event. Then there is a black and white cat who hangs out in front of his people’s house on another street, but Chopper is only occasionally friendly, depending on his mood of the moment. Chopper lives down the street from where Tommy, the big orange and white cat used to live. Tommy was king of that particular block, and lived to the very great age of 22; outstanding for an indoor-outdoor cat. When he passed on to the Great Litterbox In the Sky, all the neighbors posted pictures of and elegies to him on Nextdoor – Tommy was that famous.

The last cats on our walking route are actually a mob of pets and semi-ferals, who live around a cluster of houses on the far side of the neighborhood. They really aren’t too popular with the near neighbors, because many are outdoors cats and don’t seem to have serious owners. We got Miso from that mob, and her sister, Snowy for another neighbor – two white kittens who likely wouldn’t have lasted very long as outdoors cats, what with owls, hawks, coyotes, stray dogs and speeding cars. But we stop and dribble out a little kibble for them – all the ones who come running when they see Wee Jamie’s stroller, some of whom will ask for a friendly skritch, as well.

Stronk Wimmin!

12. October 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

It rather seems, reading some of the movie and book criticism from various angles and for various recent mass-entertainment productions (both literary and cinegraphic) that the necessity for a female character to be a strong, fearless, unstoppable Mary Sue, without flaw and above reproach has overridden any impulse to tell a good story with believable human beings … which ultimately makes for bad and unrealistic storytelling. There’s no dramatic potential in a basically flawless character. Apparently, the audience is supposed to stand about, slack-jawed in appreciation of the amazingness of such paragons of female perfection.

Which is kind of sad, really; an offense against the concept of an author being the creator of entertaining stories and interesting characters. It limits the story-teller to just a few predictable tropes; no room for creating real, human, relatable and sympathetic characters. I do like to think I have managed to avoid such tropes, mostly because I’ve always tried to simply create characters, interesting and complicated characters, whose maleness or femaleness is just one single aspect of their character and their story arc. For my first two historicals, To Truckee’s Trail and the Adelsverein Trilogy, the standout, and tent-pole characters (that is – the characters who hold up the whole thing) were male: Dr. John Townsend of wagon train fame (who was a real person, BTW) and early Texas Ranger and Goliad Massacre survivor Carl Becker. (Created out of whole cloth.) But as essential elements of the plot, they were matched with able and strong female characters. Dr. Townsend had his wife Elizabeth, who started as a near-invalid and finished as a member of the party chosen to be part of the horseback rescue party when the wagon train was close to being stranded by show in the high Sierras, as well as the temporary single mother Isabella Patterson, determined to get her wagon and brood of children safely over the wilderness trail to rejoin her husband in California. Carl Becker was matched with Magda Vogel, the immigrant German girl, who was by way of being a tentpole character herself – backbone of her family, wife, mother and eventually the matriarch of her extended family. But she started the arc of that narrative as a slightly awkward but intellectually inclined teenager.

Carl Becker’s sister Margaret was merely a walk-on in the Trilogy, but she was the main character in the next two novels. (Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart), growing from a dreamy girl into that strong woman – but it was in progression, and for a good part of the way, Margaret was mainly motivated by suppressed fury and resentment over how she had inevitably been let down by every single significant man in her life that she had really depended on. She finished that arc in finally appreciating and loving that brainy but socially unskilled man who adored her unreservedly, and who never had let her down … and whom she had rather overlooked for years. So much for a strong woman.

All the other historical novels save one, The Golden Road, focused on female characters, front and center. Golden Road featured an older teen boy, Fredi Steinmetz, and his adventures in the goldmines and boomtowns of 1850s California – adventures which mostly meant that the other main characters were male, although at the end, one of his associates there turned out to be a girl masquerading as a boy, for reasons of keeping a low profile in a society in which women were few and far between. As that disguised girl acerbically pointed out to Fredi, in that place and time, no one paid any notice to a boy – but everyone noticed a woman. And that character had darned good reasons for wanting to be persistently unnoticed. She also had specific knowledge of placer mining and a set of her dead older brothers clothing to make the disguise good, until … well, never mind. Don’t want to give up too much plot.

The next three novels, which were follow-ons to the Trilogy focused chiefly on female leads – but none of the women involved started as faultless, perfect, and overwhelmingly charming Mary Sue types. Isobel and Jane, in The Quivera Trail began as Victorian women, straitjacketed, and strangled in the expectations which their relative social class placed them: Isobel the lady, who knew herself to be fat, clumsy, and socially inept, and her personal lady’s maid Jane, hampered by the limitations expected of her comparatively lowly background. Both managed, once they were set loose in Bicentennial-era America, to discover that they could be a bit more than what had originally been demanded and expected of them. I had enormous fun writing that book looking at the manner in which a fair number of Victorian-era ladies managed to overturn all conventional roles and still live quite satisfactory lives on their own terms. The husbands whom Isobel and Jane attracted were also fully fleshed individuals, by the way. I did get a bit of ironic satisfaction out of making their characters authentically pure in a Victorian manner – that they really did long to be married to manly men and accepted without question that their ultimate role in life was to be a wife and mother … but also as a side-line, to support their husbands as the second-in-command authority of whatever enterprise their husbands operated. Sophia, in Sunset and Steel Rails also followed that path, although with a stint of work as an independent woman in one of those businesses which did offer very fair terms of employment to women in the late 19th century. That would be the fearsomely high-class and high-standard hospitality national corporation, Fred Harvey Company. The Fred Harvey Company was almost a hundred years ahead of anything else which could be classified as a national hospitality chain, so that book offered me an opportunity to explore that aspect of the late 19th century frontier.

As for the most recent historical, My Dear Cousin, the whole concept is based on a matched pair of mid-century American women experiencing a world war – one as a wife and mother, the other as a military nurse, holding her own as a woman in a male-dominated sphere. Neither Peg or Vennie are wonder woman, or Mary Sue; just two young women doing the best that they can in a world which went from tranquil to perilous in the blink of an eye. Comment as you wish.

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