Yesterday it didn’t get above freezing, and everything is ice this morning; all the outdoor faucets are frozen up. The younger children hauled hot water from the house to the chickens and the dogs and the rabbits, and Christopher and I lugged buckets out to the horses.

Saturdays are school and work days for us (Mondays are holidays). The kids have school lists to finish, Pete has a sermon to wrap up, and I have more maps to do. Maps are on my horizon for the next few weeks. I did get the first two hundred pages of manuscript back from my editor this week, but I haven’t nerved myself to read the comments yet (next week, I promise. I’ll update you then).

So what do homeschooled kids do to entertain themselves during breaks, when it’s too darn cold to go outside?

Behold the Blobs.

This is indoor blowing-off-steam time; Dan and Ben crawl around under comforters making blobby noises and Emily attacks them with her plastic sword.

Inevitably, Blobs go bad and attack each other.

This is the point at which Mom says, “Okay, time for everyone to come do their grammar…”

Dad and Dan

Mom and Power Scissors from Ben

A multigenerational household has its difficulties–my parents have to put up with noise overhead, messes in the yard, and teenage boys constantly raiding their fridge when mine is empty–but I can’t tell you how happy I am that they’re here, and not in a retirement community in Florida somewhere.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And then we started the new year. Pete and I celebrated our nineteenth wedding anniversary (we got married on Epiphany, January 6, 1990).

And I bought a harrow.

This is exciting. No, really. A harrow has two functions. You can pull it around the pasture with the spikes down, to aerate the ground or get it ready for seed, or you can flip it over and use it to spread manure. Horse manure is great fertilizer if it’s spread out, but in clumps it kills the grass.

The harrow came all bundled up, so I wrestled it onto the RTV and hauled it out to the barn.

This is the RTV. My father bought it earlier in the year. I did kind of giggle at it (doesn’t it look like a giant version of one of those toys little kids drive around in?), but it’s amazingly useful.

Ben helped me unwire the harrow, which was held together with about twenty little twisty wires, and we hooked it onto the back of the RTV and started spreading.

Emily assisted by playing knights and dragons with Max, which at least kept him out of the way. He is unnecessarily helpful.

I am ridiculously pleased with myself. I never had a harrow before, and now the pasture–all properly spreaded–looks great.

I have discovered two things in the process. First, there is an unlimited amount of amusement that children can get out of repeating, “This is a harrowing experience!” when there is an actual harrow involved.

Second, spreading/harrowing is the perfect farm job for a twelve-year-old boy and eight-year-old girl. I told Dan and Em to drive around on the RTV and aim for every pile of manure they could find. They spent over an hour careening around the pasture, whooping “There’s one! Aim for it! Bogey coming in from the side!” It was like Space Invaders. With piles of poop. How cool is that?

Also I drew a bunch of maps, tried to write some flap copy, and reflected on the generally pickled state of my post-manuscript brain.

So I thought I’d start the year out right by sharing part of my to-do list with you. Along with some commentary.

1. Writing tasks

History of the Medieval World: finish maps.

My goal is to have every place that I mention clearly labelled on a map in the same chapter. It drives me crazy when I’m reading a history and can’t look at a picture of the landscape. I always wondered why most histories are short on maps, until I started doing them myself. They’re incredibly time consuming, and they make my brain hurt. For this finished map:

I consulted an assortment of maps found in a number of different books,

and drew a rough draft, which my collaborator Sarah Park then turned into an actual (readable) map. But neither one of us could find a map, in any of our books, which gave us the location of the Battle of the Fei River (even though it is described repeatedly as one of the “greatest battles in Chinese history”). As the Fei River is now dry, it wasn’t on any maps either. Finally I found a reference work that described the Fei as a tributary of an existing river, and with this as a starting place I used the descriptions of the battle to pinpoint the most likely place.

This sort of detective work is actually fun, but it just takes time, time, time. Also it can’t be done until the book is in final draft form, so we inevitably end up doing it on a tighter deadline than we’d like.

History of the Medieval World: finish timelines

History of the Medieval World: finalize illustrations

I haven’t yet decided what illustrations will make the story come alive. I LOVE sorting through illustrations, though, so I’m looking forward to this.

Finish Writing With Ease Workbook 3

Finish Writing With Ease Workbook 4

Writing out the lesson plans for these is a little tedious, but browsing through all the possible children’s books that I’ll use for base text is great fun.

Begin outline for History of the Renaissance

Er…not going to think about that one yet.

Start working on a fiction project before you forget how.

2. Farm jobs

Put new hardware on the barn doors

I love my draft horse, but he’s hard on doors. And gates. And fences generally. He just LEANS, and over they go.

Harrow pasture and replant

The Virginia Department of Agriculture says that one acre per horse is recommended for pasture. I have two horses and a pony on three acres, and they have eaten it down to dirt. Next month, they all get shut into the corral so that I can replant the pasture.

Get the farm surveyed.

Two of the property lines on this farm have NEVER been surveyed, a fact I discovered when my neighbor decided to walk his side of the line and pointed out that it ran right down the middle of one of our farm roads. I asked for some clarification, and got something like, “Well, the property line runs from that oak tree that came down in the hurricane of ’72 right down to the big rock that used to be right across from the east foundation block of the old barn.”

Ah.

Note to self: CALL SURVEYOR. SOON.

3. General horrible tasks

Answer the 187 unanswered personal emails sitting in email box.

Actually don’t want to think too much about that one either.

Figure out why Blackberry does not work in U.K., as promised by salesperson.

Since this involves calling Verizon customer service, I’ve been putting it off as long as possible.

Sort through unsolicited submissions to Peace Hill Press.

If only, if ONLY people would send us stuff that we might actually publish. Note to aspiring writers: Check out the titles the publisher is already putting out. Chances are, they’re going to keep on doing the same sort of thing.

We have gotten a raft of totally inappropriate submissions (No, we’re probably not going to publish your magic-realism-basketball novel), and recently I figured out why. For some completely unknown reason (it probably involves a bored intern who had nothing else to do), Writer’s Digest listed Peace Hill Press as one of the “Hot Markets of 2008“–in other words, one of the best places for new writers to submit their work.

How on EARTH did this happen? We’ve never even published a title that we didn’t first solicit, and (as any aspiring writer who took the time to visit our website could tell), most of our titles were written by my mother or by me. I wouldn’t call that a hot market.

Second note to aspiring writers: Do your own research. (You might also consider cancelling your Writer’s Digest subscription and spend the money on chocolate or babysitting or paper instead.)

Revamp workshop descriptions for spring conferences.

This isn’t too horrible a task, but I’m kind of stuck on it. What new workshops should I offer at conferences this year? I’m open to suggestions.

I won’t bore you with the rest of my to-do list (“Clean out clothes closet.” “Update high school transcripts for kids.” “Take down Christmas lights before June.” “Buy castle in Spain and move there immediately.”).

Update tomorrow on the first of my 52nd books, which I found a little disappointing…

1. We got Emily a pony for her birthday because the horses have turned out to be JUST TOO BIG for her to learn on.

So we’ve spent a lot of time working with the pony. Also Max, my Belgian draft horse, did not adjust well to the pony. He wanted to EAT it. Simultaneously we were having the fence replaced, so keeping them apart was an ongoing labor. Now, at last, they seem to have made their peace.

(Everyone eating hay, with Ben in the foreground.)

2. The election sent the message boards at the Well-Trained Mind website into an amazing tizzy, meaning that the moderators needed HELP. What a circus.

My personal summary of the styles involved: Troublemakers who are Republicans post nasty offensive messages on the board. Troublemakers who are Democrats send nasty offensive messages to the moderators. I finally got on the boards myself and banned all political conversations until the election was over. We’ve tried to lift the restrictions since Tuesday, but whenever we do, chaos sweeps over us. Unhappy Republicans post apocalyptic messages about how their children’s future has been ruined and they’re going to have to move to Canada (I’m unsure how this is better, but never mind), while offended Democrats post in return that they’re SHOCKED and HORRIFIED by the incivility on the message boards.

If you think I’m going to reveal my own political leanings here, you’re nuts.

Word to the wise on both ends of the spectrum: The world didn’t end (HELLO), and it’s easy to be civil and gracious when your candidate won.

ADDENDUM to word to the wise on both ends of the spectrum, after reading today’s batch of emails: Do you realise that you ALL think you’re outnumbered on the boards and made to feel unwelcome because the boards are so clearly dominated by the other faction? Think about that one for a little while…

3. Had to do significant work on the third level of the Writing With Ease workbook series to keep it on track for publication.

4. My sister-in-law/business partner and I had to figure out how to deal with a slew of irate customers who wanted to use First Language Lessons 4 this fall. This book has been a NIGHTMARE. I ended up doing a huge amount of unexpected work on the manuscript myself, due to circumstances beyond our control, and it’s way late. They’re right to be irate, but we’ve done everything we can…

5. I ended up writing several different pieces to follow up on the publication of the Art of the Public Grovel. One was for the Richmond Times Dispatch, which asked me to write about home education after this piece ran. Two more were for the History News Network and the Wall Street Journal…I’ll let you know when the WSJ piece runs.

6. I’m leaving for New York tonight to present the Peace Hill Press titles at W. W. Norton’s fall sales conference. More on this shortly.

7. The first-pass galleys for the third edition of The Well-Trained Mind appeared, courtesy of Norton.

Yeah, the box looks unopened. It is. It’s due back in a couple of weeks but I haven’t actually had time to open it up yet.

8. There are over a hundred unanswered emails in my email box. So far I’m coping by ignoring them, but this is a strategy bound to come back and smack me in the head at some point.

9. Oh, yes, history. In the middle of all that I wrote a pretty good chapter about the rise of the Fujiwara in tenth-century Japan. Must…write…faster…

So we got home and went to bed. At 2 AM on Sunday, Emily started throwing up. At 4 AM, Ben joined. By 5 AM, Pete was throwing up too. So far, I have escaped the stomach bug, whatever it is. Daniel helped by explaining exactly which microbe was infesting everyone.

Then on Tuesday morning, my mother smelled something unpleasant underneath the laundry room floor. That, of course, is where all the drain pipes run. It’s an old house, so we have a plywood square cut out of the floor that we can lift up to get underneath the house (one of the advantages to never having gotten around to putting linoleum over the subflooring).

(The way down.)

We sent Dan spelunking, and he reported that there was water all over the ground under the house. Clearly, something was leaking. Someone needed to go down and investigate further. Someone small enough to get under the house without getting stuck, and old enough to follow directions shouted from above by the Master Plumber.

(This is the Master Plumber. He does not like to wriggle around under the house on his stomach.)

So the small, old person going under the house would be…me.

(I am very secure, now that I’m forty, which is why you get to see the picture.)

Turns out that some plumber, at some point in the past, capped a waste pipe with A PIECE OF CARDBOARD AND DUCT TAPE. It lasted quite a while, apparently, but despite its ingenious construction, it gave way and now the washing machine is spurting grey water under the house.

(The pipes under the floor. Can I just say that the flash on the camera makes it look very bright and cheery under there? IT ISN’T.)

So I climbed under. Dan and Em came down to help.

Dan carried stuff and said, at intervals, “Is that a black widow? I see something moving over there. What’s that hanging down from the floor? Is it squirming? That’s a REALLY BIG WEB.”

Meanwhile I lay on my stomach (in the water),

(see how secure I am?)

ripped off the duct tape, cleaned the outside of the pipe, and cemented a proper cap onto it.

Now the foundations are drying out. It still smells a little ripe down there, though.

Stay posted for actual BOOK RELATED updates. I was writing about the Varangian Guard when the plumbing happened, but plumbing gets priority.

I’m sitting down in my office listening to the wind howl outside. Branches are lashing against the roof, water is pouring down the windows. I’ve got my heater on to keep my feet warm. This happens every spring: we get a cold, wet week or two that feels more like February than May. My grandmother called it blackberry winter, and sure enough, it comes when the blackberries are in full bloom.

We get a blackberry winter pretty much every year, but it always surprises me when it happens. It’s been cold and dark and grey for ten days now,

and it has rained, and rained, and rained, and rained. And rained. The horses are standing in ankle-deep water in the paddock,

so I turned them out into the pasture, where they stood out in the rain all day instead of coming in and spending the afternoon in a nice, dry stall.

(Our draft horse Max now has a friend–this is our very sweet-natured new horse, a thoroughbred with such a naturally calm disposition that he’s practically comatose. The kids haven’t named him yet, so I call him Minimus. He looks a little muddy and cold here, but if the sun ever comes out again I’ll post a nice picture.)

To close, a few late History of the Ancient World bits: a nice review from About.com, a review-essay from Books and Culture, and I’m a nominee for the Library of Virginia awards. Also, you can now pre-order The Art of the Public Grovel in Canada, should you be so inclined.

Max (aka Magnus Maximus), the Belgian draft horse I bought a couple of weeks ago, has arrived.

I grew up around horses and have ridden for most of my life (that includes a number of years riding jumpers, more years teaching for pocket money, and a weird summer when I galloped racehorses at a track in Ashland…that’s a long story), but I haven’t had a horse since I started having babies instead. They don’t necessarily go together. But now everyone’s old enough to help out, ride, and enjoy. So after months of saving up, fence-building, and planning, I bought Max. He’s huge. But also very calm and friendly…kind of like an eighteen-hundred-pound puppy with feet like Frisbees.

I’m hunting around now for one more horse…something smaller, for the beginners to ride, but still big enough for me to get on and school. That way the kids can go out riding together. Also Max will have company. He’s never been stabled alone, and he’s already broken out twice to go visit the neighbor’s cows. We’ve reinforced all the weak spots we can find, but he’s spending a lot of time staring out of the corner of the pasture at the woods (the cows are through the trees on the other side of the property line).

With a frying pan.

MY frying pan.

My mother planted a huge garden this year and then went off to Seattle to visit my brother, leaving tomatoes dropping on the ground. So, rather than watching them rot, I canned them. I’ve helped my mother can all my life, but this is the first time (at the age of 38) that I’ve ever done it all by myself.

This must be how Emily (now six) feels when she manages to get her own hair into ponytails.

This not-writing thing is quite a lot of fun. I’ve canned tomatoes, started on Niall Ferguson’s The War of the World, gone exploring on my morning runs (instead of pelting around my set course and coming straight back), weeded the garden, and slept in.

Oh, and by the way…they’re BAAACK.

Late in the spring, my mother (source of all creative kid-entertainment in this house, my two standbyes for boredom being “Read another book” and “Eat another cookie”) helped Daniel and Emily plant sunflower seeds in a square in the garden, with morning-glory seeds between them. When the sunflowers were about three feet high, we laid newspaper over the ground inside the square. I helped the kids gather pine needles down near the side woods,

and spread the needles on top of the newspaper to make a floor.

Mom strung twine between the sunflower stalks for the morning-glories to climb up on, and ran it from side to side overhead so that the vines could twine along it and form a roof.

Now, the sunflowers are high enough to see over the grape arbor, and the house is big enough for me to walk into. Here’s the floor,

Emily peering out the front door,

and Emily peeking out the side window.

The house reminds me of one of my favorite books, The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, in which the Pig (who is not called big and bad for nothing) destroys all the houses the Three Little Wolves build, until they make one from flowers and apple blossoms. (This would be the British equivalent of sunflowers and morning-glories. Also the British can play in their Flower Houses longer than we can play in ours, because it isn’t 98 degrees with 80% humidity in England in July.)

Addendum: I don’t know where Mom got the Sunflower House idea, but you can find a design in Sharon Lovejoy’s Sunflower Houses book. ( Thanks for posting below, Ms. Lovejoy. I actually have this book on my shelf somewhere….)

I tend to get a little behind with blogging in the spring, because while I’m still writing away on my regular projects (just now, I’ve got two on the front burner: the history of the medieval world and the revisions which will turn my dissertation into a readable book) the farm-work springs into full blossom. All of a sudden we’re incredibly busy with grass-cutting, gardening, fence-mending, equipment repairs, picking up a winter’s worth of yard debris, and spraying Round-Up around every foundation and fence post (we’re all about judicious use of poison here). The days are suddenly longer, and the kids are outside every possible minute, enjoying nature. Also trapping it and putting it into little plastic cages.

In a couple of weeks I’ll get back to a few more thoughtful topics, such as the importance of Latin and why Byzantine theological quarrels are of riveting importance. In the meantime, take a look at the week’s high point: the baby chicks arrive.

We don’t have an incubator, so we order our baby chicks by mail. It amazes me that this actually works, but it does: you place the order, and when the chicks hatch they arrive the next day in a cardboard box. In our case, the Charles City postmaster calls us up and says, “Hey, tell Doctor Wise that his chicks are here!”

So while my father helped my oldest son set up the brooder,

I took Emily and Dan down to the post-office for the box.

When we opened it, there they were–all alive (which isn’t always the case, but the entire batch survived this time).

We got them into the brooder, where I had some trouble KEEPING them, since baby chicks (like kittens) are much cuddlier than their adult counterparts. This particular batch almost got smothered by love.

After several days of constant cuddling, they follow Emily around wherever she goes and jump up on her to sleep.

It’s so sad that they’re going to get big and ugly.

In other news, the William & Mary faculty were all notified last week that we can get tickets for an audience with the Queen, who is visiting the Wren Building at the College as part of her Jamestown anniversary tour. I considered going in and getting my ticket for about twenty seconds, and then read the part of the email where it says that SIX THOUSAND PEOPLE will be in town.

Huh. I don’t think so. I’ll just be watching it on TV.

Stay tuned for those riveting essays on Monophysitism and the eternal value of the gerundive…

No matter how many times I tell myself that, I find that I still haven’t grasped it. I’m still always looking forward to the next publication milestone, and always thinking that the NEXT one will be far more fulfilling.

The temptation to always look ahead, to what’s BOUND to be more satisfying than the present: perhaps that’s not so different from other jobs.

So after this week’s milestone (“official” publication day, March 26), it’s back to work as usual. This week I rooted out the REAL King Wenceslaus (ruler of the medieval Slavic kingdom of Bohemia from 925-935) and discovered that the most prized relic of the early Middle Ages was the Mandylion, a cloth that was said to have the face of Jesus miraculously imprinted on it, as a message to the king of the city of Edessa that he would be healed.

Who knew? Maybe you did, Gentle Readers, but I sure didn’t.

Outside of the office, the approach of spring means that there’s lots more outside work to do all of a sudden. This week I helped prune fruit trees for the first time (something I’ve always left to my father in the past, but I have a sudden desire to know how to do it); the mowers had to be serviced so that we could get ready for the first grass-cutting; there was planting and weeding to be done in the garden (supervised by Grammy),

and my father taught Emily (aged 6) to drive the little tractor and wagon.

Before we cut the grass in the spring, we go around and clear up all the sticks, leaves, rocks, and deer-bones which have accumulated over the winter. This could be a boring job, if it didn’t involve Large Machines. Ben got to drive the Bobcat down to the bottom of the yard in order to pick up a pile of trash; here he comes,

and there he goes

(this scene was just before my father, alarmed by the wild gleam in Ben’s eye, said, “Hop out for a minute, Ben, and let me do this next part).

Next week I’ll try to let you know whether anything’s happening on the publicity front. Enjoy your Palm Sunday.

But for three whole hours last week, we had SNOW. It came down in buckets, out of an almost-clear sky, with no warning whatsover.

Christopher was awed,

Daniel staked out a sniper position, snowball in hand,

and the whole family rejoiced.

Then the sun came out, it all melted in twenty minutes, and we went back to work.

Ah, January.

In the meantime, we’ve been having a warm January with lots of rain, followed by sharp frost and cold: this means that the forsythia has 1) blossomed and 2) frozen to death.

It also means that we’re having road problems. All that freezing and expanding is death on roads, and we live down a LONG one, with no other access into the farm.

The culvert closest to the county road collapsed last week. We had to call in the labor corps–my cousins (this is when it helps to be related to half the county).

(Those are my first cousins, once removed, digging along the line of the old culvert.)

Once the ditches were redug on either side, we moved into the important stand-around-and-talk-about-the-machinery phase,

after which the culvert went in

and was covered by gravel. Now we’ve got a huge gravel speed-bump down at the end of the road, which UPS and Fed-Ex have both bottomed out on. (So did I, in the family van. I forgot it was there and all the kids’ heads hit the van ceiling.)

In another sign of the season, the last day of hunting season has come and gone. Once again I can go for my long run around the back of the fields without worrying about getting shot. And once again the dogs have found lots of goodies from the woods, where the hunters tend to clean the deer and leave the…er…extra bits. Seriously, our yard looks like there’s been an explosion in a deer factory. I tripped on this one on my way down to my office this morning.

And speaking of my office…yes, I am plugging along on the medieval history manuscript, thanks to the color-coded schedule (which is REALLY helping me work when I’m supposed to be working, as opposed to emailing, or shopping online, or waching The Office episodes on iTunes…). This week I’ve finished a very rough draft of Part One, and I’m going back through making a detailed outline of each chapter on oversized paper.

I’ve decided not to do my next draft until I’ve finished a first draft of the entire book–in January 2008. By which point I’ll have forgotten what I was thinking, in Part One, unless I make very careful outlines of all my notes. This is a lot of work…but I’m hoping it will help me focus in, during that second draft, on which parts actually NEED further development and which can be cut. With the last book, I developed the WHOLE THING and THEN cut it. As a result, I wrote 800,000 words in order to produce a 250,000 word manuscript.

800,000 words. That means I threw away HALF A MILLION WORDS.

Trying really, really, really hard not to do that again.

and now look like this:

because I haven’t even started on them. I DID do a bit of work on the second volume this week, working my way through the first five Gupta rulers of medieval India in between mom-duties. But since Wednesday night, we’ve been dealing with Ernesto, the tropical storm which (unexpectedly) sailed right overtop of us and dumped ten inches of rain on the farm. It also knocked out power, washed out roads, and blew a zillion maple branches all over the lane, so Emily, Dan and I have been trying to clear them up.

We spent today piling them up in the truck and then dumping them into the burn pile, which has been doubling as a backstop for target-shooting (which is why it hasn’t actually gotten BURNED yet).

Across the road, my cousin’s cornfields are beaten down almost flat; the cornstalks are bent double.

He hasn’t begun combining yet, and I’m not sure whether he’ll be able to save it–I’ll ask him at church tomorrow.

A less dire problem: the bunny hutches got swamped and had to be cleaned and dried out. I resisted rabbits for a long time, because they’re useless (unless you eat them, which became a non-option after the kids had cuddled them for about five minutes). They don’t lay eggs, or trim the grass, or really do much of anything. Except get loved.

(Daniel and Zork, the world’s most placid mini rex. Or else he’s just clinically depressed and can’t be bothered to move–hard to say.)

So we’ve cleared the road, dried off the bunnies, scooped twenty pounds of leaves and twigs out of the pool, shaken out all the soaked dog bedding, and mopped up all the leaks. Now the temperature has dropped thirty degrees, the sky has that gorgeous post-hurricane look, and it smells like fall time.

Update on those page proofs coming NEXT week, I swear.

SIGNS.

Yes, okay, common sense should have told me that.

Update on the first pass proofing coming soon…

I’m in charge of the younger three for the next fourteen days.

And because of various deadlines, I couldn’t just take two weeks off from work. So I’m trying to slip in a few working hours early in the morning, late at night, and in the hours that my mother is doing reading lessons with my five-year-old. Oh, my goodness. I am so very tired. And not getting a great deal done. When Peter’s with the kids, I don’t even think about them. When they’re with anyone else, I’ve always got half an ear open for shrieks or explosions. It’s almost impossible to sink myself into my work.

(Number two son. And you wonder why I can’t concentrate?)

More than that, though: Parenting takes emotional energy. Writing takes emotional energy. I’ve only got so much emotional energy.

“How do you do it all?” This is the number one question I get from other moms, particularly those who are also writers. How do you manage to write, run a publishing company, home school, be a pastor’s wife? Well, I’ll take credit for a working pace that’s naturally set on “high,” but the truth is that no parent can do what I do without a full-time, fully dedicated partner.

I have a wonderful housekeeper (“cleaning woman” doesn’t do her justice) who comes in three days a week, and she has made the last six months amazingly productive for me. But I’ve done without household help in the past, and I could do it again without dropping any of my writing projects. The same is not true of my husband. (Aren’t you glad?) Apart from the fact that I just miss him, I can’t keep these kids properly parented and write at the same time. If he were to change jobs and lose his flexibility, I’d be facing a serious life reorganization.

And it’s not just my husband. My father makes the business decisions for Peace Hill Press, and acts as general manager for the farm (110 acres, far too many random domesticated animals).

(Back garden. Needs spraying, disking, and possum-shooting to stay productive.)

Since Dad’s also in Alaska, I’m dashing back and forth to the Press offices and struggling (not very successfully) to keep an algae bloom out of the pool.

(Dan leaping into pool. You can’t SEE the green tint, but it’s THERE. As soon as I go inside, the whole thing’s going to turn the color of lime jello.)

One of my favourite movie quotes is from the end of the Hugh Grant-Toni Collette About a Boy, which is about various pairs of people trying to cope with the difficulties of daily life. “I don’t think couples are the future,” one of the young characters remarks, at the end of the film. “Two people isn’t enough. You need backup.” I think he’s right. It takes four adults to run THIS enterprise, and with two of them gone, I’m absolutely beat. I’ve only written five paragraphs of the Medieval World since Monday, and I haven’t even tried to finish up those first-pass proofs of the Ancient World.

Interesting wrinkle: I normally try to write a little bit of fiction every couple of weeks, just so I remember how to do it. I tried last night, after a day of schooling/refereeing/comforting/library visiting/grocery shopping. I couldn’t get a single word down. I can keep plugging away at this history, though. I’m not getting a tremendous amount done, but I’ve just polished off Constantine’s second wife (she boiled to death in her bath) and I’m steaming on towards Julian the Apostate.

Which is illuminating, to me. I haven’t written much fiction in the last couple of years, partly because I’m slightly discouraged by the fact that the perfectly brilliant novel I finished in 2004 keeps bouncing back into my agent’s mailbox. ( He never thought it would sell, to be honest. “I didn’t say it wasn’t any GOOD,” he told me, last time we talked about it, “I just said I didn’t think anyone would BUY it.”) But mostly it’s because fiction requires immersion in an alternate universe, and with my kids at the age they are, I haven’t got the energy to create one.

Yes, I know women write novels when they have multiple children in the house. Kudos to them, but I’m betting that they’re not also turning out nonfiction books. I can only exist, simultaneously, in the Peace Hill Farm universe and the Medieval World universe. Trying to create a third world would blow out all the gaskets.

Whew. Can’t wait for the men to return from their bear hunt, triumphant and bearing fresh meat to the waiting women.

(Pete with boys)

And I have not only finished it (all 48 pages), but have now filed it, so that when I’m NEXT faced with it (when production time on the History of the Medieval World rolls around), I’ll have a previous draft to work on. The annoying thing about these questionnaires is that I’ve done them at least six times previously, but I can never FIND one of my old copies when I’m working on a new one.

I am free! I am free! No more author questionnaire!

So while I’m finishing it up, a thunderous roar splits the night and I go out to find that my fourteen-year-old has bagged a rabbit that was trying to level the baby sweet corn plants. Here he is–and before you go all Watership Down on me, remember that rabbits on a farm are kind of like locusts in ancient Egypt. They destroy EVERYTHING.

(I am becoming more and more of a pacificist, as I grow older and study more history, but still–how cool is it to be a fourteen-year-old boy and be allowed to fire off a shotgun in your own back yard?)

Time now to turn back to the next two things on my to-do list–churning out dissertation chapters (the stack on my desk is growing higher) and finishing up my outline of Volume II to send on to Starling Lawrence so that I can get started on the next manuscript before the page proofs for Volume I land on my doorstep.

This last chore involves taking pages and pages of badly spelled incoherent notes that look like THIS:

***
Chapter Four

376, Rome: Visigoths granted land on southern bank of the Danube and accepted as foederati.

378: Rome: Visigoths rebelled. Battle of Adrianople, in which the Romans were defeated by the Germans, which had little immediate consequence but proved to be an enormous mental turning point: they could be defeated. The emperor Valens was killed, becoming the fourth to fall in a fight against foreigners. This would also be the good place to do the first phase of the Migrations, (the name for Central European movements 300-900), the movement of the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and other tribes, shoved by the Huns. The movement of Germanic tribes was central to this first phase and included the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Alans, Langobards, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Suebi, and Alamanni.

384, Rome: Stilicho, whose father was a Vandal, was appointed envoy to the court of Shapur III of Persa; he was then promoted to general and married the adopted niece of the emperor Theodosius the Great (emperor, 379-death, last Roman to rule a united Rome).

395: After this, Latin and Greek halves remained separate; permanent division into two; Christianity became state religion in 391.

410, Rome: Rome sacked and burned by Visigoths, under Alaric. Alaric had become king of the Visigoths in 395. He then tried to invade Africa but died of fever and was buried beneath the riverbed of the Busento; it was diverted, he was buried, it was redirected into his channel, and the gravediggers were put to death. See the historian Orosius and the poet Claudiun; also Jordanes.

409-414, Persia: First the king Yazdegerd makes an edict of tolerance for Christianity; then he begins a four-year campaign against Christians that gives him the nickname “the Sinner.” In 420 he is overthrown by his nobles and succeeded by his violent son Bahram V.
***

and turning them into literate, editor-friendly paragraphs like THIS:

**

Chapter Four
Migrations and Divisions
The movement of Germanic tribes into Roman land (pushed by the Huns coming through central Europe) pressures the Roman emperor into granting land south of the Danube to the Visigoths. They rebel shortly after, and the emperor Valens is killed at the Battle of Adrianoble in 378. But some “barbarians” are folded into the empire: the half-Vandal Stilicho becomes envoy to the Persian court of Shapur III, and then son-in-law of the emperor Theodosius.
Theodosius is the last to rule a united Rome. By 395 the empire has permanently split in two, and in 410 Rome itself is sacked and burned by the Visigoths under their leader Alaric. Meanwhile, the Persians are fighting a different enemy; in 410 their king Yazdegerd the Sinner begins a four-year campaign against Christians within his empire.

**

This is useful for me too; it forces me to identify the central narrative in each chapter before I start researching. For Volume I, I overresearched something chronic. I ended up writing something like 800,000 words (no, I’m not kidding) and then cutting it down to 240,000. This is NOT the best strategy for a writer who wishes to remain sane.

The answer, according to my mother (seen scalding a chicken below, with the help of our neighbor from across the road), is 140-145 degrees (F). Less than that, and the feathers don’t come off. More, and you end up pre-cooking some of the chicken.

The second most popular question is: How can I build my own Whiz Bang Automated Chicken Plucker? The plans we used were from Herrick Kimball’s book, Anyone Can Build a Tub-Style Mechanical Chicken Plucker.

Over in that alternate universe (the one where I write books), my editor has decided that all of the time line designs currently on the table are confusing. So we’re redoing all the time lines vertically.

Which means I get to retype them all. Hurrah.

Meanwhile I’m trying to finish off the outline for Book Two. Will post more as soon as it gets finished…

The experiment began with that vital first step, so central to all Virginia farm rituals: all the men stand around and discuss the equipment.

From right to left, that’s my twelve-year-old Ben, my father, Shirley (the grandfather of my first cousin once removed), and Vince (our neighbor from across the road). And, in the foreground, the Whiz Bang.

Ben gives it one last once-over,

and then we turn it on to make sure that it whizzes and bangs properly.

Meanwhile, my mother visits the chicken pen to scope out the likely pluckees. I will spare you photos of the execution, but it is quick and painless, and chickens really do run around in circles if you cut their heads off

Here they hang on the edge of the sawmill, waiting for plucking.

Ben is, at this moment, not so sure that he’s going to partake of the fried chicken later on.

The first step in cleaning the chicken is to dip it into scalding water, which Mom has just brought out from the house.

This loosens the feathers. (It also smells revolting.)

Then the chicken goes into the Whiz Bang,

and bounces around in there while the rubber fingers pull off the feathers. After a few minutes it becomes obvious that the water wasn’t quite hot enough to loosen the feathers properly,

so Mom and Ben head back up to the house with the kettle to reheat it. (A golf cart is one of the most useful farm vehicles around.)

They come back with boiling water and a thermometer, so that we can keep an eye on the water temperature, and the chicken gets re-dipped and then goes back into the Whiz Bang.

And this time, when it comes out,

it has been beautifully plucked. With the water temperature kept at the proper level, the next chicken only needs one dip and one whirl in the Whiz Bang, and the feathers fly right off.

By the time my first cousin (not removed at all) drops by, the chickens are almost all finished. In record time.

And here’s the final product, headed for the fridge. My mother cooked one of the hens last night and reports that a two-hour baking time makes them tender, and that the breasts stay juicy. Tomorrow night I’ll be roasting a couple for our dinner.

Now, back to the history of the medieval world…

Now I’m in desperate need and throwing out a call to my readers. HELP. I need experts.

I’ve researched and researched and researched this book, but any professional will tell you that a non-expert, even one who researches obsessively, can make huge elementary errors in unfamiliar fields. This is quite different from the multiple inevitable small errors that sneak into long works, and which we’ll have to correct one at a time as we find them. Rather, I don’t want to use an outdated transliteration of a Chinese name, or chalk up a motivation to an ancient Indian emperor that every major historian in the field has dismissed…you get the idea.

For several months now I’ve been sending out emails to faculty members and graduate students at various history departments, begging for someone to cast an eye over a few chapters of the manuscript and offering to pay a reasonable honorarium. The only response I’ve gotten has been from Peter Enns and Mike Kelly at Westminster, both experts in the ancient Near East. (Thanks, guys.)
It’s a bad time of year, I’m guessing–everyone’s either grading frantically or writing papers–but at this point I think I need to widen my recruitment pool. I can make small changes in the galleys up until September, but I’ll have to pay for them if I make too many (it costs the publisher money to go back to the printer and reset pages).

So how about it, gentle readers? Any experts out there, on any area of the ancient world pre-Milvian Bridge? If so, drop an email to the office address (info@peacehillpress.com), and they’ll forward it on to me.

In other news…the spring crop of baby chicks has arrived. You order them by mail, believe it or not. The Charles City post office, which is accustomed to such things, called us at 6:30 AM on Monday morning to tell us that the cheeping box had arrived, so that we could drive down and pick it up.

The chicks hang out in the brooder until they’re a bit bigger, and then we’ll shift them to a larger chicken house. When they’re big enough we’ll put them in with the adult hens.

My oldest son is the chicken manager (he feeds, waters, and makes a profit off selling eggs to the neighbors), but the younger ones are always happy to help out at baby-chick time.

This unfortunately means that some of the older hens who have quit laying are, how shall I say, for the chop. An athletic hen tastes quite different from a store-bought, pen-raised chicken; there’s not nearly as much meat, but the flavor is more distinct and less bland. Good for chicken and dumplings. My father has found plans to build something called the Whiz Bang Automated Chicken Plucker which you can construct out of an old washing machine drum and various other bits of farm junk. No, I’m really not kidding. Yes, I know it sounds like something Wile E. Coyote would order from Acme. I’ll post a picture of it when it’s finished.

Meanwhile I have been doing everything in the world except writing. I spoke at a conference in Maine (lovely people, beautiful setting, but I forgot my camera) and lectured on rhetoric at the University of Richmond (ditto). This upcoming week I’ll be in Philadelphia, taking part in a panel on education and doing a guest lecture at my alma mater, Westminster. I will try to remember the camera.

The travelling, which is an important writer-job (it keeps the books in front of the public eye), also makes it impossible to write. And with spring coming, duties on the farm tend to multiply as well. We had the first big grass-cut of the year today, a task made slightly more complicated because my second son (who is supposed to take over the grass-cutting duties this year) turned out to be just slightly too light for the Kubota zero-turn mower. It’s got a safety switch that cuts the engine if it thinks the seat is empty, and whenever he shifts his weight, the engine quits. We finally solved this by putting one of Pete’s fifteen-pound weights on the seat and plonking him down on top of it.

And off he goes, a very small spot in a very big field.

During all the travelling and grass-cutting and book-packing (I’m getting ready to move out to my new office) and permission-hunting, I am trying to carve out an occasional four or five hours to start on the next manuscript. Without at least one solitary period of writing a week, my imagination starts to wither. Right now it’s feeling pretty dried and shrunken.

More next week…