high-fiving self

I finished the book

I finished the book

I FINISHED THE BOOK

Now I just have to edit all 18 chapters and do about 33 spot illustrations. And then find an agent. And then get it published. But it's out of my head and onto the page!

Industrious industry and naked halflings

Alright, folks, I re-drew the whole book and submitted it to 4 top agents. If all it does is draw swifter rejection, at least I'll know it was more eye-catching and I'm on the right track.

And I'm following the example of Tony DiTerlizzi and Adam Rex in doing D&D artwork and not being embarrassed about it. Granted, they drew mystical Paladins and rampant griffins, and I drew two naked guys on a giant worm, but still. If an agent can't handle me at my skull-humping-dwarfiest, they don't deserve me at my Caldecott-winningest. That is what I tell myself, anyway. So those illustrations are up on my website (hollybraffet.com) to entice/scare away potential business partners.

Other progress report: am a bit more than halfway through the first draft of my juvie novel. If George R R Martin can write a kid's book where someone gets their face caught on fire and melted off, I can write about ghosts and mildly-reanimating corpses, right? Right.

the first to be eaten in the next ice age

It should be a relief to everyone, particularly people I make dinner for, that I have decided after careful and thoughtful and sort-of-devoted diligence that vegan diets are complete and utter bullshit. I was going to add, "for me", but no, I have Opinions on the Subject now. How fucking precious is it to base your entire philosophy of eating around foods that are unattainable in your geographic region? To be dependent on the industry of national food distributors for your very survival? Who lives in a fertile land resplendent in the natural growth of cashews, agave, maple, flax, soy, and coconuts? I live in goddamn grow-anything magical paradise coconut land and we do not have cashew or maple trees, because that is how nature works.

No. We have lasted this long because we learned to eat the things we could catch and bash and boil with our two clever hands. Vegans will not survive the first winter when the grid falls. Vegans and e-readers. Meat-eating bibliophiles will take over the wasteland.

So I'm trading in the veganism for lean protein. I'll keep the cookies and cakes, though, because sometimes you run out of eggs and milk before shopping day and still want to withhold a plate of cake from a kid who won't eat their noodles.


ANYWAY

I'm writing a novel, so Muu is going to be a bit slower in sharing his diary entries. And the revamped picture book is nearly done. Industry is the vanguard against existential dread, and I've been putting off making a doctor's appointment because my heart is doing that weird struggling thing again, like a hamster stuck in a sock, and the last two times I've gone in for it they haven't found anything wrong when they put a stethoscope under my shirt for 10 seconds, so I guess I'm waiting for... a cardiac arrest? I don't know? Also it's almost time to see if that 40% chance of developing cancer has decided which way it wants to go, and NOPE NOPE NOPE.

Frantic drawing.

Can we still get worms from drawing on ourselves?

Bought gummy vitamins, which tipped this vegan nonsense from slow death into something a bit more invigorating. A less-slow death, maybe. Although there are probably horse knuckles in the gummy vitamins, now that I'm thinking about it, but whatever. I am only impersonating a person with dietary restrictions.

Started doing sit-ups and dangling from chin-up bar. Went on night walk and listened to Led Zeppelin while staring up at the stars and running from feral cats. Felt pretty good this morning while checking off my holds list at work. Scratched nose with working end of pen. Didn't notice. Nobody told me. For two hours. NO VEGAN COOKIES FOR YOU PEOPLE.

Well, I say that, but we have a potluck coming up and I'm bringing cookies. I really love all the little cookies. Vegans go through a lot of effort to fuck up a cookie, with flax and germ and soaked cashews and sugar scraped from plants that don't like producing sugar, but a regular egg-free chocolate cookie with lazy processed ingredients is just fine. And then you can brag like an asshole at your staff potluck and people will think you're really fit even though you are obviously just eating cookies and calling it a diet.

AND - guess how much weight I've lost? Any guess will do, actually, because I don't know. I've been living off of cookies and I'm afraid to get on the scale.

pineapple spectres

Drove along the old snake road under dark, low-lying clouds. A tall scrap of fog had detached from the sky and was gliding along, upright, across the fields. Strange weather we're having, I thought, completely misidentifying a roving murder of dementors.

vegan status: expert

Co-worker forwarded me a pdf on the "Ornish" diet, which is fat-free semi-vegan. It's a list of about 20 things you can eat. I read it while eating a bowl of sliced prime rib that my boss gave me.

Further adventures of the terrible librarian detective

firstly, the garden

My gherkins are burgeoning. I planted cucumbers under the bedroom window, and they leaped up the trellis and attached to the window screen, which probably is not good for the screen but I don't have the heart to cut it down.

Tomato and runner bean seedlings went into the ground yesterday. The kids dug the holes, patted the little plants in, and watered them - which means it was a lot more work than it should have been, with skinned knees and fighting over watering cans and dropped plants, but they will only remember being soulful keepers of the earth later on, so that was $6 well spent.

anyone got a sniffer dog I can borrow?

Speaking of planted things - I have it on good authority (second hand) that someone found a fresh severed head buried in the valley nearby. Evidently, however, even though we give our library cops free coffee and totally listen to their gross stories when they show us gruesome pictures on their phones, they still won't just go digging around in some undefined area of wilderness for a hypothetical head without something more concrete to go on (like, say, the rest of the body). Co-worker and I are colluding to go hiking with a shovel, but we haven't decided if it's worth running into head-chopping murderers up there in secret-drug-growing territory. File another one under Failed Sleuthing, right next to "walked by a dead guy on the way to the gym and didn't notice". In my defense, that time someone wrapped up a pile of dead fish and ditched it in the library dumpster, I totally got in there and ripped it open to see if it was a person. It wasn't.

Head shooting

So I am re-doing the entire book and re-submitting it to agents. Because that is how you get things done.

One of the things people like is to see that the person they are talking to is an employable meat-type human, and not a creepy sock puppet. I am getting older and squishier, but I am totally a meat-type human, so I posed for some pictures to put on my "about me" page. But a cat climbed up my body, so it looks like my shirt is attacking me.

I ended up going with the only one that wasn't blurry.

GOOD ENOUGH.

Also vegan: CAEK

And rum. And powdered sugar. It turns out you can make a totally regular cake without eggs or milk. Why are they even in there? Science and reasons, probably, but I can tell you this works just as well for a household "eat your dinner or you don't get dessert" dessert.

Finger snitches can attest.

I made mine from the Bake and Destroy cookbook, but here is basically the same thing, free and online so you can go make it RIGHT NOW.

6 min vegan cake 

• 1 ½ cups flour

• ⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 cup sugar

• ½ cup vegetable oil

• 1 cup cold water or coffee

• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• 2 tablespoons cider vinegar

Mix all those things and bake it like a normal cake. Make a frosting out of powdered sugar and rum and a bit of shortening (evidently there is a non-hydrogenated shortening that vegans use, and coconut oil would be good too, but I used a tablespoon of crisco because I hate my arteries I guess). Eat that cake. Lose weight anyway, because it's basically the only thing you've been allowed to eat all day. When the family is eating meatloaf and gravy on buttery mashed potatoes with corn, you know what you get to eat? Corn. You get the corn. But now you also get cake!

Side note: I have lost 3lbs this week. Probably because I'm slowly dying of malnutrition. Tonight I've got a nice pumpkin coconut curry, though, so that's not too bad.

Well, shit

Vegan sweet potato and spinach soup.

It may look terrible, but it also has a viscous quality that creates spit-like threads that look like hairs trailing from your mouth to the spoon. 

It's fat free, though. And I definitely don't feel like eating anything else tonight. 

Also vegan: tea and Oreos. I can live off of those and iron pills, probably.