A novel about a young herbalist making a life in a post-oil world
I have the last research links from writing the third draft of Cricket and Grey. I offer them up with no preamble:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_MP5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/patientinstructions/000315.htm
http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/portland/
That’s it, actually. More guns and how to dress wounds.
(This is not an AK-47 pictured above, but it may be an AK-74 or something like that)
One of the bigger challenges for this book has been gun research. I did a lot of it. Including going shooting for the first time in my life. When trying to decide which guns my characters would carry I had to consider which guns would not only suit their purposes but also how likely they would still be around in the future, which ones are the sturdiest and can take rough treatment? Which ones are the easiest to press your own bullets for. How hard is it going to be to find replacement parts. I agonized over which assault rifle Cricket would carry and ended up choosing the M16. I was very happy with this choice until my 10 year old son told me it was an inferior rifle in every way to the AK-47. He offered up lots of reasons. I decided to think about changing Cricket’s gun to an AK-47 when I got to the chapter where she cleans it in the 3rd draft.
So today I got through chapter 7 and talked to the kid about this again. Then I looked it up and discovered that everything he said is true and I’m left wondering how the hell I could have ever chosen and M16 over and AK-47. They are apparently sturdy, reliable, cheap to make, have standard bullets (unlike the proprietary bullets used in the M16-that fact alone makes it ineligible for use in the book) and are one of the most popular assault rifles in the world.
Avtomat Kalashnikova
That’s the loveliest name for a gun ever. Makes me want to learn to speak Russian. I’ve always wanted to. Russians are sexier than the French.
The things writing this novel have taught me are startling.
This Russian guy who calls himself a “professional Russian” is a madman with weapons. His videos are actually pretty funny and if you’re interested in guns, you have to watch these videos:
I’m working on chapter two of the second draft and two main things keep sucking up all my time in research. Plus a few little things.
1. Trying to construct one small conversation between Cricket and Grey in Scots. Hours of research for one tiny bit of true color. Now, if only I had my own Scottish person from Glasgow or the little towns immediately near it I could simply say “Here’s what I want my characters to say… please translate” and it would be done. Sadly, I’m Scottish friend free at the moment.
2. I’m not an architect and never until writing this book have I considered that a shortcoming in myself. I can picture the cob cottage that Peter built in the woods but only bits of it, like what the individual rooms look like, what the outside looks like, and where the pigeons live, but not how all these rooms are connected. When I try to sketch how I see it, it is clearly an impossible design. Does there really need to be a single bearing wall? It’s like my brain keeps hiccuping every time I try to really bring it into focus so that I can be more clearly descriptive in the story and give a better sense of scene. How hard can that be? Apparently, pretty damn hard. Am I really going to need to get some graph paper out and work it out to scale? Do I need to get a degree in house design before I can finish writing this book? The charm of cob construction is that you can practically make it any way you like with some simple building considerations.
The cabin layout question is made further complicated by the fact that it also has to house the pigeons the Winters’ keep. I had it clear in my mind until double checking old style dovecotes and realizing that some functions necessary to raise and keep homing pigeons might not have been accommodated in the “design” I came up with for one. My mother pointed out to me that dovecotes are for doves and not pigeons. She is not actually correct. The term is for a structure built to house either doves or pigeons. However, in modern day pigeon keeping it seems you keep them in a “pigeon loft” rather than a dovecote. But I can have my characters build a dovecote if I want. It’s fiction. And they’re individuals. That’s not the point.
The other slightly minor distraction is that I needed to finally decide what the hell Shockey’s “White” is really distilled from. It’s his cheap all purpose moonshine. But moonshine can be any illegally distilled hard alcohol. I think grains are too hard to come by and he saves the grains for his rarer expensive quality whiskey (for sale to the few who can afford it or those lucky enough to have become personal friends with him). The white isn’t grain but I thought it equally problematic to have it be made from potatoes. This has to be something he can make from abundant produce. Grapes. This valley is full of vineyards and in this period of time I don’t see many of them having survived. I think many vineyards will go derelict and be abandoned to overgrowth and a return to the wild, so to speak. I think finding feral grapes will not be hard. I think the White will be made from whatever he can get his hands on cheaply and in abundance. So predominantly grapes. But sometimes other crops like maybe potatoes or corn. So White is very much like grappa or Aqua vitae.
A few things I learned in research today: homing pigeons can fly distances of as far as 1, 118 miles and fly an average of 50 miles per hour over more average distances (500 or fewer miles). For very short distances they can fly up to 110 miles per hour. Quite a few pigeons earned medals of honor in World War l and World War ll. I’m including the links to a couple of those birds. I also learned that Mike Tyson is a lifelong pigeon fancier.
About the Scots language (which is NOT Gaelic but the dialect of English Scots speak), it is notable (to me) for having about a hundred words for “drunk”, “dirty”, and “crazy” but very few for “rude”. It also has about five thousand ways to call someone stupid.
Mary of Exeter a pigeon who won a medal for flying important message across the English Chanel from France while injured.
G.I. Joe a pigeon who won a medal for saving over a thousand lives by delivering a vital message in time.
Common Useful Scottish Phrases
Scottish Vernacular Dictionary
Some Fine Old Scottish Sayings
Scots Online this one has a translation feature that is cool
Glossary of Scottish slang and jargon
Glaswegian this one is really funny. Be sure to observe the pictures used for illustration and read their examples of use and translation.
Some Glaswegian/Scottish phrases
You see how sucked in I was? You start reading through these sites you’ll be sucked in too. Maybe not. I guess you have to love Scottish people, Scotland, and colorful language. These links represent hours of (mostly) useless research. Or maybe once my book is published someone will give it a review in which they say “…her use of Scots is exemplary and clearly represents painstaking research which the readers will appreciate…”
For all the time I spent looking up cob cottages I found no useful links and am still hung up on the seemingly insurmountable problem of not being an architect. Onward, then.
Taken at Red Ridge Nursery in Dayton, Oregon
It is amazing how much information I need to write this bit of speculative fiction. You’d think I can just make shit up. That’s what authors do, right? You do if you’re ten years old and don’t care if anyone finds your story believable enough to become wholly engrossed and invested in it. If I want to speculate on how we will doctor ourselves in the future I will most likely need to know how we do it now and how we did it in the past since those factors are high predictors for what direction it will take in the future.
I’m just preparing to start the third draft tonight. Actually, I tried to start it over a month and a half ago and floundered. I needed someone to read the damn book to give me some much needed perspective and I’ve had that blessing now and I know what needs the most work and I’ve written my notes for going forward. I have now only to put pen to paper and go. Just start. It’s really much harder than I imagined it could possibly be. I’ve written a damn book.
I did that. This thing I’ve tried to do since I was a kid I’ve finally done. Big accomplishment!
Now I just have to make it really good. No pressure, just be sure to put all the commas and colons in the right place and don’t remove bullets that would have exploded into a thousand pieces of shrapnel and destroyed the flesh around it as it did so.
The job now is to make it all come together more smoothly, to leave the reader with just the right amount of questions as they go along and not so many that they get so frustrated they put the book down and never come back.
Before diving in for the second time I figured it was time to clean out my bookmarks tab and share them here so I can make room for more research about how to have a proper shootout and how to build cob cabins.
My readers each brought up some questions that I think the following links might clarify. If nothing else, you may want to file this collection of links away for when the apocalypse mows you down because there’s lots of great information here. With this list you can bury people, fix them, feed them, house them, understand them if they come from Scotland, and take them sport fishing in the Willamette.
Cob Projects Peter builds a cob cabin for five reasons: materials are cheap, readily available, they are environmentally sound, it’s a technology easily learned by the average person, and lastly, he learned to love them because of the incredible long lasting historical cob cottages in Scotland (where he grew up).
The Greenest Dollar: Cob Houses Another site with information on what cob houses are.
Catgut Catgut is not really made from catgut and here seem to be more than one theory on why this natural suturing got its name. If you don’t have a lot of industrialization going on and not much access to plastics or synthetic materials this will be the suturing most likely available to you.
How Suturing is Made Very interesting to learn all of this. You think you won’t ever need to know this if you’re not a nurse but what if you couldn’t afford a doctor and had to be prepared to do your own skin stitching? I had to know a little more about how this stuff is made because I needed to know how people would produce it in a low industrial situation. Back to catgut people! (although you can use steel too – ouch!)
How to Pluck a Pheasant Well, I really needed to know how to pluck a grouse but I couldn’t find any super specific information about plucking grouse and I reasonably concluded that most bird feathers are similar enough that plucking any of them is going to be pretty similar. Hank can email me if I’m wrong. If anyone knows if this is true, it’s him. This is one of my favorite food writers of all time. He eats A LOT of meat and I eat none, yet I have the deepest respect for him.
How to Make Mustard I’m not going to say this answered all of my more pesky mustard making questions but I think nothing will until I’ve done extensive experimentation. I include this here because although I bookmarked it for my own purposes beyond writing the novel, I needed the process in my mind as so many people will be making their own in future. This is my unscientific non-clairvoyant prediction.
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife In writing this book it’s been important to get an idea of what hunting might happen during which season and which kinds of animals and fish people hunt in this area. This is a good place to start. I don’t feel it incumbent on me to be an expert but this site has given me a flavor of the local sport.
Assault rifle More gun research. Damn. I still have some fresh stuff to research as my favorite gun loving friend has passed along some information I should only apply to the novel if Cricket is REALLY COOL. I haven’t had time so there will be more. No, I don’t love guns but if you imagine there’s ever going to be a world without them then you clearly have your head buried at the bottom of a dam.
Hand Load Ammunition I don’t think it’s going to be nearly as cheap or as easy to buy boxes of pre-made ammunition in the future as it is now. I think gun powder and all the other things needed to shoot guns with the frequency and craziness to which we’ve become accustomed will require that we save as many shells as we can, buy the components separately and then press our own fresh bullets when we need them. There fore I had to look up how the hell people do this.
How Military Snipers Work This is fucked up shit, if you want to know the truth. Totally interesting and was useful in mapping out the likelihood of the ambush scene in the book. How far can people shoot assault rifles from and how the landscape affects your effectiveness. I find it disturbing that humans train each other to do this stuff. It’s awe inspiring how destructive we are and how often we actually use this knowledge, skill, and equipment, especially Americans.
Useful Scottish Slang Words Peter and Mairead Winters emmigrated to the Willamette Valley from Scotland. It is fascinating how slang is different depending on where you are in Scotland. You don’t think that’s remarkable since slang changes from region to region in the States but you have to understand that Scotland is a SMALL country. It’s fascinating how slang and accents can change over such short distances. This is very funny too. There isn’t a lot of Scottish slang in the book but I refuse to make my Scottish characters speak in a dialect (I dislike it when authors do this) but aside from my not liking dialect in novels it’s not something I am skilled at and it could ruin everything. I much prefer when authors indicate that a character has an accent and include the kinds of expressions they are most likely to keep in their vernacular on a daily basis the way British people will call the toilet the “loo” even after twenty years in the states.
First Aid: gunshot wounds — look bad or ARE bad? There’s a lot of shooting at one point. People get shot. Trying to figure out how to hurt my characters without killing them (oh sure, some get killed off too, but when you want to hurt a character but don’t find it convenient for them to die, it’s useful to know where are the best places to shoot them). I had more links than this one but didn’t save them so I must have gotten more of what I wanted from this one than from the others.
How to Prepare a Corpse for an At-Home Funeral I feel like I must have included this link in one of the other research posts but I’m too tired to check right now and as a matter of fact I keep trying to get better, more explicit, information on how to do this. Never seems like enough if you haven’t done this yourself and you suddenly have to prepare a corpse for burial. Not that I have one I have to bury. Nothing in my basement, I promise.
When Someone Dies More. Just more. Well, what if you have to do this some day? Still, where’s all the information on how to close the eyes, clean it up, dress it, anything special one should do with a body. Don’t tell me there aren’t ways and ways that humans developed long before we embalmed. Seriously, it used to be family members who did it. What was important? I did read an ACTUAL book of a woman’s account of coming over the Oregon trail and settling in the Willamette Valley. Lots of cleaning dead bodies up and burying them. No REAL details though. No manual for how to do it all. I’m perfectly aware that one can just throw a body on a pyre or toss them into a pit but I want to know what reverent people did for their dead from the moment the dead died to when they were buried. This part of the world is precious short of this useful and important information. There should be a manual available. A DIY manual.
Second draft through chapter four has just been finished. The introduction and chapters one through three were more like revisions whereas chapter four was a complete rewrite. As soon as I was done with chapter four I realized that every chapter from here on out will have to be so changed from the developments made in the story that they’ll each essentially have to be rewritten completely.
I would find this dismaying except that as I’m going through this process it seems completely organic and good that I’ve fine tuned the plots and characters so much that the second draft is mostly a rewrite. I would find it harder to take if I didn’t see how much better the rewrite of chapter four is now compared to before. I wasn’t all that excited to write it because it was a snooze-fest. It was an entire chapter setting up the next one but what I realized is that there shouldn’t be a single chapter about which I can personally say it puts me to sleep.
If I can say that about any chapter it means the story isn’t moving there. Chapter four used to tire me but now it’s my favorite one because it sets up a lot of the plot that plays out later and is full of discovery and tension.
Chapter four is so good that I’m afraid to write chapter five for fear it will just suck. What’s good in chapter five? Malakai the Mormon crime boss. (Excuse me while I go make a note of something I just thought of which needs to happen in chapter five which will make it even more exciting)
Being in the last third of November puts a real fire under my ass as far as deadlines go. I have about fifteen chapters to complete before January!
I better get cracking.
There are two underlying themes to the book: death and winter. Many years ago I read the book “The American Way of Death” by Jessica Mitford which was not only funny but shocking as an expose of the corruption of the funeral industry. Any proper goth will have started their fascination with the macabre long before they discovered the virtues of the all black wardrobe and rice face powder. I’m not sure how I found the book but it sated quite a bit of curiosity about the undertakers of my country.
In Cricket and Grey my characters don’t have access to a funeral home, embalming fluids, or manufactured fancy coffins. It’s not that these things have completely ceased to exist, but the only ones left are in big cities and only the very rich can afford such services any more. In my book you have to fill out death paperwork yourself, handle your own dead, and either burn them on a pyre or bury them in a plot, all of which must be approved by the health department which in most towns is a federally held office and due to limited power of government and limited funds through the whole country the federal agents who handle this office also handle other local federal jobs.
To write about preparing your own dead I have had to do some research. Some of the questions I need answered are:
How long does it take for an enembalmed dead body to decompose?
How soon after death must an unembalmed body be buried?
How deep should a dead body be buried?
What kinds of burial regulations might be enforced if no funeral homes were there to intercede (and interfere!) on anyone’s behalf?
How would a shortage of local doctors able to certify deaths affect the regulations for disposal of the dead?
What would the cost of permits to bury the dead be in the future if the government couldn’t extract income taxes from people anymore- would the government take a bigger piece of cost of death to citizens?
Here are links to some of my sources of information:
“Beyond the Grave – understanding human decomposition” by Arpad A. Vass
Cremation or Burial – Carbon Emissions and the Environment
Funeral Consumers of Eastern Massachusetts
“Green” Burials Require no Coffins or Chemicals
To write Cricket and Grey I have had to do a lot of research on surprising things like: how fast a Clydesdale pulling a covered wagon travels, what is the best all-purpose pistol for a person living in the woods who might need to protect themselves against both humans and large animals, what is the role of Mormon women in the Mormon community, and what the hell is pemmican and would Cricket need to know how to make it?
I spent eight hours one day just looking up weapons. I learned so much I impressed my kid and husband who know all about them already. Most of my research is necessarily online and so the quality of my sources varies greatly. Because this is a fiction book I have some slack in this regard, this isn’t a “how to survive post oil” non-fiction book that someone might need to rely on for actual survival. It’s a novel.
Never the less, I want the details in my novel to be as authentic as possible within my fictional world. Sometimes it isn’t enough to read about weapons and in my case, having never actually shot a gun in my life, my research demanded that I actually know what it feels like to shoot a gun before writing about someone else shooting one. I have gone shooting with an experienced shooter and a person I consider to be an expert in weapons (who is also a local lawyer) named Terence McLaughlin. He and his good friend Louis taught me about gun safety and basic shooting. I was able to shoot several different types of pistols and even a twelve gauge rifle. Even if I never need to describe an actual gun in detail in the book, I think it makes a difference that I have held some different pistols and know in my skin what it feels like to shoot different gauges, I think readers will know that I know.
In other areas I am my own expert. The book was originally inspired by all the homesteading projects I’ve been learning to do and practicing for the last ten years of my life: canning, drying, and growing food. Foraging for blackberries in California has extended to elderberries, comfrey, nettles, and most recently mushrooms here in Oregon. Learning to recognize herbs and wildflowers in the wild is something I enjoy a great deal and which my main character Cricket makes her living at. My mother has a certificate in herbology and has taught me to make decoctions, an anti-fungal salve, and tinctures. She and I have had a great time together coming up with lists of the 10 most essential herbs for the urban homesteader to have on hand and she’s taken me to herbal shops and pored over many recipes and projects with me.
These projects I’ve been learning on my own for years because it’s a passion of mine inspire a lot of thinking because processing food takes a great deal of time and yet it is meditative; peeling 25 pounds of blanched peaches uses up a very small part of the brain leaving the rest to contemplate the actions of the hands and to ask about the deeper meaning of these simple labor intensive activities. What if all people forgot how to preserve their own food but the fuel that runs the big factories who do it for us runs out and we suddenly all have to do it for ourselves again? Is preserving our own food worth all the time and effort it takes?
The answer to that is: it is absolutely worth it to be capable of preserving your own food because someone has to do it and some day you may not be able to afford to pay companies to do it for you. It’s a muscle we all need to flex, even in small part, so that the collective knowledge and power inherent in doing things for ourselves remains useful and readily available to us.
One of the biggest questions I have is what will we all do if there isn’t enough fuel to power the plants making medicine for us all? What if simple things like band-aids become first aid luxuries only the very rich can afford? What if antibacterial ointments and washes are no-longer being manufactured? What if the average person didn’t have access to hospitals or even if they had access, what if no one but the very rich could afford to go to them? (Which is half true already.) What do we all need to know how to do to keep ourselves alive? What will be the most needed medicine making skills? What herbal knowledge will people most desperately need?
These are the questions and the points of interest which inspired me to answer them in a fictional exploration of “what if?”. In asking all these questions I am learning a lot of things I didn’t used to know. Not all of what I’m learning will have an actual place in the story but everything I’m learning is informing its direction and its richness. I am going to put all the links to my online resources below so that you can read for yourself about the different weapons I’ve been exploring, the different pieces of odd information I’ve needed to gather. I don’t want to lose track of where I’ve been for my research so it’s also a bit of an archive for myself. The links don’t all represent expert sources, some of them are but others are queer little bits I found interesting that added texture to other things I found.
I will continue to add things to my research list as I find new ones.
Links to sources of information for the book Cricket and Grey (in no particular order):
A hunting knife Cricket might carry
Clydesdale Breeders of the USA
When I’m climbing High Heaven Road and get a glimpse out over the valley I see the patterns of the fields and the derelict vineyards crush out the monotony of the conifer view. Everything in patterns and order in spite of how run down the county is. I am falsely reassured that all is going to be fine, yet beneath the patterns there is a seeping vein of hunger. When fall arrives I am already anticipating winter. A busy time for an herbalist but also a worrying time. I know mother so much better now that I mop children’s foreheads with clean cold cloths like she did, late into the night, letting scared parents sleep while I watch. And watch. And hope not to bury.
Julie says she’ll stay a little longer. I asked because I need more of her help preparing the salves and the syrups, but she says it’s because I’m missing G. too much and if she’d been Tommy I would have floored her right there and then. What nerve that girl has! We sent a message to her mother via Zeus and are hoping to hear back soon. One pigeon down this month, I hope not to lose Zeus. We’ll need to train the new ones. Where’s the time for pigeon training? I can hear my father calling me a soft lazy lass, they always found time to train the new ones with James and Mary. It takes work. Everything takes so much work.
I sometimes find myself wondering about life at sea? Could it be so rough? I’m good with weapons, God knows my father saw to that. Julie says I’m too much of a soldier and need to become more of a woman.
She’s all around lucky she’s not Tommy.
Meanwhile I can’t find out who Julie is getting together with. She’s being coy- not her usual style. Something’s off and I don’t know what but I could swear I see May blossoms all over her and yet I can’t uncover who her paramour might be. Luckily I’m a stealthy individual and will uncover her clandestine romance. She’s never kept anything from me before. I’m the reticent one.
She’s right, of course, and it pisses me off. Father left me often enough and I never doubted he’d come back to me in one piece. Maybe he came home sometimes looking like a prizefighter after a bad night, but he always came home. I know that G. worked with him but it’s different. It’s so different.
I sound like a milk bucket.
Makes me want to go shooting.
The nights are growing cold enough to light fires. I was thinking about the Garrubos. Wondering how I might get firewood to them. It’s been bad enough during summer but with winter coming on they’ll never make it without more wood. The new baby is too frail.
What am I saying? The new baby is probably stronger than old-man Garrubo.
Sometimes I wish I could see the valley as it used to look. As it used to look when my parents first came here. I wonder how long before the farmland becomes as choked and dark as the forest in the hills?
It’s beautiful looking out over it all from up here. I know why father loved it so much. I see it differently now. With all the ghosts they saw and all the hollow voices riding up the roads into the emptiness.
This unseasonable warmth is a blessing as it’s buying us all time before the cold completely annihilates the unripe summer crops that everyone’s been praying would inch forward just a little more. It was a rough summer for tomatoes and the potato scab was bad.
Jules came to help me because I have to forage the elderberries now or run out of syrup this year and I haven’t got nearly enough put by for my own food though I promised her I can hunt. I can always hunt. But if I run out of flu medicine everyone will be remembering that mother never let such a thing happen, not even in thin years and they’ll say it’s too bad I’m not her. People suck. Ever since she died she’s been a saint. Don’t think I’ve heard one whisper about her being an “incestual bride” since we buried her.
I managed to get both gardens planted well in spring and I even got the winter patch set in this summer but I haven’t been consistently harvesting. Jules has her own work to do. I sent Euclid to tell her not to come. She never listens to me, which is actually good because I’d be pissed and a lot more lonely if she did. She’s pulling up the garlic as I write this, out in the muggy heat singing old sailor songs. I’ll bet she sings them in front of Tommy just to make his blood pressure rise. What turns a rough coarse boy into a delicate somber man with no laughter? It makes me sad when I think of all the scrapes we got into when we were kids and how hard we laughed our way out of them together. Julie kept clear of the brawls and I thought her so much gentler than myself and yet here she is yelling out:
“…Well, first there came the cabin boy, and then there came the cook
She had them by appointment in a red appointment book
The bosun piped himself aboard, and played a merry tune
And last there came the captain with his bloody great harpoon…”
I’d like to know who taught them to her. Must have been James, though I have a hard time imagining him belting them out the way father did. It’s good to hear some inappropriate singing around here.
So far I’ve got 20 pounds of elderberry drying in the shed. Only 150 to go.
Right now Julie’s singing “Bang away Lulu… bang it good and strong… what in the hell will the Navy do when good ol’ Lulu’s gone…some girls work in factories…some girls work in stores…but Lulu works in a dockside house…with forty other whores…….”
That’ll be the best garlic we’ve ever had, I’m sure.
Off to the south-side for more berries.
I got the fresh ginger from S. We did a trade for it and I have to say it cost me dear in comfrey which is obviously risky. I haven’t revealed my patches to anyone and luckily few can recognize it anyway but S. really needed it so I gave him some. More than I ought to have, actually, because I’m lower than usual. Still, fresh ginger! I haven’t gotten my hands on fresh for two years. I had to make syrup with it. I never feel half as warm in the winter without it. Since it won’t keep without alcohol, it has the added benefit of being good for the mind.
I had some of Shockey’s 9 year old whiskey socked away and used that.
One bottle to last a whole year? It will be painful.
I must share it with someone who can truly appreciate it.
If I had to choose a wife who makes the most buttery delicious scones or a wife who makes the best ginger whiskey I’d pick the one with the booze. Especially when the scones come with a free sermon. There’s no sermon with the ginger whiskey aside from “Don’t die!”
I used 4 ounces fresh chopped ginger to 1 quart of water and a 2 to 1 ratio of decoction to honey.
