Submissions, Subscriptions, and News

Hey all you lovely readers and friends,

So it’s a shorter blog post this week. I’ve been really busy trying to edit a piece for an open submission that is due on November 1^st. I found out about it less than two weeks ago and I’ve been struggling with it ever since then. I literally said today “I want to rewrite the whole thing”. I’m kind of serious about it. If I stayed up all night I could really make something really cool out of it but that just comes with working on one’s own voice. Wish me luck throughout the week on doing some good editing and on getting it published.

In recent news I shipped off this moon’s Lunacy Project out on Friday so if you subscribed that should have arrived at your doorstep yesterday or today! Enjoy. Tell your friends and sign up for this next month. I’ve started the first staged of the next story and I’m really excited for this one. It’s definitely different than last months. I’m working on my style and how to frame the plot and I’m really happy with the way it’s evolving. The next month’s story will go out on November 26^th so you do have some time.

In other news I will be headed back the twin cities at the end of this week. For all my cities people, hit me up, I’m sure I’ll be sticking around for a while. But I still have to get through this week; lots of packing and cleaning up left to do. Tomorrow is my last day in Grand Forks. Thank you everyone at Amazing Grains for making me feel so welcome when I came into the co-op on Wednesdays. You are all lovely, beautiful, and amazing individuals.

I will write about my time here at the farm but I need to get back to editing and hand wringing.

Wish me luck and safe travels in the days to come; looking forward to seeing all my Twins Cities folk soon.

The Lunacy Project

I’m so excited to be able to bring this to all you wonderful people. As some of you may know, I’ve been working on this project for a while now. Well today is the day I launch what I’m calling The Lunacy Project. This is a crowd sourcing opportunity to bring you, dear readers, my work.

I’m continuing to submit work to magazines, on-line and other wise, and other publishers but in the mean time I would like to give you a chance to read original works approximately once a month. Every lunar cycle you will receive a piece of short fiction no less than fifteen hundred words in length; some months will be significantly longer. Each full moon you will find a new story in your in-box or your mail box. Subscribers are encouraged to send inspirations, setting ideas, and character descriptions if they so choose to.

Email subscriptions will be sent as a pdf.

Snail mail subscriptions will be sent a few days before the full moon to ensure you will receive it at approximately the same time as the e-mail subscribers. Depending on the speed of the mail, you might even get it before the full moon. These will be printed on high-quality paper, signed, and sealed with wax. This is by far the more impressive and amusing option.

Subscribe at least five days before the full moon in order to receive that cycles story. To make this happen I’m asking for $5.00 for paper subscriptions and $3.00 for the pdf. A full year’s worth of stories –there are about thirteen full moons a year—is $50.00 for paper and $30.00 for the pdf. If you are an e-mail subscriber and wish to get a hard copy of that cycle’s story, I ask for $3.00 to cover paper, wax, and shipping costs. Feel free to e-mail me at grabu004@gmail.com for more information.

Thank you so much for indulging me in this quest. Your participation is greatly appreciated and I’m delighted to be able to make this a reality. If you should chose to sign up now, the first story goes out on the October 29th.

Follow this link to go to the projects main page. 

Chicken Harvest

I can talk about my weekend using two different terms; harvesting being the first and killing being the other. Both are correct and can be used interchangeably depending on the context. You can say I killed roughly fifty some chickens. You can also say I harvested fifty some chickens. Both are true. Either way, there are now fifty some chickens, drained of blood, plucked, beheaded, and eviscerated, in the walk in cooler.

I came to farm Saturday morning knowing this is what I would be doing and really I didn’t have any qualms with any of it. I’ve never killed an animal before save for the thousands of misquotes, flies, other bugs, and a few random animals whose lives I took with the wheels of a car. It was interesting to puncture the neck and feel the life literally draining out of the chicken. Sometimes they twitched and flailed about. Sometimes they flopped out of the cones and I had to put them back in before they stumbled away. Sometimes they crowed or squawked while I opened up they necks. Mostly they just stared wide eyed at nothing in particular until their lids close and their body went limp.Flipping the chickens upside down causes their blood to flow into their heads and it kind of stuns them making the blood letting one of the best ways to harvest. 

I didn’t have any problems or reservations on being the one who did most of the killing. This was a choice I made and really it wasn’t that hard of one. Chickens are pretty dumb animals. They’re instincts are pretty simple. Eat, peck, and run away from anything bigger than themselves is about all they can manage. Yes they should have good food, plenty of room to run around and starch about. They should be warm in the winter and cool in the summer and when harvest day comes; their deaths should be relatively quick. It is important to have a deft hand and a sharp knife. Other than that, there isn’t much to consider. Our chickens lives contained all of these elements and there for I am proud and excited to eat them.

Processing a chicken from oblivious bird to what you would find at the supermarket is pretty easy. They are hung upside down in a cone and their neck arteries are cut. After the blood is drained they are dead. The next step is to dunk them in 160° water for about 30 seconds or so. This makes removing their feather much easier. Even still sometimes their wing feathers can be a pain in the ass to pull out. Plucking is tedious and two people per chicken makes the whole things go much faster. Then comes the evisceration. Many cuts are made and I really didn’t catch the whole process cause I was mainly killing and plucking. After the guts come out, you can clean the gizzard if you want. I haven’t eaten one but I heard they’re crunchy. I’ll stick with using them in stocks and gravy.

I named one of the chickens; which I know isn’t good. It can cause attachment. While cutting open his arteries he kicked me in the face causing my glasses to fly off. He caught me on my left eye and I was worried that he’d cut me. It didn’t leave anything but a scratch but it did hurt. I wanted to feel malice but he was only trying to stay alive. I didn’t want him to suffer during the dying process but I had clearly hit a nerve. In the end I named him Soup and he is currently in my fridge waiting to be roasted and turned into stock.

Speaking of stock; I now have several pounds of chicken feet as well. I’m going to turn them into a rich, buttery broth. The idea of chicken feet stock might sound icky and gross but the process involves removing the skin of the feet, cleaning/scrubbing them thoroughly, and cutting way any scabby and rough parts. It makes me happy that I can use most everything from the chicken. 

I’m not going to go into all the vegetarian/vegan/carnivore/omnivore debate talk here. I just don’t have time nor the energy for that it. Call me a killer if you want. It’s true. I harvested some chickens. I will raise and harvest more. I want to raise my own goats and hopefully a pig or two as well. I will kill/harvest them as well. This way I can live more sustainably and still eat meat, which I consider vital to my own survival. I want to have a relationship with the food I eat, wither that's the onions and chard or the chickens and pig. For you it might be different and that’s okay. I’m not here to yuck your yum. If you want come visit me on harvest day; that would be great. It takes a while and many hands are needed. The more the merrier.

Pictures coming soon. 

After the Autumnal Equinox

Hello all you beautiful people.

So I'm going to apologize for being so distant these last few months. The farm has been quite crazy this year and as it was I did not write nearly as much as I would have liked to this summer. The energy for creative writing was just not there. The inspiration was sporadic and the ideas seamed lack luster. What I have written isn’t that good in my opinion and needs a lot work before I submit it to publishers and/or post it to the blog. I have an idea for a novel at the moment and I’m working making the plot all come together. I’ve tried scaling it back to be novelette or novella but each time I try to do so it wants to get bigger and longer. In short it is a work in progress.

Other ideas come and go like clouds. Like the clouds this summer, these literary clouds rarely –if ever—produced rain. I have several documents with half formed ideas, stories that go nowhere, so many characters and settings that are dead ends… for now.

The farm work is slowly coming to an end for year I’m preparing to move on with my life. I’m planning on moving back to Duluth, finding a paying job, becoming a mentor, and continuing to work on my writing. There are many steps to this process and I hope you will be a part of them in one way or another.

The muse is stirring again. I’m finding more energy for writing after work. The story ideas feel better and come out sounding more put together, and for that I am thankful. I’m formulating a project that will hopefully be a step forward in my writing career and you –yes you dear reader-- can be a part of it too. More on this in the near future so stay tuned.

The next few months will be a little hectic for me but I’m excited to grow and see where the threads of fate lead. Where ever I end up, and for whatever period of time, I promise to feed those creative fires more, to make them a more prominent part of my life, and to deliver beautiful stories.