38. "Tapping, Cooking & Writing: Everything Counts"

Yesterday's blogpost was wa-a-a-y overdue -- since last November -- something that friends and family have faithfully brought to my attention. The process of writing it also helped me break through and catch up on my FebNo’06 wordcount. Please don’t take that to mean that I’m further ahead than any of you, because I count everything in my first drafts. It’s the only way my synapses work since the accident. I take everything I can come up with and toss it all into one big kettle. When the day comes that I think I have “enough,” I’ll cook it down, strain it, season it, see what I have, then go from there. Considering the hugeness of the project and the manner in which I have to come up with it all, I’ll likely be doing that for quite some time to come.

"I write all the time.
I count all writing as writing with a capital 'W',
even if it's just scribbling notes or writing e-mail.
There's a story in Magical Thinking, 'The Rat/Thing,'
that came, almost exactly, from an e-mail I wrote to a friend."
~ Augusten Burroughs

When I was a little girl, I loved to “help” my grandpa do things. One of the many things we did together was make maple syrup. I would follow him into the woods, from tree to tree, as he tapped his little drainage pipes into each one and I’d hang a coffee can with a wire handle on each little pipe. Of course, he didn’t take me to all of the hundreds of trees he tapped. I was way too young. But he would take me around to some of them, either to tap the trees or collect the sap. When he’d collected enough syrup he’d take it all to his syrup cooking shed back in the woods. One time he took me with him and I watched him pour gallons and gallons of sap into a huge, shallow, syrup-cooking pan the size of a large door and about six inches deep that he hung with chains over several wood fire stoves. It took hours to cook just one batch, but slowly the sap would cook down to a beautiful, golden, sweet syrup. As it cooked down, Grandpa would pour more sap into the pan, until all the sap from hundreds and hundreds of trees was in that shallow pan. I watched in awe as the syrup was slowly poured off -- through little spigots Grandpa had welded into the lower side of the pan -- into shiny, clean quart and pint jars, then packed into boxes. It was getting dark when Grandpa finally put out the fires, stacked the few boxes of precious syrup on his big handtruck, took my hand and slowly walked the mile or so back to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

It takes 45 quarts of maple sap to produce one quart of pure maple syrup. (I looked it up.) Each maple tree produces about one quart of maple sap each year -- which can only be harvested during March and April. Each tree must be at least 8 inches in diameter before it can be tapped, which makes it about 45 years old! Plus, I think I remember my grandparents talking about the trees needing to have a certain number of weeks in a row of hard freezes or they wouldn’t produce enough sap to make a good run in March and April.

The way Grandpa made maple syrup is how I have to write, since my head injury. So if I say that I have a wordcount of 12K, please know that it will boil down to a miniscule amount of useable material -- maybe 270 useable words (if I’m lucky). Right now my wordcount is about 16.7K. That'll probably work out to about 370 useable words -- when I finally get around to editing it. At that rate, I figure that I need to write about three or four million words to come up with my first full length novel! :lol: :-D

"Tactically speaking,
go ahead and crowd in the first draft
-- put everything in.
Then in revising decide what counts, what tells;
cut and recombine till what's left is what counts.
Leap boldly!"
~ Ursula LeGuin

Most of this blog -- especially the story about making syrup with Grandpa -- comes from an email I wrote to a friend early this morning. I'm also going to use it on the ‘PubYe forum. This is the first time I've written about that precious memory. I started writing the email at about 1:30 a.m. and finished writing at about 4:10 a.m. -- then spent another hour editing it -- and it wasn't much longer than this blogpost. When it takes that much time to get something useable, it’s good when it can be used more than once. Waste not want not. I do show my age, don’t I? :rolls eyes:

Take care, Y'all and ...
Write On!
~ Nanette

© Nanette Y. Francis, 2006. All Rights Reserved.