Sis and her family are still on the way, but I thought I'd throw out a few quotes and get us started. So far, all courtesy of my mom:

• "Would you like one of these cookies?" A minute and a half after she'd plied me with dinner and dessert and I'd left the table.
• "I've got some ice cream if you're hungry!" A half hour later.
• I made some pound cake you might like!" Maybe fifteen minutes after that.
• "Did you just hit her car???" Heard as I was emerging from my shower today. (The answer is yes. For those who are overly alarmed, don't be. I have been stubbornly holding on to the oldest car in the state for way too many years now. People have been using it for target practice for several years now, usually while I sleep and without leaving a note. You'll notice, but not by much.) I'm about to move my car and call sis to make parking suggestions for their new car when they arrive.
• "They're eating??? I'm cooking! ...well I guess we'll just have it for supper." Uh... because the rest of us won't be hungry again all day long?
• "I could make some of that green stuff you like. You know, the soybeans." Then "Eda Mom... Mommy May I. Hm. Maybe that'll help me remember what it's called."

Presumably once the little person arrives, the focal point will shift ever so slightly away from food. One can always hope...

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Well why don't I take a stab at it and tell you what I think you would do? I think that if you had just completed this newly-revised Master List on a Friday afternoon that followed a long and productive week in which sometimes your day began at 5:45am and ended after midnight, you would complete the making of that list, check off two or three tasks, then jump on down to the end where you wrote the "if you seem to be making exceptional amounts of progress, you get to do this later" item. The item tucked away at the end of the list so as not to draw too much attention to itself. Of course you wouldn't find scrolling to the end of that list a detriment whatsoever, and so you would get started on that item the second it crosses your mind as a spiffing idea!

Which is to say, you would stop your less compelling activities to make a batch of cheese straws from scratch! Naturally!!!

Now I'm not saying that's happened to anybody we know, or anything. Remember, I'm writing a novel these days. Maybe I'm just exercising my creative writing muscles. Yea - that's convincing... right?

SO. Let me give you a little example of why I not only don't make my living as a chef, but why I also never became a food blogger, even though I love to cook and blog. Although I can't recall the last time I prepared anything in the kitchen that required the strict following of a recipe, I respect the recollections of my past free-flying experiences with food prepartion enough to know that if it's a recipe I haven't prepared very often, it's best to try and stick to the instructions.

Fine. I'll play along with the rules. A decision which, I am thrilled to report, was greatly enhanced by the allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner iPhone app. I located a handy recipe there nights ago when I started craving cheese straws in the first place. After which time I decided it sounded like a whole lotta work, so I saved the recipe to the convenient "favorites" list (list of one!) for later on. Today felt like later enough.

The first deviation from the rules came when I got bored slicing the dough into uniform straws. I know, shut up. But seriously. Enough with the repetitive long strips, already! Then those strips got all, y'know, weak and bendy and sometimes they even broke off as I was putting them onto the cookie sheet for baking. Which doesn't bother me at all, of course. I'm all about diversity. Why must all my food items look the same as their friends? Pshaw!

But then those uneven little broken-in-half strips of cheese straw dough gave me the idea of shaking it up a little:

• So I started making them shorter and wider, then cutting those strips in half. Now I had a little batch not unlike crackers. And who doesn't like cheese crackers? (Okay, Ethan, who is afraid of cheese. But surely not anybody else in the free world we can think of.)
• After that I started enjoying myself even more and found it highly entertaining to roll them into skinny long snakes (the kind we make when my nephew and I are playing with Play Doh, if that helps with the visuals,) before cutting them into little pieces.
• Then I rolled a few into balls thinking little poofy cheesy pillows might be nice.

Turns out there's a lot of fun to be had in seeking out creative new shapes into which you can cut and form your cheese straws! Kind of reminded me of my jewelry design years when I made pendants like the still-drying ones in this photo. (Pause a moment to let the wistfulness brought on my recollections of hands in clay pass. Sigh. Okay. Back to the cooking.)

So yea, I didn't exactly follow the rules when it came to the cutting of the cheese straws, but nobody cares. They're intended for family and friends. And me! Me sure don't care.

Ohhh! I almost forgot to mention that I actually didn't follow the recipe to the letter, either. Ooops. In case this matters to you: I thought it would more tasty if I replaced some of the sharp cheddar with parmesean and also a bit of this white six cheese blend I have. No, I'm sorry. I can't tell you the proportions. I'm not being me. I just have no idea. The end result was still 2 cups, but that's all I got.

The other thing I feel compelled to mention is that in this particular oven it took quite a bit longer than 5 minutes for the finished product to be ready. It would be lovely if I could tell you how much longer, and believe me, I'd be more than happy to accommodate. But no. Better go see your Real Food Blogger about that. I only know that I added two minutes then three minutes then two more then some more. One time I moved on to something else, in another room, then realized that I did, in fact, have something baking in the oven, which led to the discovery that I'd forgot to actually hit "save" on my iPhone alarm. And yes, I know most of you just use kitchen timers like normal people, and I'm not going to judge you for that. But for my money, having the ability to actually add a little note to my alarm? Priceless! Seeing as how during a particularly aggressive appearances of the ADD Monster, I am likely to move on to something else - or several something elses - and when the timer goes off, I'll then find myself standing in the middle of the room wondering what's that pretty chiming sound and where is it coming from!? So I now have the ability to do a little mini time-travel forward and tell the curious me of "only a few minutes from now" exactly what it is I'm reminding myself of. Ta da! But you have to hit "save." Remember that. You could burn something if you forget. (I didn't, but I have other stories...)

This seems like a perfect time to mention: I am so fortunate and grateful to have found a career path that I love so much that I just don't get bored. My job is great and the variety never ends!

In conclusion, my conscience won't let me get by without telling you that as I was putting a tray of cheese straws back into the oven One More Time, I noticed that the temperature dial was set to 350° instead of the 400° this recipe calls for. However I feel compelled to further tell you - No. Insist - to you, that I am 100% certain that I set the oven to 400° during the preheating phase. I did! so either I bumped it during one of the many open and close sessions (which is actually possible; this oven is not digital and it's easy enough to bump a dial so that it turns, right?) or it was one of my friend's cats playing tricks on me. We're parting ways, these felines and I, in just a few days, and maybe they wanted to just mess with me one more time...

Bonus Material:

• Click here for THE Cheese Straws recipe on allrecipes.com.
• Remember my title-included an indication that there might have been an Episode 1 to the whole Cooking with ADD Chick experience? It was another chick, too, but no less indicative of the thrilling, seemingly-simple process that cooking with this particular disorder can present. You can read that one over here.
• Yes. They taste very, very good, thank you for asking. Maybe I'll even have some left to share!

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one's papers and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

This quote is from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King. I'm about halfway through this book for the second time and his advice to read stands out even more than when I read it a couple of years ago. A woman whose early identity was largely entertwined with reading, I haven't thought of myself as "a big reader" for several years now.

It's as if blogs and how-to articles online have taken the place of books for me. I still read a lot. It's just what I read that's changed.

While the things I read are important to me, this shift away from those years of thinking of myself as a voracious reader isn't setting well with me. I'd like to blame it on the typical busy-ness of life, but I know this is just a lie I tell myself. I am not reading much because I watch TV. Having gone complete years without even owning a television, I've once more fallen into in a rhythm that includes picking up a remote control several evenings each week, instead of a book. Or prior to the book, since I am reading this particular one each night before I fall asleep.

Enough. The end of the year with its questions of "What worked and what didn't?" and "What will be different about next year?" swirling around in many of our heads, is a perfect time to call a cold-turkey elimination of TV addictions.

Can I do it? I have to. Writing this novel matters a great deal to me. Now that I finally got started, I want to do it right. I want to keep the early momentum and push on, through the writer's block surprises and "man this is hard" stretches, and self-doubt phases. If Stephen King says reading is a way to help get myself there, then reading it shall be. Plus, "the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor" really got my attention. We bloggers are used to making fools of ourselves on a fairly steady basis. At least I tell myself it's not just me. But in my novel? There's far more weight to an actual work of fiction. It might be work to occasionally pen something of actual merit for a blog, but if I'm working this hard on a novel? Yea, best to take that as seriously as possible.

Fortunately for me, the "threat" of a stack of books is kind of like the Uncle Remus Br'er Rabbit's briar patch...

Rami and I haven't talked today, but last I heard, there was a local forecast of snow. Where we live in North Carolina, schools get closed much sooner than for our friends living in colder climates.

I can't help but wonder if there's a giddy mood of anticipation in Rami's classroom. It's his first possible snow day in the history of ever! Remember those? I can't remember my own first snow day. I wonder if he's excited, or just having business-as-usual? I hope he is. Snow days were fun.

What a little bundle of delight. I see the world in a shifted way because of thoughts and observations over how he might be seeing it. Even a fairly ordinary Friday morning has been tilted a bit, with thoughts of "what's going on in his head right now?"

Hm. I think I just blogged one of the definitions of "love" today!

Now to figure out if I know how to prepare them... AND make them enjoyable! (The lack of photo the first time I published it, merely reinforces my awareness that I really need to learn how to master the Squarespace iPhone app. Which would be easy enough...just gotta' remember to keep testing it!)

Now with a photo, this time, then? :)

Illustrating one of the reasons I have a job. Squarespace makes it possible for non-techies to create their own sites. Ability is not always the deciding factor, however. There are lots of reasons highly capable people sometimes just want to turn that process over to someone else.

By the end of our conversation, she was excited to have found me, and my enthusiasm for Squarespace was catching. But she wasn't completely sold. "Now tell me why you think it's to my advantage to pay this much for hosting instead of paying $5 a month to one of the other hosts."

• So I told her the story about a client whose website was hacked the week before her site was about to be seen by business professionals in her industry and how those specific first impressions would be vital to the advancement of her career. And how the folks at her "economy hosting" company told her, "We don't have the staffing to help you figure out why this happened. Just upload your clean code again!"
• I showed her a handful of high-hitting Google searches that put my own site near or at the top of the first page of some keyword results, out of thousands, even millions. (Due, I vehemently believe, to the fact that my site is hosted by Squarespace and I regularly update my site's content by blogging frequently.)
• I told her about the phenomenal customer service, about how I've never waited longer than a couple of hours for a support ticket response, and about other satisfied clients I know.
• I forgot to tell her about the time I agreed to take a "simple little job" for a client who had already set up hosting and was planning to use WordPress. I decided "A squillion Wordpress customers can't be wrong." Within a week, I'd realized that uh huh... a squillion Wordpress customers might just be wrong. And so I walked into our meeting in the coffee shop a week after I'd started, and said to him, "If you will consider using Squarespace to host this site, I will not charge you a dime for the work I've done for you this week." He now has two sites hosted on My Platform Of Choice and he sits on the board of an organization that is now using Squarespace, thanks to his glowing recommendation. I forgot to tell her all this, but I figured I could tell you, anyway.
• And then I told her, "I'm also going to send you a link to a piece I found about a year ago, that considers some differences between Squarespace and Wordpress. Since it was so brilliantly written, it's easier to just share it with you than even try to break down these points myself."

And now I'm going to share it with you. Tyler Thompson, now Creative Director of Squarespace, wrote a list of 6 things to consider when you're choosing between Wordpress and Squarespace to host your site. In his last point, he says:

Some people will like open source software better, but on a day to day basis and if my business's website is counting on it, I want stability and reliability. When you buy a Squarespace account, you are buying a team.

I couldn't agree more. And just thought it was a good time to point it out again. Everybody won't choose Squarespace. I get that. It's always about finding the right match for your needs. For my money, though? Today I'm just feelin' the Squarespace luv again and thought I'd mention it. How completely stoked I am that I have this choice. Read his whole post, Squarespace -vs- Wordpress, over here.

But what happens if Writer's Block shows up during your designated writing time? Yesterday I got to find out.

Here's what I did during my 2 hour writing session when writer's block showed up:

1. Edited my opening scene,
2. Fantasized about how much fun it would be, On This Particular Wednesday, to just curl up in bed and read my novel to find out what's going to happen, instead of taking the time and All That Effort to write it,
3. Realized that wasn't really productive use of my time,
4. Scrolled through my scene list until I found one I was nominally interested in, and fleshed out my notes about what happens there,
5. Wrote a first draft of part of that scene,
6. Decided that a minor character is going to be very loosely crafted around the personality of someone I know. Enjoyed seeing this fabricated person through the lens of my memory,
7. Drafted a short scene around a minor thing that once actually happened, which involved that real person. In fact, it was the memory of That Tiny Little Thing That Really Happened that made me realize I wanted to use this person as the inspiration for my character.
8. Asked some questions about my main character I still haven't figured out,
9. Spent several minutes contemplating whether or not I'm handling point of view the right way - shhhh. I'm still not sure I am.
10. Got curious about character names again and went online to see what I could quickly find about the name of one very minor (but important) character whose name happens to also be the name of a European city. (And no, lovely as the name is, her name isn't "Paris." Maybe I should have said she shares a name with a Scandinavian city. That'd be true, too.)
11. Deleted an entire scene since it was just hanging around while I decided between two directions I want one major plot line to go in. Done. I now know, and so notes for that whole scene are no longer necessary.

In the end, I had to admit it was a productive writing day. Not the kind of productive writing day I'd come to love and welcome, since there was so much internal struggle to contend with, but yes, it was productive nonetheless. Since all these things have to be done, too.

Moral of the story: writing a novel is hard work. In case you ever wondered. Just sayin...