Yeeha!

Last Friday afternoon I printed out the chapter of my memoir that I was working on and took it with me down to the Laurel Berry, Mole Creek, which is where I’ve written so much of this book. There, while I shared an iced coffee with Farmdoc (they know exactly how we like it) I revised the chapter. And that was it for the first draft. Done! Finished!

On the way home we picked blackberries and a few apples from a street tree and fed our neighbours’ dogs because they were away.

In my inbox, when I checked, was a message from my editor, asking me when I might be ready to deliver the manuscript. A nice coincidence.

Over the weekend I read through the manuscript and made some changes. One or two chapters stood out as needing a fair bit of tightening but I decided to leave those for my workshopping crew, to give them something to do.

I knew there was still a long way to go with this book and a lot of hard work, but I felt freer then than I had in a long time so I celebrated by making blackberry and apple jam.

The wood for the cooking stove came from a blackwood that fell across the fence into our home paddock a few years ago; it’s dry now and caught quickly.

I couldn’t resist giving this batch of jam a special label.