Month: April 2009

Writing: The First Hundred Thousand Words are the Hardest

I started writing seriously (that is, “for money”) when I was in college. For me, the keys to mastery were:

  • Write a lot. I became much more fluent during the course of my first book, Through Dungeons Deep: A Fantasy Gamers’ Handbook, (Reston Publishing, 1981) which covered how to play Dungeons & Dragons and role-playing games in general. When I started out, I set myself a quota of 1,200 words a day and just couldn’t do it. At the end, I’d upped my quota to 4,500 and beat it every day. (I have since had a number of 10,000 word days.) Going over my old work, it seems that the extra speed was a free bonus, involving no loss of quality.
  • Big works are easier than small ones. I think that’s it’s infinitely easier to write a 100,000 word novel than a hundred 1,000-word short stories or even four 25,000-word novelettes. Similarly, it’s easier to write a nonfiction book than a series of articles that add up to the same length. Coming up with new themes is harder than running with what you’ve got.
  • Write for a reason. I come from a storytelling tradition, which means that connecting with my audience is important to me. If I lose them, I’ve screwed up. I also wrote for money from the beginning, because I was broke. Writing is hard, so you need a goal in mind.
  • Writing is hard. It’s harder than anything. After a hard day’s writing, I sometimes lose the power to speak coherently. If that happens to you, you’re doing something right.
  • Pick up the nuts and bolts as you go. Perfectionism is for editors. Just keep going. Get to the end before you rewrite. Keep notes, but leave the earlier passages alone. A lot of people use perfectionism and revision as an excuse to never finish anything — or to never start. There are editors everywhere, so your stuff can be professionally washed, waxed, and detailed after the fact. So get to work!

The Geography of Fertilizer

The parts of the country with the most intensive animal farming have so much manure they don’t know what to do with. Manure is bulky — it has a low value per ton. This is a problem. The reason Iowa farmers are putting chemical fertilizers on their cornfields instead of manure is that it’s a lot more concentrated, so it’s cheaper to ship. In fact, it’s cheaper to ship oil halfway around the world, make fertilizer out of it, and truck the fertilizer to the farm belt than it is to truck free manure to the farm belt.

So people are doing various dodges to try to get around this. An article in Wired discusses duckweed’s ability to grow in manure lagoons and create a lot of starch for ethanol, which is a lot simpler and cheaper than growing corn, and it uses manure that’s just being wasted, anyway.

But you gotta wonder. It’s supposed to be like the old ads for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “Hey, you put manure on my cornfield!” “Hey, you put cornfield on my manure!” Two great things that go great together.

You’re supposed to generate manure in an area where people will pay you money for it. You’re supposed to grow crops in an area where you can get cheap manure. In spite of the current namby-pamby attitude towards manure (“Ewww! It’s so organic and smelly! Shouldn’t we disguise its origins by composting it first?”), manure is something that belongs out in the field where plants can benefit from it directly. Plants know what to do with manure. Plants and animals co-evolved for 600 million years. Plants have this manure stuff figured out. Farting around with methane generation or composting is okay if you don’t have any fields to spread it on, but it’s second-best.

On a regional level, getting the location right is hard. Crop generation and animal raising have different needs and cost structures, and livestock production drifted away from the Midwest back when fertilizer was cheap. Now it looks like the poultry industry is shifting back towards the Midwest, with its insatiable appetite for fertilizer.

On a local level, though, your setup is more controllable. For one thing, it’s possible to go into the manure-generation business yourself, by raising enough livestock to generate the fertilizer you need for your crops. This is what Edmund Morris describes in his 1860’s classic, Ten Acres Enough, one of my favorite back-to-the-land books. (Go buy a copy.) Morris had a ten-acre farm near Philadelphia, where he grew high-grade fruits and berries. His expenses for manure were astronomical, so he started keeping cow-calf pairs over the winter. This operation only broke even when you considered just the cash, but was insanely profitable when you counted the value of the manure.

This can still be done today. Frankly, I’m amazed that anyone even considers going into the contract broiler-growing business without having enough acreage to use all the manure profitably, because it’s the only edge that’s available to you. But most people don’t, so manure is free, or at least cheap, near broiler-growing areas.

In our case, we do things the laziest possible way, and raise our chickens outdoors, where their manure is added to the soil with no intermediate steps. This increases the fertility of the pastures and keeps them lush and green through most of the year. Chickens can eat lush green plants but not mature, woody plants. A diet that includes lush green plants does wonders to the flavor and appearance of eggs and meat, so we’re getting direct value from the exercise, plus restoring the fertility of the land.

Quality is Something You Can Taste

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing people talking about chemicals when they think they’re talking about food. What’s the flavor of the month? Is it still Omega 3?

Egg hucksters always claim that their eggs are superior, at least with regard to the flavor of the month. People used to claim that brown eggs had more vitamins, then less cholesterol, and now more Omega 3. Those are pretty tall claims. (People don’t eat the shells anyway, so it doesn’t matter what color they are.)

The real test is a taste test. If an egg tastes better, it’s more nutritious. Seriously. The same is true for other products. What do you think your sense of taste is for?

This is also useful in dealing with feed. Taste your chicken feed from time to time, especially when you try a new brand. It should be bland but not unpleasant. If it tastes nasty, there’s something wrong with it. Feed your chickens something else. The feed industry has a lot of second-rate or spoiled ingredients flowing through it. You want to buy your feed from an outfit that won’t touch that stuff.

Your chickens and other livestock know this. You can starve them to the point where they’ll eat bad feed and then get sick or die, but if they have alternatives, this is very unusual. So if you see them turning up their noses (or beaks, as the case may be) at their dinner, pay attention.

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Time to Break Out the Mowers

We’ve gone through a fast snow-to-mow transition. The sun is shining and the days are a lot warmer, so the grass is growing like crazy. It’s time for me to put the mower on the tractor and get the lawn mower running, too.

The tractor spent the winter under cover, and it got a thorough overhaul from John’s Combine and Tractor Repair in Lebanon, OR a couple of years ago, so it always starts as soon as you turn it over. Our walk-behind lawn mower that we use around the house had a tougher winter, being left out again. (Why do we always do that?) As usual, it started on the 39th pull, but the starter cord broke soon afterwards. I’m always amazed at how these el cheapo mowers stand up to abuse.

Our riding mower (or “lawn tractor,” as the manufacturers optimistcally call it) is not running. I don’t know about you, but I hate the dual-blade design of most modern riding mowers. The mowing deck is inaccessible and the belts are way too hard to install. I liked the old-fashioned kind better, with a single blade, the world’s simplest belt drive, and an overall shape that made it easy to tip the mower on its side to get at the parts.

In case anyone is wondering, a “lawn tractor” is not a tractor in any sense of the word. It’s just a riding lawn mower. If you want to do something other than mow lawns, you want a real tractor. You can get an old Ford 2N, 8N, or 9N tractor in good working order for about the cost of a “lawn tractor.” These 60-year-old tractors will give you a lot less trouble than the sheet-metal junk in the hardware store.

The undeniable tractor-ness of a real tractor was brought home to me several times this winter when we got 4WD vehicles stuck on the pasture when unloading feed. We had no trouble pulling them out with the tractor (a Ford 641 from 1957). A lawn tractor wouldn’t even have made it onto the pasture before getting stuck, but a real tractor has immense amounts of traction where other vehicles have none. Great big rear tires with plenty of weight over the axle and deep rubber cleats, plus the immense torque of the low gearing make all the difference.

Check out my for more tractor tips, and happy mowing!